Cry My Beloved Lebanon
Part I: Reflections on the Carnage...and what Lebanon Used to Be
I am an American citizen, born in Beirut, Lebanon, the daughter of a diplomat/spy — which makes me immune from President Trump’s deportation efforts. My father, Daniel Dennett, served as head of counter-intelligence for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and later the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), the immediate precursor of the CIA. An expert in Middle Eastern history and languages, he was highly valued and carried the code name Carat. His State Department cover was cultural attache.
He did not live to see the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948, but like many foreign service officers at the time, he worried about the impact of sending European settlers to take over Arab lands in Palestine.
For all his foreboding, he could not have imagined the expulsion and flight of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948, or that 100,000 would settle in refugee camps in Lebanon.
Palestinians flee their homes in Palestine. Now the “Gazafication” of Lebanon is underway
Or that in 2026, over one million people had been displaced from their homes in southern Lebanon and entire villages have been demolished.
Massive Exodus from southern Lebanon in 2024. Photo: AP
In 2024 and 2026, many terrified Lebanese have had to flee on foot. Source: NewIndiaExpress
Two lives entwined
In the spring of 1946, when I was conceived in a Bedouin cave in the Jordanian ruins of Petra — Carat managed a vacation trip with my Mother as cover for his investigating British post-war intentions in the region — Palestine was convulsed by violence. Jews were fighting the British, Arabs were fighting Jews, and within two months Zionist Irgun militants would bomb British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Palestine. killing 91 people — 41 Arabs, 28 Britons, and 17 Jews.
Several weeks later, both the British and American embassies were bombed in Beirut, the latter (including my father’s office) more heavily. My father spent several months investigating the bombing. He wondered why the British were not concerned. He reported that the bombings were not as sophisticated as happened at the King David Hotel and concluded Arab nationalists were the likely culprits.
My birthplace, 1947
My attachment to Lebanon spans decades, beginning with the first six weeks of my life.
Shortly after my birth, my father took me to the American embassy and showed me off to embassy staffers, exulting “It’s a girl” — to which, my widowed mother would later tell me, smiling gently, “no one said anything at all.”
Daniel Dennett at a State Deparment event in Beirut
In retrospect, this story must have stayed with me, imbuing in me a responsibility to prove his love for me right, while asserting my sense of value in a world governed largely by patriarchy. And yet, nearly three decades later, during the time I worked as a journalist in Lebanon and the Gulf countries (1972–75) I never experienced derision or disrespect. Quite the contrary. Maybe I was an object of curiosity (there were few female journalists in those days).
Or maybe there was something else…something my father revealed through his own writings: that in the 1930s and 40s, during his time there, Americans were held in high esteem in Lebanon and much of the Middle East. And the feeling was mutual.
What ultimately connected our lives was his likely death by sabotage on March 20, 1947 in a C-47 military plane en route to Ethiopia following his top secret mission to Saudi Arabia to determine the safest route of the Trans-Arabian pipeline.
The Crash of Flight 3804 that killed my father. Source: National Archives.
He couldn’t wait to get back to Lebanon to tell his wife about what he witnessed at ARAMCO’s growing oil compound in the Saudi desert, and to see his baby girl, but he never made it.
I was two months old when I left Lebanon on a boat headed back to the States with my Mother, Ruth Leck Dennett, my 5 year old brother Dan and 8 year old sister Cynthia.
The Dennett family in Beirut. Summer, 1946
My first passport photo. I was two months old when I left Lebanon for the US.
We grew up in my father’s hometown of Winchester, Mass, a suburb of Boston . When I turned 16, my mother, asked if I would like to go back to Beirut, which she dearly missed. And small wonder.
My parents’ Beirut in the 1930’s and 40s was a thriving cosmopolitan city known as the Paris of the Middle East. The French had taken over from the defeated Ottoman Turks following World War I, and during their 20 year reign under the League of Nations’-created “French mandate” imparted their unique flavor to an already charming orange-roofed city of merchants, bankers, university intellectuals, and spies from around the world. Beirut’s fine climate and unique location — astride the azure-blue Eastern Mediterranean Sea –ware perhaps its greatest gifts to foreigners, and eventually, Lebanon’s tragic undoing.
The campus of the American University of Beirut
When I arrived in Beirut with my mother in 1963 to attend my junior and senior year of high school at the American Conmunity School, I expected to find white-robed Arabs astride camels walking through its streets. Instead I found Beirutees dressed in Western clothes, shopping for American goods in the local Spinneys supermarket, and often frequenting lively night clubs where they drank whiskey and gin and danced to romantic French songs and American pop music.
They spoke Arabic but also French, and increasingly English, and were incredibly generous to foreigners, welcoming us into their homes saying Ahlan wa Sahlan (you are welcome) and sharing their fabulous food: humus, tabouli, babaganouche, shish-kebab, and kibbe being among my favorites.
