Dispatches from the present
Monday
Recently my four-year-old has grown interested in the notion of infinity. Can you add a number to infinity? she asks on the way to the grocery store. I do not think you can, but I can’t give her a good reason why. On the playground, a philosopher friend with a son my daughter’s age explains that infinity is a concept rather than a number; that adding to infinity is a category error (my paraphrase), like saying “five plus book.” My daughter finds this answer unsatisfying because she knows that infinity, unlike “book,” entails counting; it’s a number and a concept. The philosopher tells us that he and his son have been talking about paradoxes recently.
In Zeno’s paradox of motion, for example, a bomb falling from an Israeli jet occupies a space equal to itself at every instant, meaning that, at every instant, it is effectively at rest. If time is composed of instants, then the bomb never moves, which contradicts its observed effects on the buildings in Beirut.
The strikes begin at approximately 3 a.m. on March 1st, but we are awoken by family in the U.S. whose multiple calls bypass our phones’ sleep mode. They send us screenshots of AP reports that bombs are exploding in Beirut’s southern suburbs, an area known as Dahiyeh. Google it and you’ll come across something known as the “Dahiyeh Doctrine,” the IDF’s strategy of targeting civilian infrastructure in response to the use of long-range rockets by non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah. As we begin scrolling, emails from administrators come through announcing the immediate closure of the university and the schools our children attend next to the campus.
The playground by the apartment buildings where I live is like a privileged expat version of an office water cooler where each family offers its own opinion on whether there will be a ground invasion and at what point they will leave. A gaggle of kids snack on popcorn while a colleague and his wife debate the significance of a troop buildup on the border. Another family has bought refundable tickets to Cyprus. An acquaintance tells me he’s carrying his entire checking account, over $10,000 in cash, in his backpack. A friend tells me that her colleague at work has already lost an aunt and an uncle in the first night of airstrikes. This abundance of anecdotal experience, combined with the constant stream of updates from social media, is both gripping and unsettling. Eventually I decide to see what my kids are doing and give my daughter a push on the swings.
Some of the old-timers nod knowingly when we tell them it’s our first war. Most of them were here for the last one, in 2024, and some can even remember 2006. I feel a sense of pride when I tell them we don’t plan to leave, but I am not a courageous person. I just don’t know what we will do with our kids if we flee to Europe or back to America; our lives, and our childcare options, are here.
In the evening, four bombs fall approximately two miles from our apartment. Up to this point the war has been either an abstraction or a distraction—something to scroll through obsessively. But now the war is not just in my phone. I can hear it and feel it, a dull pounding that sounds like it’s gone off inside a barrel—once, twice, then two more times. The sound generates an overpowering need to hold onto my children, but I also have to arrange my face, because there will be more bombings like this one, and I don’t want them to be scared.
Wednesday
Before the war, my biggest teaching worry was AI-generated content submitted for essay assignments. Now I receive messages from students tending to wounded relatives in the hospital. Lebanon is a small country, and it doesn’t take long before everyone knows someone who’s been affected by the bombing.
By Wednesday displaced people from southern Lebanon and the Shi’a suburbs have begun to arrive in Beirut proper. My son and I watch a van moving slowly down the corniche piled to almost twice its height with suitcases, a mattress and everything else they could strap to the top. Many of these people would wind up camping in Beirut’s public spaces, but not all of them. As we walk by a niceish hotel near campus, a family unloads a big, shiny SUV. My daughter squeezes my hand and I ask her what’s wrong. It’s the suitcases, she says. The sight of them has always made her a little nervous, emblem as they are of transience and dislocation. Beirut doesn’t have many tourists these days, so the suitcases signal to her that something else is going on.
In the evening my wife tells her that Israel is knocking down buildings. This is geopolitically incomplete, but we think it’s better than telling her something false (“fireworks”), and it helps to explain the sheer kinetic force that is suddenly part of our lives. She is sure to ask, eventually: How long will it go on? In my weaker moments I want to ask my Lebanese friends, but one of the country’s unwritten rules is that you don’t think about such things.
March is my favorite month in Beirut because the weather is slightly chilly, so there’s less pollution from diesel-powered generators than in the hot summer. Ramadan means that the gym is less crowded, with many Muslims sleeping during fasting hours rather than working out. Much of this remains intact—the pleasure of living on the Mediterranean undimmed by explosions or violence.
