On Wednesday , 8 April, Israel expanded its kill zone beyond what had been known as the ‘safe’ areas north of Beirut’s suburban south. I talked to a doctor at the American University Hospital who told me his emergency room was treating four hundred patients wounded in the bombing. Four had died. I passed the hospital, where families outside were waiting for the medical staff’s reports. By the evening, the Health Ministry put the death toll at 182, already a day’s record for the round of fighting that began on 2 March, later raising the total to more than three hundred. Among the dead was a young man who worked in the Thai restaurant round the corner from my house. His family, like so many others, is in mourning. The last five weeks of Israel-Hizbullah warfare have produced more than five thousand Lebanese casualties.
When I walked home from dinner at the end of this worst day in this latest war, our western half of the city looked pretty much as it does in periods of peace: cafés filled with families having coffee or ice cream, shops open and brightly lit, boys kicking footballs on forecourts, bins overflowing with rubbish, babies in pushchairs rolled along broken pavements, music blaring from bars and men lugging plastic bags of groceries from Spinneys supermarket. It had been a long day of fear, not knowing where the Israeli jets would strike next.
I went home to sleep, but that wasn’t the way my days in troubled times here used to end. When war kicked off in Lebanon in 1975, the foreign press corps congregated on most evenings in the bar of the Hotel Saint Georges. Over the barman Ali Bitar’s martinis and other concoctions, we compared impressions of our daylight excursions to the fluctuating frontiers between Beirut’s mutually hostile neighbourhoods. Our dispatches filed by telex, we relaxed in leather armchairs, well out of mortar range, or so we imagined, and took counsel from the impeccable concierge, Mansour Breidy. We also garnered what gossip we could from politicians, bankers, arms dealers and oilmen. It was a rare correspondent who turned up in anything less than jacket and tie. We took consolation in the calming panorama of Saint George Bay and talked ourselves into somnolence in preparation for the morning’s savagery.
As a novice freelance among legendary correspondents from the world’s major newspapers, wire services and television networks, I knew my place: listen, observe and never pontificate to elders scarred from wars in Palestine, Korea, Malaya, Suez, Belgian Congo, Indochina, Algeria and a dozen other colonial battlegrounds familiar to me only from history books. One or two had fought in or covered the Spanish Civil War and the Normandy landings. Rumour had it that a few drew second salaries from the CIA, MI6 or the KGB. The epoch of celebrated reporter-spies had, however, ended ten years before my initiation into the scribbling confraternity: in January 1963, Kim Philby, then correspondent for the Observer and the Economist as well as the Kremlin’s top agent in British intelligence, defected on a freighter from Beirut harbour to Moscow. It was in the elegant surroundings of the Saint Georges that Philby had entertained his mistress, thus declaring to surprised colleagues his liaison with the wife of his opposite number in journalism and espionage, the New York Times’s man in Beirut, Sam Pope Brewer.
Set back from the shore behind the Saint Georges loomed a cluster of its less exalted competitors, Le Vendôme, the Palm Beach, the Excelsior and the garish Phoenicia Intercontinental, where aquarium-style windows behind the bar afforded drinkers visions of swimmers cavorting in the pool. The ‘hotel district’ ceased to function towards the end of 1975, when it became the front line. Christian snipers took up positions on the upper floors of the hideous new Holiday Inn to sight and murder my neighbours. Palestinian commandos, the backbone of what was then an alliance of Sunni Muslim and leftist factions calling itself the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), expelled the Christian militias from the western half of the city, gutting, looting and burning as they went. Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post, the only one of us to see the inevitability of civil war, evacuated the Saint Georges to take refuge in our new press corps HQ, the Hotel Commodore. Another Commodore arrival was Rob Warden of the Chicago Daily News, rescued from the Palm Beach with his wife and children in an armoured personnel carrier. The Commodore, less graceful but just as functional as the Saint Georges, was safely tucked away in the urban morass of what we had begun calling ‘Muslim West Beirut’. Saint Georges exiles packed the Commodore’s circular bar sans jackets and ties, yet still flush with employers’ funds to supply one another with copious quantities of alcohol.
