In Beirut, I asked myself: Would you like your war before or after Christmas?
On January 2, at about 5:30 p.m., as I was reading at my desk in my Beirut apartment and contemplating a busy start to the year, I was jolted out of my focus by a loud blast. The first question that came to my mind was: Has it started?
An explosion had ripped through an apartment block in the southern suburbs, just a 10-minute drive from where I live, killing Saleh Arouri, a senior leader of Hamas, along with at least six others. These suburbs are a Hezbollah bastion; Hamas leaders must have felt, wrongly, that they were safe there.
City streets emptied quickly. People rushed home, checked on their loved ones, and waited. Will Hezbollah’s response be immediate? Will it be big? Will there be war?
The following day was a big travel day for the tens of thousands of expatriates who’d returned to Lebanon for the holidays and were heading back to their lives abroad. Now the planned departures took on an added urgency.
Read: Hezbollah watches and waits
“We’re leaving just in time,” said one of my friends going back to the U.K. Another described long queues at check-in and passport control, relief to be going, heartache about everything left behind.
And those of us who lived in Lebanon wondered: Should we get out of Beirut? Go farther north? Get on a plane?
From the moment the horror of October 7 unfolded in Israel, panic set in among many Lebanese, alongside the knowledge that what had happened in Israel would surely ripple back toward Lebanon. Trauma runs deep here. We have been through civil war, five wars with Israel, several invasions, as well as one of the largest nonnuclear explosions in modern history, at the Beirut port in 2020. We tend to react to events with a mix of pragmatism and disquiet, but the response to October 7 was like none I’d previously seen.
Friends around me took their children out of school and left the country. Soon, international airlines began to cancel flights to Lebanon, and the Lebanese national carrier sent some of its planes to safety in Turkey. These were precautions based on precedent. In 2006, the last time war erupted with Israel, the first target had been the airport. Decades earlier, on December 29, 1968, an Israeli commando team had descended onto Lebanon’s airport and destroyed 13 civilian aircraft—in retaliation, Israel said, for an earlier attack on a civilian El Al flight by Palestinian militants based in Lebanon. The UN Security Council had voted unanimously on Resolution 262 condemning the Israeli commando raid.
Throughout this past October, Western embassies readied evacuation plans and warned their citizens to leave the country while commercial options were still available.
In 2006, during 34 days of war, several hundred thousand Lebanese and dual citizens had evacuated by land via Syria and by sea. But this time around, with Syria at war, the best or only option would be the sea.
Rumors churned through the public: The World Bank is evacuating its staff; U.S. warships will remove all the American citizens; the such and such ambassador has fled the country. New restaurants postponed their openings; the organizers of art fairs canceled their plans.
I asked my hairdresser in mid-October how business was. Dead, came the answer. So many clients had left the country—but not before booking a last appointment for a haircut, highlights, and color. This was still Lebanon, where style matters, even in war.
One can feel helpless in a country that is more often an arena for regional powers than a player—and where Hezbollah, rather than the state, holds the keys to peace and war. Lebanese across the political spectrum have spoken out to offer solidarity to Palestinians but made clear that Lebanon does not want to be involved in the fight. Various foreign ministers have visited Beirut to press Lebanese officials to avoid war. But if there was ever an admission of impotence, it was that of Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, to CNN after the Arouri killing. Asked if Hezbollah could be restrained, he said: “The decision is theirs. We hope they don’t commit themselves to a larger war.”
Read: America’s future might be Lebanon
Hezbollah has shown pragmatic restraint since October 7, and even since the Arouri killing. It is thought to have 150,000 missiles, including precision-guided ones, which it could have used to wreak havoc deep inside Israel. Since the fall, it has shelled northern Israel, where some 80,000 civilians have had to leave their homes. In southern Lebanon, 76,000 people have been displaced by the fighting, an estimated 90 percent of the population of the southern villages. Schools are closed and crops have been abandoned, the olives left unharvested. The clashes have mostly followed a predictable pattern of tit for tat, but Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has warned that Israel can “copy-paste Gaza in Beirut.”
For almost 17 years, a modus vivendi had reigned along the border, based on UN Resolution 1701, which was passed after the 2006 war. The resolution calls for Israel not to breach Lebanon’s sovereignty by air, land, or sea, and for Lebanon to ensure that no armed forces other than those of the UN or the Lebanese government operate along the border. Neither Hezbollah nor Israel ever fully respected the resolution. Israel is now demanding its implementation to the letter, or it will resort to war to push Hezbollah away from the border. It says that its citizens can no longer live with the possibility of a cross-border infiltration similar to what Hamas did.
