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The View from Besieged Beirut
In the wake of exploding pagers, universalism plunges into the abyss.
I left Beirut in 2006, a month after graduating from medical school. In July that year, war had erupted, or rather been renewed, between Hezbollah and Israel following a cross-border raid by Hezbollah that left three Israeli soldiers dead. Without a foreign passport that could guarantee me safe passage out of Lebanon, which was under an Israeli air blockade, my only way out was through Damascus—a city I had never visited before. The journey to the airport was profoundly unsettling as my driver sped us through the Beqaa Valley to avoid the frequent bombardment. Apocalyptic scenes of destruction unfolded before us: charred ambulances, a truck loaded with wheat grains struck by a missile, smoke rising from destroyed infrastructure and agricultural fields. I promised myself I would never return to live under such conditions.
Almost two decades later, following my recent appointment to the Faculty of Medicine at the American University of Beirut, I find myself once again in this besieged city—this time during an unnerving new kind of war in which ordinary electronic devices are turned into bombs, drones hover above your head every day and night, evacuation orders with barcodes are dropped by an almighty army, and buildings become potential targets because of their unknown inhabitants or visitors. In conditions of constant surveillance, any unusual urban sound becomes a source of panic. That is to say nothing of the sonic booms of Israeli warplanes that have been violating international airspace as long as I remember.
On September 19, while Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was giving a speech from an undisclosed location, low-flying Israeli warplanes again caused a terrifying sonic boom in the city. It rattled windows and sent everyone rushing to balconies and into the streets, triggering old memories of unresolved fears and traumas. These accumulate like archaeological layers here, another facet of the historical and geological layers of Beirut—a city once known to the Romans as nutrix legum, “Mother of the Laws.” In recent years, the law has also become a casualty of Lebanon’s political dysfunction.
The Israeli show of force was many things at once: in part a tactic to see if Nasrallah would react to the boom (though some claim his addresses have been pre-recorded), but also part performance, an exercise of psychological warfare unleashed on an already distressed population—trapped between a militia–cum–political party operating at the behest of Iran, a morally bankrupt and inept ruling political class, and a Western leadership so morally decadent that it has largely accepted, without much protest, Israel’s callous, self-declared intent to “escalate to de-escalate.”
Following the assassination of Nasrallah on September 27 and the killing of more than 1,000 other people over the last two weeks, Israel has now begun a ground invasion into southern Lebanon.
I was in my office at the university hospital on September 17 when a “partial” code D (for disaster) was suddenly announced over the hospital’s central system. Though the hospital has endured crises and upheavals since its opening more than a century ago—two world wars, a fifteen-year civil war, decades of political instability, and the catastrophic blast at the port of Beirut in August 2020—confusion still ensued.
I opened my door to worried faces. My first thought was that a politician had been assassinated, leaving countless innocent civilians injured in the aftermath—something I had grown accustomed to during my medical training. I tried to make sense of what was unfolding; my phone alerted me to pagers exploding across the country. I saw men in black, probably security personnel, rushing wounded people into the hospital’s chaotic entrance. A few minutes later, the code became “full” and the medical staff rushed to the emergency department. Within minutes and continuing for hours, scores of the severely injured poured in—some likely members of Hezbollah, many others mere bystanders.
The shock of mutilated bodies was matched by the shock of the mundane source of the explosions—devices mostly used, these days, by medical professionals. My hospital alone received over 190 casualties with horrific poly-traumatic wounds, mostly to the eyes. At least thirteen people were killed, including several children, and thousands were injured; the day after, hundreds of walkie-talkies exploded, killing more people and injuring several hundred others. Paranoia ensued, with rumors quickly circulating that solar panels and electronic appliances had also exploded. Every object that symbolized the achievements of our era of hyper-modernity and hyper-consumerism suddenly had a hideous and indiscriminate killing aspect. We were all potential targets.
Of course, the two Janus faces of technology are not new. Paul Virilio wrote extensively on the concept of “accidents” in relation to technology, speed, and modern society. The development of any new technology inherently produces its own accident, he understood; progress and catastrophe were two sides of the same coin. In a 1998 book he likens the rapid growth of the digital world to a ticking “information bomb” that could explode in unforeseen ways. But he did not anticipate the literal weaponization of electronic devices, nor the weaponization of artificial intelligence that has been disturbingly deployed in the latest ongoing onslaught in Gaza and now in Lebanon.
