When explosions were triggered in pockets of alleged Hezbollah operatives on September 17 and 18 and when Israeli airplanes started bombing Lebanese targets while their Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was showing to the United Nations General Assembly what he thought of the UN’s vociferous political theater and diplomatic rituals in the name of peace, triggering a wave of fear and displacement north of their border, some civil society organizations around Lebanon leapt into unprecedented and intuitive action.
”On September 23, I think it was a Monday, we decided to use the money from the concert,” Dahlia Dagher, president of Stouh Beirut Association tells Executive about the organization’s pivot to immediately assisting displaced Lebanese with humanitarian materials and away from the final hustle of ticket sales in preparing for a charity event scheduled for September 27 at the prestigious Casino du Liban.
“After the pagers [have been exploding], it was a very dangerous phase and I did not ask if I need to continue or if I need to [reimburse tickets]. We decided ‘khalas’ (stop what we have been doing). I called a group of ladies and told them that we have too much displacement going on. So we need to prepare aid boxes and I need you to help us right now. Everybody came here and we started to work. It was like an avalanche,” Dagher says.
Concert plans – previously cast as single charity event titled Ya Habibi Ya Janoub or for the love of the south – were rescheduled and repurposed, with ad-hoc addition of two diaspora concerts in Paris and Geneva, to garner support for displaced persons under the slogan of love for all of Lebanon. Equally remarkably, Stouh Beirut Association, which boasted on its Facebook page that it was created in 2017 on basis of having helped “more than 50 families” through five successful telethons over the previous years, stepped into accelerated humanitarian action. According to Dagher it was ahead of others in this, such as being “the first association to go to [the southern Lebanese border village of] Rmaich with a large aid truck, which was organized with the Lebanese Armed Forces”.
Capturing this emergence as a quantifiable expression of aid to displaced people, Stouh Beirut Association, between September 24 and October 30, 2024, provided support to 20,687 persons all across Lebanon, says Rosy Haddad, the association’s business development manager. According to published records, aid over this period included nearly 20,000 food parcels, 15,890 hot meals, 1,500 units of baby formula, 5,709 mattresses, 3,846 blankets, 4,370 hygiene kits, and 1,393 packs of essential medicines, among other supplies from apples and drinking water packs to toys and clothing. On the human investment side, the association according to Haddad received 134 volunteering applications over the same period.
Reveals of contradictory human capacities
The current reality of Lebanon reinforces several insights into the human capacities of good and evil. Being faced with invasion, occupation, and overwhelming violence firstly brings out an old truth that in this world region has never receded into the far distance: every humanitarian crisis is an emergency that should have never happened – especially when occurring as man-made atrocities in pointless wars. From a second, correlated perspective, every disaster produced or aggravated by members of the human species is a calamity the magnitude of which could have been mitigated, at least to an extent, through better crisis management preparedness.
A third insight into the evil of human destructiveness is that it does not help to try and measure it, or its impacts. Every humanitarian catastrophe inflicts pain and suffering beyond useful comparison. That is to say that in the case of Lebanon with its cyclical recurrence of externally or internally inflicted adversities and accumulation of hardships in the past decade, inundation with daily casualty numbers and sensational stories of suffering runs great danger of deteriorating into a, from a humanitarian angle, a mind-numbing account of institutional or media voyeurism – a potentially vain endeavor with dwindling effectiveness and by itself nil value for improving anything.
In an economic side-glance, it is even from macro- and micro-economic perspectives pointless to apply a preliminary or a comparative approach to the statistics of destruction and pain. Assessing the human harm of the current war is a grim duty that becomes all the more difficult the longer the war is raging. Comparing crises with very distinct characteristics and military damages inflicted upon Lebanon, namely the ongoing assault from Israel’s instigation of undeclared open war in late September of 2024 to the end of last month, with the 34-day military conflagration of July-August 2006, is not useful even for a comprehensive account of damages and post-conflict reconstruction needs.
The counterpoint of constructive good
One observation that points to the best upside human potential in the middle of the pain, is the rapid, highly enthusiastic escalation of volunteerism and humanitarian aid provision by local organizations of all origins and identities in a crisis that is superseding and eclipsing several socioeconomic meltdowns. The outpouring of Lebanese solidarity despite an epic recession being on its way in the economy is not at all new in terms of its spontaneity – the flooding of devasted streets with aid givers immediately after the Beirut Port explosion of August 4, 2020, is an inerasable memory for many residents of the affected neighborhoods. The scale and social dimensions of the 2024 war impact on civilians of all identities, however, potentially transforms the volunteerism into a cultural taskforce of nation building and inclusiveness.
The positive jolt of seeing volunteerism in action – one that perhaps even constitutes a valid answer to this human predilection with bad and worse news –is deepened from knowing the humanly incomprehensible data points of nearly 16,000 reported Lebanese casualties in just under thirteen months of conflict between Oct 7, 2023 and October 30, 2024.
The impression on the irreplaceable value of spontaneous volunteerism is further magnified by understanding that those injured and dead – in their overwhelming majority civilians, including 1,351 children according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – are the premier victims of an undeniably disproportionate aggression against Lebanese civilians. The bulk of victims that have been dehumanized and collateralized are tens of thousands of families and hundred of thousands of individuals in an imperfect official count of internal refugees (IDPs) that escalated from 211,300 as of September 27, 2024, to more than 842,600 reported IDPs by end of last month.
