Beirut: Two Cities, One History

One of the two rockets that struck Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, yesterday hit a residential building, shattering glass across a living room and knocking a wall down onto a sofa. The photo of the apartment, so typical of a Shia home in Dahiyeh brings to mind all the evenings I spent in precisely such a space, during the years I lived and worked in Beirut as a journalist. I nearly ended up living in ضاحيه myself, because when I first began looking for an apartment, I was accompanied by a Shia friend, and all the Christian Lebanese apartment owners politely shut the door in our face after discovering his last name was faghih.

I eventually found a flat in a Christian quarter, but the neighbors in my building sniffed a bit when word spread that an Iranian had moved in. One by one they stoppped by to peek in behind my door, old Lebanese ladies snooping to see whether I had any carpets worth looking at, checking out wheter I was an Iranian to be worried about or one who could discuss Farah Pahlavi's fashion sense with them in French.

I learned early on that there are two Beiruts, the affluent neighborhoods of the Christians and Sunni Muslims, and the southern suburbs, where the Shia lived. Many of my Lebanese Shia friends families lived in Dahiyeh, but only some took me home with them for visits. Beirut is a competitive city obsessed with appearances (the Lebanese share this trait with Iranians), and many of the young Shia journalists I knew did their best to pretend their Dahiyeh roots didn't exist. But not everyone was like this. My Arabic tutor, who worked part time for Iran's Al-Alam network, seemed perfectly comfortable crossing the city to teach me grammer, though eventually we had to part ways; like too many Lebanese Shia men encountering an umarried Iranian woman, there was one thing too much on his mind.

But in time, I found my way in Beirut. I learned that no taxi driving through my Christian neighborhood would ever willingly drive me to Dahiyeh, there was a snobbery even of destinations. I learned that many young Hezbollah officials preferred Beirut's cultural openness and vibrancy over Tehran's grim strictness, and as a result, felt Iran's model didn't have so much to offer Lebanon. I learned these things because I grew to know some of these officials very well over time, returning to  ضاحيه  again and again. I felt in those days rather proud of what Iran had done, all the hospitals and schools it had built, tending to a community who had been abandoned by the state. It seemed in those days investing in the future of a people, whereas today it feels like investing in the wind.

This apartment, that was partly destroyed yesterday, was plainly decorated, with a lace covering on the coffee table and a small Allah tile decoration in the corner. After Hezbollah's 2005 war with Israel left southern Beirut in ruins, Iran poured billions of toman into reconstructing precisely these sorts of apartments. This reconstruction project was both massive and expensive, and was handled with a level of care basically unheard of in such endeavours.

When General Hassan Shateri, who headed Iran's reconstruction effort in Lebanon, was killed on the road between Lebanon and Damascus last February, we heard of the passion he brought to restoring both the physical and emotional architecture of Dahiyeh. As Hossein Sheikholeslam, Iran's former ambassador to Syria explained in an interview, Shateri sought to rebuild residential blocks in a manner that preserved even how neighbors related with one another. If before the war, two buildings faced one another and families could talk through their windows while they cooked lunch, Shateri tried to rebuild in a manner that recaptured that experience.

What sensitivity, what expense. The Lebanese are surely grateful, they know well how Iranian money funded all those Hezbollah hospitals and clinics, the very infrastructure that tended them when the Lebanese government ignored them. People in Dahiyeh usually beamed when they discovered I was Iranian, there was thanks lurking behind each smile.

And now we see it all in danger of being blown to bits again, with not even a decade passed. Iran's support for the Assad regime in Syria comes at a great price, not least of which we now see as the potential destruction of the subrubs, which Iran restored so lovingly. Hezbollah may not want a new fight in Lebanon, but its Shia fighters are killing the mainly Sunni rebels on behalf of Assad's minority Alawite regime.

That all sounds like a distant and complicated fight, but what's clear is that Iran's foreign policy in Syria and Lebanon is becoming more expensive each day. One wonders, why rebuild apartments with such love and devotion, only to have them blasted by rockets again before the paint even yellows?