Then the universe all of a sudden righted itself.
Christopher managed to pull himself up as a taxi approached in the street. I stepped in front of the car and forced the driver to stop. “Get in!” I yelled. Christopher got in the car. Jonathan got in the car. I got in the car. We slammed down the locks on the doors with our fists. The street was empty of traffic. The way in front of the taxi was clear. The scene for our escape was set.
“Go!” I said to the driver.
“Where?” the driver said.
“Just drive!” I said.
One of the SSNP guys landed a final blow on the side of Christopher’s face through the open window, but the driver sped away and we were free.
I don’t remember what we said in the car. I was barely scathed in the punch-up, and Jonathan seemed to be fine. Christopher was still in one piece, though he was clearly in pain. Our afternoon had gone sideways, but it could have been a great deal worse than it was.
“Let’s not go back to our hotel yet,” I said. I covered my face with my hands and rubbed my eyes with my palms. “In case we’re being followed.”
“Where do you want to go?” our driver said.
“Let’s just drive for a while,” Jonathan said.
So our driver took us down to the Corniche that follows the curve of the Mediterranean. He never did ask what happened. Or, if he did, I don’t remember him asking. I kept turning around and checking behind us to make sure we weren’t being followed.
“Maybe we should go to the Phoenicia,” Jonathan said.
The Phoenicia InterContinental Hotel was one of the priciest in the city. Management installed a serious security regime at the door. This was the place where diplomats and senators stayed when they were in town. I doubted the guards would allow thugs from any organization into their lobby.
“He deserves a huge tip,” Jonathan said as our driver dropped us off.
“Yes,” I said. “He certainly does.”
The three of us relaxed near the Phoenicia’s front door for a few minutes. We would need to change cars but first had to ensure we hadn’t been followed.
“You’re bleeding,” Jonathan said and lightly touched Christopher’s elbow.
Christopher seemed unfazed by the sight of blood on his shirt.
“We need to get you cleaned up,” Jonathan said.
“I’m fine, I think,” Christopher said.
He seemed to be in pretty good spirits, all things considered.
“The SSNP,” I said, “is the last party you want to mess with in Lebanon. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you properly. This is partly my fault.”
“I appreciate that,” Christopher said. “But I would have done it anyway. One must take a stand. One simply must.”
Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus still wielded some of its occupation instruments inside Lebanon. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party was one of those instruments, and it counted the regime as its friend and ally. The geographic “nationalism” of the SSNP differed from the racialist Pan-Arab Nationalism of the Syrian Baath Party, but it conveniently meshed with al-Assad’s imperial foreign policy in the Middle East. It logically followed, then, that the SSNP was also allied with Hezbollah.
The SSNP was first and foremost a Syrian proxy, and Hezbollah was first and foremost an Iranian proxy, but during the previous May when various March 8 militias invaded Beirut, the SSNP established itself simultaneously as a de facto Hezbollah proxy.
I still shudder to think what might have happened to Christopher, Jonathan, and me if we were Lebanese instead of British and American.
“If you were Lebanese,” said a longtime Beiruti friend, “you might have disappeared.”
The next morning I awoke to find more than a dozen e-mails in my inbox from friends, family, and acquaintances, some of whom I hadn’t heard from in a long time, asking me if I was okay.
None of us had written about the incident yet, so I wondered what on earth must have happened while I was asleep. Did another war just break out? Did another car bomb go off? I hadn’t heard any explosions or gunshots.
As it turned out, the incident on Hamra Street with the SSNP made the news on at least four continents, and possibly six.
Great, I thought. Now I’m the story. Christopher was the nearest thing the journalism world had to a celebrity, so pretty much everything he did was news.
