At 43, I still cannot drive a car. My first lesson in Beirut scarred me: the car was falling apart, drivers ignored traffic rules, and the lesson was in Arabic. After I drove the wrong way, my teacher made me get out and yelled. Despite that, Lebanon holds a special place in my heart. When I was 18, my parents moved to Beirut, and I visited regularly. We explored Baalbek’s ruins, visited Bekaa wineries, and ate man’oushe in the mountains. Things were never calm: my mother narrowly escaped a car bomb in 2005, and in 2006 my parents were stranded overseas during the war with Israel. Yet there was hope; in 2009, the New York Times named Beirut the top place to visit.
That phrase, 'Paris of the Middle East', is cringe and orientalist, but it conveys that Beirut is not fundamentally different from Paris. People in Lebanon are not born with thicker skin; they do not grieve their children less. Yet many seem to think otherwise. In 2022, a CNN journalist lamented the Ukraine war happening to 'civilised' people who 'watch Netflix'. In March, Donald Trump said a Lebanese acquaintance told him: 'Over the years, they’ve gotten used to the fact that it’s being bombed.' This idea may explain why the world shrugs at Lebanon’s suffering.
But this is not just another war in a war-torn region. The Gaza playbook is being enacted in Lebanon. Entire villages in the south have been wiped out. Israel intends to control a 30km 'security zone' inside Lebanon. Ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir call for expansion; Defence Minister Israel Katz has called for indefinite occupation of southern Lebanon, displacing 600,000 people. Hezbollah is not blameless—it has fired thousands of rockets into northern Israel—but Israel’s reaction goes beyond self-defence. Suspected war crimes happen almost daily; Unicef estimates nearly 14 children are killed each day.
