Barrage Reopens Wounds of a Fractured Beirut

As smoke from Israeli airstrikes rises in the background, Lebanese in Beirut watch Hezbollah's leader on television. Many had thought the city was on the cusp of a revival, finally recovering from the devastation of Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war. (By Kevork Djansezian -- Associated Press)

BEIRUT, July 17 -- Physician Salem Ali sprawled in a chair at Sahel General Hospital, where he had spent the last four days. His house? He laughed and shrugged his shoulders. It was near the Iranian Embassy, he said as explanation.

"I have no idea whether it's still standing or whether it's destroyed," he said.

A television near him Sunday echoed with the staccato images of the Israeli attacks, chronicling in real time the successive explosions rattling his hospital in the southern neighborhoods of Beirut, which serve as Hezbollah's stronghold.

On the radio next to him was a song by Majda Al-Roumi, "O Beirut, the Lady of the World." "Rise from under the rubble, like a flower of almond in April," she sang. Her voice then soared: "Rise, O Beirut!"

In the crucible of Israel's attacks this month on the Lebanese capital, the city that rises will probably never be the same as the one that stood before. These days, in poignant ways, many different Beiruts are emerging, its famous diversity proving its greatest curse. There is the city of Ali's neighborhood in Dahiya, home to a Shiite Muslim ideology that merges militant politics with deepest faith. There are others in a capital where streets serve as borders: a Sunni Muslim community that presided over Beirut's reconstruction from a 15-year civil war, now watching its destruction, and a Christian neighborhood that talks of the city's very survival.

From bomb-scarred Dahiya in the south to unscathed Ashrafiyeh in the east, there is a sense that the very calculus of the city is changing, the sectarian forces that have always defined it beginning to overwhelm it. Now more than ever, politics are conflating with identity, and to many, Beirut's most difficult questions may be asked only when the Israeli bombs stop falling.

"We've gone through worse times, and life returned," Ali said, as the song played. "It will be a beautiful city again."

Said Patrick Ferran, at the city's other end: "Sometimes you have to destroy a house if you want to rebuild it."

Devotion to Hezbollah

---

In Dahiya, the yellow banners of Hezbollah carry a martial image: a fist grasping an AK-47 assault rifle emblazoned in green. Under a sky shadowed by plumes of smoke from bombing, portraits on lampposts commemorate slain Hezbollah fighters: Talal Zein, Nasrallah Daher, Fadi Azz el-Din. Across one building is the face of Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader. "Always loyal," the slogan reads underneath.

Along a nearby street is Ali's hospital and, a little farther down, the bomb shelter where he and 50 other people watched a speech in which Nasrallah extolled Hezbollah's attack Friday on an Israeli ship off the coast of Lebanon. Gathered around the television, the crowd erupted in cheers. "God is greatest," some shouted. Children cried out, "Victory to the resistance!"

"It makes you feel proud," said Ali, a Shiite Muslim originally from Taibe, along the Israeli border.

There are myriad reasons for Hezbollah's support among Shiite Muslims, Lebanon's largest community. Once rural, illiterate and dominated by a small elite of feudal landlords and reactionary clergy, the community was transformed during the 1975-90 civil war. In many ways, Hezbollah, which emerged during the 1982 Israeli invasion, embodied that metamorphosis. It provided schools, hospitals, pharmacies and dental clinics, spending millions of dollars a year -- made possible by Iran. It transformed the community's numbers into a voice that today represents the deciding factor in Lebanese politics.