Every single reporter without exception got the details wrong. In one version, we got in a bar fight. In another, we were attacked by foppish shoe shoppers.4 In almost every version, Christopher was drunk or had been drinking.5 Not one of the reporters who wrote up the story bothered to ask any of us who were actually there what had happened. Some even claimed they had “confirmed” this or that detail, but all they were doing was publishing rumors. It made me think, not for the first time, that first-person narrative journalism, whatever its faults, was far more reliable than the alternative.
I later sat down with Christopher over coffee in the hotel lobby and asked him to reflect on the recent unpleasantness.
“When I told you that I should have warned you,” I said, “that I take partial responsibility, you said. . .”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” he said. “Thank you, though, for giving me a protective arm. I think a swastika poster is partly fair game and partly an obligation. You don’t really have the right to leave one alone. I haven’t seen that particular symbol since I saw the Syrianization of Lebanon in the 1970s. And actually, the first time I saw it, I didn’t quite believe it.”
“You saw it when you were here before?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “But it was more toward the Green Line. I did not expect to see it so flagrantly on Hamra. Anyway, call me oldfashioned if you will, but my line is that swastika posters are to be defaced or torn down. I mean, what other choice do you have? I’d like to think I’d have done that if I had known it was being guarded by people who are swastika fanciers. I have done that in my time. I have had fights with people who think that way. But I was surprised first by how violent and immediate their response was, and second by how passive and supine was the response of the police.”
The men of the SSNP had to use force to maintain a hold in West Beirut. Many of its members were Orthodox Christians, as was its founder Antun Saadeh, while most West Beirutis were Sunnis. They would hardly be any less welcome in Tel Aviv. If its enforcers didn’t jump Christopher in the street, their commemorative sign would not have lasted.
“But I was impressed,” Christopher said, “with the response of the café girls.”
“What was their response?” I said. “I missed that.”
“Well,” he said, “when I was thrown to the ground and bleeding from my fingers and elbow, they came over and asked what on earth was going on. How can this be happening to a guest, to a stranger? I don’t remember if I was speaking English or French at that time. I said something like ‘merde fasciste,’ which I hope they didn’t misinterpret.”
I did not see the café girls. Or, if I did, I don’t remember them. Once the actual violence began, it was over and done with in seconds.
“By then,” Christopher said, “I had become convinced that you were right, that we should get the fuck out of there and not, as I had first thought, get the hotel security between them and us. I thought, No, no, let’s not do that. We don’t want them to know where we are. The harassment might not stop. There was a very gaunt look in the eye of the young man, the first one. And there was a very mad, sadistic, deranged look in the eyes of his auxiliaries. I wish I’d had a screwdriver.”
“You know these guys are widely suspected of setting off most or all of the car bombs,” I said.
“They weren’t ready for that then,” he said.
“They weren’t,” I said, “but they’re dangerous.”
“Once you credit them like that,” he said, “you do all their work for them. They should have been worried about us. Let them worry. Let them wonder if we’re c
arrying a tool or if we have a crew. I’d like to go back, do it properly, deface the thing with red paint so there’s no swastika visible. You can’t have the main street, a shopping and commercial street, in a civilized city patrolled by intimidators who work for a Nazi organization. It is not humanly possible to live like that. One must not do that. There may be more important problems in Lebanon, but if people on Hamra don’t dare criticize the SSNP, well, fuck. That’s occupation.”
“It is,” I said, “in a way. They have a state behind them. They aren’t just a street gang; they’re a street gang with a state.”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “They’re the worst. And also a Greek Orthodox repressed homosexual wankers organization, I think.”
The Syrian Social Nationalist Party spokesman denied the attack ever took place. He lied.
Some of my politically connected Lebanese pals were furious when they heard what happened. One friend, whom I’ll just call Faisal so he won’t get into trouble, said it was time to retaliate.
“They attacked guests in our country,” he said as his blood pressure rose, “and they can’t get away with it.”
I appreciated that my friends were looking out for me, but I felt distinctly uneasy about where he was going with this. A retaliation could easily end badly and might even escalate. Still, I couldn’t dissuade him, and he called his bosses and asked for a posse.
