Seventeen years ago, I arrived in the greatest city in the world, Beirut, to work as a University professor, and soon learned how the Israelis had been routed from southern Lebanon months before my arrival, in 2007.
People, friends, colleagues seemed relieved, elated. The concrete environment of Beirut was pock-marked with a palimpsest of shell and bullet holes. One was never sure whether the urban scars were from the tussle with Israel or some other military intervention by colonisers or adversaries. Lebanon had been through complex, devastating civil war years (1975-1990), and the roads and streets back then still seemed ground up and dusty with the flotsam and jetsam of conflict.
Even then, I resisted seeing Lebanon as part of ‘the ‘Middle East’– that orientalist label which actually designates countries carved up by the British and the French in the early 20th century. Lebanon was and is, rather, part of ‘the Center of the World’ (as Jordan Elgrably convincingly puts it). Only by living there can one view the region’s historical trajectory, through new eyes, through Lebanese friends’ eyes.
Lebanese friends – colleagues, students, journalist friends – were intellectuals who lived and breathed the political, rather than experiencing it as words in books. Politics was felt viscerally, it concerned lived experiences during the Civil War and afterwards. Friends told me that driving in Lebanon was chaotic because people often failed to stop at red traffic lights. This was because, during the Civil War, checkpoints set up at traffic lights could determine whether you lived or died.
Infrastructure in Lebanon then was patchy, electricity scarce, things didn’t work, there was chaos and poverty, so there was a post-war, recovery feel about things. There was little in terms of a formal public transport system: to get from Beirut to the north, there was the informal system of ‘mad vans’ – you took your life in your hands when you travelled with these young men in battered, dodgy-looking vans, who watched satellite TV screens while driving at break-neck speed.
Once, Lebanon did have rail transport. It was the destination for the Orient Express. There was a station in Mina in the 1920s and 30s, and in the 40s, the line extended to Beirut.
Eventually, permanent refugee status in north Lebanon’s camp awaited her. She would die there. She was a beautiful person, one of many who had paid the price of imperial intervention. She just wanted to return to her olive groves and say to her children ‘This is our land’.
Despite all this, Lebanon offered a rich intellectual and cultural life. We had spikey, argumentative students as well as kind and brilliant ones. We attended poetry evenings in Trablous (Tripoli). Christopher Hitchens visited the American University of Beirut to stir up debate. Mariam Said came to talk about the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. Norman Finkelstein visited the nearby Palestinian refugee camp, and a colleague translated for him. My students put on dramatic scenes in the Roman amphitheatre at Jbeil (Byblos). Female students argued with parents about whether to continue to Master’s study or to get married. It was a remarkable context.
On the other hand, the Lebanese appeared to be walking on shaky ground. The civil war and the Taif Agreement’s power-sharing framework meant people were still finding their way, it was difficult to trust people entirely, the sectarian divides still held to an extent, having been built into the very heart of Government and the society at large.
Visiting the nearby Palestinian refugee camp, I got my first taste of what life was actually like for refugees in that part of the world.
Their camp environment shouted ‘we’re about to go back’; they lived in makeshift concrete shelters that appeared unfinished and impermanent with their tacked-on electricity cables and other services. My Palestinian friends were hospitable to a fault, made meals that took hours to prepare, had long conversations into the evening about the Nakba and current political developments.
Um Mazen Said, a delicate, elderly woman, narrated her walk from her village Suhmata, 25 kilometres north-east of Acrein Palestine,into Lebanon in 1948. Along with her family, she was ethnically cleansed as part of the Naqba. The journey into exile was dangerous, arduous; she witnessed atrocities. Eventually, permanent refugee status in north Lebanon’s camp awaited her. She would die there. She was a beautiful person, one of many who had paid the price of imperial intervention. She just wanted to return to her olive groves and say to her children ‘This is our land’.
Reducing Gaza to Ruins
Seventeen years later, I am witnessing, live streamed on social media, the massacre of over 45,515 of Um Mazen’s people. There must be thousands under the rubble. The Israeli Government has broken records in terms of the sheer weight and frequency of the bombardment of the tiny strip of land. The Lebanese camp in which Um Mazen lived until her death, was hit last year.
Hamas’s attack triggered the onslaught, causing the death of 1,139 people including 36 children; but for those of us who choose to admit it, Hamas’s criminal actions came out of an appalling context of imprisonment and occupation, apartheid and siege, and the periodical mowing of the lawn.
UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, is calling Israel’s 13-month onslaught ‘Genocide as Colonial Erasure’. She argues Israel is using the crisis to further its long-term settler colonialist project – hence, reducing Gaza to ruins.
In October 2024, 65 doctors claimed in the New York Times that Gazan children are being systematically targeted; they have seen countless child casualties with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. On January 29, 2024, in a horrific event, six-year-old Hind Rajab, her four cousins, her aunt and uncle, and the two paramedics who came to her rescue, were killed. The world heard Hind’s cries for help, and witnessed the distressing snuffing out, recorded in real time, of her precious life and that of her family.
One hundred and thirty seven journalists have been killed in Gaza (one of the deadliest periods in history); as well as Medics (at least 1000) and UN aid workers (333 dead). Gaza’s hospitals are barely functioning. Some of them, Al Shifa for instance, was the site of an atrocious raid by Israel, that resulted in the multiple deaths of sheltering Palestinians and patients, including premature babies.
Scholasticide has taken place – all of Gaza’s universities have been completely destroyed or partially so, while thousands of students and around 100 professors have been killed. Eighty per cent of schools have been hit.
Recently Human Rights Watch concluded Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity by displacing 90 per cent of Gazans, as well as ‘killing them along escape routes, bombing so-called safe zones, and cutting off food, water and sanitation.
An Amnesty International report released on Thursday Dec 5, 2024, concluded Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) saw a ‘plausible’ case for genocide in January 2024. Now, the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu and ex-Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri (also known as Deif), have been issued (November 21, 2024).The ICC points to how Israel has been using starvation as a weapon of war as part of its rationale.
As part of a growing majority of onlookers in the West who want a ceasefire, what can I do now?I demonstrate or write letters – with the life of my friends in my heart and in my imagination. Yesterday, I wrote to my MP, asking him to back the recognition of a Palestinian State, a motion put to the Commons by Shockat Adam, MP for Leicester South who was voted in November 2024 as an Independent for his advocacy for Palestinians.
With all the evidence and condemnation piling up, will the British Government see that the West’s position on this issue is untenable?
This genocide, one of the gravest crimes of our age, is determining what happens to the integrity of international law, to our human rights, our freedom of expression, our academic freedom, and our right to be free of imperialism and racism around the world. It is unclear how the West is going to come back from this, but we have to take the first steps: achieve a ceasefire; stop arming Israel; and guarantee the inalienable right to self-determination for Palestinians, going forward.
