March 2025

You’re looking at the view down the road from my mother’s house. In Lebanon, only the seas are calm.

Is it not something that, as the world is making mind-bending technological and scientific leaps, both life-saving and threatening, this very world is throwing to the wind practically all the legal and moral guardrails of the past century?

It’s a dizzying prospect, frankly, experiencing human effort at its most creative and destructive. A mighty troop of what ifs, once inhabiting only our dreams and nightmares, are coming into actual shape, titillating and horrifying our senses as the case may be.

You’re looking at Beirut’s Burj in 1952. I cannot lie. I would have very much liked to walk those streets and live that life.

In the 1920s, France, the mandatory power in control of Syria, spent the better part of its ill-conceived mandate by turns slicing up and restitching Greater Syria. Its first attempt in 1920-1921 produced five statelets: the state of Aleppo, the state of the Druze, the state of the Alawites, the state of Damascus, and Greater Lebanon. Mount Lebanon attained its “greater” status courtesy of the coastal cities, the Bekaa valley, and the south, which France saw fit to add to it.

A Birdseye view of Hassan Nassrallah’s funeral. Credit: AP

On Gazan landscapes of genocide, domicide, and educide, Hamas emerged, as if from the rubble, after the ceasefire to deliver showstopping releases of Israeli hostages. To the loud cheers of thousands of spectators, one group of hostages after the other climbs the podium, by turns smiling, waving to the crowds, and thanking their captors.

On Lebanese landscapes, last Sunday the 23rd, Hezbollah, whose resistance Israel severely tested and whose communities it hammered and displaced by the hundreds of thousands, threw a showstopping funeral for its martyred leader, Hassan Nassrallah. In unison, the huge mass of supporters chanted, fists raised high, labaika ya Nassrallah, we are at your command, Nassrallah.