Commentary, Israel, Lebanon, Press Freedom

Craig Murray: Two Weeks in Beirut

In the middle of a shopping street in Dahiya, our driver pulls up at a checkpoint manned by armed militia in civilian clothes, to see if we could start filming. Then it all starts to go wrong.

Aerial view of Beirut Airport. (Ian Lim, Wikimedia Commons, GFDL 1.2)

By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk

Flying from Rome on a bright Sunday morning, the MEA Airbus was configured for about 300 people. About 20 of us boarded to fly to Beirut. It is a very strange feeling to be on an almost empty commercial airliner, particularly as nearly all of the small number of passengers were in business class, leaving economy class barren.

Two Christian priests traveling economy, with impressive beards and pillarbox hats, were rescued by the hostesses before takeoff and moved forward to business. The flight was entirely uneventful, except that for some reason it served no alcohol, which is new to MEA. Niels suggested they had been warned about us!

We have all seen photos of Israeli bombing near the airport as MEA flights come in to land, but our approach was untroubled and we could not spot any bomb damage in the vast sprawling vista of Beirut as we came down.

Niels Ladefoged and I had toured Germany together, with the film Ithaka, on which Niels was cinematographer. That tour was related in great detail on this blog. So regular readers know the two of us, who arrived into Beirut airport slightly confused.

Our aim in coming to Lebanon was to counter the overwhelmingly pro-Israel narrative of Western media reports of the Israeli assault on Lebanon. Before coming, I had spoken with a friend from my Blackburn election campaign, whom I knew to be very well connected in the Middle East.

This friend had told me he had a sponsor for us in Lebanon who could organise all the necessary logistics, and the first instance of this was the arrival into Beirut. We knew that other activists who had recently arrived had encountered difficulties with Lebanese immigration.

To counter this, we had been asked to provide our aircraft seat numbers before embarking, so we could be met on the plane and escorted through immigration. We had done this, but on arrival nothing happened on the plane.

We saw how it was meant to happen as we disembarked into the finger that led to the terminal: the two priests were whisked through a side door down to a vehicle that waited on the tarmac, to take them straight out of the airport.

As we wandered along the arrivals pathway through the terminal, the feeling of weirdness aroused by the near empty plane returned. Where there would normally be hundreds of people pouring in from multiple flights, the place was empty and echoing, with just the 20 from our flight trailing through the vast halls.

It felt strange and ominous.

Inside Beirut airport passenger check-in; entrance to passport control out of frame to the right, 2007. (Yoniw, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Once we reached immigration, the reason almost everyone had been in business class was apparent, as almost our entire flight headed into the “UN and Diplomatic” lane. That left us and a Lebanese family with small children. As we approached the immigration desk, a man in jeans and a striped shirt approached us, identified himself as a policeman, and asked us to leave immigration and head to a side area.

There were eight disconsolate people waiting there, with five chairs between them. We waited, and waited. Two hours passed uncomfortably. We tried without success to contact the sponsor who was supposed to have helped us with immigration.

Every now and then somebody was called forward into an office, stayed there for ten minutes, then came out and sat down again, looking unhappy. This was an ethnically and socially disparate bunch; the odd brief conversation revealed that European passports were the obvious common factors.

We were in essentially a very tatty corridor; everything from the furniture to the tiling to the counters appeared in need of renovation. It was not dirty; merely worn and chipped.

Niels and I had at no stage been asked for anything at all, not even our names. Our passports had not been inspected. Nothing was happening, very slowly.

I managed to phone my friend from Blackburn, who said he would try to contact our sponsor. After a further hour of waiting, a large uniformed man with a moustache and notably bold spectacles came out and pointed at us.

“Why are you waiting here?” he asked.

“I don’t know”, I replied, “A policeman told us to.”

He called me in to the office.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I am a retired diplomat, and now a journalist.”

“What kind of journalist?”

“Independent media. I publish online.”

“So, you are a social media influencer?”

“Oh no, I am much too old.”

“Aren’t you scared to come to Lebanon at this time?”

“No, I am Scottish.”

This answer was obviously sufficient explanation, and he got up and waved to a subordinate, who took us through and stamped our passports. A very patient driver from the hotel had been waiting four hours for us and had already rather brilliantly tracked down and loaded our luggage.

Israeli Drones Overhead

Heading out into the car, we immediately heard the Israeli drones circling overhead.

I want you to understand how loud this noise is. You do not have to strain to hear it; rather it is impossible to block it. You can still hear it even over heavy traffic.

