A Fight to The Death (the Rest of Us In-Between)

When war erupted again on March 2 between Hezbollah and Israel, old routines returned. The scramble to reach relatives and colleagues in the areas targeted by Israeli raids. Morning huddles with friends in abandoned cafés. The addiction to the rush of news. The incessant calls and WhatsApp messages from the outside, hoping that we were safe. 

My heart went first to my little sister, Iman, who left us a little over a year ago. We buried her on a hill on the far edge of the cemetery in Nabatiyeh, a major town in the south. Beirut’s graveyards, derelict and overflowing, had long ago lost all respect for the dead. Our family had roots in Nabatiyeh. With every new generation, they grew more frayed. But when it came to finding Iman a dignified resting place, the old town, which she never knew, was the obvious choice. A very familiar Lebanese story.

In its military offensives, Israel has been as ruthless with the departed as with the living. Hence my dread.

I wrote my column in the days after, and sent it to my editors at al-Quds al-Arabi and The Markaz Review. We were bound to let loose our festering domestic feuds. We always do. It was inevitable that rival narratives would quickly efface the nuance that permeates our contentious politics. I thought, in my column, I might knit a backcloth that retrieves for the reader the first casualty of our internecine squabbles: context. One of my editors sent me a note: “…although you write as if you are almost out of the fray, your situation in this kind of war seems precarious, and yet many Lebanese accept the inevitability of it.”

I had succeeded. And I had failed. 

No one in Lebanon is ever out of the fray, not even those who are very far away from burning neighborhoods and landscapes. Not those like me, who for now live in a relatively safe area. Or those going about their day in total calm on the other side of the bloodshed; or those who hope against hope that, this time, the Israeli blitz will pulverize Hezbollah and rive its supposed hold on the state. Not even those who truly wish that Israel would just enfold us, once and for all, in its embrace. Or those who packed up their emotions and belongings a long time ago and bade this country and its troubles farewell.

It seems extraordinary that, eighty years into the modern Lebanese experiment, we have yet to learn its most tragic lesson. If we are not able to dream collectively, we’re doing little more than reprising the country’s nightmares. Between our reveries and incubi lies the very faint line between our beauty and ugliness. There we trace our true shape: how many pieces do we want to be; how small or large each; or how whole and coherent dare we finally become.

This has been our enduring existential quest, our holy grail. In times of war, almost always a near-death experience for us as a nation, it asserts itself with frightening urgency. Political divides fortify with alacrity, and we are forced to choose between them. Those who prefer their own path — and I am one of them — become the usual suspects for both sides. If you are not unequivocally with one, you are wholeheartedly with the other.  

All the while, the ground is giving way. Over a million Lebanese, by the last official estimate, have been displaced. Under Israeli pounding and threats, the south is emptying fast and the southern suburbs (Dahiyeh) have been reduced to something between Dresden and a moonscape. The suffering of the uprooted and those who have lost loved ones is painfully palpable. But this is hardly the final count. The Israeli military offensive feels as if it has barely started. 

Every war generates its own haze. There are forces at play that one cannot immediately decipher. But not every aspect of the battlefield is a mystery. In this conflagration, Lebanon is for the first time the sideshow, the second theater of the larger cataclysm between two mortal enemies. I exclude the United States, because I subscribe to Fintan O’Toole’s view that, in this conflict, it is America, a power that “…manifests overwhelming military strength but also stark political weakness,” that acts as Israel’s proxy.  

This is a fight to the death now between the Jewish state and the Iranian Islamic Republic. Not the death of them as countries and peoples, but the death of so much besides, none more precious than life’s reassuring rhythms for ordinary beings caught in this vortex of hate. Lines that ought never be crossed, norms, values, guardrails that, for decades, had been under severe duress, are part of the detritus of this furious unraveling. 

We all should have seen it coming. Unchecked Israeli horror in Gaza turned out to be quite empowering. But frankly, I could point to so many milestones before the genocide, all easing the way to this drunken pursuit of absolute Israeli supremacy. After Gaza, the ultimate wrong, Israel understood it could actually ask for the moon — and get it. And the moon for the Jewish state has long been Iran. 

It’s not surprising that, for most western ruling elites, the Islamic Republic’s brutal system has a privileged place in the argument for attacking it. Nor is it remarkable that their acquiescence in Israel’s genocidal, apartheid regime patently renders their rationale morally repulsive.  

The Levantine predicament casts its shadow now on the entire Middle East and beyond. We have morphed from the outlier to Israel’s dry run for total regional hegemony. In its arrogance, it may not know it, but it is already stumbling. And, as always, it is leaving a trail of misery in the wake of its ruinous excess. One from which it is not exempt.

The war’s wreckage belongs to all of us. No one is out of the fray.

On Another Note

Khirbet Khizeh is Yizhar Smilansky’s novella on the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. It fictionalizes the very real expulsion of Palestinians from the village of Khirbet al-Khisas in Askelon, Palestine (Ashkelon, in present-day Israel). You would be hard-pressed to find a copy of it today in Israeli bookstores. But as early as 1964, only fourteen years after the Jewish state’s formation, the Education Ministry added it as an option to the high school curriculum.

Khirbet al-Khisas was one of 400 Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed and then destroyed by Zionist forces. Smilansky contends with that legacy and his place in it as an Israeli Intelligence officer who took part in the ejection of Khirbet’s Palestinian inhabitants.

In today’s Israel, polls show a breathtaking ignorance of this fraught inheritance. Worse, they reveal Israeli youths’ illiteracy about basic contemporary facts, among them the geographic location of the Palestinian Territories colonized after the 1967 conquest. Arguably, this psychological erasure is the state’s most spectacular Orwellian accomplishment. Its results partly announce themselves in the unusually high popular support for the IDF’s savage campaigns in the Levant and wars against Iran.

Nathan Thrall’s timely tribute to Khirbet Khizeh in the New York Review of Books recovers essential sections of a history that has been all but edited out of Israel’s collective memory.

Debates about 1948 are now a thing of the past. Most Israelis rarely think of the expulsions carried out in their name, neither the ones in 1948 and 1967 nor those in the present. During the last three years, dozens of Palestinian communities have been violently driven out of their West Bank lands, dozens of Khirbet Khizehs entirely uprooted. As this process accelerates, most Israelis look away. Denial, however, is a tricky thing. It is a form of simultaneously seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing. In the early months of the Gaza genocide, the very same Israeli pundits, journalists, and political leaders who once refused to admit that any expulsions had occurred in 1948 now promised the Palestinians a new Nakba, a “Gaza Nakba,” a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948.”

If you are not a subscriber to the New York Review of Books, I am happy to gift you the article.

Amal Ghandour’s biweekly column, “This Arab Life,” appears in The Markaz Review every other Friday, as well as in her Substack, and is syndicated in Arabic in Al Quds Al Arabi.

Opinions published in The Markaz Review reflect the perspective of their authors and do not necessarily represent TMR.