Before Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers last week and started firing rockets into Israeli cities, before Israeli warplanes started bombing southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut to destroy Hezbollah militias, Beirut was becoming a fashionable place–a seaside, hillside mix of clubs and mosques, churches and boutiques.
Now, fearing air strikes, downtown Beirut has pretty much closed up shop. Hezbollah vows “open war.” Israel says strikes will continue until its soldiers are freed, rocket attacks end, and the Lebanese government moves troops into the country’s south–replacing the Hezbollah militias that have controlled the region.
Unfortunately, the people of Beirut–capital of a weak and unstable Lebanon–are caught in the crossfire again. It’s a city that armies and ethnic groups have fought over (and destroyed) for thousands of years.
The first mention of a city called “Biruta” dates to the 15th century BC. Back then, the region now called Lebanon was inhabited by seafaring traders. The Bible calls them Canaanites. But the Greeks called these merchant mariners Phoenicians (from “phoinikies,” a purple dye they sold), and adapted their slick alphabetic script for their own use.
Unfortunately for the Phoenicians, neighbors coveted more than their letters. Beirut’s wealth and natural harbor made it a target. At various times, the ancient city was conquered by Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans.
In 14 BC, Caesar Augustus officially made Beirut a Roman colony. Veterans of Rome’s wars were given land around the city and encouraged to settle in. Beirut was adorned with statues, temples, and an aqueduct. It became a center of Roman life in what historians have called “Greater Syria”–the territory now occupied by Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel.
In 551, Beirut was struck by two earthquakes, a tsunami, and then–after the aqueduct collapsed–a devastating fire. Witnesses estimated that 30,000 people lay dead beneath the wreckage. The ancient city never recovered. When the Arab armies of Islam conquered the region in 635, much of Beirut was still in ruins.
The Muslims rebuilt part of Beirut as a military outpost and administered it from Damascus. Over the next three centuries, Lebanon became a refuge for minority religious and ethnic groups–including Maronite Christians, who fled there to escape persecution by other Christians (they still make up most of Lebanon’s Christians), and Druzes, a minority sect.
During the 10th century, Mediterranean maritime commerce picked up, and Beirut began to flourish again. Then, in 1110, western crusaders captured the city and held it for more than 150 years, first from 1110 to 1187 and again from 1197 to 1291. After that, Egyptian Mamluks took over, and Beirut fell on hard times. In 1421, a pilgrim to the Holy Land took one look at its silted harbor and called it “abominable.”
From 1516 to 1916, Beirut was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire (specifically, of Ottoman Syria), but for much of that time local rulers enjoyed considerable autonomy. In the 17th century, Sultan Fakhr ad-Din II embarked on an ambitious building plan, starting with a fabulous palace that featured water-cooled walls and beautiful gardens. After his death, though, the city once again declined. By the end of the 18th century, it had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.
In the 19th century, Beirut bounced back, as trade with an industrializing Europe increased. Christian missionaries from America and France established universities, and a multilingual publishing industry took root. By the turn of the 20th century, the city had become a hub of Arab intellectual life, with a population of more than 100,000. But being a multicultural Mecca help set the stage for civil war.
Ten decades ago, Beirut was a blooming, buzzing place. Long a crossroads of Mediterranean culture and commerce, the multiethnic city had become a hub of Arab intellectual life, with universities and publishing houses and 100,000 diverse people making it their seaside home. Its future looked bright. But then global, regional, and local conflicts intervened.
During World War I, the Ottoman Turks–Beirut’s nominal overlords for centuries–reasserted their authority over the city from bases in Syria. But the Ottomans lost the war, and the French became the region’s big player, obtaining a League of Nations mandate for Lebanon.
In 1920, France oversaw the birth of the State of Greater Lebanon, with Beirut as its capital. Six years later, Greater Lebanon became the Lebanese Republic–though it remained a French mandate until 1943.
Under the French mandate, and for the first years of Lebanese independence, Beirut became known as “the Paris of the Middle East.” Banking and tourism boomed, and the city got rich. But not everyone shared in the wealth. The size of the city’s underclass increased, and long-simmering ethnic and religious tensions soon boiled over.
Part of the trouble stemmed from the National Pact, a power-sharing formula that divvied up political representation based on religious faith. Under the pact, the Lebanese president had to be a Christian, and the national assembly had to have a ratio of six Christians to five Muslims. The pact and its ratios were based on Lebanon’s 1932 census, with no provision for changing them if the country’s makeup changed.
By the late 1940s, the country’s makeup was changing, and many Muslims complained that Christians–about half the population–enjoyed an unfair share of wealth and power. Tensions increased when Palestinian refugees poured into Beirut in the wake of the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948-49. Before long, a brief civil war broke out, but it settled nothing.
Then, in 1967, another Arab-Israeli war, the Six-Day War, drove another wave of Palestinians into Lebanon. With them came the heavily armed militias of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which started to use southern Lebanon as a base for operations against Israel. Dispute over what to do with the Palestinians helped polarize Lebanon, exacerbating the old ethnic and religious tensions.
While Muslim and leftist leaders called for a new census and a new political structure, Christian leaders decried the PLO’s expanding power and influence. Armed militias cropped up on both sides. Then, in 1975, a full-scale civil war erupted, with Beirut as the primary battleground.
In the chaotic 15 years that followed, Beirut was divided into two–with Christians in the east and Muslims in the west. Much of the city was reduced to rubble, and many of the region’s powers were drawn into the fray.
Syrian forces first arrived in 1976, seeking to prop up the existing government. During the relative calm they helped impose, the PLO launched a series of attacks against Israel, which responded by invading Lebanon in 1978. The Israelis soon withdrew, but invaded again in 1982, determined to destroy the PLO.
That invasion led to the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres, in which the Israelis allowed Lebanese Christian militiamen to massacre hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Palestinian refugees in two camps. It also led to the creation of a multinational force–including U.S. Marines–charged with stabilizing the city.
In October 1983, truck-bombing terrorists killed 241 U.S. Soldiers and 58 French soldiers who were serving as part of the multinational force. The United States blamed the attack on the Shi’ite militant group Hezbollah and its Iranian backers. Early the next year, the multinational force went home, and the war went on.
In 1986, leaders in West Beirut invited the Syrians to send enough troops to stop the fighting. The Syrians complied, but peace didn’t come until 1990–and when it did come, the Syrians didn’t bother to leave. As the Beirutis began to rebuild their battered city, the Syrians effectively assumed control of Lebanese politics.
In September 2004, the UN Security Council told Syria to send its troops home. But the Syrians didn’t budge until the so-called “Cedar Revolution” of 2005, when huge protests within Lebanon and international pressure pushed them out. By then, most of the old militias had disbanded. But not Hezbollah, which had replaced the PLO as Israel’s main antagonist in southern Lebanon. There, the conflict has never really ceased.