It is far louder than a normal light aircraft at that height, and the noise must be a deliberate feature, an instrument of psychological warfare. I suppose the comparison would be the deliberate screeching of Stuka dive bombers, although the quality of sound is very different.

To come into a city which is under active bombardment, where dozens of people are killed every single day, is not entirely a comfortable feeling. Particularly when journalists are deliberately and systematically assassinated by Israel and, not to put too fine a point on it, the Israelis are not particularly keen on me.

The large Israeli drones carry a range of unerring missiles, have state-of-the-art surveillance and target-locking capability and can be triggered to fire by AI without human intervention. I would be lying if I pretended that on this first occasion the hairs were not standing on the back on my neck.

But you get used to it.

After this interesting drive through nightfall, we arrived at the Bossa Nova hotel in Sinn el Fil, a Christian area of Beirut, which we had been told would be unlikely to be attacked by Israel.

The hotel is, rather surreally, South American themed, with a restaurant serving only allegedly Brazilian dishes. It is nine storeys high and constructed with massive concrete pillars, and a great many of them. It has a very well-stocked cocktail bar to cater for the most pernickety fan of mixology, though without a presiding mixologist at present. It is allegedly owned by a Scot.

All of the other guests in the hotel were refugees from the evacuated areas. 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon. The human trauma of this is immense, particularly as the homes, farms and businesses these people have left are being systematically destroyed behind them.

Over the next 10 days we slowly get to know some of the refugees. A school teacher, a policeman, a farmer, a tailor. All with their large families, crammed in, a family to a room in this hotel which is creaking to cope. Being Lebanese they are tidy and clean, and emerge looking well dressed and groomed.

Like refugees everywhere, they sit listless and morose, displaced and discarded, filling in time doing nothing. Chat is infrequent and subdued. People sit isolated with their thoughts, even from their own families.

They do not look up when somebody walks past. Food in paper bags is brought from local bakers and consumed in the lobby. The free water cooler is the busiest spot in the hotel.

Only the children are happy; an unexpected school holiday, a trip to a city, lots of new friends for games of mass soccer in the hotel courtyard.

When the drones are particularly loud or low, the children race inside, mostly before their mothers have to call. One small boy in particular, about three years old, bursts into tears every time the drones get loud.

The Israelis have made a point of bombing hotels housing refugees, particularly in Christian areas. Turning the Christian community against the refugees is part of the Israeli plan.

The next morning we received a message from our sponsor that a driver, Ali, will come to pick us up. We had explained we wished to start by visiting the much-touted in Western media “Hezbollah stronghold” of Dahiya, which is subject to continual bombing.

Ali arrives, a well dressed individual driving a very comfortable and new Lexus saloon. He doesn’t speak any English, but through Google Translate he explains that we need special permits to visit Dahiya.

We give Ali our passports and he takes photos of them with his phone, sending them to somebody whom he then phones to discuss it. He then speaks into his phone again and shows us on his phone:

“You cannot go to Dahiyah now. Permits will take one or two days. But I can take you on a tour of bomb sites, without stopping the car or taking photos”.

So we embark with Ali on a tour of recent death, driving to nine different bomb sites. What is immediately clear is that eight of the nine sites are residential buildings, blocks of flats. Ali is very well informed indeed about each one, relating how many people were killed there—men, women and children.

Ali does not attempt to hide the fact that, in almost every case, there were Hezbollah members present, and sometimes he can tell us who. Flags are planted on top of the mounds of rubble to commemorate these martyrs, and sometimes there are pictures of them in uniform, on planted stakes.

One or two of the sites have been struck by precision missiles targeting an individual apartment, with usually a handful of immediately neighbouring apartments also damaged or destroyed. But at the large majority of the sites whole blocks of apartments, containing 20 or more, have been completely reduced to rubble, much of which is powder.

The same of course is true of the inhabitants. Driving slowly past the sites, it is immediately apparent these residences are civilian, with corners of settees and beds and kitchen equipment jumbled in the rubble and heart-stopping indications of children, including a bright pink poster of a pony, held down by a dust-filled boot.

There is no indication whatsoever of military and industrial activity. It is not a question of Hezbollah hiding behind human shields. It is rather a question of Hezbollah figures being killed alongside their partners, parents and children in their civilian homes, with numerous other families in the block killed too. It is plainly a war crime.

