Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Lina Mounzer and Faysal Itani
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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Lebanon is no stranger to conflict. For many of its citizens, a vicious 15-year civil war and a short but brutal war with Israel in 2006 are within living memory. Now, another conflict simmers on the country’s southern border with Israel and threatens every day to expand across the country.
“When it’s reported from the outside, you don’t really get the sense of what it’s like on a human scale,” Lebanese writer and translator Lina Mounzer tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “You’re going about your daily life. And at the same time, there’s this abyss of terror that’s opening up beneath you.”
“You’re going about your daily life. And at the same time, there’s this abyss of terror that’s opening up beneath you.”
Since the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil in late July, the possibility of a retaliation from Iran’s ally Hezbollah has raised fears of a significant escalation. Israel has repeatedly performed fly-bys over the Lebanese capital, Beirut.
“It’s quite terrifying,” Mounzer says. “For me, there’s a physical reaction that takes place where even if your mind is telling you, ‘This is a sonic boom, it’s not an airstrike,’ your body just goes into panic mode.”
The fly-bys, says Mounzer, have retriggered past traumas from the civil war.
“I think that’s part of where the PTSD comes from,” she says. “It’s not just the fear. It’s the sense of your life not mattering at all.”
The strategic thinking in this conflict, explains Faysal Itani, a political analyst and adjunct professor of Middle East security at Georgetown University, appears to have changed from previous wars between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah.
“The Israelis, rather than do a kind of tit-for-tat exchange with Hezbollah over the past few months, they decided to escalate every time Hezbollah hit them,” Itani says. “Hezbollah is now contending with the fact that they have this opponent that’s a little more energetic maybe than they expected. And that there’s a cost to these kinds of Hezbollah operations, and one of the risks is this spirals into a bigger war.”
Hezbollah, Itani suggests, is constantly assessing the likelihood of a full-scale conflict.
“They recognize that this may well happen, and they’ve had to calibrate their actions very carefully because they don’t want it to happen, but I think they understand that it might,” he explains.
While it will generally throw its weight behind Israel, the United States does not want a wider conflict, Itani says. Just a year or two ago, the U.S. was in a position where it was not committed to any conflicts in the region.
“Now the United States is in a position where all of its equities are threatened by a regional war with Iran,” he explains. “They don’t want that war. Frankly, the United States has much broader interests than Israel does.”
Further reading: It Felt Like Love by Lina Mounzer