BEIRUT — Down a quiet street in one of Beirut’s fancier neighborhoods, couples huddle over designer cocktails. The music of jazz trumpeter Enrico Rava washes over the dining room as solicitous waiters recite the evening’s specials, their delivery unaffected by the thud of bombs falling on a neighborhood nearby.
Barely two miles away, Israeli warplanes begin their near-nightly pummeling of the Dahiyeh, the cluster of Beirut suburbs where Hezbollah holds sway.
In Lebanon’s south, entire villages and towns have been erased in recent Israeli bombardment, triggered by Hezbollah’s yearlong rocket campaign against northern Israel. More than 2,200 Lebanese have been killed in recent weeks, while a quarter of the country’s population is displaced.
But for a significant segment of this capital’s residents, the war remains somewhat removed. Despite the incessant buzz of drones and the drum line of occasional explosions, for those determined to stay out of the fight between the Iran-backed Shiite militant group and Israel, it’s the “war over there.”
All conflict zones reach this point eventually — when the initial shock of violence’s proximity gives way to a cautious return to normalcy, sometimes even a dinner-jacket-in-the-jungle attitude.
After more than two years of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, street life in Kyiv — more than 200 miles from the nearest front line in the country’s east — is mostly back to its prewar vitality. Syrians have learned to live with the bloodshed of a conflict that smolders on, 13 years after it kicked off. In years past, residents of cities from Baghdad to Jerusalem managed to continue everyday life amid suicide bombings.
As Israeli airstrikes flatten swaths of Lebanon, groups warn the attacks mirror some of the patterns of destruction and displacement seen in Gaza.
In Beirut — a city devastated by Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, the 2006 war with Israel and then a gargantuan 2020 accidental port explosion that wiped out 87,000 homes — that attitude comes sooner than in most places, less due to romantic notions of resilience but rather because of experience under fire.
“First two weeks, you’re afraid of the war,” said Christine Codsi, a managing partner at Souq Al-Tayeb, a farmers market operating in central Beirut. “Then you understand its patterns. Then you plan your life around it. ... You start thinking, ‘OK, now I can go to the market. OK, I can go get coffee somewhere.’ But you’re never relaxed.”
A month after Israel intensified its campaign against Hezbollah with thousands of airstrikes and a ground invasion in the south, the capital now exists in a twilight state, somewhere between war and lull.
It’s a place where you can catch the surreal tableau of a plane from Middle East Airlines, Lebanon’s national carrier, threading its way between columns of smoke rising from explosions below, the Mediterranean sparkling in the background, before making a nonchalant landing. In certain parts of the city, you can go about your day, almost blocking out the threat of airstrikes down the street and ignoring the prevalent mood of subdued fear. Shops are open, sidewalk cafes are well patronized and cars clog the streets.
But the difference between safety and danger can be as short as a block. Drive past an intersection linking central Beirut to the Dahiyeh’s edge, where Hezbollah’s yellow flags start to appear on lampposts and the din of Israeli drones grows louder, and traffic rapidly melts away. Few vehicles brave the abandoned boulevards; those that do move in furtive dashes: They barrel down the road, slow near the still-smoking ruins of a freshly struck building, then race away. By sunset, there’s no one about, the only faces on the streets those of slain Hezbollah fighters looking down from posters commemorating their deaths.
A strike in Shebaa, Lebanon, kills a family of nine, including a woman eight months pregnant, reflecting the horror of the growing violence between Israel and Lebanon.
The war has brought with it a new geography for Beirut, rendering some of its main arteries inaccessible for those unwilling to risk Israeli targeting. But it’s also shifted the city’s center of gravity: An estimated quarter of a million people from the Dahiyeh escaped to the city’s downtown and coastal neighborhoods, urban researchers say. Those who didn’t find room with relatives cram into public schools and hotels, squat in abandoned buildings or, for the truly desperate, sleep in makeshift tent encampments that now line the city’s parks and seaside boulevards. Either way, tens of thousands of vehicles are now double- and triple-parked on many of the city’s thoroughfares.
Not everyone is happy to host the displaced. In some areas of the city, anti-Hezbollah officials have refused to open up state schools and urged landlords not to host Shiites for fear of harboring someone with Hezbollah links and drawing Israeli fire.
Still, the reaction of most people has been to help. With Lebanon’s notoriously ineffective government unable to deal with the amount of displacement, food collectives and restaurants all around Beirut have taken it on themselves to provide food assistance.
“For me, this is a simple humanitarian thing,” Codsi said. “Do I ask someone who needs help what are their politics? It doesn’t matter.”
It was easy to make the switch to a community kitchen, she added. Souq Al-Tayeb had already done it before when it partnered with the Spanish American chef José Andrés’ nonprofit World Central Kitchen to feed residents affected by the Beirut blast in 2020.
The place where Souq Al-Tayeb held its farmers market was converted to a meal preparation center, drawing dozens of volunteers to prepare 4,500 meals every day.
Other establishments have joined in. “The way I thought about it, it’s better to feed thousands of people rather than just three or four. It’s that simple kind of clarity,” said Ziad Akar, chef and owner of the restaurant Aleb. Though he could have kept the restaurant going, Akar said, he “couldn’t be a bystander.” Within days, he had the place running as a soup kitchen.
“It’s easy. I knew exactly what to do. I knew exactly who to call,” Akar said, with a smile. “It’s not our first rodeo.”
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