Killing 40 or even 70 entirely innocent people is of no concern to Israel in eliminating a target. Nor do they care in the least how many of them are children. Non-Jewish life simply has zero intrinsic value in their eyes.

‘Targeting Hezbollah’

But there is also of course a real problem with who is being targeted. Hezbollah is an intrinsic part of Lebanese society. It is a political party with elected members of parliament and forms part of the government of Lebanon.

Hezbollah also runs extensive health, welfare and infrastructure functions in the predominantly Shia districts, particularly in the South of the country, and these functions and institutions are organically interwoven with the official Lebanese state in a hundred different ways.

So doctors, professors, ambulance drivers, journalists and teachers may be designated “Hezbollah” by Israel, in an exact parallel to the situation with Hamas in Gaza.

So the “terrorist target” Israel is eliminating by bombing an apartment block, with the deaths of 40 other people, may not have any military function at all. They may be an ambulance driver. In fact that is one of the most likely possibilities. As in Gaza, Israel is systematically eliminating healthcare workers. In 40 days, it has killed over 200 paramedics in Lebanon. That is five a day on average.

We take a road which bounds Dahiya and, looking into the area, startlingly, the destruction is extremely extensive. Block after block after block of apartments has been levelled. In one place the bomb crater is simply massive, a great deep hole you could fit dozens of buses in, several buses high. It is hard to comprehend the power of such an explosion.

The one building we see which is not residential and which has been bombed is a hospital. It looks gutted with shattered windows. I cannot particularly recall having seen this reported in the West.

It is a deeply sobering experience. We arrive back to the hotel in pensive mood, and take a gin and tonic in the courtyard, as the refugees huddle and the drones buzz overhead. I am awoken by loud explosions in the night, and the next day the smoke is still billowing into the air, rising up about a kilometre from our hotel, and the acrid smell and taste will not wash away.

On Tuesday we had arranged finally to meet our sponsor, a charming and urbane man who is genuinely horrified by the genocide in Gaza and the unfurling carnage in Lebanon. He phones “Ali’s boss” to check on progress with our permits for Dahiya. He advises that they will be available later that day or the next morning.

We agree to have a day to orient and prepare, and go to Dahiya the next day once the permits are done.

Our sponsor tells us a number of worrying things, including that he had offered friends of his from evacuated areas accommodation in properties he owned outside of Beirut, but that some of the local Christian communities had objected in case the presence of refugees provoked Israeli attack (as indeed is frequently occurring).

He apologised for the delay at the airport and said that a new policy had been introduced the very day we arrived, when dozens of Europeans had been sent back. He had been working behind the scenes to vouch for us (which was later confirmed to me by another source).

The new crackdown on entry is reported in L’Orient Today:

“L’Orient Today spoke to and heard reports of dozens of people turned away in recent weeks, including around 10 NGO workers from various organizations, two journalists who received entry bans and were deported, two people who were refused for not having “sufficient grounds to enter the country,” and three passengers from Germany, Spain and the U.S. who were told this past weekend that foreigners can’t enter unless they have a work permit.

According to Ingrid, through her phone, an employee of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs spoke with airport staff who told them that a new law had been implemented restricting entry…

“There has not been a change in the law regarding the entry of foreigners into Lebanon,” a source at General Security told L’Orient Today… “However, due to the security situation in Lebanon, General Security is being more vigilant about who is entering and leaving the country and some people are not permitted entry due to security reasons,” …

A General Security spokesperson said the order came from the Directorate roughly one month ago and that it applies across the board but is focused on the airport. In the last two months, Hezbollah, currently at war with Israel, has suffered a number of profound security breaches, one of which led to the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah. In the two weeks following the escalation into full-out war, starting on Sept. 23, several people were arrested under suspicion of espionage, including a journalist who entered Lebanon on a British passport only to be discovered with an Israeli passport after residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs alerted the authorities to his presence.

“One person making a mistake will affect the others sometimes,” the spokesperson said. “No one [at border control] wants to be labeled as the person who let someone into the country who shouldn’t have been allowed.”

Which sounds entirely reasonable, but read on.

So we had a relaxed day waiting for permits to come through. I sat in the courtyard writing as the drone buzzed overhead, and Niels made a little tweet about it:

We then walked out into Beirut. The only way to walk from the hotel is down one side of a buzzing dual carriageway. We crossed a concrete bridge over the sad remnant of the Beirut river.

