In War, Nuance Is The First Casualty
The sharp words that obscure our ambivalence
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.
Nabatieh, my parents’ old hometown, is a choreography of rubble.
The driver of a friend lost his aunt and three of the five grandchildren staying with her in the latest Israeli raids on the Bekaa.
In one of Beirut’s schools that has become the refuge of the displaced, the sweet man who works at the supermarket where I shop shelters with his family. His home in the southern suburbs is still intact, last he heard, but who would dare go back there now?
It is estimated that there are 550,000 students, K to 12, out of school. This, in a country of an estimated five million.
I don’t know anyone who has not been touched by this war.
In magnitude, there is a world of difference between Lebanese and Palestinian suffering, but there are enough similarities in Israeli ferocity on both fronts to make the pain and fear of one people distinctly familiar to the other. Unlike those farther located, we require no leap of the imagination in grasping Israel’s ambitions and hatreds.
But this war, like all others, has thrown into its fog all nuance, the paradoxes and contradictions that permeate thought and emotion in the course of life. Within us, every position and its opposite struggle to accommodate one another, but you wouldn’t know it from the public discourse.
In this way, we swing between our support for Hezbollah in its determination to show solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza, and our recognition that the movement’s decision came at tremendous risk to a Lebanese people agonizingly exposed to the war’s consequences.
In this way as well, we register that this form of resistance is the very raison d’être of Hezbollah even though we are fully aware that the nefarious role it has played in Lebanon’s murky politics has been purposeful and extremely damaging to its mission.
So is the case with our oscillation between admiration for the resistance’s toughness against Israel’s ground incursions and our heartbreak over the sweeping devastation to the land for which its soldiers gladly fight and fall as martyrs.
As we pendulate, we ask: where’s the movement’s plan for worst-case scenarios that its spokespeople kept touting? Where are its preparations for the inheritors of this scorched earth? What was the point of fighting for the sake of the Palestinian people if we ourselves turned out to be just as alone and naked before Israel’s wrath?
They say that Israel’s is the original sin, and Israel’s is the eternal craving for Lebanese land. True! But does this not reinforce the argument that Hezbollah should have reserved its strength for this fateful fight?
They say Israel is paying a very high price for the war. True! But that hardly answers how we will manage our own titanic losses once the bombs stop.
They say it will all be rebuilt again. The hard fact is that, bar the world’s indulgence and generosity, the prospects of meaningful recovery are abysmal.
We are only one set of citizens grappling with our own furious arguments. There are other groups contending with their own embattled politics.
By turns, we nod and frown as we navigate between clashing convictions. Frankly, this war, for us, is just the extreme version of the routine of this Lebanese life. We had long ago set up house in a world of gray dominions and made peace with our lot.
But this ambivalence, as intense as it has been, hardly manages a showing in the heated back and forth. It certainly hasn’t managed to tame the sharpness of the words that have been progressively shaping the discourse in certain quarters about this maddeningly endless conflict with Israel.
It’s either us or them! You hear such language often these days. On both sides of the Levant. I know that for many of us, Israel’s abominable conduct is forcing the kind of question to which there really is no answer: how do we coexist with this neighbor? And I know that this question has been asked multiple times by multiple people in practically every corner of the world, because almost every corner in the world has experienced the kind of horror that prompts such a question. Many Jewish Israelis have too –– long before Israel was established and they got to call themselves Israelis, and ever since.
Talk is cheap. Words are not. Even when uttered in a moment of rage and despondence, words connote a state of mind longer than the moment, a state of being, however frequently it surges and fades. So when “it’s either us or them” is spoken, what do we and the Israelis mean? How do these words offer anything conceivably imaginable? Not because of the impossibilities of such a doomsday scenario in this day and age –– Israel is only the latest state to demonstrate that mass murder is quite the easy accomplishment –– but because our destinies, our aspirations and identities as peoples, are forever intertwined as if two bodies locked in an eternal embrace.
At the end of his recent interview with Robert Pogue Harrison, the author Kamel Daoud, most famous for The Meursault Investigation and whose latest novel Houris is the winner of the 2024 Goncourt Prize, said of his restless sense of self:
Like all Algerians, I’m French. All Algerians are French; some refuse to be, some want to escape, and some want to be more French than the French. And the French are bound by Algerian history, even in amnesia. ‘It’s too late, you’re already Palestinians, and we’re already Israelis,’ replied the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish to an Israeli journalist.
Is such not the legacy everywhere of the oppressed and their oppressor?
In his recent writings, the historian Illan Pappé has been predicting that the hour is nigh for the Zionist project, warning that the unravelling, typical of very potent ethnonationalist enterprises, may well unleash a kind of brutality unfathomable in its violence. Israel’s wars on Gaza and Lebanon, in this telling, are mere previews of the calamities to come.
But then if Pappé is right, what do we hope to salvage in ourselves beside the wreckage of life itself? Are there actual winners and losers in an Armageddon? What do the Israelis think they will achieve in victory? What do we think we can look forward to upon ours? Do they genuinely believe an apocalypse is winnable? Do we?
On Another Note
Kamela Harris is history. Donald Trump is the future. The knives are out. You want to listen to this fun post mortem. Alistair Campbell, from The Rest is Politics, is joined by British historian Dominic Sandbrook from The Rest is History, the one and only Anthony Scaramucci from The Rest is Politics US, and Marina Hyde from the Rest is Entertainment to discuss why Harris lost and Trump won.
Two weeks ago, Le Monde asked me to write an op-ed on Lebanon. I chose to make it all about context. It was translated to French, a language that eludes me only because of my own procrastinations and reticence. Le Monde has a paywall, so please email me if you would like me to gift you the piece. I choose these excerpts from the original English:
Recently one evening, as the buzzing Israeli drones faded into Beirut’s forbidding silence and we awaited the day’s hail of bombs, I pondered questions no person wants to ask about their country: Will this Lebanon that I so love in spite of myself forever remain such a terribly fragile place, always flirting with different versions of the abyss? For those who can leave, is there a remotely valid reason to stay, or is this tortured mother of ours finally signaling to us to flee once and for all?
On their face, the questions seem rhetorical, even lazy. They used to be. For decades, after every paroxysm and war came the untidy, self-serving remedies, allowing a tattered consociational democracy to plod on. Over time, the expectation that we can only manage change at its most superficial grew into a conviction. If the somewhat bold but swiftly abandoned 1990 Taif Accords, which supposedly sealed the fifteen-year civil war, stood out as the exception, they did so to reinforce this belief. But what of it, we consoled ourselves. We are a tiny sliver of land overlooking the Mediterranean, after all; however tangled our problems, it takes little to put us back together again and nudge us along. Hayda Lebnain –– this is Lebanon –– we kept repeating, as if to relinquish to fate all responsibility for our quandaries.
Both them and us. is there another way with life?
The glitches make your thoughts human and close.