Young Lebanese, Caught in the Middle, See a Brighter Future Take a Dark Turn

July 23, 2006

By JAD MOUAWAD

BEIRUT, Lebanon, July 22 — Maya Hage, 24, is a singer in a local band that plays at the hip beach resorts dotting Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast. Ms. Hage, a Maronite Christian, returned from France four years ago to enjoy her country’s many charms. Now she feels betrayed.

Nabil Sargi, 26, is trying to cling to his freewheeling Beirut. An account manager and musician, he was sipping a beer recently at a bar in the Gemayzeh district, whose restaurants and clubs long drew the artistic, literary crowd. But few of them are open now, and the traffic that so recently paralyzed the street late into the night has vanished.

Zainab Anis Jaber, 23, fled her home in southern Beirut when the terrifying pounding of Israeli rockets began. For Ms. Jaber, a religiously observant Shiite, the Beirut of glossy magazines, nightclubs, and luxury boutiques was always more distant than the dark side of the moon, and the scars of war were always near.

Today’s young Lebanese are a multifaceted group, hard to generalize about. But they all came of age in a country that was supposed to be moving past war and the religious tensions that tore the country apart from 1975 to 1990, and they all saw how a unified Lebanon drove Syria’s troops out last year after 29 years of occupation.

Now, with Hezbollah’s raid on Israel and Israel’s siege of Lebanon, there is a weary sense that the country’s halting progress may unravel.

Even before the bombing began, Beirut bore the memory of its civil war on its bullet-gouged buildings. The old Green Line that once divided the city has been sewn back with the yellow stone of refurbished French colonial buildings, chic cafes and trendy restaurants, a repaired Greek Orthodox cathedral and an expanded Sunni mosque. Roman ruins rubbed shoulders with glittering high-rise buildings.

Lebanon’s delicate tapestry is made of many religious communities — 18 in all, the largest among them Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Maronite Christians, and Druze. Power is divided along religious lines, and so is patronage.

On the surface, the divides among these groups have been ironed out. But the war never really stopped for Lebanon’s Shiites. First they were driven out of their homes by the Israeli Army fighting Palestinian militants. Then the slums where they moved in Beirut’s southern suburbs were bombed. And now, once more, an Israeli assault is throwing hundreds of thousands of them on the road.

Ms. Jaber grew up in south Beirut. Her father was killed before she was born, when the Israeli Army invaded Lebanon in 1982. Her family was forced out of the town of Marjaayoun, when the Israelis occupied southern Lebanon for nearly two decades.

Last week, war again turned her into a refugee fleeing Israeli rockets on Beirut’s southern suburbs. She said she lost a relative during the recent bombing in the south.

Ms. Jaber now lives at her aunt’s home, close to the highway that leads to the airport and a short walk from the center of town, where life seems to have stopped 11 days ago. Much of that neighborhood, devastated in the early years of the civil war, was torn down a decade ago to make way for glittering new buildings. By erasing the signs of the past, the promoters sought a clean slate. But their efforts did little to help bridge the gap between Lebanon’s disenfranchised — including the country’s large Shiite community — and the rest of the country.

“We feel neglected,” said Ms. Jaber, walking past Martyr’s Square. Her engaging round face and clear green eyes were tightly wrapped with a veil so that her hair was hidden. A long black robe revealed only sports shoes.

“People in Beirut, especially the Christians, don’t understand what is going on in the south because they live in security and prosperity,” she said.

Ms. Jaber blames the other Lebanese communities for ignoring the problems of the south, and the government for having failed the Shiites. Only Hezbollah, which distributes funds and administers services and schools, provides for the Shiites of Lebanon, she said. Only Hezbollah, she said, can defend them against Israel.

“My relatives in the south are fighting, not going out and partying,” she said. “It’s not a privilege for us. It’s something we’re forced to do.”

Thanks to Hezbollah’s financial help, she said, she went to college and earned a master’s degree.

She does not shake hands with men. When her Christian friends visit her home, she warns them against shaking hands with her male relatives. She does not listen to pop music. She does not drink.

Her experience is light-years away from Beirut’s image as a casual party town, where champagne sells for $7,000 a bottle and all forms of excess are welcomed.

“Coexistence does not mean compromise,” she said. “I respect them, but I don’t think we live the same life.”

A case in point: Before the siege, Lana El Khalil, 24, enjoyed going to parties in the cosmopolitan capital that Beirut had once more become. Now she is volunteering to help Lebanese refugees who have fled the airstrikes, as well as continuing her work practicing art therapy to help young children in a Palestinian refugee camp cope with the trauma of being uprooted.

Like many affluent Lebanese families, her family settled in Nigeria before the civil war. She returned to Lebanon when she was 16.

Although she is a Druze, she has not been actively religious. She says the Lebanese have been complacent, failing to face their past or the reasons the country spent 15 years tearing itself apart.

“We have opted for collective amnesia after the civil war; we pretended nothing had happened — we never said ‘never again,’ ” she said. “I rejected religion a long time ago because I saw what it did to this country.”

Now, Ms. Khalil said, “it seems like all the work, all the sweat, all the emotional toll spent building up, has been decimated.”

Unlike Ms. Jaber, many of the more secular younger set are furious with Hezbollah, believing the group has dragged Lebanon into a ruinous conflict. Mr. Sargi said it set the clock back 20 years. “I am 100 percent against Israel, but I also don’t agree with Hezbollah as an armed militia,” he said. “They have no right to take the country as a hostage.”

Ms. Hage is also critical. “I don’t agree with Hezbollah’s lifestyle, and I didn’t choose this war,” she said, wearing dark Chanel glasses, a revealing white T-shirt and tight sweat pants.

“The Lebanese enjoy life, they enjoy leading a good life and having fun,” she said. “We had other battles to fight — like finding work and making this economy grow. Waging a war on Israel was not a priority for us,” she said.

Many young Lebanese say they will not be dragged back into divisive conflict.

Nayla Tueni, 23, remains a believer in Lebanon’s future. She says she has little choice. Last December, a powerful bomb killed her father, Gebran Tueni, a prominent anti-Syrian campaigner and the publisher of the newspaper An Nahar. The assassination was the last of a string of bombings and killings that followed the Syrian pullout.

“I am part of a generation that does not think along the lines of Christians or Muslims,” said Ms. Tueni, who is a journalist at the paper. “Too many people have given their blood to make this happen.”

She remains optimistic about Lebanon’s capacity to unite its communities. Yet she, too, feels disbelief that the country has plunged so quickly into a conflict few here expected. She believes Hezbollah was wrong to drag the country into war.

“I don’t want my father to have given his life in vain,” said Ms. Tueni, who had a picture of her father pinned on her black shirt. “I don’t want to enter into a long, black tunnel. I don’t want to accept we’re in a war.”

From Beirut to Tripoli, to cities in the south of the country, the past 16 years have been a slow and painful road of reconstruction in Lebanon. The unfinished task has left the country with $40 billion of debt. The center of Beirut is still a dusty quarter with many empty lots. A few buildings have risen. Around the country, strong inequalities remain. And now, many fear just how much the onslaught will undo.

“I wonder if the Lebanese people will have the strength to rebuild everything for a second time,” said Mr. Sargi, the account manager and musician. “The bombs don’t frighten me as much as the aftermath of the war.”

Carole Corm and Nadim Audi contributed reporting for this article.