Its waters entirely diverted for the uses of the great city, the river course is a giant, entirely concreted storm drain, perhaps fifty metres wide and 10 metres deep. In it oozes a trickle of greenish-brown sewage, perhaps three metres wide and ten centimetres deep. The sickly sweet smell is nauseating. Our hotel is on the bank and carries a truly giant neon sign on its flank: “Riverside Bossa Nova”, devoid of irony. Briefly during a storm the river returns to life for a few hours.

Beirut River near Bourj Hammoud, 2015. (Quatchenerlo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Beirut is not pedestrian friendly. Frequently on major streets there are long stretches with no pavement at all, it having been either never built or removed to make way for car parking, bonnets right up against the building and cars often stacked two deep at right angles to the traffic.

As we walk down the busy Damascus Road to the city centre, major junctions are designed with no provision for pedestrians to cross; not just no pedestrian feature in the traffic lights, but nowhere for them to navigate the sea of open tarmac buzzing with aggressive vehicles.

Scooters buzz pedestrians with almost the malevolence of Amsterdam cyclists.

On the corniche and beach, the tented refugee city that had sprung up along the promenade and beach has been cleared away. Locals are following the tradition of putting their living room in the back of a car and reassembling it on the corniche for the evening, whole families sat around on circles of domestic chairs on the promenade, with tea, chess, backgammon, shishas and gossip.

The glamorous, golden, wide-balconied apartments across the corniche, overlooking the sea, glower mostly dark and empty. The rich have left to Paris, London and New York for the duration of the war.

Manara corniche, Beirut, 2011. (Saudi Arabian tourist Marvikad, via Wikimedia)

Manara corniche, Beirut, 2011. (Saudi Arabian tourist Marvikad, via Wikimedia Commons)

In this national emergency, temporarily relocating refugees in the vacated apartments of the runaway rich would seem an obvious step. Sadly, that is not the way of the world. Instead the schools are closed and house thousands of refugees. It gives some understanding of how the process developed in Gaza, and we wonder when Israel will start to target the schools here.

It is a lot to think on, and on Wednesday morning we look forward to getting in to Dahiya and making our first video report. Ali arrives around noon and says through the Google Translate he is ready to take us there. I foolishly assume that this means the permits have come.

We enter into the Dahiya suburb (which is a redundancy — Dahiya just means “suburb”), and I am immediately struck by just how vast is the evacuated area and how very well developed. As we move in, it is a pleasant, middle class area. It reminds me of good bits of Marseille. There is nothing to distinguish the blocks of flats which have been demolished or damaged from the other residential blocks all around.

Niels has me wired up for sound and the strategy is to record everything, to do some straight-to-camera talks in key areas, and then to edit it down to a short piece in the evening, possibly with a considered reflection added. Accordingly, we are filming as we go along.

Checkpoint With Armed Militia

In the middle of a long shopping street in Dahiya, Ali – who has appeared very confident and in control, having told us he is Dahiya born-and-bred and knows everybody – pulled up at a checkpoint manned by armed militia in civilian clothes, to check that it is OK for us to get out and film.

Then it all starts to go wrong.

First a young man opens the car doors and politely asks us in good English for our passports, which we give him. He is wearing a red shirt and carries his AK47 with great care, pointing down to the ground.

Ali tells us via phone translation that we should not worry, it is only process. Then the young man comes again and asks for our phones. We give him two each. He then takes Niels’s camera bag and goes through the microphones and other equipment.

Several more militia men are gathering, and the young man leaves. An older man with white hair and beard arrives in a beaten-up saloon car. He does not seem to speak any English other than “Don’t worry!”

Nobody here now speaks English. A huddle of people is now looking in bemused fashion at our phones and equipment. The old man offers us coffee, and two strong, gritty, sweet concoctions are brought in tiny paper cups.

But it has become gradually plain that we are not free to leave. Ali’s confidence has dissipated like a punctured balloon.

Then two larger and more military-looking men appeared in a battered old Jeep Cherokee with cracked windows, followed by a pickup holding several more men with guns. They were obviously in charge. The atmosphere had become much less friendly. I got out of the car and walked round shaking hands, in an effort to remedy this.

Standing on a street strewn with bombing rubble, amid a group of four parked vehicles, three of them Hezbollah, at the centre of a growing knot of armed Hezbollah militia, while missile-armed Israeli drones circled overhead and had us under close surveillance, I could not help but inwardly reflect that I had spent safer afternoons.

There was now nobody around who spoke any English. Our possessions were loaded into, and then taken out of, a series of backpacks, being slowly and carefully inventoried in notebooks each time. Every now and then an item would be brought over for Niels to identify — charger, or microphone, or hard drive – but I don’t think anyone understood his answers.

