Arab Life Blog

Lebanon is a tad bit stranger than usual these days. Nothing too alarming suggesting anything imminent. But over the past few months, the tussle between the seriousness and frivolity of the country has acquired a sharper appearance. I say appearance because many of our Lebanese melees are both distraction and consequence.

Over the last few weeks, as student protests and encampments have erupted on college campuses across the US, trepidations have risen, especially among younger supporters of the Palestinian cause. One messaged me: “Congress will pass their new antisemitism law, everyone will be silenced, foreign students will be deported, visas will be cancelled, new ones will be denied. They will shut it all down.”

The Middle East, for its observers, is theater. A place of smoke and mirrors, as many a foreign journalist is fond of saying. It’s more sorry fate than cultural disposition. In coveted lands, conspiracies tend to thrive and, alas, everybody, inside and out, wants a piece of us.

So, we Arabs, from a very tender age, are conditioned to believe that what we see is almost always a lie, shadowplay, the purpose of which is to hide something sinister.

Joye Vailes Shepperd–Vailes to me since we were teenagers–is my best friend. We met in high school when I joined Holton-Arms in my junior year. She was an old timer and a senior, with all the comforts and familiarities that come with that; I was new, with all the discomforts and unease that attach to this.

Ever since those early days, she and I have been each other’s whisperers, editors, advocates, and critics–constant conversationalists across the spectrum of time and life.

Every once in a while the heart falls silent and a pause imposes itself.

At such moments, I find respite in curating other people’s voices.

First, there is the fact that becomes truth:

In a Haaretz interview, Nathan Thrall, certainly one of the most astute and sensitive observers of Israel and Palestine, distilled the essence of the dilemma now–for both Israelis and Palestinians.

As Israel’s genocide in Gaza entered the starvation phase and photos of emaciated children began to go viral, Arundhati Roy illuminated an essential fact that jarred with the heartbreaking sight:

Her name is Mariam. Why is she upset, the journalist asks. Life is very hard, she explains. Za’atar (thyme) is all they eat. Her father recently left for heaven, and they are stranded in a school, she and her brother.

And then the tears. “We have nothing. We miss bread…white bread.”

Who will rebuild life anew from the wreckage of Mariam’s childhood? From the ruins of her sisters’ and brothers’ in Palestine, in Syria, in Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, Libya…?

October! The usual change of seasons and its darting dizzy spells. A few days and they will dissipate, I said to myself. But they stayed for weeks, then months.

The doctor said it could be the crystals in my left ear. My sister’s problem since her teens, would you believe? What would make them misbehave with me now, I wondered?

The label sticks!

The International Court of Justice may take years to adjudicate the South African case but the accused, Israel, shall forever have the charge hanging like a badge of shame around its neck. Because the ICJ has, in essence, deemed the sum of what it is committing in Gaza as heinous and premeditated enough to be probed as genocide.

Hagar Brodutch and her three children were among the Israelis who were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, and later released in the exchange of captives in November. She and her kids were held in an apartment somewhere in the North of Gaza. As Israel pounded away all around her, she started to grapple with the twin-truths of the October attack: