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Leaving a Life in Lebanon

How the gathering clouds of war in October 2023 prompted a New Lines editor to depart his home of 11 years

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Leaving a Life in Lebanon
Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines Magazine

My favorite part of our house in the hills of Lebanon was the balcony.

Straight ahead and to the left stood a dramatic valley, blanketed in thick green forests of pine and fir, rolling up the steep slopes of Mount Lebanon toward the snow-capped peaks of Sannine, just out of sight. To the right, below us, 6 miles away, Beirut stabbed like an arrowhead into the shimmering silver of the Mediterranean. In the mornings, I would come out with steaming coffee to breathe in the cool, fresh air blowing down from on high, listening to hundreds of birds squawking and cackling in the trees, while buzzards circled overhead, wings outstretched, before swooping down in rapid dives. In the calm of the evenings, nothing interrupted the rustle of leaves in the breeze but the soft, woodwind hoots of owls and the cries of packs of jackals reverberating around the hills. Best were the full-moon nights, when a bright white glow shone from behind the trees before the disc itself emerged, gliding slowly into view, almost painfully luminous against the black sky, its blue-gray pocks and craters on spectacular display. Small wonder that Lebanon’s greatest singer, Fairuz, who lives nearby, had sung:

We and the moon are neighbors
Its house is behind our hills
It comes out to hear the tunes

On such nights, if I found myself alone with a glass, in a wistful mood, I might tilt its rim to the moon, recalling the old words of Li Bai:

A cup of wine, under flowering trees
With no friend near, I drink alone
Raising my cup, I beckon the bright moon
For he, with my shadow, makes us three

But the night of Oct. 13, 2023, was not one of those occasions. Sitting just inside from the balcony, on a light gray sofa facing the TV in our living room, I was in the grip of acute panic. Six days earlier, Hamas had waged its infamous assault on southern Israel, sparking an atrocious war in Gaza that looked to many in Lebanon like it might soon engulf their country too — not least after Hamas’ more powerful Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, began attacking Israeli forces from Lebanon the following day. Now had come the news that Israeli tank fire near a Lebanese border village had killed a Reuters journalist and seriously wounded a number of his colleagues — my colleagues, too, in the wider sense — from Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Al Jazeera. War, it seemed, was not just coming to Lebanon: It had arrived.

Should we leave?

The perennial question, one my wife and I — like so many in Lebanon — had asked ourselves countless times over the 11 years that I had then lived in the country. We had stayed through the deadly wave of car and suicide bombings that had blown up Beirut and other Lebanese cities and towns as the war had raged in neighboring Syria from 2012 on. We had stayed after the waste crisis of 2015, when government incompetence saw putrid trash pile up head-high in streets all over the country, poisoning the atmosphere in every sense of the words. We had stayed after the financial collapse of 2019, when our meager savings and bank deposits were taken from us by the same corrupt authorities, and 80% of the population sank below the poverty line. We had stayed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed a much-loved member of my wife’s family. We had stayed after a colossal explosion at Beirut’s port gutted whole chunks of the capital in 2020, killing over 200 people and mangling the apartment block we had moved out of only weeks earlier. And we had stayed after the assassination of a friend, the courageous public intellectual Lokman Slim, in 2021.

But for most of those years, we had been youthful, adventurous, idealistic — and childless. By October 2023, we had entered our late 30s, and were doting parents to a young son and daughter whose wellbeing came before all else. We were also — unlike most in Lebanon — lucky enough to have a safe second country to escape to, and the requisite passports, visas and funds to get there. Foreign embassies were advising their citizens to get out while they still could.

So, should we leave?

On paper, we weren’t in immediate or mortal danger. Living in the hills northeast of Beirut, we were relatively far from the areas likely to be hit hardest in the event of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah — which, in mid-October 2023, was still only a hypothetical scenario.