The pager and walkie-talkie explosions raised alarms and drew widespread condemnation around the world. Beyond the indiscriminate nature of the attacks—decried as likely serious violation of the rules of war and human rights law—this new chapter of espionage and sabotage heralds a new kind of pedestrian warfare on a global scale. We have become subjects in a morbid experiment. New weapons are being tested, studied, and perfected on lives deemed expendable, with the approval of the most powerful democracies in the West.
Unlike in Israel, Lebanon has no bomb shelters for ordinary citizens, no missile warning systems, and no imminent strike alerts. The country is deeply dysfunctional, its institutions crumbling and population exhausted from a seemingly endless series of crises and an unbearable sense of infinite uncertainty over what each day will bring. In this unnerving climate of fait accompli and resignation (not “resilience,” a word the Lebanese particularly detest), a few friends and I started to meet regularly to take stock of the day while offering support and solidarity during these dark times. We discussed various topics with a strange feeling of unrestrained freedom—surreal at a time when speech has become so severely policed and restricted in the West.
In our conversations, we spoke about the disillusionment with the West, which purports to promote human rights and the rule of law, including international law, only when it seems convenient to do so. We bemoaned the fact that our lives seem worthless on the ladder of values assigned to human life. Growing up in Lebanon, I used to take pride in reciting a memorable quote by Montesquieu that I learned at my Jesuit school, using it as a talismanic shield against sectarianism and religious bigotry: “If I knew of something useful to my nation but ruinous to another, I would not propose it to my prince, because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.” He went further:
If I knew of something that was useful to me but harmful to my family, I would dismiss it from my mind. If I knew of something useful to my family but not to my country, I would try to forget it. If I knew of something useful to my country but harmful to Europe, or something useful to Europe but harmful to humanity, I would consider it a crime.
This may sound idealistic in an age of fervent nationalism. But for the author of The Spirit of the Laws, a good citizen ought to behave as follows: first, uphold the law of humanity, and then show allegiance to one’s tribe. Our belief in secularism and universalism, perhaps naïve, demands that we uphold such moral principles. Yet today, this very framework of human rights—itself developed in the wake of the terrors of the Shoah—is being buried by the same powers that once claimed to have helped shape it.
Wary of the drones and warplanes flying overhead, nervously looking at our phones for any news update, we discussed the double standards prevalent in European and Western politics. Europe’s guilt over the Shoah, combined with a longstanding and troubling Islamophobia, creates a stark moral blind spot regarding Palestinian suffering. Some officials in wealthy democracies have even suggested that the raison d’être of the International Criminal Court applies only to Africa and “thugs like Putin.” Such thinking echoes the same powerful prejudice that once depicted Africa as the “dark continent”—barbaric, uncivilized, incapable of self-governance or progress. This hypocrisy on display in the West today demonstrates that the lessons of colonialism have not been fully learned.
We also pondered the paradoxical nature of Zionism, an ideology born in the nineteenth century and shaped by European Jewish intellectuals anguished by the rise of European anti-Semitism. In his latest book, Deux peuples pour un État? (translated from Hebrew into French, forthcoming in English with Polity Press under the title Israel-Palestine: Federation or Apartheid?), Israeli historian Shlomo Sand shows how Israel today faces a dead end, partly due to the contradictions of its ethnonational project: a state for Jews and Jews only, which alienates and treats its non-Jewish residents as second-class citizens. As Sand reminds us, this scenario was accurately predicted by Hannah Arendt as early as the 1940s. In Lebanon, which has itself flirted with ethnonationalism and paid a heavy price for the arrogance of one community’s efforts to rule over others, the dangers and limits of the very idea of an ethnostate are almost an embarrassing cliché. Lebanon’s history is a testament to the idea that a mono-ethnic state—or to be more accurate, a mono-sectarian state—is not the solution in a pluralistic society; if anything, it is suicidal. And yet in the United States it remains by and large taboo to speak openly about the contradictions of Zionism.
