November 2024

You’re looking at a war map of southern Lebanon.

Nothing in the current Israeli war on Lebanon, nothing in the devastation it has wrought, the lives it has taken, the bodies it has mangled, the mourning it has unleashed, the bitterness it has engendered, is unfamiliar to us Lebanese. They occupy the better part of the archive that chronicles the conflict between the two countries.

Above, a glimpse of Nabatieh in 1955, the way my mother remembers it.

My aunt called me last week to ask, “Is it true they are going to deport Shiites to Iraq?”

I am told by a friend that the stench of the dead envelopes every mad man and woman who venture into Shaqra, his village in the south. Israel’s bombs did not even spare his parents’ graveyard.