Michael Karam

At around 2:30 a.m. on March 2, Israel bombed Beirut’s mostly Shia southern suburbs in response to a Hezbollah rocket attack on northern Israel. The road heading into Beirut from South Lebanon and the city’s southern suburbs was jammed with cars filled with Lebanese fleeing further reprisals. Some 52 civilians were killed and 154 injured, a hefty butcher’s bill even in this part of the world. Most Lebanese are happy Hezbollah has been defanged, even if they wish it wasn’t thanks to Israel Hezbollah’s actions were a demonstration of their ongoing support for Iran, but goading Israel was a cataclysmic miscalculation.

Lebanon will be 100 years old on 1 September. But the joke circulating in Beirut is that the country may not be around for the party. Eye-watering hyper-inflation, not helped by the Covid pandemic, has brought the country to its knees, just as famine and extreme poverty sparked its creation after the end of the Great War. Lebanon eventually won full independence from the French in 1943, and became an impossibly glamorous, multilingual entrepôt with a rare facility for doing business. According to Major General Sir Edward Spears, the British minister to Syria and Lebanon, the country ‘sprang from a far older and higher’ civilisation than the French. Even so, it has always had a tendency towards self-destruction.

I was a little less than three blocks away on West 26th street when I heard the blast. Twenty-two years of living in Beirut had taught me to wait for the sirens before becoming concerned. And they came, distant at first, and then louder, followed by the clatter of a helicopter. But the New Yorkers enjoying the pop-up food court in Madison Square Park on that balmy Saturday night didn’t appear to be panicking. Neither for that matter was CNN, which was covering the Black Caucus Foundation in Washington, attended by both President Barack Obama and the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Beirut If any of the Syrian refugees who have made it to the relative safety of Europe have been watching the smash-hit TV show Homeland (season five), they would be baffled by its warped depiction of their compatriots’ plight in Lebanon. Unlike the vast majority of Homeland’s viewers ,they would know there are no government-sanctioned camps guarded by nervy UN soldiers and run from the inside by menacing Hezbollah operatives. This is out-and-out nonsense and insulting to the Lebanese, who have arguably done more than any country to absorb this unfolding human tragedy. For the record, Lebanon, a country a tad bigger than Wales, plays host to around 1.5 million Syrians, a number equivalent to a third of its population.

It's Lebanon's birthday this month -- 70 years since independence -- but no one's really in the mood to party. Our first birthday present last week came in the form of two suicide bombers belonging to the Al Qaeda-affiliated Abdullah Azzam Brigades who detonated their payloads at the Iranian embassy in Beirut killing 26 people.

  Beirut News that the Syrian regime has agreed to hand in its arsenal of chemical weapons is a great relief to Lebanon. For the past few weeks we have been wandering around like inmates on death row, fearing that a US-led strike would ignite a potentially apocalyptic conflict between Hezbollah and Israel or at the very least provoke a prolonged internal Shia-Sunni terror campaign. This was no idle fear. The salvos fired at the end of August brought back memories of the darkest days of the civil war. But Lebanon is still not in the clear, especially as a framework for handing over the chemical weapons still needs to be thrashed out.

  Beirut On New Year’s Eve 2011, I asked a senior Swedish diplomat, who had just crossed over from Damascus and was ready to see in the New Year Beirut-style, how long he gave Bashar al-Assad as Syrian president. ‘Longer than we think, but not as long as he thinks,’ he said with a wink. That was still in the days of what we naively called the Arab Awakening; we Lebanese assumed we could sit back and wait for Syria’s hated system to fall. But the weeks have turned to years, and not only is Assad still in place, he might just be prevailing. Lebanon, meanwhile, is falling apart.

Earlier this month, while he was in Lebanon to highlight the plight of Christians in the Middle East, in particular those fleeing the fighting in neighboring Syria, Terry Waite, the former special envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, kissed and made up with Hezbollah, the militant Shia group that held him captive in Lebanon between 1987 and 1991. One probably shouldn’t blame Waite, now 73, for wanting to exorcise any residual demons of his 1,763-day nightmare, but in doing so he unwittingly gave Hezbollah dangerous and unwarranted legitimacy.