This was the era of the journalistic raconteur, satirised by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop forty years earlier, whose favoured sagas involved the finagling of expenses. A Newsweek colleague of mine used to say: ‘I love doing expenses. It’s the only chance I get to write fiction.’ My favourite tale, which I recall hearing from Donald Wise, a courtly former Suffolk Regiment officer who became a correspondent for the Daily Express and later the Daily Mirror, involved a British reporter in Cairo during the brief lifetime of the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria. The reporter was submitting countless receipts for lunches and dinners with a valued source, ‘Syrian diplomat Marwan Badawi’. As the cost of entertaining Mr Badawi exceeded even Fleet Street’s generous limits, a bookkeeper in London cabled Cairo: ‘No Badawi listed on Syrian diplomatic register. Please explain.’ The correspondent fired back: ‘Man must be an imposter. Will never deal with him again.’
The Commodore accommodated our expense needs by transforming our bar tabs into telephone, telex, taxi and laundry charges – a money-saving device known as the ‘Commodore laundry service’. One ABC News accountant told me the company tolerated the scam out of sympathy for reporters enduring wartime hardships. Hardships? Up to a point, Lord Murdoch. It was a rare evening that the hotel’s owners, the urbane Jordanian Nazzal family, deprived us of three-course dinners with Lebanese wine and post-prandial brandies.
There was nonetheless a job to do, and most of my colleagues did it well. I learned from them how to cultivate sources among the fighting factions, rush to explosions before the smoke cleared, get to hospitals to interview survivors, check body counts with morgues and police, differentiate straight-talking from bullshitting political analysts, befriend telex operators to move my copy to the head of the transmission queue and a hundred other tricks journalism schools don’t teach. The Sunday Times correspondent Nick Tomalin, whose Vietnam reporting made him famous, was right when he wrote: ‘The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.’
In January 1976, the warring militias initiated what Serbs and Croats in the early 1990s would term etničko čišćenje, ‘ethnic cleansing’. Christian and Muslim militias besieged and massacred one another’s populations to drive them out of areas they considered their own. Christians slaughtered Palestinians, Lebanese Muslims and Kurds in the aptly named slums of Karantina (Quarantine) and Maslakh (Slaughterhouse). The LNM, referred to in French media as ‘les Islamo-Progressistes’, did the same to Christians in the coastal towns of Jiyeh and Damour just south of Beirut. The country was splintering into sectarian cantons. A ‘green line’ cut Beirut in half along Place des Martyrs, the vast plaza in the centre of the downtown area. Rival warriors, often drugged, barricaded themselves on either side, shooting and shelling one another, and the inhabited quarters behind them, at will. We covered sieges and ceasefires, battles and mediations, life and death in a maelstrom that lacked sense as much as purpose.
By summer, with my flat deprived of electricity and running water, I moved into the Commodore courtesy of an expense account that ABC News extended to me as their radio stringer. My other strings were Time, the Guardian and the Chicago Daily News – back-up for overworked staffers. In August, the Christians tightened their siege on the last Palestinian enclave in the east, a refugee camp on Tel el-Zaatar, Hill of Thyme, perched on the highway leading to Christian mountain villages above Beirut. The Christian militia spokesmen whom I came to know justified their assault on Tel el-Zaatar by claiming that its armed residents frequently stopped traffic to extort money and examine identity cards. I had lived in one of those villages, Broumana, in 1972, and always passed the camp without incident on my drive to Beirut. The Christians’ objective was to remove an obstacle to purification of their zone. It was comprehensible in military if not in human terms.
During the summer’s siege, most of us would leave the Commodore to observe the camp from surrounding Christian positions and gather what information we could from the Christian Lebanese Front coalition of Phalange and National Liberal militias, each headed by a rival Maronite Catholic family: the Phalange by the Gemayels and the Liberals by the Chamouns. Then back to West Beirut for briefings from PLO sources before filing our stories. The person who most impressed me was from neither the Christian nor Palestinian gangs, but a soft-spoken, intense young Swiss delegate from the Red Cross, Jean Hoefliger.
Hoefliger negotiated, indeed pleaded, for the lives of the estimated fifteen thousand inhabitants of Tel el-Zaatar, mostly Palestinian along with some poor Lebanese and Syrians, who by the end of July were dying of thirst, hunger and lack of medicines. His efforts achieved an evacuation of about four hundred wounded in early August. We saw Hoefliger defiant and unmoved at the camp’s entrance as gunmen tried to frighten him away with automatic weapons fire. Working in tandem with the representative of the Arab League, Hassan Sabry el-Kholy of Egypt, it seemed he had obtained an understanding with the Lebanese Front that they would not commit massacres as they had in Karantina and Maslakh if and when the PLO commandos withdrew. The commandos left the camp, and on 12 August the massacre began.