Reading the underlying fundamentals of the developments since the morning of Oct. 7, however, left me increasingly persuaded that, sooner or later, a substantial war in Lebanon was unavoidable. On the morning of Oct. 8, Hezbollah launched rockets and artillery at three Israeli positions in a border area known as the Shebaa Farms, opening a second front in the “al-Aqsa Flood” battle that had, until that moment, been confined to southern Israel and the Gaza Strip, more than 100 miles from Lebanon.

In truth, I didn’t think much of this act on the day it happened. It appeared, at first glance, to be little more than a token gesture of moral support for Hamas by its Lebanese brother-in-arms, both groups being members of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” funded, armed and led by Iran. Whereas Hamas’ massive operation the previous day had claimed over 1,000 Israeli lives, there were no casualties reported in connection with Hezbollah’s first salvo. So long as things stayed that way, I figured, Lebanon would probably pull through unscathed, as it had throughout the preceding 17 years of almost total calm on its southern border.

The following day, however, left me considerably less assured about Lebanon’s situation. For one thing, it was only then, 48 hours on from Hamas’ attack, that the full extent of the slaughter that morning in southern Israel was becoming clearer. As it did so, one began to see the magnitude of the impact it was going to have in Israel, and on Israelis — mentally and emotionally — and what that was going to mean for the war unleashed on Gaza and, perhaps, beyond. You had only to glance at Israeli media, including social media, to see it. This was the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, people began to repeat. Gruesome tales of gore and brutality exceeding even the Islamic State’s atrocities flooded the internet. The massacre struck at the very heart of Israelis’ darkest and deepest fears, triggering decades if not centuries of profound intergenerational trauma, convincing a large majority that they had been thrust into a battle of life or death. This held across the political spectrum, from right to left; those who had only days earlier been in the streets protesting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government were now lining up to report for military duty. They saw the coming war — with Hamas, and whoever else chose to stand with them — as not only justified but necessary, a decisive battle for nothing less than the survival of the Jewish nation. They were not going to be “deterred” by a few Hezbollah rockets from a fight they believed was existential. In the words of al-Mutanabbi, the drowning person doesn’t fear getting wet. That day, Oct. 9, I wrote in my notes:

As the full scale of Israeli losses becomes clearer (they’re now at 1,000 dead), it becomes more difficult to seriously doubt that their response is going to be too large to not entangle Lebanon in some way. … The Israelis, it is plain to see, are psychologically in a whole new place now, one in which all options are on the table and all prior understandings and arrangements hurled out the window. This is 9/11 to them, perhaps even an extension of the Holocaust. They are in for a penny, in for a pound, or a hundred pounds if need be.

Far from displaying any sign of grasping or caring about any of this, Hezbollah and its Palestinian allies in Lebanon chose that same day to intensify their attacks, which were evidently not intended to be merely performative after all. Three Israeli soldiers were killed on Oct. 9 during an attempt by Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters to enter Israel from Lebanon, which led to armed clashes in which two Palestinian militants were also killed. Three Hezbollah fighters were then killed in turn on the same day by Israeli shelling. “This while the Israelis still appear very much only in the initial phase of their Gaza campaign,” I wrote in my notes. Already, just two days in, I had become seriously concerned that things in Lebanon were getting out of hand: “How, given the momentum that has already now gathered, can these forces be prevented from a major collision?”

The next few days did nothing to assuage my fears, bringing further tit-for-tat attacks across the Lebanese-Israeli border, including by Hamas itself. An anti-tank missile fired by Hezbollah on Oct. 11 killed another Israeli soldier. The mood in Lebanon grew palpably more tense. One of my wife’s university students told her she was leaving the country for a while, on account of “the situation.” Photos tweeted from Beirut airport showed the departure terminal to be busier than usual.

But it was the deadly Israeli strike on the group of journalists on Oct. 13 that convinced me Lebanon had entered an entirely new category of danger, and matters were going to get a great deal worse before they stood any chance of getting better. If unarmed civilians away from the front lines, posing no conceivable military threat of any kind, clearly identifiable by their clothing and vehicles as members of the press, were now being fired on unprovoked, it was not difficult to imagine who else might soon find themselves on the wrong end of an Israeli tank barrel or airstrike.

