The Age/Matthew Knott and Kate Geraghty/19.10.2024
How much more evil can this world allow – Mark
Syrian refugees are sleeping on beaches after fleeing the city’s south. Palestinian refugees are crammed in a camp. This is Beirut, where Israeli strikes are a constant threat.
Beirut: If you want to live in the present, don’t come to Beirut. Even in the midst of a devastating war with no end in sight, it’s impossible to silence the ghosts of history whispering in your ear. Don’t succumb to ignorance, they warn; don’t try to convince yourself this moment is an aberration. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner, the legendary chronicler of the American South. He could easily have been writing about Beirut, this charming yet seemingly cursed city of trauma piled upon trauma, conflict layered upon conflict where we have spent the past eight days on assignment.
“Due to the current situation, we cannot offer our usual service,” apologises the Middle East Airlines flight attendant as our plane departs for Beirut. It’s the first of many times we will hear this phrase – “the situation” – deployed as a usefully oblique way to discuss the war being fought between Israel and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Most international airlines have cancelled flights to Beirut since the fighting escalated last month, but the Lebanese national carrier pushes on, even as bombs drop from the sky just a few kilometres from the tarmac. On the drive from the airport to the city centre, we pass rows of giant billboards of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs last month. In death, as in life, he looms over the city.
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