How to Separate waring factions? And how Green can this Line of separation be?
Posted on: December 19, 2014
Separating waring factions
When people talk about Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil wars, you’ll often hear references to the Green Line.
I’ve never really questioned the term. Maybe that makes me ignorant, maybe it doesn’t. Blue Line, Green Line, Maginot Line, Metaxas Line.
At some point, these things aren’t about etymology, they’re about tragedy.
But exhausted by ambient tragedy, today I wanted to find out about etymology.
I found that as Beirut retreated into Christian East and Muslim West, the no man’s land that slid into the cracks in between them became so hostile to human life that the streets and alleyways were overtaken by a dense ecology of plants, seed-carrying birds, and pollinating insects that settled into the fissure made by humans.
Into the void left by warring humans, nature crept back in.
And for probably the last time ever, in the absence of men and their filth, a sliver of Beirut was allowed to be green.
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