I looked around the area. It was a well-established shopping street with decent stores, all now shuttered, stretching as far as the eye could see, punctuated by restaurants and cafés.

The area was largely deserted except for one or two armed militiamen on every corner to prevent looting. A few people were around, returning to their homes to collect possessions, and some storekeepers were removing stock into their vans. Many had opened temporary stores elsewhere. The scene was one of quiet order and discipline.

I am sure everybody was aware a bomb could fall without warning on this area under evacuation, and people worked quickly with obvious purpose. But there was no visible emotion.

Just opposite me was a large toy shop with one shutter open, and a cluster of large teddy bears looked at me forlornly over a sit-on electric model car. Occasionally scooters would pass, their occupants waving at our captors.

After what I am sure was a shorter time than it seemed, we were motioned into the rear seat of the Jeep Cherokee behind the two senior men. One man with a gun squeezed on to the passenger seat beside us, and another entered the luggage space behind us.

Ali followed behind driving the Lexus, with armed men both beside and behind him. This did not appear to be playing out well.

I was relieved we left Dahiya into a rather more populated area, but felt very isolated again when the vehicle turned off through a gated entrance guarded by several men openly carrying guns, and pulled up in a small car park opposite a nondescript concrete building.

This had an entrance porch protected by a wrought iron gate. With the entrance doors shut, by placing Niels, Ali and me inside this porch and locking the gate behind us, we were now in an effective cell. The gathering of men discussing our fate grew larger and louder.

After a little while somebody opened the gate to hand us bottles of water. But he also motioned us to turn our chairs and sit with our faces directly to the wall. I made only a token compliance, being far too keen to see what was coming up behind us.

Niels later told me that he thought I was turning away from the wall because of the large amount of blood spatter on it, right in front of my face. I have to say I simply did not notice this. I assume Niels observed correctly, although he is from Scandinavia, and therefore has a dark and brooding imagination.

Eventually somebody arrived in another vehicle who actually spoke very good English. He entered the porch and asked if any of us had ever been in Israel. We answered in the negative. I was hoping to give further explanation of who we were, which side we were on, and how easy it was to prove, when Ali broke in volubly in Arabic.

Our interrogator turned to Ali, who had for some time appeared terrified, and asked him several questions in Arabic, to which Ali responded earnestly. The man then left. This was not helpful as Ali, to my knowledge, knew nothing about either Niels or me.

Shortly afterwards a bag was brought in with our possessions, and there was a further fuss as each was identified, noted and transferred into yet another rucksack. We were then led outside and into the back cab of a large pickup, again surrounded by armed men. Ali did not follow and we did not know where he had gone.

We went back into Dahiya again, and on a deserted street were driven down into an underground car park. This seemed particularly alarming. A single man, apparently unarmed, stood in the car park waiting to receive us. The car doors were opened, we were bundled out and our captors delivered us into his possession.

General Security

“Don’t worry”, he said in English, “you are safe now. I am with General Security. We are official Lebanese government state security.”

Having some experience of state security services around the globe, I am afraid I perhaps did not find this as comforting as intended. We were taken up to a corridor, where our possessions were yet again repacked and inventoried.

Fifteen minutes later a vehicle arrived with three more General Security agents, none of whom spoke English. My feeling of unease was deepened when Niels and I were both immediately handcuffed. We were placed in the back of a much nicer Toyota, and driven away with two General Security officers in the front and one between us.

Our next destination was General Security HQ, which was more obviously a government building. On arrival our possessions were inventoried once again, and this time we had to sign an acknowledgement.

At this stage, two rather alarming things were said. The first is that we were asked about medications “in case you have to stay in prison”. The second is that one of the officers said to me, in a hostile tone,

“why do you want to support the Palestinians? If you want to support the Palestinians, why don’t you go to Gaza and join them?”

It was a reminder that in Lebanon not all on the government side can be assumed to be hostile to Israel.

There was now a further long wait, on broken chairs in a dingy back office, while nothing happened for hours. Eventually an officer arrived who was deemed to have sufficient English to interrogate us, a judgment I would dispute.

We went through my life in minute detail. My date of birth, my parents, their dates of birth, my grandparents, their dates of birth, my brothers and sisters, their dates of birth, my children, their dates of birth, my partner, her date of birth. We also went through my education and every job I had ever held, every single stage taking six times as long as it would if we could communicate freely in the same language.