Doyle McManus of United Press International and I went there that morning and witnessed the annihilation of unarmed women, children and old men. A population that had lived there since 1949, the year after their expulsion from Palestine by the Israelis, had ceased to exist. Their dismembered and crushed bodies covered the camp’s streets and alleys. Blood surged down the gutters. Looters from nearby Christian quarters drove over the corpses in their haste to steal furniture, refrigerators, clothing, anything they could carry. A bulldozer scraped bodies from the ground and dumped them in pits. The air was filthy from the smoke of burning shacks, cars and flesh. When Doyle and I walked out of the ruins, we saw a Maronite priest on a balcony blessing looters on their way home.
I recorded what ABC called ROSRs (radio on-scene reports) on a tape recorder to send over telephone wires when we got back to the Commodore. That evening, I claimed one of the hotel’s two telex machines to type out a long file to Time to supplement the main report from the magazine’s staff correspondent, Dean Brelis, who had covered the Vietminh’s struggle against France in the 1950s. That night in the Commodore bar, no one laughed. No one told old stories. No one that I can recall mentioned what we had seen. We just drank.
I composed a story the next day on my portable Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter for the Guardian, whose reporter Peter Niesewand had already filed the main piece. I forget now what I had to add, but I took my pages to the Reuters bureau, a fifteen-minute walk away, for its telex operators to transmit to London. It was while I was returning to the Commodore that the regular afternoon artillery barrage, a ritual on both sides of town, began. If a kind Armenian woman had not opened the door to her apartment block and beckoned me inside, the shell that hit the pavement would have killed me. I didn’t notice the shrapnel in my leg until she pointed at the blood staining her floor. She made me lie down and handed me a telephone to call the Commodore. Julian Nundy and Tim Pearce of Reuters picked me up and drove me to the American University Hospital, already full to capacity with people of all ages far more badly injured than I was.
When I propped my crutches against the Commodore bar that night, the BBC’s Tim Llewellyn was already there with his bandaged arm in a sling courtesy of a Palestinian sniper who had spotted him in a car on the east side. If the Daily Telegraph reporter John Bulloch hadn’t known how to apply pressure to the wound, Mr Tim, as the Commodore staff affectionately called him, would have bled to death. His wound was deeper than mine, but he was gracious with his sympathy and we stayed up much of the night toasting our survival. Because the fighting had closed Beirut International Airport, we left town a week later by taxi to Amman and a flight to London.
The Syrian army, which had entered Lebanon with American approval to save the Christian militias from defeat, occupied west Beirut in November and ostensibly ended the civil war. The war did not end, of course. It assumed new forms and it isn’t over yet. Like my colleagues, I returned again and again to cover each eruption of violence. In the meantime, there were other wars – Eritrea, Somalia, Rhodesia, Bosnia, East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan. What drew me to them was curiosity, competition and a lust to tell stories, but there was also companionship in ramshackle bars around the world with fellow members of our bizarre brotherhood-sisterhood of misfits, too many of whom were killed along the way.
Most of the wars we covered ended, and not always well. Yet Lebanon’s seemed perpetual, like an illness that doesn’t kill the patient but never leaves him. ABC News sent me back full-time for television coverage in 1983. Ronald Reagan, in the wake of the Israeli invasion of 1982, had posted US Marines on the low ground beside the airport, the ideal spot for a suicide bomber to kill 241 American military personnel on the morning of 23 October 1983. When the number of Westerners kidnapped by a new Shia Muslim militia, Hizbullah, soared at the end of 1984, ABC sent me back to London. I stupidly became a hostage myself for two months during a visit in 1987, after which I avoided Beirut for ten years.
When the ill-fated Arab Spring erupted in 2011, I returned often to Beirut to take a taxi to Damascus and cover Syria’s evolving civil war, for the LRB and other places. That conflict ended with the flight of Bashar al-Assad on 8 December 2024. I raced to Damascus two days later to record the first days of the country’s new Islamist regime. In the meantime, Hizbullah had fired rockets into Israel in support of the Palestinians being butchered in Gaza. Israel won that round, decapitating Hizbullah’s leadership and eliminating its secretary-general of thirty years, Hassan Nasrallah, crippling hundreds of its militants with exploding phone pagers and razing much of South Lebanon and southern Beirut.
