Beirut, rotten city of literature, fascinates and scandalizes, always defying any attempt to describe and apprehend it.
One of the last books that exalt her during her times of war has been written by Selim Nassib, who lived with exaltation in a neighborhood that has now disappeared. A Jew of Iranian nationality, but born in the Lebanese capital, a correspondent for the Parisian newspaper Liberation, he titled it The Tumult. The forgotten civil war of 1958 divided the capital for the first time between the eastern, Christian neighborhoods, and the western, Muslim, mainly Sunni and also inhabited by Orthodox Greeks.
Years later, suburbs with a Shiite population emerged on its southern periphery, people arriving from the south attracted by the capital, which generated a third urban center that has been expanding rapidly and has become the fiefdom of the fierce Hizbullah militia, headquarters of its leaders, its military and welfare organizations where around a million inhabitants are crowded together.
When I settled in Beirut in the fall of 1970, the now large Shia community was very irrelevant. It was, without a doubt, the success of Imam Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 that made this disdained and marginalized population gain surprising strength. It catapulted them to the forefront of contemporary Middle Eastern history, where they form a Muslim minority.
The section of the airport avenue that crosses Burj el Brajne has for decades been the showcase of the urban power of Hizbullah, with the display of its flags, the large portraits of leaders, first of all Imam Khomeini, of its local bosses –some, killed by Israel–, of its martyrs or guerrillas against the Jewish State. This section of the avenue is often blocked by his supporters in confrontations with the Lebanese Government police. It is almost impossible for an outsider to go unnoticed.
From the moment you cross the entrance to Burj el Brajne Street, your attention is drawn to the large number of motorcyclists who invade these alluvial suburbs, which emerged in just a few decades. During the three decades of the civil war this was a cursed place and one of the favorite places for kidnappers of Western journalists and diplomats from Beirut.
Hizbullah, with its powerful army, which has nothing to do with the Palestinian Hamas militia, is very popular because it has been able to organize public services such as water or electricity, partially free, hospitals, dispensaries, charitable or cultural associations using in their companies and institutions to their neighbors. It became and continues to be an essential force in everyday life.
After the destruction in the war in the summer of 2006 by Israeli bombing of these neighborhoods and southern border towns, he rushed to help the victims.
In its small perimeter next to the airport it has some of its offices, but it is a mystery to know where the center of its power is located, especially where Sheikh Nasrallah, the number one enemy of Israel and the United States, is hiding.
Little Lebanon has been described as an “archipelago” made up of small islands populated by Sunnis, Shiites, Druze and Maronites that Israel’s perfidy is increasingly distancing. During the 2006 war with the Jewish State, Sheikh Nasrallah, faced with the destruction suffered in the war, coined the famous phrase of “divine victory.”
It is that statement that Israel wins wars against the Arabs militarily, but loses them politically.