Party leaders turned him down, which disappointed him but relieved me. And it occurred to me later that what Faisal had in mind was likely much more serious than tit-for-tat payback.
“What, exactly, did Faisal mean by retaliate?” I asked a mutual Lebanese friend.
“He wanted to shoot them, of course,” she said.
He wanted to shoot them!
Some Western journalists who lived and worked in Lebanon eventually came to the conclusion that there were no “good guys,” that every faction was tribal and brutish and equally to blame for the country’s violence and instability. At times I almost agreed, but the March 14 parties did manage to keep their worst instincts in check. They wouldn’t use car bombs or death squads or terrorism, not even against car bombers, death squads, and terrorists.
I thought Faisal’s party leaders were wise to say no. Killing a man in self-defense is one thing, but if every party responded to each provocation with premeditated extrajudicial gangland-style assassinations, Lebanon would go straight back to the late 1970s.
That was the moment when I understood Beirut’s Spring truly was finished.
Sending paramilitaries in the streets to gun down members of the SSNP was a terrible idea, but the police and the army weren’t going to stop them or Hezbollah. Damascus, Tehran, and their proxies could continue indefinitely to act with impunity. They may as well have had their names affixed to the title.
“The first duty of all civilizations,” foreign policy analyst Lee Harris wrote in Civilization and Its Enemies,6 “is to create pockets of peaceableness in which violence is not used as a means of obtaining one’s objective; the second duty is to defend these pockets against those who try to disrupt their peace, either from within or without.”
In Lebanon, this had become all but impossible without destroying the country.
“Once you have accepted this reality,” Harris continued, “you are faced with the problem of how to fight. If your enemy is composed of men who will stop at nothing, who are willing to die and to kill, then you must find men to fight on your side who are willing to do the same. Only those who have mastered ruthlessness can defend their society from the ruthlessness of others.”
March 14’s refusal to behave ruthlessly set it apart, in a good way, from most Middle Eastern political movements. That’s what made me unashamed to support it against the alternative. Yet it was that very quality that doomed it in the face of the unflinching ruthlessness of its enemies.
A peaceful disarmament of Lebanon’s militias was out of the question while the Syrian and Iranian regimes were in place. So was a war of disarmament, at least while the army remained weak and divided. Another war with Israel, then, was looking more and more likely. Short of an unpredictable history-changing Black Swan7 event in the region, war seemed—again—to be in Lebanon’s future no matter what. The only question remaining was what kind of war it was going to be.
For years the Saudis tried to lead a united Arab front against Syria, but after the U.S. and France announced their intention to engage with Damascus, the Saudis found that they, rather than Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite clique, were the ones who were isolated.
That by itself was untenable. Riyadh also needed to patch things up with Damascus so the two could work together in Iraq, where they had parallel interests. Al-Assad wished to continue promoting instability there for his usual reasons, while the Saudis felt compelled to subvert the Shia-dominated order that emerged after Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Baath Party government was demolished. The Saudis feared that Iraq, with its Shia majority, might align itself with Iran if the violent Sunni resistance abated. So the Saudis, Michael Young wrote in Beirut’s Daily Star,8 “decided that Lebanon was a distraction worth dispensing with.”
A month after Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States, Saudi King Abdullah met with al-Assad in Kuwait and cut a deal, and the March 14 bloc in Lebanon found itself without backup. The U.S. and France were still its allies on paper, of course, as were the Saudis, but since they were all “reaching out” to the Syrians, their Lebanese allies had little choice but to follow.
The latter, at least, was put on hold until after the election in June of 2009. The anti-Hezbollah side won and even added a seat to its preexisting majority, but almost as soon as the votes were counted, Walid Jumblatt did what his supporters most feared and dreaded—he abandoned the March 14 alliance and declared himself neutral.
He would not dare do that in advance of the election. He needed March 14 to win as much as they needed him, but he could no longer afford to be a partisan for the weak horse.