Nor was the news from Gaza encouraging in the slightest. Having already imposed what Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called a “complete siege” of the territory, cutting off supplies of water, electricity, food and fuel to its 2 million inhabitants, Israel had now, on Oct. 13, ordered all residents of Gaza’s northern half to relocate at once to its southern half. A ground invasion that promised to be exceptionally bloody was imminent, and the rumor then swirling in Lebanon was that this would cross a “red line” for Hezbollah, triggering its entry into the war in full force.

Should we leave, then?

I sat on the light gray sofa, just inside from the balcony, reading the news on my phone with a sick stomach. Issam Abdallah was the name of the Reuters journalist killed moments earlier. Pictures of him filled my social media timelines: a warm, likable face, with intelligent eyes and a toothy grin. I couldn’t recall ever meeting him, though we had several friends in common, and there was every chance we had crossed paths at some Beirut cafe or bar or gathering or other. We were almost exactly the same age. Browsing his Instagram account, I saw he had a penchant for motorbikes (not really my scene) and Macallan whisky (much more my scene). He clearly had a sense of humor: One of his recent posts was a quote — “Never be afraid to cut someone off” — attributed to Lebanon’s state electricity company.

Switching to X (formerly Twitter), I made the mistake of opening a video showing the moment he and the others were attacked. I immediately began to feel unwell. Sitting was bad. I stood up. I paced aimlessly around the house. That was, if anything, worse. My breath drew short. My chest tightened. This was really not very good at all. Not for the first time that week, I headed to the drinks cabinet in the dining room, pulled out a glass tumbler and poured myself a 12-year-old Glenfiddich, drinking it neat. That felt better. I poured another, this time adding a splash of water. With that in hand, I was approximately functional again. And my mind was resolved.

We should leave.

I no longer doubted it. This was no way for anyone to live. The point was not, as I say, that I or my family were in grave physical peril — we were not. It was very unlikely that bombs would fall on or near our building even if Israel were to launch a full-scale invasion and besiege Beirut itself, as it had in 1982. The point, instead, was that I did not want my children to experience war of any kind, period, be it from a “safe” distance or otherwise. I did not wish to have to explain to them what the sound and feel of an airstrike meant. I did not wish for them to see the dark plumes of smoke rising from Beirut — as they would, very clearly, from the balcony. I did not wish to see the alarm in their eyes as our walls shook and the air clapped while fighter jets broke the sound barrier overhead. From a place deep in my bones, hardwired into the DNA, an involuntary, mammalian instinct seized and shook me, ordering me to get the children away at once, with no further delay. My wife, too, born in the latter years of Lebanon’s civil war, whose earliest childhood memories are of sheltering under a bathroom sink as artillery battered her neighborhood — and who later lived through the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, among much else — was adamant that her children should not begin their own lives the same way.

There was something else, too. As I sat on the gray sofa, mind and heartbeat racing, anxiously gulping at my Scotch, my fear began turning to anger. It was insulting to be in this situation. It was degrading, repulsive, loathsome in the extreme. I was not a supporter of Hezbollah. I did not subscribe to its ideology, nor admire its politics or its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Why, then, did I permit him to wield such extraordinary power over me and my family? This was not some abstract debate or theoretical critique; the man was rolling the dice with the lives of my children. Needless to say, he had not deigned to ask for my approval before doing so, nor that of anyone else in the country, for that matter. What absurd madness, what intolerable humiliation was it to allow the fate of one’s children — the people one held dearest in the world — to fall into the hands of a man like Hassan Nasrallah?

It was with this thought uppermost in mind that I — frightened, furious and half-drunk — opened my laptop there and then on the gray sofa and booked four one-way tickets to the United Kingdom, departing two days later, on Sunday, Oct. 15.

And so we left. To date, none of us has been back.

