The ancient city of Tyre in southern Lebanon was an important Phoenician port, founded almost 5,000 years ago and mentioned dozens of times in the Bible. “They shall destroy the walls of Tyre, and break down her towers: I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her a bare rock,” records the book of the Prophet Ezekiel, a prophecy also found in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Joel, Amos and Zachariah. Some believed this was fulfilled with the city’s destruction (or near-destruction) at the hands of the Mamluks, when they captured it from Christian Crusaders in 1291. When Israel significantly intensified its bombardment of southern Lebanon on Sept. 23, many in Tyre and the surrounding area fled their homes, knowing they would be in the firing line. Over the following weeks, the remaining inhabitants received multiple evacuation warnings. Starting on Oct. 23, Israeli bombs pummeled the city for days. The video footage and satellite imagery of these attacks make this conflict seem like a rerun of Mamluk history, a biblical prophecy fulfilled.
Archaeologists who have been working on Tyre since the 1990s are observing from afar, helpless to protect their life’s work and the archaeology of millennia that remains to be excavated at this UNESCO World Heritage Site. So far, those on the ground report that the still-standing Roman colonnade, one of the world’s largest surviving Roman hippodromes, and current excavation sites have escaped any damage, though it will take time to ascertain whether there is foundational damage (which is possible, given that many of the bombs fell just 200 yards away).
“For me, the worst scenario is in the hinterland,” Francisco Nunez from the University of Warsaw told me. “We know almost nothing from an archaeological point of view from these areas, and the bombings could have destroyed precious evidence in the form of ancient sites.” These are sites that the research simply has not caught up with, because the surveying and excavating have not yet been done. “The landscape is full of ancient tells, ancient sites,” said Helene Sader, a professor at the American University of Beirut. “Some are on private land, never investigated by archaeologists. They may disappear without anyone knowing what they were.” Sader is realistic about this. “When the bombs are falling, no one is concerned with a small tell. People have other worries. They are searching for shelter, food, safety. It’s a tragedy on all fronts in Lebanon.”
For one of Nunez’s Lebanese colleagues, the fear is of what is to come. “The war is not over yet, and Israel shows no sign of either letting up nor avoiding heritage sites, even biblical ones,” he said on a phone call from Beirut. Heritage expert Alia Fares agreed. “I’m more worried about destruction in the coming weeks if there is no [cease-fire] agreement,” she said. “We know that things can always get worse.” They are just waiting, and watching, to see what will make it through.
The same is true of Baalbek, a site that perhaps symbolizes Lebanon more than any other, as ubiquitous as the cedar tree on tourist material. Its iconic Roman remains, which have stood for two millennia, have already been bombed: Sader identified a photo of a destroyed wall as showing part of the northern gate, a lesser-known part of the site, not on the tourist trail. Fares wrote a doctoral thesis on the Roman temples of Lebanon, and confirmed this identification of damage to the northern gate to me. This is another of Lebanon’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites, one of the most famous Roman sites in the world. Its remarkably well-preserved acropolis, or complex of Roman buildings, includes temples to Jupiter, Venus and Bacchus, together with smaller buildings, courtyards and fountains. It is home to the Baalbek festival, with international artists performing on the raised platform of the acropolis every year. I had a ticket to see perhaps the most famous Lebanese musician of all time, Fairuz, in the summer of 2006. That year’s monthlong Israeli bombardment of Lebanon meant the festival was canceled.
For some Lebanese, the damage to iconic millennia-old buildings is by no means the worst part of the destruction being visited on the country’s historic sites. Fares has produced a report on the heritage that has been affected so far in this war; “hopefully the last I write on what is gone, rather than what is there,” she wrote to me after its publication. This report zooms in on far smaller sites than the tourist attractions: a cafe in Baalbek that has been central to the town’s social life since 1924; the Palmyra Hotel, which in its time hosted T.E. Lawrence, Jean Cocteau and others; Ottoman- and French-era dwellings; palaces and Crusader castles across the south — nothing that would make it onto a UNESCO list, but all part of Lebanon’s rich and layered history, and of the population’s day-to-day backdrop. The disappearance of buildings is one way in which violence remains visible and palpable in people’s lives in any postconflict situation.