And yet the uneasiness, even without the drones overhead or the bombing in the suburbs, is profound. There is a phrase in Arabic, حسب الوضع (hasab al wadaa), that captures the frustrating inability to make plans or think beyond the end of the current conflict. It means something like “depending on the situation,” the generality of which belies its functioning as the country’s de facto national slogan. Children may return to school next week, hasab al wadaa. We may be able to go on vacation next month, hasab al wadaa. “The situation” is a vague locution meant to defer judgment about the justice of the war itself, which divides many Lebanese, not just along sectarian lines but within families and even within individuals. Hasab al wadaa, “depending on the situation,” suggests that such a judgment will never come—that the country may never decide whether the ongoing conflict with Israel is one that it wants or doesn’t.
Thursday
The bombing tonight is going to be particularly heavy, so they tell us to keep the windows open to prevent the pressure from shattering the glass. It’s cold so we put extra blankets on the kids, who fall asleep in bed together. My wife and I try to stay up late—we don’t want to be awoken when it starts—but the fatigue of childcare and online teaching gets to us.
After the first few days of fighting, it appears that Lebanon is heading for a second Israeli occupation between the border with Israel and the Litani River. The first occupation ran from 1978 to 2000, but Lebanon’s conflict with Israel, not to mention its internal strife, goes back further, when the country became a staging ground for Palestinian guerillas in the late Sixties. This set a precedent whereby military conflict with Israel was basically handled by non-state parties, including and especially Hezbollah, which was founded after Israel’s invasion in the Seventies.
The result is a disfigurement of traditional state sovereignty—an abyssal divide between Hezbollah and its supporters, who bear the brunt of the war’s impacts, and the rest of the country, who try to carry on as if it’s not their problem. In the long term, Lebanon lacks a clear path to becoming its own “imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s classic term, without reference to a regional hegemon—be it Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Iran, the countries that have long jockeyed for influence (or worse) over the country’s politics.
In class this week I am teaching “The Wanderer,” an Old English elegy. The poem describes loneliness and exile in the wake of loss, a medieval warrior lamenting his separation from the lord and mead-hall that once gave his life meaning. The speaker of the poem reflects on the enormity of his loss, not only of his lord, but also of the social fabric the lord emblematizes:
The wise man must realize how ghastly it will be
when all the wealth of this world stands waste,
as now here and there throughout this middle-earth
walls stand blasted by wind,
beaten by frost, the buildings crumbling.
Needless to say the poem’s depiction of waste and destruction is unusually salient, despite the fact that the speaker grants ultimate responsibility for this destruction to a quasi-Christian “Creator” (scyppend). I wonder whether students will draw a connection between the crumbling of buildings in pre-Conquest Britain and the crumbling of entire neighborhoods in Beirut’s Shi’ite suburbs; whether the military assault on Lebanon will make this poem somehow more meaningful to them or, on the contrary, render it even more obscure and remote from their own experiences of loss and displacement.
As bombs start to fall in Dahiyeh again, I am asleep on the couch.
Monday
The halls of my academic department are bereft. Almost all of the students are displaced in one way or another: some are simply staying with family in safe parts of the country, but some have had to flee their homes in the suburbs.
Exhausted by the sound of the drone buzzing over our heads night and day, we take a break from Beirut and head north. In the seaside town of Batroun, cafés line a pebble beach, and dapper families slump in their chairs post-brunch, eyes locked on their phone screens. We are trying to distract ourselves from the week’s horrible events, yet there is Beirut in the distance, plainly visible from the coast. As we return south to the city the next day, two columns of black smoke stretch upward, leaning gently over the skyline. Checking my phone at home, I read about a round of strikes hitting Hezbollah targets in the afternoon, shortly before we arrived.
In the evening we hear from the philosopher; he and his family are leaving for Cyprus tonight.
Later in the week leaflets will fall from the sky carrying the strong suggestion that we should leave, too; the military warns Beirutis not to scan the QR code, which will supposedly give up your device’s location to the IDF. But it’s better not to look up if you can help it. Beyond the planes coming and going from the airport, it seems there’s little about the skies above Beirut—the motions of drones, the vector of leaflets or the reasons for bombing—that we can understand.