As I write this, one year since we boarded our plane, the worst-case scenario has come to pass in Lebanon. The terror my wife and I sought to spare our son and daughter has become the daily reality for boys and girls across the country. Israel has killed over 2,400 Lebanese since hostilities began on Oct. 8, 2023, hundreds of women and children among them — more than were killed in 2006, or in any round of conflict in Lebanon since the civil war ended in 1990. Israeli boots are now on the ground in southern Lebanon, while airstrikes pound Beirut and its suburbs around the clock, leveling whole residential buildings with their occupants inside them, lighting up the night sky with blinding explosions of a size that beggars belief. Much of the deep south is scorched earth, with frontline villages such as Yaroun and Maroun al-Ras now largely flattened. Strikes can seemingly occur anywhere: A recent one in the remote Christian mountain village of Aito, 40 miles northeast of Beirut, killed 23 men, women and children residing in an apartment block. One million people — a quarter of Lebanon’s population — have been displaced, many of them sleeping rough in the open air in Beirut’s streets and squares. If the homes they left behind are not already rubble, they may become it at any moment. Israel’s onslaught has hit medical workers and centers, more journalists, mosques, churches, markets, historic architecture and at least one winery. Even United Nations peacekeepers have not been spared: Two separate incidents last week of Israel attacking forces from Indonesia and Sri Lanka, respectively, drew a rare public rebuke from President Joe Biden.

Smoke rises from the site of an Israeli airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Oct. 6, 2024. (Stringer/AFP via Getty Images)

Events have moved so far, so fast — especially in the past month — that it can be hard to believe they began with just three rocket strikes on the Shebaa Farms one morning last October, injuring no one. Yet, as I have tried to show above, the portents of what was to come could be glimpsed from the earliest days. Looking back through the notes I have kept up since leaving, it is striking in retrospect how candid the Israelis were from the beginning that they were prepared to do all this if Hezbollah didn’t stop attacking — and how frivolously Hezbollah’s leader dismissed the repeated warnings from every interlocutor. As early as November 2023, Gallant stated that “What we are doing in Gaza, we can also do in Beirut.” It was a message the Israelis would repeat many times, both in public and through diplomatic intermediaries. Witnessing the apocalyptic destruction in Gaza — where over 40,000 have now been killed, more than half of them women and children, 90% of the population has been displaced and the U.N. estimates it could take 15 years just to clear the 40 million tons of rubble — there was no reason to doubt they were serious.

And yet, in his televised statements, Hassan Nasrallah cracked jokes about the “tired,” “terrified” and “defeated” brigades with which Israel purported to intimidate him. “What a threat!” he scoffed sarcastically in a speech on Jan. 14, adding, “Ya hala wa marhab,” a folksy expression of courtesy said to guests, meaning “welcome” or “please come in” — flippantly inviting Israel to launch an all-out war, in other words. “The one who should fear war is Israel,” he said that day. “We’re ready for war. We don’t fear it.” The “Ya hala wa marhab” line became something of a catchphrase, echoed by Hezbollah fans on social media and repeated by Nasrallah in a subsequent address on April 5. Right up until the last speech of his life on Sept. 19, eight days before he was killed by Israeli bunker-busting bombs in his underground complex beneath Beirut’s southern suburbs, Nasrallah kept the braggadocio going. Of Israel’s then-anticipated ground invasion of Lebanon, he said: “We hope they enter our Lebanese land. We hope for it. … What they regard as a threat, we regard as an opportunity.” This time, “Ya hala wa marhab” was rephrased to the synonymous “Ahla wa sahla.” (It’s no small irony that these were the same words uttered by the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser on the eve of the Six-Day War on May 22, 1967, when he said: “The Jews threaten war. We tell them, ‘Ahlan wa sahlan.’ We’re ready for war.” Two weeks later, Israel wiped out Egypt’s air force in a day and conquered the Sinai Peninsula — as well as the Gaza Strip, occupied until then by Egypt. History, as they say, might not repeat but it does rhyme.)