I went on school trips to the ancient (and still lived-in) Phoenician port of Byblos just north of Beirut, to the Phoenician port of Tyre to the south, and, to the marvelous Roman ruins of Baalbek. UNESCO has declared Baalbek a national heritage site, describing it as “one of the most celebrated sanctuaries of the ancient world, progressively overlaid with colossal constructions which were built during more than two centuries. Its monumental ensemble is one of the most impressive testimonies of the Roman architecture of the imperial period.”
In modern times, Baalbek’s Roman Acropolis posed as the dramatic backdrop to the Baalbek International Festival, which featured dance, theater, opera, and jazz every summer. I had the thrill of watching rehearsals for the wonderful Lebanese debke dancers from my balcony in Beirut.
Never would I have dreamed that Baalbek and Tyre would be indiscriminately bombed by Israelis to “rout out Hezbollah” as is happening now.
My father fondly described Lebanon as a tiny country whose political life “is never dull and always highly flavored.” Famed for its cultural and religious diversity, it was the original homeland of the Phoenicians and was subsequently conquered and occupied by the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Ottomans and the French. After gaining independence from France in 1943, life in Lebanon was relatively stable for the next 30 years, its government set up so the president was a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of the House, a Shiite Muslim.
Lebanon’s Civil war
In addition to the 100,000 Palestinians who became refugees in Lebanon in 1948, the Six Day war of 1967 created some 300,000 more refugees from lands taken over by Israel, many again escaping to Lebanon. With the growth of the Palestinian resistance movement in the 1960s and 70s, their presence in Lebanon was resented by conservative Christian Maronites, who allied themselves with Israel.
As fate would have it, I had returned to Lebanon in 1972 following college in the U.S. and graduate school in Florence Italy with an MA in art history. My mother died that year and, as it had with her in the early 60s, Lebanon beckoned to me to come back. I took up a career as a journalist writing about art and architecture, and before long, about politics in Lebanon and economic development in the Gulf countries of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Oman and Iran.
By 1975, anti-Palestinian ferment was growing.
I recall standing on top of my Beirut apartment and watching French mirage jets flying overhead on their way to bomb a refugee camp in Beirut. A few weeks later, while traveling by a communal (“service”) taxi to visit a friend living near the airport, a tank came barreling down the road toward us, its turrets swinging wildly, causing my fellow occupants and me to flee the taxi. I took refuge in a Christian school and spent hours hiding under a desk, watching terrified parents dodging bullets to rescue their children.
As evening approached, a young man who had spotted me earlier came back and informed me that I had two choices: stay there, not knowing who would take over the school, or flee with him. I went with him. We raced to his car across the street when a shot rang out. It missed, and he was able to get me lowered into the back seat of his car. He sped in reverse and took us to safety at his uncle’s house. When his uncle saw me on the phone dictating my story to the Beirut Daily Star, he suspected a spy and asked me which side I was on. Knowing the neighborhood and prone to truth telling, I said “The Palestinians.”
“Then you are welcome,” said the uncle, who fed me and gave me a room where I would spend the night.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was the precursor to the Lebanese Civil war. I decided on April 1, 1975 (April Fools Day) to take a breather in England. Two weeks later, right wing Christian Phalangists fired on a busload of Palestinians in Lebanon, killing them all. I knew this was very serious, and so returned to the U.S. The civil war which began in April 1975 would pit (mostly Shiite) Muslims and Palestinians against Maronite Christians, lasting 15 years (1975–1990) and killing over 150,000.
In 1982, Israeli forces entered Lebanon, and succeeded in forcing Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization out of the country. Shortly afterwards, Israelis encouraged Christian Phalangists to attack the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, slaughtering 3,000 Palestinians and Lebanese civilians over two days.
Palestinian women amid bodies in their refugee camp of Shatila. Photo: Gulf News Archives
Israel occupied southern Lebanon until the year 2000. The only forces to fight the Israelis were Shiite Islamists calling themselves Hezbollah. Inspired by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that put Ayatollah Khomeini in power, they sought support from Iran and became part of the “Axis of Resistance.”
After offering the embattled Shiites extensive humanitarian aid, including schools and health clinics, Hezbollah (the party of God) formed a political party and became a sizable bloc in Lebanon’s parliament.
Fast forward to 2024–26. Israeli jets have pounded the city of Baalbek, damaging residential buildings and killing civilians, on the grounds that it hosts members of Hezbollah.
Destruction near the Roman temples of Baalbek. Photo: AFP
There is talk now that Israel wants to trigger another civil war, with the aim of forcing Hezbollah to disarm and abandon its Shiite followers as a condition for cessation of its bombing of southern and now central Lebanon.
Today, you may ask, as I did, why on earth is this happening?
The Gateway to Middle East Oil.