What we did very little of was discuss who I actually am and why I was in Lebanon in general and Dahiya in particular. My efforts to spend more time on that were simply ignored. I don’t think he understood my explanation that I believed the permits had been applied for and granted.

At one stage my interrogator asked “Dahiya is very dangerous. You can be killed. Why are you not scared?”, and I was delighted to redeploy the line “I am not scared, I am Scottish.” This time I got a smile and a one word response “Braveheart!”

After we had finished, it was Niels’s turn to go through the same process while I waited.

Finally we were told that our passports and possessions would be retained. We would have to return when called to face the investigating judge of the Military Court. Meantime we would be either held in prison or allowed to go, as the judge decided. We would have to wait for this.

We asked what had happened to Ali. We were told he was safe at home with his family, which we mentally filed under “Good if true”. There followed a long and anxious wait for the decision of the judge, and we were acutely aware that the judge had only the information furnished by somebody who had understood very little of what we had said.

Finally Released

One by one the security agents went home, until there was only one man left on this floor of the building, who complained he could not go home until the judge called. Thankfully about 10pm the judge did call, and said that we could be released pending further investigation.

Niels and I walked the two miles back to our hotel to clear our heads.

I accept that the fault was mine. I had assumed that our sponsor and Ali knew what they were doing in applying for the permits, and they had assumed that I understood the permit system. I had failed to take on board that our sponsor was merely a wealthy and well-meaning friend of my Blackburn contact, and had no relevant experience at all.

Mainstream media organisations all employ fixers, at a standard rate of $250 a day, to organise the permits and negotiate these things. I had assumed that to be basically Ali’s role. In fact he was just somebody our sponsor had arranged to drive us, who thought he understood the system but apparently did not.

Given that I was a fool blundering around a war zone where actual Israeli spies had recently been caught, I have nothing to complain about in my treatment either by Hezbollah or by General Security.

There is a psychological terror in the situation that they did their best to allay with coffee and water and assurances that all was OK. At no stage did anybody point a gun at me; at no stage did anybody threaten violence in any way. The Hezbollah militia were notably disciplined and professional for a local volunteer force.

The problem was the situation, not the people. And the situation was my fault.

I was now warned not to publish anything until I had all the proper accreditations, beginning with the Ministry of Information. We could not apply for accreditations until we had got our passports back. So there was nothing to do now except wait for the judge.

The alarming part now was the disappearance of both Ali and our sponsor. The morning after this ordeal, we were surprised to hear nothing from either of them. I contacted the sponsor through his office, and received a response from his secretary not to worry, all would be OK.

This was followed by a message from my friend in Blackburn to say I was not to contact our sponsor again.

Through multiple contacts I was soon in touch with a plethora of people in Lebanon who all were called upon for help and advice. The universal response was not to worry, this was all perfectly normal. One very well-known Lebanese journalist texted me:

“General Security, Military Courts – we all go through this. Do not worry, it’s normal.”

I spoke with a lawyer who said much the same thing, but did also give the useful advice that, while I could not publish journalism without accreditation, there was nothing to stop me being interviewed by accredited journalists, as a well-known person in Beirut.

So I did some of this. I particularly enjoyed this conversation with Laith Marouth for Wartime Café on Free Palestine TV:

I also caught up with Steve Sweeney of Russia Today. You may not be able to watch this in the U.K.:

We also had a chance to see more of this extraordinarily resilient city of Beirut. Adults in Beirut have lived through a catalogue of civil war, occupation, resistance and disaster, and internal coherence is both weak and elusive.

But this has led to an instinct to survive. When Israel ordered the evacuation of the majority Shia Dahiya district, and commenced to destroy it systematically, the majority of its inhabitants simply moved north within Beirut.

Of the 1.4 million displaced persons, an estimated 400,000 have left, half to Syria or Iran and half to Europe and the United States. Of the remaining 1 million internally displaced, the majority have come into Beirut. The great magnet is Hamra district. I ask a resident why. He replies:

“Everybody wants to settle in Hamra. It has bars and brothels, churches and mosques. Everybody has always been welcome in Hamra. It shelters everybody.”

It is certainly now extremely crowded, and the traffic is in permanent gridlock. A taxi driver refused to enter with me as he would never get out again. Vehicles are double- and triple-parked, sometimes right across junctions.

The influx reminds me of the Edinburgh festival, minus the bad temper and vomiting stag parties.