Nasrallah is now dead, along with many other members of Hezbollah’s military and political leadership, as well as hundreds of rank-and-file fighters. It is hard to see how the gamble he took by opening the second front last October could have backfired any more spectacularly. It was always, from the start, an act of astounding recklessness. Lebanon in 2023 was a country already on the brink of total collapse, even in peacetime. Its main port, for a start, lay still in a pile of uncleared wreckage, three years on from its detonation. As Issam Abdallah’s joke alluded to, there was never enough electricity: We were lucky in our house if we got three hours a day from the state grid. Shortages of such basic essentials as grain, fuel and medicine were frequent — bread would suddenly vanish one day from the supermarket shelves, and drivers would park their cars in lines outside gas stations overnight, hoping to get a chance to fill them up in the early morning before they closed again. In 2021, the best hospital in the country (the American University of Beirut Medical Center) was forced to make an urgent appeal for fuel to power its generators, warning that hundreds of patients undergoing vital lifesaving treatment would otherwise die within days. How was this a country in a position to go to war against a nuclear-armed technological superpower?

And by what right did Hezbollah arrogate to itself the power to drag Lebanon into that war? The Lebanese Constitution is crystal clear: Decisions of war and peace may be taken only by the Cabinet, headed by the prime minister. To his credit, Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati has been vocally and consistently opposed to this war from the start, saying on Oct. 16, 2023, for example, that “It is in no one’s interest to embark on the adventure of opening a front in southern Lebanon.” That was a sentiment shared by virtually everyone in Lebanon who was not Hezbollah, including prominent Hezbollah allies: The most recent president of the republic, Michel Aoun, publicly criticized the rationale of fighting on behalf of Gaza, which, as Aoun noted, shares no official defense pact or other binding agreements with Lebanon. In deciding unilaterally to go to war, without consulting even its friends, let alone its foes, Hezbollah acted with total contempt not just for Lebanon’s laws, constitution, state institutions and democratically elected officials, but also for the unwritten rules that have always governed the country’s pluralistic power-sharing system, which stipulate that major decisions require the consent of all the main religious communities.

Worse, this is now the second time Hezbollah has done this in less than two decades, despite Nasrallah claiming to have learned his lesson after the first time. (Had he thought there was even a 1% chance, he later said, that the 2006 war would have occurred as a result of the Hezbollah operation that did in fact start it, he would “absolutely not” have ordered the operation.)

Watching the devastation of the country I had long considered home from my new perch in Scotland, I wonder: How sustainable is this? How many more times can Lebanon and its people withstand this much death and destruction? If there were a full cease-fire and Israeli withdrawal tomorrow — as I fervently hope there will be — what guarantee is there that Hezbollah wouldn’t do it all again a third time? What would such a guarantee even look like, and who would enforce it? Can anything be done by what remains of the Lebanese state — feeble, corrupt and compromised as it is — to provide it? Is there any way to even begin to persuade a diminished Hezbollah — and its Iranian sponsors — to hand its arsenal over to the state, as every other Lebanese militia did decades ago at the end of the civil war? Is there any way to persuade Hezbollah’s base — many if not most of whom are currently displaced — that they would actually be better off without the militia that has brought their sorry fate upon them? If not, how are the rest of Lebanon’s many and varied communities expected to respond? I have no answers myself to these questions, which in any case must be answered by the Lebanese alone — not the Americans, not the French or British, and certainly not the Israelis. It may seem premature to even ask them while the bombs are still raining and there is reason to believe the war will not end soon. Yet, in fact, there are Lebanese on the ground already asking such questions today, on social media as well as on local television and in newspapers and online publications. Now, indeed, they insist, is precisely the time to ask them. Eventually, the guns will fall silent and Israel’s soldiers will leave. When that happens, if these and other vital questions go unanswered, Lebanon may find it has problems deeper and more existential even than bunker-busting bombs.

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