Belén Fernández
Al-Jazeera / October 29, 2024
Lebanon’s Tyre has seen Israeli-wrought destruction before and has recovered. It will rebuild yet again.
On Monday, the Israeli military set about maniacally bombarding the southern Lebanese coastal city of Tyre, striking residential buildings left and right and converting the scene into a typical Israeli-induced horror-scape. Since the beginning of the genocide in neighbouring Palestine in October last year, Israel has killed more than 2,700 people in Lebanon, the majority of them over the past month and a half.
An ancient Phoenician port sacked by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, Tyre is of course no stranger to destruction. The city bears three sets of Roman and Byzantine ruins – one of which incidentally played host to a more unique form of destruction in 2013 when the convoy belonging to then-United States ambassador to Lebanon Maura Connelly managed to damage the historical site while inexplicably driving over it. This particular episode prompted the Jadaliyya headline: “Tires over Tyre: US Ambassador Ruins Ruins.”
Given its fierce partnership with the state of Israel, the US has certainly had an outsized hand in ruining Lebanon over the course of contemporary history. In 1982, for example, the US greenlit the Israeli invasion that killed tens of thousands of people in the country. And during Israel’s 34-day war on Lebanon in 2006, which killed approximately 1,200 people, the US expedited bomb deliveries to the Israeli military while agitating to delay a ceasefire – an approach the Joe Biden administration has now basically supercharged to accommodate the genocide in Gaza.
I first made the acquaintance of the city of Tyre – and the rest of Lebanon – one month after the carnage in 2006, when my friend Amelia and I undertook a hitchhiking tour of the country, both ruined and unruined parts. Heading south from Beirut, we were given a ride by a jovial middle-aged man named Samir, who put us up for several days in his home in Tyre and escorted us on vehicular excursions to battered villages along the Lebanese-Israeli border.
Samir resided with his young son in an apartment building that had barely escaped battering. Just opposite the complex was another residential building that Israeli handiwork had sliced in two, leaving a vertical stack of kitchens on display. In keeping with Lebanese traditions of excessive hospitality, Samir ensured that Amelia and I remained severely overfed for the duration of our stay, plying us with manousheh and other treats at a humble establishment along Tyre’s seaside corniche.
The palm tree-lined corniche is currently ravaged by Israeli air strikes, but in non-apocalyptic times it provides a picturesque backdrop for summer evening strolls, family picnics, argileh consumption, and other standard human behaviour in a city Israel would now like the world to believe is a den of terrorists. In World Cup times, it also provides a venue for local motorists to cruise endlessly back and forth with flags and horns, celebrating whichever team has triumphed.
I next returned to Tyre in 2008 in the company of Hassan, a friend Amelia and I had made hitchhiking in 2006, whose father had come to Lebanon on foot from Palestine in 1948, when Israel violently set up shop on Palestinian land. A passport-less refugee, Hassan had taken to compensating for the claustrophobic boundaries of his imposed land of refuge by driving up and down the country, sometimes several times in a day.
I got to ride shotgun for the few months of my visit, and in the evenings we often found ourselves by the sea in Tyre, drinking Lebanese wine out of the bottle and gazing across the water at the sparkling lights of the UNIFIL base at Naqoura on the Israeli border – the only ultra-electrified spot in an otherwise spectacularly electricity-deficient country.
On many nights, we would also speed through the villages south of Tyre, and Hassan would recount to me his days as a fighter with Amal, the predominantly Shia Lebanese political party and former militia that participated in the Hezbollah-led resistance to the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. When I spoke recently to Hassan, he informed me that he was also “fighting” Israel in this latest war – but this time by delivering food and other necessities to displaced civilians from south Lebanon.
Amal has largely been excised from international view by a reductionist political and corporate media narrative that prefers to simply cast Hezbollah in the role of reigning Lebanese “terrorists”. But in Tyre, martyr posters of militants from both parties line thoroughfares and are plastered to storefronts, a reminder that – as long as Israel keeps slaughtering, displacing and occupying – people are going to keep fighting back.
During one of my numerous returns to Tyre over the years, in 2016, I rented a room in the labyrinthine Christian quarter of the city abutting the port, which I used as a base to conduct my own solo hitchhiking expedition through south Lebanon – a journey that brought me into contact with ever more martyr posters and ever more living stories of resistance, as I recorded in my travelogue Martyrs Never Die.
I hitchhiked to Qana, the site of the legendary water-to-wine conversion by Jesus Christ and of the 1996 Israeli massacre of 106 refugees sheltering at a United Nations compound. And I hitchhiked to Aita al-Shaab, the border village that served as the starting point for the 2006 war and that has now once again been pulverised.
Back in the Christian quarter of Tyre, I frequented a diminutive portside restaurant belonging to the iconic Abu Robert, an octogenarian fisherman and survivor of all manner of Lebanese cataclysms. Abu Robert recommended daily dips in the Mediterranean for longevity and told me about the time in 1948 when he sailed to Palestine with his father for watermelons and returned with a cargo of fleeing Palestinians.
My last visit to Tyre took place in June 2022, when I learned that Abu Robert had passed away earlier in the year and spent the day in his honour on the city’s white sand beach. The temperament and colour of the sea in Tyre is in constant flux, but on that day it was placid, crystalline, aquamarine.
As Israel now does its best to bomb the life out of Tyre, it is important to remember that it takes a lot more than bombs to kill a place.
Belén Fernández – Al-Jazeera columnist