We also learn about Dahiya. At what soon becomes a favourite restaurant works a young woman named Yasmeena. In her early thirties, she dresses in a Western style, does not wear a veil or scarf, and is the single parent of a 7-year-old. Yet she lived happy and unthreatened in what the Western media calls the “Hezbollah bastion” – until she had to evacuate and her home and possessions were completely destroyed, bombed to oblivion, as she now tells us with momentary tears, soon dispersed by a beaming smile.

Dahiya was founded after the Israel invasion of 1982 brought an earlier flood of Shia refugees from the South, and they founded a place to live among dusty lanes and crops. It rapidly developed into a thriving hub of commerce, and as in refugee areas all over the Middle East – including Gaza – good quality housing, workable infrastructure and good healthcare and, above all, education were developed, with remarkable resource and effort.

The Israelis are now involved in trying to destroy the entire area, systematically, through an unopposed bombing campaign that I predict will, as in Gaza, roll on relentlessly for over a year.

But the interesting thing about Dahiya, as represented by Yasmeena and others like her, is that it had become a centre of freedom of expression, with a café culture and thriving arts scene. Islam was at the centre of the community, but not forced upon anybody and not even Muslims were forced to abide by any particular precepts, while other religions were protected.

Tyre is another example. This great ancient city is under continual bombardment by Israel as another Hezbollah centre, and indeed Hezbollah has there firm political control. Yet it is also a city where anybody can wear swimwear on the beautiful beaches and alcohol is freely available and can be consumed in public with no problems.

In other words, Hezbollah is not at all on the ground as you have seen it portrayed in the West, and bears no relation to ISIS.

Graves of killed Hezbollah members at a mausoleum in Beirut, undated. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

In fact the longer I am in Lebanon, the more I realise that much of what I thought I knew, was wrong. I do hope you will stay with me on this journey of discovery.

Six more days roll by in comparative inactivity, with the frustration of being unable to publish or film anything. Israeli bombing intensifies, and starts to occur by day as well as night. The wanton destruction in southern areas is appalling and the Israelis also start bombing heavily the Bekaa Valley, North East of Beirut, massacring civilians mercilessly. Photographs of dead infants start once again to flood my timeline.

On the Tuesday evening, now nine days after arrival, we were approached in our hotel by a man from General Security, who presents each of us with a summons (“convocation”) to reappear at their HQ at 9am the next day. He says it is to collect our passports. We suspect it is more complicated than that, and try without success to find a lawyer to accompany us.

The next morning we arrive promptly at 9am, and to our dismay are taken again to the same floor we were held in before. We are locked in a dirty waiting room with a single wooden bench and a mattress on the floor. Gradually three other people join us, all suspects.

We are prisoners again.

We talk to one, a young man who was caught, by his own account, taking pictures around his own home and community, just for fun. He has been back four times for interrogation and had spent three nights in prison, which he described as “hell”. He said the food was inedible, the cells overcrowded with nowhere to sleep, and he had witnessed a man screaming in agony and terror with a heart attack but unable to get any attention from the guards.

This did not cheer us much.

We waited in that room until about 11am, when a General Security officer who spoke some English came to interrogate us. We had not seen him before.

He complained the officers last time had done nothing, and he had not seen the file. He then proceeded to start the entire process over again: My date of birth, my parents, their dates of birth, my grandparents, their dates of birth, my brothers and sisters, their dates of birth, my children, their dates of birth, my partner, her date of birth.

I could have screamed.

He brought out my phones from a large brown envelope, and asked me who Eugenia was. I replied I had no idea, I did not know any Eugenia. He said I had Eugenia in my contacts with an Israeli phone number. I said I did not believe so. He asked me to switch on the phone and look, but I could not as it was out of battery and no charger was available.

The second phone did have a charge, and we confirmed it contained no Eugenia. In the process, we came across the messages between me and our sponsor about Ali, the car, and when the permits to visit Dahiya would arrive. These messages were so clear, and made so plain the transgression was a misunderstanding, that he appeared largely to lose interest.

He went through the process also with Niels, and asked us whether we had money to pay for our flights home to Europe. He then went “to speak with the judge” and came back after half an hour with the news that it had been decided we were genuine, and we could stay, which seemed to surprise him.

He declared it was now only a matter of time, but he had to also get the consent of the “Big Boss” of national security to let us go. He did however proceed to ask us a great many more questions, much more acute and relevant than any that had been asked so far, and kept noting down our answers on a laptop — until this point the process had been entirely pen and paper.

