‘Lest We Forget’

The death toll in Lebanon has now risen past three thousand with more than thirteen thousand wounded. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the villages of the south and the Bekaa Valley. More than a million people have been displaced. Schools have been turned into shelters, making it difficult to resume the school year even in areas considered relatively safe. Yet even the schools cannot hold enough people; tents and makeshift homes have been built on the corniche and in the public square in central Beirut. You would not recognise the city, my friends there tell me.

Some of the latest attacks have focused on Tyre, a city not normally associated with Hizbullah. Nor is my mother’s village, which was heavily pounded in the early days of Israel’s latest war on Lebanon, and pounded again since in intermittent bursts of destruction. The youngest of my mother’s brothers, who lives there, is now staying with another brother in Beirut. The Israelis hit car repair shops, metal sheds, even bakeries, he said. In Nabatiyeh, the closest big town, the whole historic centre was destroyed; the mayor, who had refused to leave, was killed. One of my cousins celebrated her wedding in Nabatiyeh; we danced the night away in an outdoor restaurant overlooking the town and its surrounding villages.

News of my father’s village, closer to the border with Israel and near many of the villages that have been heavily targeted by Israeli attacks, has been hard to come by. It was heavily bombed in 2006. The only footage I have seen comes from an Arabic TV station’s report, which my brother managed to record. The houses shown were destroyed beyond recognition. My father sends updates when an acquaintance tells him that houses of people we know have been hit. We don’t know what has happened to my parents’ house there.

This is what I tell people when they ask me how things are back home. But I am never quite sure where the questions come from and whether my answers make any difference to their views. After all, even Israeli officials, when interviewed, express compassion for innocent civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, placing the blame for their ordeals squarely on Hamas and Hizbullah.

In any case, no one asked me about Lebanon today. Instead, I found myself wondering whether it was incumbent on me to participate in the lamentations about the results of the US elections, the discussions of how deeply divided American society is, the predictions of the end of democracy and the rise of fascism in America. The end of the world is relative to the world you take for granted. As Adam Shatz wrote after Trump’s victory eight years ago, American exceptionalism ‘lives on … in the unprecedented horror we imagine ourselves to be experiencing’.

Someone recently asked me if the latest war on Lebanon was in a way familiar, something we were used to. I said that the death toll from the July 2006 war had already been vastly surpassed by this one, which has also caused much more widespread destruction. This one has been long in the planning, too, with nearly twenty years of intelligence-gathering paving the way for the devastation. The pager and walkie-talkie attacks gave way to aerial bombardment and continuous drone surveillance, the constant buzz of further intelligence-gathering, heralding further devastation, and the long, painful work of trying to pull bodies out from the rubble.

I only knew the Israeli occupation of the south, where they retrenched in 1985 after withdrawing from Beirut, from a distance, though it was sometimes a short distance: we used to visit my father’s village, just across from the occupied zone. I am not old enough to remember the carnage of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, perpetrated by Lebanese Christian militias with the cover of Israeli forces. But there were Israeli attacks on Beirut in 1996, 1999 and 2006, which I vividly recall, with their attendant death, displacement and destruction.

And I remember the final years of the civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990, in which Israel participated, along with the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Syria. The motto of the years after the war was ‘lest we forget’. But before it there had been the war of 1958, and it was followed by an uneasy peace that always threatened to shatter. I don’t recall many times in my life when there were no predictions of war in Lebanon.

At the end of September, someone sent me a cartoon, published in the Lebanese daily L’Orient-le Jour, showing war as the cherry on top of a multi-layered cake of financial collapse, Covid, the Beirut port explosion, political deadlock and mass depression. I wondered, though, if war, or the threat of it, should not be the base. Since independence from the French mandate in 1943, Lebanon has been under constant threat of Israeli aggression, of conflict between the social groups that make the country up, and of being engulfed in wider wars across the region. In the moments of respite, as if powered by the incredible ability to survive against the odds, Lebanon is buoyant. But then it gets submerged again. The latest Israeli war has been crushing. I struggle to see how, even after a ceasefire, itself a distant prospect, the country can bounce back from this level of destruction – which seems to be precisely the aim of the war.

In a short video on Facebook, two women discuss what they have felt, and done, since the war started: they say they felt tired, depressed, helpless; they could not see the future, analysed but did not come to conclusions, shared posts, donated, followed the advice to ‘keep talking about’ Lebanon, felt guilty for being all right while others are dying. One of them says that she wrote things down so that she could remember them later, but then she wondered when later would be. ‘But you did not think of leaving?’ the other asks her. ‘I did not,’ she responds, ‘because even if I leave, would I even be able to forget?’

I left, many years ago. I also cut short my visit this summer because of the escalating events. This last departure shattered my heart. Something about it was different: the premonition of things never being the same again. Not being there to bear witness, I am frightened of forgetting, as life here goes on and the drama of the US elections unfolds, the death and destruction being inflicted on Lebanon and on Gaza.