Not just some globalized civil society agent
In the well-oiled humanitarian economics of first-world markets, the human impulse of providing help and/or leaping into immediate volunteer action, is commonly channeled into financial giving to top-tier charities and international, non-governmental institutions (iNGOs). They have stolid and storied popular reputations that precede them in sudden shocks of earthquakes, floods, and famines; they have proven capacities of moving large aid shipments; they are certified as transparent and professional in their emergency responses; and they are very well known to their state partners and UN agencies.
Comparable state-backed structures in the humanitarian sector of Lebanon, as much as they exist, have either been developed in rudimentary / fragmented ways during Lebanon’s post-conflict reconstruction period after 1992, or they have been degraded because of outmigration of qualified personnel, loss of equipment and rolling stock due to lacking maintenance, and erosion of salaries and operating budgets. Not to forget the impact of the society’s perennial scourges of shameless cronyism and corruption.
It is against this backdrop that the annals of Lebanese volunteerism become astounding stories full of national importance, solidarity and surprise, but also narratives that warrant much further investigation of local non-profit organizations and their perceptions. A point of note, and doubt, in this regard is the common emphasis on inclusiveness among non-profit organizations that have been competing for local or international recognition and all-important foreign funding support since the late 2000s.
Whatever their chosen identity and moniker, no charity, NGO or CSO would ever portray themselves as anything but transparent and free from communal partisanship – but such declarations would be met with distrust in a country notorious for its deep cronyism and fake political promises. This skepticism is endemic in Lebanon. However, the huge gap between claims and perceptions on true civil society motives and drivers is not observed only in Lebanon but rather can serve as a reminder that the narrative of global civil society is anything but comprehensive or quick and easy to categorize through the notorious simplifications of journalism.
The story of Stouh Beirut’s leap into humanitarian aid activities for internal refugees and displaced families that are victims of Israeli aggression, can be read as one example for the complexity and convention-defying reality of human solidarity in the multi-religious Eastern Mediterranean polity and very small modern country of Lebanon.
Rising above mundane bindings?
Stouh Beirut, or surfaces of Beirut, started out rather mundanely as television program covering cultural, political and artistic news and events from around the Arab world. It launched its first humanitarian project as a telethon in 2013, some time after having debuted as a weekly talk show – and this to its detractors is a key item of note – on Lebanese broadcaster OTV, a station known for its affiliation with the “Aounist” movement, or Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) political party.
The FPM has at its core the political dynasty established in the civil war days of the late 20th century by Michel Aoun, the erstwhile army leader who was handed the custodianship of the country in 1989, was forced out after a year, spent 15 years in French exile, returned as top political contender and was President from 2016 to 22. Aoun and his son-in-law and political heir as head of the FPM party, Gebran Bassil, have over more than a decade been some of the most polarizing figures in the immensely controversial Lebanese political establishment.
While not avoiding the issue of her professional link and use of OTV studios for producing her telethons, (which she attributes to an advantageous agreement on her costs of facilities), Stouh’s Dagher presents the creation narrative of Stouh Beirut as humanitarian organization as something far removed from politics. She does so with the verve of a seasoned media producer and exuding the passion of an activist in carefully chosen attire of a humanitarian worker. She had a personal eureka moment for a Christmas season telethon while watching such an event during a family visit to France. She tells Executive: “I had the idea to have people of every different mindset and political color, whether Muslim or Christian, join on one stage to help five persons, one person from each region in Lebanon like the south, north, [and] the Bekaa. This is how we started.”
A pattern of an annual telethon was established with annually increasing charitable donations by the telethon’s captive audience, in conjunction with a mid-yearly follow-up campaign of presenting testimonials as well as financial reports. There was no large single giver or sponsoring entity, she says, but rather an increasing flow of donations ranging from single dollars to about one thousand dollars.
Further points on the journey included incorporation as a non-profit association under Lebanese law and – in an effort to mitigate the impact of the 2019 crisis on the financial system – a parallel non-profit in France. Following years of the telethon entailed a focus on persons in urgent need of lifesaving medical procedures, sometimes outside of Lebanon, that in some cases would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars.
The organization’s explosive emergence on the scene of mass assistance to displaced persons in Lebanon marks thus another surprising pivot and reinvention. It has its special cultural accent through the creation and expansion of musical performance aiming to simultaneously express patriotic passions and appeal to generosity of domestic and diaspora donors and their perhaps elusive friends.
Hope springs eternal even when faced with a phalanx of destructive evils. Lebanon, by the combined force of its recent and new adversities, is internally confronted with new social realities and with irrefutable needs of tackling entrenched social barriers. Diverse, often faith-based and locally rooted charities can be found aplenty in Lebanon. They are essential as institutions serving humanitarian survival needs in the current onslaught and its aftermath. But they also are potent chambers of societal coalescence, given that economic integration and productive inclusivity are the imperatives for building livelihoods and sustenance for the day after all international aid budgets and humanitarian volunteer efforts have run their course. Stouh Beirut appears to be an entrepreneurial outlier among a plethora of locally formed civil society outlets of volunteerism and it will be compelling to see whether the declarations and practice of non-sectarian inclusivity will hold in five or ten years.