Again, it was the strange situation of being apparently very friendly — he shared his sandwich lunch with me — but at the same time we were prisoners. We were given back our phones and passports, and had to sign for them, but still were not allowed to go.

We then had to sign a form in Arabic three times within printed boxes, and then make an inked thumbprint three times over them. We asked what the form was, and were told it was for our release. It was very hard to believe this – why would you have to sign and thumbprint in triplicate your release? But there was no help for it.

As the afternoon wore on, the officer identified for us the different makes of Israeli drones buzzing overhead, and their capabilities. Then the drones were joined by a deeper rumble, which he said were F35 jets come to bomb. If General Security HQ has a bomb shelter, they were ignoring it, but a huddle of agents gathered to look out the window and plainly they were concerned.

At 5pm the officers all left, bar one again, and said we had to stay for the answer from the “Big Boss” on our release. Suddenly the return of our passports and phones seemed horribly premature, and we wondered about those triple-signed forms. Initially we were locked back in the dirty waiting room, but then the duty officer (who spoke no English) came and led us to a comfortable office, where we were not locked in.

Finally, at 8pm the “Big Boss” phoned the duty officer to say we could go, and we walked out into Beirut, free but for the Israeli killer drones circling over our heads and the throbbing tones of the F35s.

We were now desperate to get accredited to report so that we could finally do what we had come to Lebanon to do. So the next morning we went in to the Ministry of Information Press Bureau, armed with credentials supplied by Consortium News.

My work has been carried there for many years, but coincidentally I had just had the great honour to be elected to the Board of Consortium News, replacing my friend the great John Pilger.

The head of the Ministry Press Room looked at us mournfully and told us he was sorry, they could not accept credentials from Consortium News as it was an online publication. Accreditation was strictly limited to print newspapers and broadcast television.

He sent Niels a text confirming what was needed for accreditation, which included an email from the legacy media editor covering an official letter of credentials, and copies of press cards, passports and visas.

To rub salt into the wounds, at that moment the team of journalists from the Zionist, Murdoch-owned, Wall Street Journal came in. They were accorded VIP treatment.

Lebanon’s regulations ensure that only the state- and billionaire-owned, Zionist legacy media can accredit, whereas anti-Zionist alternative media is banned from accreditation and thus publication.

At this stage we might have been forgiven for giving up, but the idea did not cross our minds. We immediately sat down, inside the foreign press room, and set about texting anyone we could think of who might help.

This resulted in numerous dead ends, but through friends in Rome I got an introduction to Byoblu media, an alternative channel that has obtained national TV status in Italy, as both a terrestrial and satellite channel.

They were willing to provide accreditation, and the Editor was willing to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops required by Lebanon, in exchange for occasional news reports, which they will need to dub. They sent us the artwork for the required press cards and we had them made up locally.

Meantime, we had moved out of the hotel and into an AirBnB. It had never been quite plain if our sponsor was paying for the hotel (he had not charged us for the services of the disappearing Ali), but the hotel started to make plain to us that he was not. Finances started to become a real problem, as we now had no transport either and it was obvious that an interpreter was essential. We settled into a cosy AirBnB and started to get organised to live more cheaply.

On Monday morning we were back in the Ministry of Information presenting our new Byoblu credentials. The head of accreditation looked sceptical, but could not find anything immediately wrong with Byoblu TV. Before he left, he phoned somebody and kept mentioning “Byoblu” to them during an animated conversation in Arabic.

He then told us the application would go to General Security for processing. I could imagine the officers there throwing their hands in the air and screaming “Not these two again!”

We returned to the Ministry the next day as instructed, steeled for yet another disappointment. To our amazed delight, we were handed our press accreditations immediately.

We have to get further accreditation from the Ministry of Defence, and from local militias, before we can travel anywhere, but this should not take long.

You are now up to date, and we are poised to start the real reporting from Lebanon. Let us get started!

We have plans for a serious programme of written and video content to be produced between now and Christmas, but this will depend on our obtaining the money to do it.

We require to raise an absolute minimum of sixty thousand pounds, and preferably more. This is for transport, accommodation, logistics and staff.

We are prepared to put our lives on the line to try to bring you the truth from here and counter the Zionist media, but that requires the sacrifice from you readers and viewers of putting in the resource required.

The normal methods of contributing to support my work are open. I hope to add to them with Patreon and GoFundMe options tomorrow – but straight bank transfer remains the best, and free:

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

This article is from CraigMurray.org.uk.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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