Navigating War – Disruptions, Involvement, and Continuity

On September 17, 2024, I had just completed teaching my classes and was making my way back home through Beirut’s busy streets when I started receiving news, texts, and soon later phone calls about what first seemed to be a cyberattack on electronic devices held by members of the Hezbollah across Lebanon. Suddenly, my short ride home turned into a lengthy and nerve-wrecking journey as I navigated the now totally congested streets of Beirut, filled with frenzied people eager to get to safety. It was only by the time I got home, turned on my television, and made a few calls, that I understood the magnitude of what had just occurred. Thousands of pagers owned and operated by varying ranks of Hezbollah members had received simultaneous text messages that afternoon, and had simultaneously exploded, leaving thousands of people injured and at least 12 dead, including two children. The next day, on September 18, as I prepared myself to leave the FIME office in Beirut after a long day of work, interrupted by political discussions and conversations in the office, thousands of walkie-talkies exploded all over Lebanon, injuring hundreds and killing at least 30 people.

The war between the Lebanese resistance factions, led by Hezbollah, and Israel, had been ongoing since October 8, 2023. However, until that day, it was what war specialists would diagnose as a ”limited war”, occurring in very limited geographic and military boundaries – primarily in the south of Lebanon and between Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli army. By the evening of September 18, what everyone in Lebanon had anticipated and dreaded for almost a year, became clear. An expanded Israeli war on Lebanon had begun. As the war expanded into Beirut, the entire South of Lebanon and the Beqaa region, the country stood still.

As someone born and raised in Lebanon, I am not a stranger to navigating life amidst conflict, wars, political upheavals, and social disruptions. Yet, despite that fact, and despite all the years of ”training” one gets from having been born here, there is no amount of preparation enough to endure living through yet another war. Wars are disruptions; the violence they ensue and unleash can dissociate one from everyday life, and they often render everything else except their details irrelevant. Yet for those of us who teach and write about the region, and especially about Lebanon, being in a time of war can put us so bluntly face-to-face with our work and raison d’être so to speak.

In the first few days of the war, as I sat confined to my home scouring the news for information about the location of the next Israeli airstrike, I turned towards my historical research and particularly the early Lebanese leftists I write about. I wondered, what could they teach me about such a seminal moment? How would they have reacted to such times, especially since they, too, had lived through several wars, and were politically active through the Second World War.

Ra’if Khoury, a Lebanese Marxist and a significant Arab literary figure, narrated that upon seeing his leftist comrade Omar Fakhoury editing a draft of his 1941 book, al-Fusul al-Arba‘a (The Four Seasons), Fakhoury declared to him that this would be his last work on aesthetics. When Khoury questioned him for the reason behind his decision, Fakhoury explained: “There are other pressing problems that are shaking the world, and that relate to us. We cannot, and do not have the right, to live on the margins of the world and of history. It is not enough to live, but we should think of how we are supposed to live.”[1] For a group of leftists who had founded and organized the Communist parties in Syria and Lebanon, World War Two was a turning point and a seminal moment through which they developed some of their most complex ideas on nationalism, internationalism, democracy, and justice. It was during the war that they became concerned about their role in society as literati and started to develop the concept of a politically engaged literature, which I argue would later morph into iltizam, the Arab intellectuals’ equivalence to Jean-Paul Sartre’s littérature engagée.

For them, political engagement was no longer a choice during the war, it was a duty, something they did not have the right to ignore. The Lebanese state was established in 1920, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, under the auspices of a newly created French mandate. Although Lebanon was proclaimed a parliamentary republic, the French colonial government over Lebanon, along with local supporters whose financial and political interests aligned with the mandate system, built the Lebanese state and society within the framework of a sectarian political system that overlapped and catered to a liberal oligarchy in control of the key economic sectors of the Lebanese economy at the time. Leftists who organized during the mandate, saw imperialism and capitalism as intertwined oppressive systems that needed to be fought simultaneously, and thus saw the national liberation struggle against French colonialism in Lebanon as part of the global struggles against imperialism and capitalism that the Third International was heading at the time. Leftists organizing in Lebanon during the interwar and war periods, sought the liberation of Lebanon from colonialism, the abolition of political sectarianism as a tenant for a democratic rule, and the equal distribution of income and resources as the basis for a just society.