Some said he feared an internal war between Sunnis and Shias—a distinct possibility—and wanted to step back and out of the way. He himself said compromise with Hezbollah, though undesirable, was necessary because the Lebanese state was too weak to disarm a foreign-sponsored militia, which was true. Most important, however, he believed correctly that Lebanon could not effectively take a hard line while her erstwhile defenders invited Hezbollah’s patron regimes in from the cold.
“Four years after the Cedar Revolution,” Lee Smith wrote ruefully in Slate,9 “Lebanon is not a functioning democracy but, rather, a state in which a democratic majority is held at gunpoint by a gang of obscurantist fanatics who prize death more than life, and Jumblatt must try to make his peace with them, lest the community he has been tasked to defend since birth is destroyed.”
And then it got worse. After months of wrangling and haggling in Beirut and in the wider Middle East, where every major player had a stake in the outcome, Saad Hariri replaced Fouad Siniora as prime minister and was able to form a government, but his prime ministership devolved into little more than a titular figurehead post, at least when it came to foreign policy and internal security. Hassan Nasrallah was not the most popular leader in Lebanon, but he was without a doubt the most powerful.
Hariri was all but forced to surrender to Hezbollah’s continuing existence as a militia with its own foreign policy and its ability to defy the Lebanese state. March 14 parliamentarians resisted an extraordinary amount of pressure for months before caving in, but cave in they did. At the end of the day, they had to do what Hezbollah and its allies and now even the Saudis ordered them to do unless someone with an even bigger stick had their back. Yet no one had Hariri’s or Lebanon’s back, not anymore. And toward the end of the year, in December of 2009, Hariri made headlines all over the world when he spent two days cringing in front of the cameras in Damascus with the man who was suspected of murdering his father.
Walid Jumblatt was next in line to make his own
pilgrimage to Damascus and apologize for resisting the regime that also killed his father. Al-Assad made the ordeal as humiliating as possible and forced Jumblatt to all but beg for the privilege. Nasrallah made a public show of convincing al-Assad to “let” Jumblatt visit Syria, and Jumblatt was then obliged to publicly “thank” Nasrallah for being his fixer.
So that was it then, or at least almost. Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea refused to play along, and Lebanon’s President Michel Suleiman—a clear improvement over his predecessor Emile Lahoud—did the best he could to preside as a “consensus” leader over irreconcilable factions. Even these impotent bleats of protest, though, were too much for the increasingly emboldened al-Assad.
“The Syrian regime would love to get rid of these ‘thorns,’” Hanin Ghaddar wrote on NOW Lebanon.10 “A national unity government, formed despite the clear majority achieved by March 14 at the polls on June 7, 2009, is apparently not enough. Neither is a ministerial statement that was drafted under duress and that gives legitimacy to Hezbollah’s arms. Jumblatt’s decision to leave March 14 was also not enough; ditto Hariri’s visit to Damascus. The goal, it appears, is to destroy March 14, its leadership and its achievements, including the international resolutions on Lebanon. . . . Until there is another sea change in regional politics, one that hopefully restores Lebanon to the international community’s agenda, March 14 faces a bitter fight for survival.”
An unsigned editorial at the same website published on February 12, 2010, two days before the five-year anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, was even more pessimistic.11 “It’s all over. War, blackmail, civil violence, regional horse-trading and even bare-faced hypocrisy have put an end to the dream. Hezbollah is still armed, the drums of war are once again beating, the speaker of parliament was reelected by the very politicians his gunmen tried to topple, the tribunal is going nowhere fast, and, last but not least, the arm of Syrian influence once again reaches into the very heart of Lebanese power. The end came in 2009 when, on polling day, millions of Lebanese voters said ‘yes’ to prosperity, democracy and sovereignty and ‘no’ to the forces for whom violence is the final option, only to have these votes ripped up in their faces.”
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 33