Every day, the same question at breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Will there be war? A big war? But the war is already here, on a low boil.
Lebanon has been a country of emigration for centuries. Its diaspora helps shore up the economy with remittances that amount to an estimated $7 billion a year, or almost 40 percent of the country’s GDP. Every year, hundreds of thousands of expatriates come home over the summer and at year’s end, even if they don’t celebrate Christmas, for the opportunity to gather with family and friends. In a small country where community bonds hold strong, even after a decade’s absence, friends will invite you to Sunday lunch as if they’d just seen you the day before, and the waiter at your favorite restaurant will greet you like a long-lost friend, as will the concierge of the building where your parents once lived.
This year, we wondered whether anyone would come home at all. Then, on December 8, the national carrier, Middle East Airlines, announced that it would resume most of its regularly scheduled flights to Beirut and add 150 additional ones for the festive period. The scramble to book seats began. My London-based friend said it felt more important than ever to come, because for a couple of months, Beirut had seemed like forbidden ground.
My favorite holiday gathering was the drinks party for Christmas “orphans”—those who had no family Christmas-dinner plans. Sunnis, Shias, Druze, and Christians came together at a Sunni friend’s house, where a Christmas tree, gifts, wine, and a buffet of appetizers awaited us.
“I hope the war doesn’t start while we’re here,” said one of the guests visiting from Saudi Arabia.
At holiday lunches and dinners, talk almost always turned to the war. There is widespread anger and shock at the devastation that Israel’s military campaign has wrought on Gaza, and some discussion about whether Hamas is to blame for starting the war. Some dinner guests expressed disappointment that Hezbollah had not fully entered the fray; others were angry at Iran for “fighting Israel until the last Arab,” as one person told me. Many of the conversations revolved around guessing what a war with Israel would look like this time, and how to prepare. Would it be a limited incursion, like the one Israel conducted in 1978, or a full invasion, as in 1982, when Beirut was besieged for two months and 17,000 people were killed? Or would it be a bombing campaign, like the one in 2006? The ease with which people reminisced about past wars belied their anxiety. One acquaintance I bumped into bluntly said that the Palestinians had carried out their own bloody exactions against us Lebanese during our civil war, when their armed factions were a party to the conflict, and no one should feel sorry for them now. Most everyone seemed to think that there could never be peace between Lebanon and Israel.
This New Year’s Eve, some Lebanese partied with abandon. Others held a sit-in in downtown Beirut to show solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. On my way home from dinner, I got a flurry of text messages from friends in the U.S. about an escalation at the border that had made headlines in the United States. And I thought of a line in Thomas Friedman’s book From Beirut to Jerusalem.
Friedman arrived in Lebanon in 1979 to cover the civil war for The New York Times. He stayed until 1984, and his account chronicles ordinary life in Lebanon amid the chaos of war. He quotes a dinner hostess who keeps delaying serving dinner to her guests on Christmas Eve because the shelling around them is so intense. Finally, she asked her guests: “Would you like to eat now or wait for the cease-fire?”
Graeme Wood: Hamas doesn’t want a cease-fire
During this holiday period, a variation of that line kept ringing in my head: Would you like your war before or after Christmas?
Lebanese are often described as resilient, even amnesiac, in our insistence on dining and partying while battles rage nearby. People here resent the cliché. Embracing life with a vengeance is not an unusual way of coping, as the journalist Christopher Hedges described in his aptly titled book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Lebanon has endured layers of trauma that are hard to talk about, because they never really stop accumulating. But adaptability, entrepreneurship, and inventiveness, combined with extreme survival skills, define this country and keep us going. A friend of mine is a radio producer who has covered every atrocity from Rwanda to Sarajevo. She visited Lebanon for the first time a few years ago and told me: “This the most normal fucked-up country I have ever experienced.”
This year, when friends and relatives said goodbye at the end of the holidays, they also said things like “See you in the summer, if the country is still standing.”
Sometimes this country doesn’t seem to stand at all, but instead to be a figment of our individual and collective imaginations—small bubbles, communities that overlap or sit side by side, sometimes in harmony, often in opposition, but somehow still holding together.
Several new hip restaurants have opened in Beirut in recent weeks. More villages in southern Lebanon have come under shelling. Italian, French, Russian, and British musicians are flying in next month for a yearly classical-music festival in a grand hotel in the hills just east of Beirut. Israeli fighter jets have been buzzing over our heads.
Would you like your war before or after Christmas?
We would like no war—though it might still happen. At least we will have had some time with loved ones over the holidays.
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