Arab Life Blog

You are looking at my sister Iman, when she was six years old.

An unscheduled post this week for a special reason.

On a Saturday morning years ago, my father and I sat talking on my parents’ balcony. Iman was on our mind. Iman was always on our mind.

You know, he said, Iman will not last a year after we’re gone, your mother and I. He had that look on his face, the one that always betrayed he knew things; things the rest of us mortals couldn’t possibly know. He was still very well then. We were all well. But not quite Iman. She was forever the child, and forever saddled by the burdens of those who have seen far too much of the mystifying cruelties of life.

The photo is self-explanatory. Nawaf Salam as if ushering in his tenure.

What in Lebanon went weak enough to give prime minister-designate Nawaf Salam the strength to form a cabinet whose profile, for the first time in decades, is somewhat resistant to the ruling class’s dictums?

You’re looking at Fatmeh, sister on her shoulders, journeying on foot back to Northern Gaza.

In a cascade they fell, the unbearable ironies of this past week.

Together, without meaning to, they epitomize this extraordinarily raw hour, by turns terrifying and utterly ridiculous, tragic and joyous. And so we swing between extreme prospects and the new era they threaten or promise.

Would you believe:

The 80-year commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz -Birkenau takes place in Poland as the children of its victims wrap up their own genocide on another people 1,600 miles away.

Poland, a signatory to the Rome Statute that underpins the International Criminal Court (ICC), had to guarantee protection against the court’s arrest warrant to the visiting prime minister of the genocidal culprit.

You’re looking at Palestinians in Gaza as they cry out in joy and relief at official news of a ceasefire. They express the joy and relief of so many of us Levantines after a nightmarish year.

On the evening of October 31, 1992, a bygone era of a bygone Lebanon, a mad spectacle of fireworks overwhelmed the Lebanese skyscape. Rafiq Hariri, a rotund man with deep pockets and elephantine ambitions, had just ascended to the position of prime minister of a war-torn, mess of a country desperate for resurrection.

The cover photo needs no explanation. A salute to the colors of the watermelon, red, green, white, and black today and forever.

Some housekeeping before I start with this first post of 2025: a few readers have reached out to me expressing frustration that they are unable to like my posts. That’s because what you receive in your inbox from substack is an email of the post. Click on the heart or the title and it will take you to the blog itself. There, by all means click away!

You’re looking at a snapshot of old Damascus.

“The Emperor Has No Clothes, And Neither Do We,” was the fourth lesson I drew from the 2011 Arab uprisings in This Arab Life, A Generation’s Journey Into Silence:

There are no pretenses anymore; no pretense of a real bond, a serious promise, or common cause. It’s a nakedly honest relationship between ruler and ruled. They no longer pretend to care for our wellbeing, because who would believe them? And we no longer pretend to love them, because who would believe us? It’s a bare, bare Arab political terrain. Every grand idea and party and movement that lit up the 20th century survives only as a relic in the twenty-first

You’re looking at just one of countless vistas of return to the south.

It begins! The recrimination here and the chest pounding there in the aftermath of this latest war on Lebanon. The devastation is massive enough to announce Hezbollah’s defeat, but the movement’s stubborn steadfastness is credible enough to trumpet its victory.

In full view of the actual tally, such psychology may seem preposterous. But it shouldn’t be. It’s never been in struggles between very powerful actors who seek to overwhelm with superior force and underdogs who bear it, stand their ground, land their own painful punches, and emerge to plan for another day.

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.

You’re looking at Ayman Baalbaki’s painting, Untitled, 2011

When the war is over and the economists are done with the calculations, the magnitude of the losses will probably shock even the most pessimistic among us. The baseline, I suppose, would be the last major clash in 2006, whose toll is estimated at $3.5 billion.