When I first set foot in Lebanon in 1963, I learned that the Lebanese people took pride in calling this small country astride the Mediterranean Sea the “Gateway to the Middle East.” It was an apt description for anyone who cared to look at a map and view Lebanon as a land bridge to oil-rich Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. I shared in that pride, and considered those two years in Lebanon a transformative experience.
Having returned in the 70s as a rather inquisitive young adult, I discerned that Western businessmen viewed Lebanon from a slightly different perspective, as the Gateway to Middle East Oil. For Lebanon hosted two Mediterranean terminal points for pipelines , one in the north carrying oil from Iraq (the French-controlled Iraq Petroleum Co, or IPC pipeline) and the other in the south carrying oil from Saudi Arabia (the U.S. controlled Trans-Arabian Pipeline, Tapllne). As I have described in my book, Follow the Pipelines, Tapline and the lucrative Saudi oil that flowed through it on the way to Europe transformed the U.S. into a major regional power replacing both the French and the British (who controlled Palestine) to become the world’s numero uno superpower.
My father understood the importance of Saudi oil the moment he set foot in Lebanon in early 1944. In a six page “Analysis of Work,” which I got declassified after suing the CIA under FOIA, he outlined what OSS headquarters expected of him.
“Up to the outbreak of the present war,” he wrote, “ the U.S. enjoyed, throughout the entire region, a greater prestige than any other foreign power.” His main points were as follows:
1. The Middle East, having been outside the sphere of our imperialistic activity, regards us as being politically neutral and therefore safe. This was an important consideration in the granting us of oil concessions in Arabia.”
2. American educational, medical and scientific missions [largely centered around the American University of Beirut] has brought us to the attention of all classes of society in a highly favorable manner. The philanthropic basis of our activity was generally accepted at its face value.”
I should note, other than marveling over his term “imperialistic,” that he had had the invaluable experience of teaching English to Middle Eastern students at the American University of Beirut (AUB) from 1931–33. As it was for me, so too for him: his time in Lebanon changed his life. He developed a love for the country’s diverse peoples, religions, and cultures, causing him to switch his major at Harvard from German literature and language to Middle Eastern history specializing in Islam.
AUB was founded by Chistian missionaries in the late 19th century . They named it the Syrian Protestant College, but it evolved into a secular institution valued for its pursuit of science, its liberal arts education and respect for all religions. It also boasted an extraordinary medical school that trained nurses and doctors while providing highly-rated health care. (I should know: I was born there!) AUB’s President David Dodge once aptly described the university as America’s most valuable investment in the Middle East, next to oil.
Yet because of these advantages, my father continued writing in his 1944 report “up to 1939, a deliberate effort was made by all great Powers, Axis and Allied, to undermine our prestige.” By 1944, the Germans no longer posed a significant threat, so Dennett’s focus was spying on our allies: the French, the British and the Soviets, all of whom were intensely jealous of the US’s exclusive oil concession with Saudi Arabia.
In a segment he called “Probable American post-war interests,” he cited “Oil as a vital factor,” and most significantly, the oil of Saudi Arabia. “The probable extent of these oil deposits is so great that we must control them at all costs.” [Emphasis added].
This one sentence would become a mantra for any nation hoping to become a major power in the latter half of the 20th century up until now. And the fact that my father was spying on our allies, as they were doing with him, got me to thinking about The Great Game for Oil and the deadly politics that often underly the Game, and that likely made my father one of its first American victims.
So there you have it: my explanation for the chaos in Lebanon, or at least part of it. The quest to find and control oil, the coveted fuel of all militaries, was behind all the wars in the Middle East. And the discovery between 2000 and 2010 of $500 billion worth of oil and natural gas off the coast of Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon is a major factor behind the violence engulfing the region. My goal has been to elevate discussions on the Middle East conflict above the typical Arab versus Jew descriptions. Yes, those conflicts are real and deeply routed in the massive traumas visited on both Jews and Arabs, but who has benefited from their suffering?
The fighting in Gaza and now Lebanon continues despite diplomatic efforts to achieve a lasting cease-fire.
Today, May 10th Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon continue, killilng (without warning) eight members of one family: a married couple, three of their children, a 6-month-old grandchild, the father’s brother and a grandmother. More evacuation orders have been issued.
“They are hitting a lot today,” the resident of a town just south Saksakiyeh told the New York Times. “So many people are getting killed for no reason.”
In Part II, I will take you into the hearts and minds of prominent Lebanese -American citizens who are desperately seeking an end to the fighting, and the return of Lebanon “as it used to be.”
You can find my previous posts on charlottedennettsubstack.com
I put too much time in them! But badly want to connect. I hope you will consider subscribing for free, but if you can afford it, pay for it!
What a remarkable perspective you have, Charlotte. Well worth all the effort you bring to reclaiming it. Your insights are invaluable.
Great story Char, can't wait to read the next one. What a life!