Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, David Hirst, Faber and Faber, 496pp, £20 (hardback)
Spirit of the Phoenix: Beirut and the Story of Lebanon, Tim Llewellyn, I. B. Tauris, 288pp, £17.99 (hardback)
At the end of his excellent book, David Hirst records that it did not start out as a history of the Arab-Israeli struggle. But it turned into that, because at every stage of its writing, the struggle kept intruding. Perhaps he wasn’t very surprised. It is impossible to spend any time in Lebanon – and Mr. Hirst has lived there for half a century – without feeling the pressure of the conflict. From the moment that the uniformed official at Beirut airport minutely scrutinises every page of a visitor’s passport to check for Israeli visa stamps, which would earn an instant trip home, you can feel its heavy presence to the south. Sooner rather than later the subject crops up in every conversation. Drive through Beirut’s southern suburbs or through the villages near the border and you will see memorials to some of the thousands of Lebanese, in and out of uniform, who have been killed by Israelis. Israel even intrudes into the backstory of Massaya, my favourite Lebanese wine. The brothers who produce it risked their lives during the war of 2006 to rescue shipments that would otherwise have been broiled on the quayside at Beirut docks. Now they make sure they send as much of their stocks as they can to a warehouse in France. The Lebanese often live for the moment, because you never know what the future will bring.
No wonder that the people of Lebanon obsess about their neighbour. Israel’s record is clear enough; the deaths and the damage; major wars in 1982 as well as 2006, and countless other incursions, bombardments, airstrikes and raids. Israel occupied a big part of south Lebanon for more than twenty years. This year talk of the next round of war is everywhere, on both sides of the border wire.
The Israelis don’t stop foreigners entering if they have a Lebanese visa, but they do reserve the right to spend as long as they like asking you why you got the stamp. Israelis are every bit as obsessed, fascinated and repelled by Lebanon as the people north of the border are by the Jewish state. Lefties in pleasure-loving, hedonistic Tel Aviv have quizzed me about Beirut, a city that they hear is just the same, where the food is good and, if it wasn’t for politics, history and war, would be close enough to visit for a night out. Where I used to live in west Jerusalem there was a place that happily billed itself as a Lebanese restaurant, which was packed out with Israelis eating kibbeh, tabbouleh and other Lebanese staples, cooked by Palestinians who claimed a Lebanese connection.
But there are also plenty of Israelis who have been to Lebanon, carrying guns, and have unhappy memories of what they found there. These visitors still regard the country as a nest of terrorists and a dangerous morass for their army. More than anything there is for Israelis a nagging doubt, and sometimes a fear, about the way that the long arm of Iran stretches right down to their border, thanks to Hizbullah, Tehran’s ally in Lebanon.
David Hirst’s book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the creation and evolution of the tortured, symbiotic relationship between Zionism and Lebanon’s sects. It is very much a view from Beirut. Mr. Hirst does not have any time at all for those who believe that Israel’s often drastic actions in Lebanon are justified by its security needs. For him the victims are Lebanese – civilians who have fled their homes, who have seen their children killed and their villages smashed. But Israel is not the only villain in his book. He turns his elegant, at times scalpel-like pen on the Assad family in Damascus; on destructive, partisan American diplomacy; and on Lebanese warlords who time and again in the seventies and eighties raced to the abyss and threw themselves and their people into it.
The subtitle of the book – Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East – says it all. Mr. Hirst lays out the way that other powers have fought each other, directly and indirectly, in Lebanon. Prominent men in weak, fractured, sectarian Lebanon did a great deal to aid and abet their foreign patrons. Whatever central authority existed – and at times there was none at all – was in no condition to do anything to push back.
That is different now, thanks to the rise of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the man David Hirst calls the ‘warrior-priest’, and leader of Hizbullah since Israel assassinated his predecessor in 1992. He has turned Hizbullah from a small band of zealots into what Mr. Hirst, quite correctly, judges to be ‘both the most influential political player in Lebanon and probably the most proficient guerilla organisation in the world’. In the process, he has put himself into a position occupied by no other Arab leader since Nasser.
Nasrallah aimed to make Israel ‘bleed slowly’, and while his own men have often been bled very fast to achieve that, he succeeded. The occupation of south Lebanon became untenable before Israel pulled out in 2000, and Hizbullah fought Israel to a standstill in 2006, inflicting a blow to the self-esteem of the Israeli military that still pains them. Mr. Hirst explains with great clarity how the growth of Hizbullah’s power tilted the political system in Lebanon, and how pragmatically Nasrallah modified Hizbullah’s message to get as much support as possible for its fight with Israel. In 1996, during a big bombing campaign that Israel called Operation Grapes of Wrath, I interviewed the kind of Lebanese people who keep Beirut’s night clubs and bars going as they rallied behind the strict Islamists of Hizbullah. In Beirut it is still only a short drive from the city’s many and varied pleasure domes to Hizbullah’s stronghold in the southern suburbs.
But Hizbullah’s power is now so pervasive in Lebanon that it makes people who are not its supporters nervous. Of all Lebanon’s many fault lines the biggest and most significant now lies between those, personified by the assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who look to Saudi Arabia and out west across the Mediterranean, and Nasrallah’s side of Lebanon, that looks east via Damascus and on its Shiite friends in Tehran. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, called the two tendencies ‘Hong Kong and Hanoi’. David Hirst says that Hanoi never buried Hong Kong, but generally secured the upper hand.
A lifetime of experience and knowledge has been distilled into Beware of Small States. Read this absorbing book if you want to understand the place where the next Middle Eastern war may start.
I would suggest that you also pick up Spirit of the Phoenix, Beirut and the Story of Lebanon by Tim Llewellyn. Mr. Llewellyn is an old BBC Middle East hand who, since he left, has criticised the Corporation for the way it reports his stamping ground. In the interests of full disclosure, I ought to say that he is an old and respected friend and colleague. For the novice in Lebanon, Spirit of the Phoenix is more approachable than David Hirst’s book. It is a convivial journey round places and people in what is clearly the author’s favourite city. He goes out of town as well – to the mountains above Beirut, to Palestinian refugee camps, and to the beautiful, battered south. One result of years of occupation and war is that the south has the cleanest, most unspoilt beaches in the country. Foreigners will need permission from the army before they can visit them though, and if you want to reveal too much flesh it might be a good idea to stay poolside in Beirut.
Mr. Llewellyn is fascinated, like so many foreigners, by the unconquerable spirit of a country that has suffered so much. Modestly, he calls his work a series of snapshots. But there’s much more than that: history and analysis, eyewitness reporting, food and drink, and some of the stories with which he would regale you over the ‘steadily building pile of little bottles of arak and Lebanese beer’ if you were lucky enough to be on the other side of the table.