For years, Beirut’s southern suburb has been spoken about as though it were a world apart: A Hezbollah bastion, a target, a warning, or a battlefield. But in Arabic, the word “dahiyeh” simply means “the suburb”.The word itself is ordinary. What makes it extraordinary in Lebanon is its history.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listWhen the Lebanese speak of Dahiyeh, they do not mean any suburb of their capital city. They mean southern Beirut in particular – a dense belt of neighbourhoods that grew from villages, fields, informal housing and municipal edges into a major extension of the city.Dahiyeh – in size nearly as big as municipal Beirut – has been shaped by migration and displacement in the past 50 years. While many moved there in search of work or housing, most of the others were pushed there by wars, political unrest, evictions and a general sense of being neglected by the Lebanese state. The social geography of Lebanon, which gained independence from French colonisers in 1943, began to be transformed in 1948 when Israel’s establishment saw the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land in what is commonly referred to as the Nakba. After Israel’s further occupation of Palestinian lands in 1967 and the expulsion of Palestinian fighters from Jordan in 1970, southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut became increasingly bound up wit …
