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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is author of ‘Black Wave’ and an FT contributing editor
How many wars can you endure in one life? How many lives can be contained in one lifetime? These are the questions running through my mind at 3am as I listen to the thud of Israeli missiles exploding in Dahiyeh. The southern suburbs, a Hizbollah bastion of support, are an almost nightly target, a short drive from my flat in Beirut.
This is my fifth time living through an Israeli military campaign against Lebanon. I was too young to remember the first one in 1978. During the invasion of 1982, I watched Beirut in flames, from afar, as my family took shelter north of the capital. We were also trying to survive 15 years of Lebanese civil war, which lasted until 1990.
Why didn’t your family leave? How to explain the myriad complicated calculations that go into making such a decision: businesses that need to keep running, elderly parents who can’t be left behind and the attachment to home, no matter what. Many people did go. Many stayed. There were more wars, assassinations, uprisings, then in 2019 a major economic crisis, and in 2020, the massive Beirut port blast. Half a century of turmoil, imprinted in our DNA. And now, more war.
The question I get most today is: are you safe? I’m still looking for the right answer. I’m not in Gaza. I’m not in Dahiyeh. But safety is relative. War is all around me. It’s on the road for my drive back to Beirut after a few days in the mountains. Israel has been targeting cars on that highway, including a van that was carrying Hizbollah munitions.
War is in my community. The bartender at one of my favourite hang-outs is a tattooed, clean shaven, apolitical Shia who grew up in the southern city of Tyre. His family’s ancestral home is in the village of Ramya on the border with Israel. One day, close to tears, he told me he’d seen pictures of Israeli soldiers drinking coffee in their living room. The house was then blown up as the army detonated large parts of the village. Then, their home in Tyre was destroyed when a block of apartments was targeted by strikes.
The vegetable grocer down the street lives in a neighbourhood that was struck with no warning. His face was haggard the next morning. His brother next door had lost his wife and children. A young research assistant is from the area of Nabatiyeh. Her family fled the first day of shelling. She is lucky to have found refuge with an uncle in Beirut but her nights are still punctuated by the sound of nearby shelling.
When Israeli missiles killed Hizbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, I was in Europe for work. Why don’t you stay, people asked me? Perhaps people think war is temporary and it would be a momentary escape. But as we know well in Lebanon, Gaza and Ukraine, war can last years. I didn’t want to be stuck in a hotel indefinitely with a carry-on. I flew back as scheduled. If I leave, I want the luxury of choosing the timing. A friend of mine moved her family to Europe after the port blast. She runs a retail business in Lebanon and commutes every few weeks. The day the Israeli bombing campaign started, she flew to Beirut to be with her 50 employees.
One evening at dusk, while on the phone, I screamed in surprise when a loud bang rattled the windows. Too early for a strike, I thought, it must be a sonic boom. Messages started pouring in: are you OK? I checked the news: it was a missile, close by. If Dahiyeh was five minutes south of me, this hit three minutes west of me. My neighbourhood was now sandwiched between strikes. Were the Israelis starting to bomb all of Beirut? I could see plumes of smoke from my window. I waited. I had a dinner appointment. I checked the news again: there were no evacuation warnings. I rationalised the danger: this would be it for now.
I grabbed my keys and headed out. My dinner was one neighbourhood away. There were barely five people at the restaurant, all looking for normalcy amid war. Had I become numb to death and destruction? Was I in denial? Or did I think this might be the last time I would share a meal with a friend? I know war too well, and all the questions it provokes, none of which have a good answer. When does it end? Will it be the last war?
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