And there are huge numbers of missing buildings, especially far to the south, along the border with Israel. There are now numerous videos of entire villages being deliberately destroyed by Israeli forces, the houses and other infrastructure all being detonated at once in a huge cloud of dust and destruction. Amid all the videos coming out of Israel’s multiple simultaneous wars, there is something particularly horrifying about watching something so fast, violent and clinically complete: entire communities razed to the ground in seconds. The last official count at the time of writing was taken on Nov. 5, and put the number of obliterated villages at 37.
One of the first to be destroyed in its entirety this way was Mhaibib, situated just over a mile from the Israeli border. Its name literally means “beloved,” and one source has it that it was named for the shrine it contains to Benjamin, the (beloved) son of Jacob and brother of the biblical Joseph, or Yusuf in Arabic. (Benjamin is also, ironically, the namesake of Israel’s prime minister.) Joseph is a central figure in all three Abrahamic faiths, with the Quran adding the poetic detail of his beauty: It was said that women were so “stunned” that they cut their hands with the knives they were holding, saying “Good God! This cannot be human, this must be a noble angel!” In the commentary tradition, it is said that of all the beauty in the world, Yusuf received a full half. But he is also famous for his skills as well as beauty, from interpreting dreams to managing the affairs of the superpower of the day — Egypt.
Joseph is familiar to generations of children in English-speaking countries thanks to the oft-performed Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” I still remember that “Reuben was the eldest of the children of Israel / with Simeon and Levi next in line,” thanks to the opening song. (While I also know that Gad brought the total to nine, the middle ones have gone hazy.) In all, Jacob had 12 sons, who were said to have founded the 12 tribes of Israel. Jacob, Joseph and his brothers are foundational not just to all three Abrahamic faiths but also the historical concept of Israel itself — the very history upon which its modern-day claim to the land is based.
Benjamin was Joseph’s youngest brother, doted on by all. Reports of his resting place vary, with another shrine inside Israel, so who knows where the body was actually buried. But legends and rituals are important to religious beliefs and practice, and the shrine to Benjamin in Mhaibib has been a site of pilgrimage for Jews, Christians and Muslims, from as far away as Iran, for centuries. Some sources attest that, in 1948, a stone bearing Hebrew inscriptions was stolen from the Mhaibib shrine by Israelis from their newly formed state next door, reinforcing the sense that this was an important site in biblical history. And now, according to the latest reports, it is gone.
“This maqam [shrine], it was proof of a peaceful coexistence — not even a hundred years ago people worshiped there together, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Lebanese and non-Lebanese,” said Fares.
“Honestly, I come back to it again and again,” a Lebanese archaeologist who works in the south of the country told me. “Why did they destroy this place, so important to Lebanese Jewish history?” The obvious answer is, of course, that this Israeli administration is not interested in history but security: All the villages that have followed Mhaibib into oblivion are close to the Israeli border. “But it’s not the first time they have done this,” the archaeologist countered. “When they withdrew from the south in 2000, they destroyed one in Sejoud, a well-known shrine for Lebanese Jews.” There are undocumented rumors that here, too, they removed items first, even excavated, before destroying the site, perhaps to cover the evidence. But this makes even less sense than the destruction of Mhaibib, which is just one of the villages within 2 miles of the border destroyed in the past month: Its fate was clearly part of a military campaign, the heritage irrelevant to the security calculations. The destruction of Sejoud as Israel left in 2000 seemed more vindictive to the inhabitants, but this doesn’t square with the importance of the site for the Lebanese Jewish community.
“The media reports hardly mention the small sites, like those with the shrines — and few would even have heard of those except the locals,” Sader told me. I spoke of the layers of history in every part of Lebanon; this is where humans first came when they left Africa; part of the Fertile Crescent where farming began; part of empire after empire. “This is what is disappearing, yes,” she agreed. “Alma al-Shaab [a village in the south] was full of beautiful old mansions, and they’ve all gone — it’s really heartbreaking to see that all these villages have been razed — literally, literally razed to the ground.”
It is in these small sites, and via the clues found in names, legends and shrines, that the fabric of Lebanese history, including biblical history, is really felt. “Many of the village names themselves refer to the Bible,” Sader said. “You can see just from the amount of places with Nebi in their name.” (Nebi means prophet.) “For example, we have a village called Nebi Yunus, where people believe Yunus — or Jonah — was brought by the whale.” She’s keen to stress that these are oral traditions rather than archaeological sites with any solid evidence, which is why they are not always picked up on and reported as heritage sites. The heritage is intangible and often undocumented, yet no less part of the nation’s identity.
The destruction of these sites of pilgrimage and devotion is attracting little attention in the international press, partly because most attention is rightly paid to the human cost of Israel’s bombing campaign, which at the time of writing officials put at 3,287 deaths and 14,222 injured, but also because of the immense amounts of damage to far higher-profile heritage in Lebanon. And it’s not just the press. “What the people are concerned with here are mainly the main sites,” Sader told me. “The Tyre bombing is something that has really moved all the people,” she continued, “because Tyre is a concept, a symbol, a World Heritage Site.”
“You just have to translate the village names that were completely razed to the ground,” Fares echoed Sader. “They are ancient Upper Galilee villages, with so much character and beauty.” It’s not just the biblical roots of these places that are significant: They have been continuously inhabited for millennia. “Some have entire streets with ancient heritage, Ottoman houses, some of them 300 or 400 years old.”
Another Ottoman-period site that was destroyed, the Nabatieh souk was a traditional marketplace that included 12 residential buildings and 40 shops from the late 19th century, used continuously since then for trade. It is these sorts of spaces that link people to their past, when they shop for everyday items in the same places as their great-grandparents. The Melkite Greek Catholic church of St. George’s in Derdghaya, built 150 years ago, was sheltering people seeking sanctuary when it was bombed, killing at least eight and destroying the church. The Toron Citadel, a Crusader castle, has been shorn of one entire wall. Damage has also been inflicted on Chamaa Castle, which is home to a small village.
And of course, many of these were not just historic buildings, they were homes. The conductor of the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra, Lubnan Baalbaki, has spoken movingly about watching his family home being destroyed in another of the obliterated villages, Odaissah. His father, an artist and professor at the Lebanese University, built their home gradually, as and when he could afford it, supervising every part of the process and designing the facade himself. Many decades later, when his wife passed away, she was buried in a small separate building on the property, where he joined her on his death. After that the house became a center for the arts, a small museum in the south of the country. It is now destroyed. “The hardest part,” Baalbeki said, “is that it forces us to relive the loss of our parents, decades after their passing.” He and his siblings have lost this anchor to their past and their parents, another type of grief.
Community, too, can be destroyed when buildings go. The al-Hosh neighborhood of Tyre was close-knit, as seen when the first major new wave of displacement happened on Sept. 23: They all kept tabs on where each other were. “We needed to know where Rami from the phone shop ended up, or the guys who trained at the local gym made it to,” said one al-Hosh native to me, who, although living and working in Beirut, used to travel back to Tyre for weekends. The view in front of her family home is now irrevocably changed, with three missing buildings, one of which contained the apartment of her uncle who was killed in a plane crash. This echoes the grief of Baalbeki: the loss of a tangible place to grieve a family member, in this case reinforced every time the family looks out of the window.
It is now clear that Israel is establishing a buffer zone along the border, around 2 miles deep. Destroying these villages is part of this plan, with little consideration given to human life nor the heritage, Jewish or otherwise, of the area. “There are several archaeological sites in this buffer zone which prove the presence of Jews here, in what was called Upper Galilee, thousands of years ago,” said Fares. They were described a hundred years ago by Europeans “who were digging this place with a Bible in one hand and a spade in the other.” So many of these places, sacred to Muslims as well as European biblical archaeologists and Jewish historians, are now gone forever.
When the Islamic State group destroyed parts of the Roman site of Palmyra in Syria, the world rightly condemned them, as it did when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan. But the world has been slower to react to the destruction of Levantine archaeology in this current crisis. UNESCO is holding a meeting this month in Paris to discuss the possibility of “enhanced protection” of Lebanon’s cultural sites in the face of Israeli attacks, but UNESCO has been proven toothless again and again in terms of halting destruction. The U.N.’s statements on the suffering of Gazans have long been disregarded, and there is little reason to have greater hope in this case. The archaeologists in Lebanon simply watch, knowing they can never know how much is disappearing beneath the bombs.
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