Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel isn’t the only thing on the minds of Lebanese people. They are struggling with political chaos orchestrated by a militant political movement that seems more interested in helping stage attacks on Israel than dealing with a wrenching economic crisis at home.

Nothing symbolizes the frustrations voiced to me here in Beirut more than the gaping hole in the center of the city’s downtown where the world’s largest non-nuclear explosion destroyed tie city’s port and reduced much of Beirut to ash. No one really knows much more about why the explosion occurred and who was responsible than when the blast rocked the city more than three years ago.

Lebanon has long been known for sectarian strife, corruption, controversy, and dysfunction. And the southern reaches of this city of 5.6 million have well-worn paths to the doors of Hezbollah, the militant political movement that now holds sway in the nation.

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reports that operatives from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas met here in recent months to secretly plot the unprecedented attacks on Israel that now has the Middle East in turmoil. There’s also concern that militants could strike Israel’s northern border from this nation that went to war with Israel in 2006.

*photo of journalist Sahar Arnaout by James O’Shea*

But outrage voiced by Lebanon people I spoke with seems equally focused on the parliamentary gridlock orchestrated by Hezbollah’s political wing. The militants’ tactics resemble those used by Republicans rebels in the U.S. Congress. Although Hezbollah -- a militia with terrorist ties -- represents a minority of Lebanon’s population, it has the political savvy to tie the Lebanese parliament in knots For nearly a year now, every time the parliament meets to deal with the nation’s vexing problems, Hezbollah and its allies walk out, denying the parliament the threshold it needs to do basic tasks such as trying to fix a staggering economy or finding out who was responsible for an explosion that blew up the port. Official investigations into the cause of the blast have gone nowhere.

I visited the site of the Beirut port explosion with Sahar Arnaout, a journalist who covered the blast for Alhurra, the Lebanese television news outlet for the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN). I am the chairman of the MBN, which was created by Congress in 2004 to bring balanced, objective reporting to the Middle East and North Africa, a region of the world where censorship and government-controlled news is common and not flattering to the U.S. I wanted to learn more deeply about the organization I chair and decided to visit MBN’s offices. Beirut was my fourth stop on my tour, and I spent some time with Arnaout and her MBN colleagues.

One thing that became immediately apparent to me. Beirut differed from several of the other MBN offices I visited, not only because of the relentless spirit of the staff and the Lebanese citizens but also because government control of the press is not as bad as, say, Cairo, where a journalist can be jailed or banned from pursuing his profession simply for writing a story the government doesn’t like. Read my piece on Cairo here.

To be clear, the more diverse Lebanese media scene is not because politicians here are more tolerant of a free press. Hezbollah routinely threatens journalists for coverage it doesn’t like. Nevertheless, the tactics it embraces shows how radical militias are better at making noise than running anything. The Hezbollah-dominated government is so dysfunctional that it can’t even fulfill its basic duties much less impose censorship on the scale of Egypt.

The nation has gone without a president for nearly a year, even though the parliament held twelve votes on a successor to Michel Aoun, who left office in October 2022. Lebanese parliamentarians with ties to Hezbollah and its allies keep walking out of the votes, denying the parliament the threshold it needs to elect a president, giving the nation what many of its citizens call a “government in name only.”

Arnaout says it’s unfathomable that no one in power seems able or willing to explain the true cause of the blast or who was responsible a full three years after the port exploded on August 4, 2020. “That was my day off,” she recalls, “and I was on a shopping trip with my husband.” Although she wasn’t close to the disaster, Arnaout nevertheless felt the force of the blast. “We were in the car and suddenly there was this strong force that pushed against my face.” The couple soon saw a huge pink and orange ball roar into the sky. They started driving towards the cloud. As they got closer, though, her husband warned her: “I don’t know, Sahar. Look at the color of that cloud. I think it’s a chemical explosion.”

A veteran journalist with years of experience covering news in the Arab world, Arnaout’s phone had an app that allowed her to file live news reports. So, she and her husband continued driving until she could get as close to the scene as possible. Despite the cell phone disruption caused by the blast, she got through to Alhurra. “I just started filming with my phone and talking about what I saw. Alhurra was the first news station with live coverage,” she says.

Arnaout says some things are known about the tragedy, but they surfaced largely thanks to some investigations launched by organizations such as Amnesty International. The prevailing wisdom is a fire at the port detonated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, a chemical used to make fertilizer and explosives. To give some perspective, just two tons of the same chemical helped destroy a federal building and kill 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995. Investigators also concluded that the chemical had been improperly stored in a port warehouse for six years after Lebanese authorities forced a Moldovan ship owned by a Russian businessman to dock in Beirut because of technical problems. A fire nearby ignited the ammonium nitrate as near as can be determined.

But getting beyond the basics is hard particularly since the port disaster occurred as Lebanon experienced an evolving economic crisis that is equally toxic. The economic turmoil and some proposed tax increases to mitigate its impact sparked widespread protests called “the revolution” in October 2019. Lebanese inflation, which has been raging for years, now stands at about 250 percent; the unemployment rate has hovered about twelve percent for the past four years. The World Bank says the nation’s economic crisis is the worst since the mid nineteenth century.

How the nation gets out of its woes is anyone’s guess. Lebanon is governed by a sectarian-based political structure that dates to its independence from France in 1943. Although attempts have been made to change the system, it remains fundamentally intact with power-sharing agreements divvying up political spoils between eighteen different religious sects.

Allegations are widespread that officials in the government suppress probes about responsibility for the port blast to cover-up their own corruption. Hezbollah, for instance, has been known to use the port to import explosives for its terrorist operations in the region. The port itself remains about as dysfunctional as the government that controls it, and Arnaout says it not much more useful that the day she first filmed the disaster.

“See that big hunk of concrete with the large hole in it,” she says pointing towards the port after she helped me scale a large coil of concertina wire designed to keep intruders out of the port area. “That’s where it was stored when it exploded.” She also points to idle cranes that once plunked containers from trucks and placed them aboard ships. “They haven’t been used since the explosion.” A stroll around a nearby neighborhood exposes charred scars from the blast and damage to many historical buildings. “That one was a U.N. heritage site,” she says.

Arnaout and journalists like her in Lebanon struggle with the challenges of gathering the news and do what they can trying to sift fact from fiction in a world that often resembles a farce. Yet she also points to signs of hope that the disaster will lead to better times at some point. As we strolled past a new modern steel and glass restaurant perched on top of an ancient stone foundation, she says, “They are trying to mix the old and the new!”

Ahead of us a street filled with people shopping for high-priced goods, eating lunch, and scooping up hummus with pita bread in neighborhoods that one veteran journalist called “our crazy but lovable region.” Some recent news reports say visitors from the Lebanese diaspora around the world are returning to vacation here and spend money to help with the nation’s economic struggles. “Look,” Arnaout says with a smile, “some of these places are starting to reopen.”

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.

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Any opinions or observations in this blog are purely those of the author and do not represent the official positions of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) or of the U.S. State Department’s Agency for Global Media, which administers federal grants to the MBN.

Chaos Haunts Beirut