At the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, Lebanese and Syrian leftists convened the League Against Fascism and Nazism in Lebanon and Syria. Although there were no openly fascist organizations in Lebanon during this time, however, there were a few nationalist parties that showed quasi-fascist tendencies and influences that the left tried to counter and fight against. Also, Lebanese leftists considered the struggle against fascism to be a global issue that concerned them directly, and that the success of fascism in Europe spelled danger for Arabs and the rest of the world alike.[2] Ra’if Khoury, one of the main conveners of the League, declared in one of his reports the purpose for establishing a League that would oppose fascism by arguing that “neutrality is a joke in the struggle between democracy and fascism,”[3] and that it was then more imminent than ever to take a stance. For the League and its supporters, the stance to be taken was clear, “we are part of the democratic front.”[4]

As I immersed myself in the works of these intellectuals during this past war, I knew there was much work to be done on various levels. Apart from revising the chapters for the book I am completing on these Lebanese leftists during the mandate period (1920–1948), I engaged with the students on the history of the region and the events that led to the current war they were experiencing. Some of the issues we covered were the history of colonialism in the Middle East, the Palestinian Nakba following the UN decision to partition Palestine in 1947, the subsequent Arab-Israeli wars, the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1978 during the Lebanese Civil War, and the rise of Islamic resistance in the form of Hezbollah in Lebanon, among other topics.

These issues allow us to better understand the complexity of the current situation in Lebanon in facing the Israeli state’s latest aggression. Although there is no consensus among the Lebanese population on supporting Hezbollah and their allies in Lebanese internal politics, however, a proportion of the population understand that these resistance factions, however problematic on various political and social aspects, are the only defense Lebanon has against the Israeli state’s occupation and destruction of Lebanese territories and the former’s infringement of the latter’s sovereignty. Other factions within the Lebanese landscape demand that Lebanon remain neutral from this conflict. These divisions within Lebanese society mimic the wider division of the world, its peoples and its governments, along demarcation lines of either supporting the Zionist state of Israel to achieve its goals, or supporting Palestinian and Lebanese resistance against occupation.

The severity of the war meant that we had to move the teaching online, and eventually incorporate hybrid modules of learning, which was very time-consuming and stressful for both faculty and students. It also meant navigating the various conditions and circumstances of our students, including coming to terms with the martyrdom of one of our students following an Israeli airstrike on his home in the suburb of Beirut, and some students’ losses of their loved ones and homes.

Despite the importance of my work as a teacher and a researcher, the war particularly brought into light the urgency of humanitarian and relief work, especially among the thousands of displaced people all over the country. I became involved in various individual and group-based initiatives that catered to the needs of the displaced civilians who suddenly found themselves stranded in the streets of Beirut and across the Lebanese landscape. Some of the major humanitarian work on the ground in Beirut that I was involved with was done by organizations, individual initiatives, and communal kitchens such as Nation Station, Hostel Beirut, Riwaq Beirut, the Great Oven, and Tunefork Studios, to name a few. The efforts included providing shelter, food, medicine and medical care, and basic necessities for hundreds of thousands who not only lost their homes but also their only sources of income. In the absence of a state-led emergency plan, and the presence of a state decision to concentrate relief work on Lebanese citizens, many of us turned towards focusing our work on the non-Lebanese residing in this country who were also affected deeply by the war, particularly Syrian refugees, Palestinians, and migrant workers from a variety of national backgrounds.

A ceasefire, based on the 2006 UN resolution 1701, was signed on November 27, 2024. As people rush to go back to their neighborhoods, bury their dead, rebuild their homes, and resume their lives, we are faced with new challenges of the post-war realities. During the war, one of the main questions that most plagued me were: how do we continue to survive and live our lives as “normally” as possible, without falling into the trap of normalizing the ongoing violence and loss? In the post-war period, however, with a ceasefire currently held on such vulnerable grounds and with Israel so far committing several violations of the agreement, we need to face the question how does one go back to living a “normal life”? What is a normal life in light of all the destruction, death, and the various internal political challenges we have faced and will still face at least for the foreseeable future?

In the absence of a strong unified state that has failed over and over again to provide a plan for reconstruction and post-war building, the Lebanese people have often historically resorted to personal initiatives and private organizations to rebuild what was destroyed. And as this war and previous ones have shown, the unified resolve of people to rebuild and reconvene their communities and spaces was not successfully shattered as predicted by the enemies of this country. Here in Beirut, we are holding on to this hope and looking forward to a brighter future.

[1] Ra’if Khoury, “‘Umar Fakhuri fi Khamsina Sanatan”, al-Tariq 5, no.9/10 (1946): 39.

[2] For more on this see my article, Sana Tannoury-Karam, “This War is Our War Too: Anti-fascism Among Lebanese Leftist Intellectuals During World War Two”, Journal of World History vol.30, no.3 (September 2019)

[3] Ra’if Khoury, “Taqrir al-Lajna al-Tahdiriyya fi Mu’tamar Mukafahat al-Fashistiyya”, 358.

[4] Ibid.

Illustration: Woman in the southern suburbs of Beirut checking what is left of her home and building after ceasefire agreement between Lebanon and Israel, 27.11.2024. Picture: Ali Chehade Farhat

Sana Tannoury-Karam, 12 helmikuuta 2025

aatehistoria, Beirut, Hizbollah, Israel, Libanon, sota

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