Showdown!
You’re looking at a snapshot of displacement. The caption at the top reads: Oh, sea! Oh, you father of the orphaned!
Does war have its routines?
Of course it does. Mayhem’s very disruptions are routines: mass murder, assassinations, razed neighborhoods, massive displacement, the insecurities of existence without shelter, food, water, electricity, medical care, schooling, mother, father, son or daughter…
Each war also has its own unique routines, some ubiquitous, others very personal. In Beirut, from where I write, throughout the day Israeli drones hover and buzz in the limitless expanse above. We know that drones come also in silent mode, so I suppose Israel is keen to make it known that it roams unhindered and reigns. The message is meant to register forcefully with Hezbollah and resonate with the rest of us: the movement, the buzzing flying machines attest, has lost its deterrence. Like the Palestinians of Gaza, we are all exposed, as if an occupied people.
Vistas of displacement
And then closer to midnight, but not always, the missiles and bunker busters begin to fall, flattening more of Beirut’s southern suburbs and its environs. Much like the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Mossad extinguished Hezbollah’s leadership and degraded its military and intelligence hardware, they now make the suburbs bleed and lose the wherewithals of life. What physical and psychological wounds they inflicted with the detonated pagers and walkie-talkies, they completed through the terrors of daily explosions. Doubtless, the aim is to blast their way through Hezbollah’s ‘asb — its solidarities — and deny the party the once formidable anchors of its power.
The immediate repercussions are the panoramas of dislocation as far as the eye can see, with over a million people from the suburbs, the Bekaa, and the south thrown asunder across Lebanon’s urbanities. The deeper impact is sure to traverse class, social fabric, and demography in a country already severely disfigured by its decades-long myriad crises. Hezbollah may, therefore, appear to be Israel’s target, but in effect our Israeli neighbor is gunning for all of us.
Even if Israel were to accept a cease fire tomorrow and quit its plans to reach the Litani River, or even beyond, the ramifications of this war already have all the elements of a tectonic jolt. Entire sections of the southern suburbs have been leveled, the south has been wrecked, the Bekaa has been smashed, and Hezbollah’s civilian supports have been seriously damaged. The devastation is widespread, the funds for the rebuilding effort are meager at best, and our paralyzed state is hopelessly captive to a group of unusually callous, confessionally petty, and corrupt elite.
It gives me no pleasure to say this, but I suspect that Israel meant for Sayyed Hassan Nassrallah, the leader of the resistance who for decades presented its single biggest challenge, to watch his movement’s savage diminishment before he himself was assassinated. The man who presided over the growth of Hezbollah into both a Lebanese and regional juggernaut poignantly presided over its weakest moment.
What turned the tides so suddenly last month cannot be deciphered solely through the obvious blows. Clearly, there were fatal security breaches; clearly, Israel felt unexpectedly confident in crossing all the red lines; and clearly, Hezbollah and Iran misread the US and Israel’s reluctance to risk an all-out war. But Nassrallah was not an amateur in this geopolitical conflict. He was well-tested, studied, and very sharp. On the face of it, his seems a mystifying strategic miscalculation, but initial insights, even if valid, are always extremely impressionable. The analysts are predictably in a rush, the answers are not.
Israeli policymakers, retired and active, claim that the aim of the blitzkrieg ripping its way through us is peace and prosperity. With the presumed crippling of Hezbollah and Iran, they think Lebanon, yet again, will be the arena from which they will forge a new Middle East — “the blessing,” as prime minister Netanyahu branded it in his recent General Assembly speech. Upon hearing such Orwellian doublespeak by a genocidal, apartheid regime, whose ministers are openly frothing at the mouth about annexing and settling Gaza and the Lebanese south, one starts to wonder at the mental faculties of these gurus. But then we Lebanese are not the intended audience, are we? Outside of the usual useful idiots in our midst who are rigged to buy this spiel, those meant to bite are Israel’s advocates, supporters, brothers-in-arms, and the like.
We’ve been here before. Tragically, more than once. Tragically, in more than one country. Israel’s ambition is not new and the assumption that drives it is even older: military vanquishments beget cleansed killing fields on which the victors can singularly mold the world of their dreams.
Upon invading Lebanon in 1982, Raphael Eitan, the Israeli army’s chief of staff, asserted that “Israel is fighting in Lebanon to win the struggle for Eretz Yisrael…destroying and uprooting the terrorists’ base…would weaken the Palestinians’ opposition to the Jewish presence in Eretz Yisrael.” His army reached and besieged Beirut, killed 19,000 civilians, displaced half a million people, devastated the city, starved it for a while even, kicked the PLO all the way out to Tunisia, and occupied part of southern Lebanon for 18 years. But Israel could neither pacify the south nor kill Palestinian soumoud, steadfastness.
It’s also typical of the Jewish state to put on spectacular shock and awe shows and, on their heels, prematurely declare “total victory.” The fierce resistance the invading Israeli army is facing in the south, at a minimum, suggests that Hezbollah’s fighting spirit remains strong. Unlike the Palestine Liberation Organization fighters who quickly withdrew from the south upon the IDF’s invasion in 1982, the movement’s soldiers are the sons of that earth. Theirs is a rock-hard attachment to the land made even more unshakable by their ideological zeal. The missiles that keep hitting the north and the vicinities of central Israel also signal that Hezbollah is not about to raise the white flag. And even if it had to, the demand that Lebanon must revive without it or suffer Gaza’s fate is one that reeks of malevolent intentions.
This is, however, a fluid picture that remains frighteningly unpredictable. Four weeks ago, Israel was smarting as Hezbollah kept the cross-border reprisals on a relatively slow burn, today Lebanese reel from Israeli escalations without any guardrails. Three weeks ago, we puzzled at Iran’s disengagement, today we wait for Israel’s retaliation to the IRGC’s (Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps) missile strikes. Three weeks ago, Lebanon had to contend only with an incapacitated state, today it has to cope with a humanitarian catastrophe greater than any in its recent past.
Whatever world is about to come into shape in the Levant, I sincerely doubt there will be anything dreamlike about it.
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On Another Note
Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail is, to my mind, one of the 21st century’s most dazzling novels. Pankaj Mishra describes it as “an extraordinary work of art…continuously surprising and absorbing: a very rare blend of moral intelligence, political passion and formal virtuosity.”
Shibli is also an absolute pleasure to listen to in conversation. Here she is with Dionne Brand “contesting colonial narratives” and discussing “what it means to imagine togetherness beyond the nation-state.”
The talk was a partnership between the literary podcast Between the Covers and Jewish Current’s On the Nose. It was part of Jewish Current’s one-day Event, “A Day of Politics and Culture,” on September 15.
For October 7’s first anniversary, I wrote a piece titled “Everything Has Changed, Nothing Has Changed,” for The Markaz Review. It was painful to write. It certainly has been unbearably painful to live.
Can a genocidal, ethnic cleansing state thrive in the gruesome penumbra of its atrocities? Can an apartheid regime endure in the full glare of its entrenched racisms? Can self-described democracies that are branded as both? Might unrestrained Israeli bloodlust and vengeance in the name of self-defense yield a tangible comeuppance? Will we ever see the true limits of US permission, international timidity, and Arab acquiescence? Can an occupied people murdered, decimated, and terrorized en masse recover, continue to resist, and finally achieve liberation?
History says it all depends, and so, it is no guide. The specific history of the struggle over Palestine is even more reticent. As kind as it has seemed to Israel and cruel to the Palestinians, had it categorically swayed for either, they wouldn’t be still vying for its verdict.