Our conversations also turned to Hezbollah, which suffers from its own kind of hubris. Hezbollah views itself not only as the protector of the Shiite community but also as the vanguard of resistance for mostly-Shiite oppressed groups in the Middle East, positioning itself as a crucial part of the Axis of Resistance led by Iran. Though one of Lebanon’s many sects (eighteen are officially recognized, including Jews), the Shiites have historically been marginalized. In The Vanished Imam (1986), historian Fouad Ajami describes how Musa al-Sadr, who vanished on a trip to Libya, energized the Shiite community by forming “Amal” (the Movement of the Disinherited) to address their grievances and give them a political voice.
Following the rise of the Islamic Republic in 1979 and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Hezbollah emerged as a paramilitary organization trained and funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It became a powerful force, filling the gap in Shiite representation and playing a central role in what Vali Nasr calls the “Shiite revival.” While the Party of God offers military resistance and social services and has become a political party, its status as a “state above the non-state,” to quote Lebanese political scientist Karim Emile Bitar, reveals its real character. It projects influence across the region with little regard for Lebanon’s fragile sectarian balance or state institutions.
In our conversations, most of us could discern no clear endgame to the ongoing and horrifying destruction of Gaza, the West Bank, and now South Lebanon. What does the unrestrained use of phosphorus bombs that erode all life—scorched-earth tactics on land considered holy by the perpetrators—portend? Are Gaza and the West Bank merely the targets of a grand real estate project, as Jared Kushner unashamedly confessed during a conversation at the Harvard Kennedy School earlier this year? Is the unfolding war part of the expansion of Eretz Israel, with more and more illegal settlements, driven by the messianism of the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu? Could it be explained by the enduring trauma of the Holocaust that is still lingering generations later, with a disturbing transference of hate of Nazis onto hate of “Arabs” who had nothing to do with the Holocaust in the first place? Has Israel become the proxy of the United States in more or less the same way Hezbollah has become the proxy of Iran?
Some of these ideas made me think of Austrian-born Israeli philosopher Martin Buber, who in 1918 wrote to a friend this visionary assessment:
We must face the fact that most leading Zionists (and probably also most of those who are led) today are thoroughly unrestrained nationalists (following the European example), imperialists, even unconscious mercantilists and idolators of success. They speak about rebirth and mean enterprise. If we do not succeed to erect an authoritative [Zionist] opposition, the soul of the movement will be corrupted, maybe forever.
This is precisely what Shlomo Sand fears in his insightful new book: that it may be too late to save Zionism and reform it. The crimes are too many, the contradictions too glaring, and above all, security will not be achieved by creating more insecurity.
Besides, in an increasingly antagonistic and polarized world, it has become not only instrumentally urgent but morally necessary to think about convergence rather than divergence, about common destinies, the fate of our species and our dying planet, rather than ghetto-like mentalities and fortress nations—those brutal forms that derive their power from “waiting for the barbarians,” as the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy wrote, and today include the self-styled more advanced, liberal, and, yes, genocidal democracies. They feed on greed, profit, and ignorance rather than on envisioning a sustainable, progressive, and equitable future.
The day the pagers exploded coincided with the funeral of Elias Khoury, the Lebanese novelist and literary critic considered one of the leading voices in contemporary Arabic literature. Just a month earlier, on August 14, we lost the prominent Lebanese intellectual and economist Georges Corm. It is something of a tragic relief to know they departed before witnessing the two causes closest to their hearts—Palestinians’ struggle for liberation and Lebanon’s fate—plunge into the abyss. With their passing, we have lost powerful secular and humanist thinkers who transcended the divisions of their country. Their intellectual legacies promoted critical thought, openness to others, and the importance of resisting sectarianism and tribal identities for a more just, humane, and inclusive society.
Beirut, the late poet Nadia Tuéni memorably wrote, has been “a thousand times dead and a thousand times reborn.” Despite our misfortunes, this city remains a place where these issues can still be discussed openly—even if, paradoxically, we do so under the bombs, the roar of warplanes, the distressing sound of drones, and the ever-looming threat of another catastrophe.
© 2024, Boston Review
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