Is all of Lebanon now a danger zone?
Israel’s prime minister has told the UN to get its peacekeepers out of Lebanon’s ‘danger zone’. But is the whole country now at risk? Hunger and malnutrition rates could rise ‘exponentially’ in Lebanon if Israel escalates the current military operation, which has so far killed more than 2,000 and displaced a million people, according to a leading UN expert. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s big news story.
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The Big Story:
With Iranian missiles targeting Israel and Israel bombing Lebanon even as it invades it, what’s next for this small country ravaged by five years of economic crisis, run by a weak caretaker government and hostage to broader Middle Eastern conflicts?
Hemmed in between Israel, Syria and the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon’s situation is bleak. As one of this week’s books* points out: “The Lebanese have become used to bad news stories”.
…UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the world “cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza”…
This Week, Those Books:
- An insider-outsider takes a long hard look at Lebanon.
- Short stories that bring Beirut startlingly to life, in the midst of death.
The Backstory:
- Lebanon may be facing the largest displacement crisis in its 81 years as an independent country.
- The Lebanese, like the Irish and the Italians, have a large diaspora, with people migrating in their hundreds of thousands in a series of waves that began in the late 19th century…
This Week’s Books:
*Lebanon: A Country in Fragments
By: Andrew Arsan
Publisher: Hurst
Year: 2018
The author, a Cambridge University academic, is of Lebanese heritage and it’s apparent in the passion and exasperation with which he examines the state of that country. He starts out by noting Lebanon’s apparent “limited significance”. It’s not India, China, the US, Russia, South Africa or Brazil, he says, being neither territorially vast, nor demographically, economically or geopolitically important. And yet, that’s exactly the reason, he suggests, Lebanon does matter. Might it be seen as “a microcosm of the contemporary world, a petri dish…”
Beirut Noir
Edited by Iman Humaydan Younes; translated by Michelle Hartman
Publisher: Akashic Books
Year: 2015
Beirut is a fitting subject for a short story collection. It’s the capital of Lebanon, one of the largest cities in the country and in the Levant. And it’s one of the world’s oldest cities.
This anthology, about 21st century Beirut, has 14 stories by Lebanese writers, and one by a Beirut-born-and-bred Palestinian. The editor, a well-known Lebanese writer…
Choice quote:
“They say that in Beirut, you live like there’s no tomorrow. Every day is so intense. So extreme. Here, people work, argue, drive, dance, drink, and even make love as if it were their last day on earth…”
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