I left soon afterwards and returned last August, not as a journalist but as a teacher. The American University of Beirut allowed me to conduct an undergraduate course on ‘The History of Resistance’ and a graduate seminar on ‘War and Media’, despite the fact that I had less expertise in pedagogy than I had in journalism fifty years ago. My students call me ‘doctor’ or ‘professor’, though I am neither. In Lebanon, many things are not called by their right name. Outright thieves are called ‘bankers’, gangsters designate themselves ‘political leaders’ and Israel’s continuous bombardment of South Lebanon between November 2024 and March 2026 went by the name of ‘ceasefire’. The ‘ceasefire’ ended on 2 March, when Hizbullah lobbed a few desultory rockets at northern Israel in response to Israel’s murder of Iran’s supreme leader, and Hizbullah’s supreme backer, Ali Khamanei. Israel reacted with the fury everyone, including the Lebanese government, said it would – depopulating Lebanon as far as the Litani River, bombing Beirut’s southern suburbs and displacing a million people. Hizbullah, which alone among Lebanon’s militias had retained its armoury on the pretext of protecting Lebanon’s borders, had by antagonising the Israeli war machine justified its critics’ claim that its devotion to Iranian interests superseded its loyalty to Lebanon.
Israel’s massive, ongoing bombardment has made reaching the university campus unsafe for many students. Israeli troops have bulldozed their families’ houses near the border, while Israeli drones and rockets have demolished their apartment buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs. The fact that one of my academic colleagues is an atheist and not a Hizbullah-loving Shia didn’t save his house and its large library from Israeli bombs. Like many of my students from South Lebanon and the Shia quarters of Beirut, he is renting in a ‘safe’ area of the capital. Even safe areas like mine near the university have been hit by Israeli drones assassinating Iranian diplomats and suspected members of Hamas and Hizbullah, making landlords afraid to rent to Shia fleeing the bombardment. This forces many to sleep in their cars or under flimsy tents along the seafront Corniche.
Wherever we are in Beirut, we hear explosions that kill our neighbours and endure the relentless hum of the Israeli drones that watch us. I hear and sometimes see this war, but I’m not covering it. What good would it do? You, dear reader, don’t give a damn. Nor do the Israeli invaders, their American enablers or Hizbullah’s aspiring martyrs. Unlike Israel, Lebanon’s non-functioning state provides no air raid shelters. The Lebanese army, supported by the US, UK and France, is not permitted to purchase or deploy air defences that might protect the country from Israel’s aerial assaults. The army’s sole purpose, in Washington’s eyes, is to disarm Hizbullah – an enterprise that would result in another civil war. The risk of that looms large anyway, as increasing numbers of young Shia move onto the turf of young Sunnis and anti-Muslim Christian fanatics call for attacks on their Shia countrymen. Friends in the northern city of Tripoli, which has a Sunni majority, tell me that the most popular politician there is not Lebanese at all, but the Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, champion of Sunni religious fundamentalism. Shias and many Christians fear an invasion of Lebanon by Sharaa’s combatants stationed along the border. Their purported motive would be to take revenge on Hizbullah, which fought against them on behalf of Assad, and persecute all who do not share their fanatic dogma.
The young people I am trying to teach believe, as I did once, that telling the story will rouse the Western public that pays for this and most other wars to persuade their leaders to stop the killing. Would anything I write compel the arms dealers and ultra-high-tech digital warfare providers to deprive their managers and shareholders of the profits accruing from their wizard new methods of taking human life? Like the rest of Lebanon, I wake in the night at the sound of every loud bang, unsure whether it is thunder, an Israeli naval shell, a drone explosion or a jet dropping a two-thousand-pound bomb to destroy an entire city block. And, like much of Lebanon, I manage to go to the cinema and enjoy good meals.
I reconcile myself to obsolescence when I read the young correspondents covering this war. Raya Jalabi of the Financial Times, William Christou of the Guardian, Bassem Mroue of the Associated Press, Hugo Bachega of the BBC, Maya Gebeily of Reuters and a dozen others are doing excellent work at great risk, despite Israel’s killing of many of their colleagues. Their work impresses me as much as anything my colleagues and I did in Sarajevo, Baghdad, Aleppo or Mogadishu. They, however, suffer two handicaps we didn’t. There is no longer a press bar in Beirut: the Saint Georges remains gutted and the Commodore, already a ghost whose latest owners had erased the old bar anyway, closed for good in January. Worse, most of their potential readers and viewers prefer the flashing slide show of social media. My students admit, somewhat apologetically, that this is where they turn for information, like their counterparts everywhere. For the first time in my life, I am not covering a war. Like every other civilian in Lebanon, I am just living it.