A City Struggles To Maintain a Bit of Its Charm

An employee readies bar stools at the Godot Café, one of the establishments trying to open for business despite Israeli bombing. Many close much earlier than they once did. (By Michael Robinson-chavez -- The Washington Post)

Actually, it was always more like San Diego: raw and unfinished. What set Lebanon apart was the people, an unlikely amalgam of primeval Middle East and a European veneer. The Phoenicians started here, replaced by Arabs. The Western quotient was left behind by French Jesuits who came in the 19th century to educate children, and French colonialists who came 50 years later to rule.

Their legacy was audible at Duo, which sits behind a row of columns and arches in the Beirut city center rebuilt with traditional Lebanese architecture. A lithe woman with stylishly unkempt hair, her tank top revealing a lot of gloriously tanned skin, used Arabic, French and English in a single sentence to greet a friend who had arrived for lunch.

Lebanese, particularly well-educated Christians, have always loved to do that, showing themselves and their neighbors how cosmopolitan they are. In the tiny Torino Express bar on the other side of Martyrs' Square, the traditional center of the city, a world-weary young sophisticate betrayed another legacy the other night, fending off the urging of a companion with the Hebrew for "Take it easy a minute."

As they always have in conflict, the people of Beirut have shown astounding resilience over the last two weeks. Michael Sawma, who runs Tapas restaurant just down Al Gemaizeh Street, reopened for business Monday night. With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in town, there was a pause in the bombing and he got about 10 customers for sangria and calamari. Sawma showed up again Tuesday, but the bombs crashed and echoed down Al Gemaizeh Street once again.

It was harder to keep up pretenses in Jounieh, the Christian-inhabited beach resort just north of Beirut. The area is normally boiling this time of year with Persian Gulf Arabs spending petrodollars on hotel rooms, restaurants, nightclubs and brothels. As the first Israeli warplanes unleashed their bombs two weeks ago, most of them left for safety in Damascus, Syria, and Amman, Jordan. After Israeli jets bombed a television relay tower just above the beach Saturday, the last hardy few packed and fled.

"Even the Lebanese who had come here to get away from all the fighting, they left, too," lamented Rashad Bitar, who owns the Malibu Bay Beach Resort overlooking the Mediterranean. "They went to the mountains, those little villages up there," he added, pointing at the sharp spine of Mount Lebanon.

Ahmed Saadoun, who owns the Golden Gulf hotel just down the beachfront, said he still had a full house of southern Lebanese seeking shelter and safety after being driven from their homes by Israel's air campaign. As a result, instead of robed Arabs ogling bikini-clad Russian prostitutes, his poolside was populated by black-robed Shiite mothers chasing after children. "Before, this hotel was full, and full of what? Not Lebanese people, but people from every country," Saadoun said. "And now they all left."

Saadoun, who migrated from Iraq, said the most fearful thing about this round of fighting is that it could reopen Lebanon's civil war. Primeval forces have boiled over regularly through Lebanese history, bursting through the veneer. Mutual slaughters broke out between Druze and Maronite mountain men long before Israel was born. Since 1948, the emergence of the Jewish state just to the south has made peaceful coexistence among Lebanon's Shiite, Sunni, Druze and Christian communities even more difficult.

In the 1970s and '80s, Yasser Arafat and the armed Palestinians who took up residence here made it impossible. With their quest for a return to Palestine, they posed the uncomfortable question: How Arab is Lebanon? The long civil war and several Israeli invasions killed thousands of people and destroyed the country but never provided a definitive answer.

Lebanese, papering over their differences, have worked hard and spent a lot of money over the last 16 years to put their country back together again, hoping against hope that they could get along without really deciding their national personality. Rafiq Hariri, when he was prime minister, organized the renovation of the city center to symbolize the renaissance he hoped would endure. He now rests in an elegant new mosque overlooking Martyrs' Square, having been assassinated last year.