For episode 155, Ayman sits with Beirut-based journalist and friend of the show, Justin Salhani, to talk about ⁠his recent essay for Al-Jazeera⁠. Expanding on the essay, the two talk about parallels between the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As two children of survivors of the ’82 siege, their conversation moves between political/military analysis and discussions of memory and narratives as tools of agency. 

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Episode Credits:

Hosts: Ayman Makarem
Producer: Ayman Makarem
Guest: Justin Salhani
Music: ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠
Sound editor: Ayman Makarem
Episode designer: Elia J. Ayoub
Team profile pics: Molly Crabapple
Original TFTT design: Wenyi Geng

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

We think that history is “the things that happened before,” and people often say that we learn history so that we don’t repeat it. But we need to understand that history is not just what happened before; it’s why things are the way they are today.

Justin Salhani: I’m Justin Salhani. I’m currently based in Beirut, kind of between Beirut and Paris, filing mostly for Al Jazeera at the moment—I’m a freelance journalist covering the wider Middle East, and for the last few months I’ve been covering the fallout of everything that’s been happening after October 7.

I wrote a piece that was released back in January (I did most of the reporting in December). My family had lived through the ’82 siege of Beirut, and I grew up with stories about it. My dad used to tell me stories about it; he was working as a journalist for United Press International at the time, and my mother was also in town (the two years that she lived in Beirut were ’82 to ’84). And I read an article in the Washington Post from that time period talking about the siege, and so many of the things that happened at that time—attacks on hospitals, amputations without anesthesia, white phosphorus being dropped on parts of the city—there were a number of parallels to Gaza now, and it made me think there must still be a healthy number of people around (my parents are no longer with us unfortunately) who have vivid memories of this time period.

So I went around and spoke to a few, and I went back and started speaking to other folks about their memories and their experiences, including one of my dad’s old colleagues, who told me about one day in particular that hopefully later we can discuss a bit. But looking at everything that has been going on in Gaza in the last four months, it felt really pertinent to be able to see how so many people in Beirut (and particularly west Beirut, because that’s where the siege happened) had lived through similar things, and to have their experiences show that this is not new, this is something that has happened before, and there is an awareness about it.

Even if there’s a new awareness—a lot of people are coming to this realization now in terms of how the Israeli military has performed their acts of aggression and have acted in times of war in the past—this is something people already knew about. I thought it was important to revisit that and show that there’s a long history of this.

I wasn’t born yet in 1982, and I don’t think you were either, Ayman, but the memories are there and the histories are there, and it’s well documented. That was the idea of my article on Al Jazeera, and hopefully we can dive into those parallels, what west Beirut means to us, the evolution of it, and other topics.

Ayman Makarem: I really appreciated that essay. Drawing parallels, not necessarily to compare or to flatten the history, but to demonstrate—I thought that was very valuable. History did not start on October 7. And when you look more into the history of Israeli aggressions, things become less surprising. It becomes more daunting.

My parents also grew up in west Beirut—or what was known as west Beirut during the war. So seeing this writing is really familiar for me as well. Also uncovering some of this history—our parents didn’t talk to us much about the war; it’s something they wanted to move on from. And specifically, the 1982 siege and Israeli invasion was something that I never really understood the full extent of until only a few years ago, doing my own research and discovering just how atrocious—how much the Israelis put into it, how many tanks. I heard from one UN guy in a documentary that the Israelis had sent more tanks into Lebanon in ’82 than the French army had, ever, at all.

This is relevant today because there is currently an Israeli aggression on Lebanon, and there is constant fear that it will escalate. Just the other day, the Israeli aggression escalated in Lebanon. They attacked civilian areas, killing between nine to twelve civilians, including six children. I appreciate discussions of what Maya Mikdashi described as close histories: histories that are very much still lived. If you walk around Beirut you can see the war; you can see it, it still exists. Our politicians are still the warlords. It’s a very close history that still affects today. Israel still exists and is still doing its bullshit.

I’ve recently been doing watch parties of documentaries on Palestine. Watching and learning about the Nakba and the lead-up to the Nakba, and listening to survivor testimonies of the ’47-’48 mass expulsions of Palestinians—it’s terrifying how eerily similar it is, word-for-word. I’ll give you one example. One survivor was talking about how they were mixing animal feed with water to make some sort of bread. That’s something we’re seeing in the north of Gaza, where there’s forced starvation of the population. It’s really valuable to demonstrate how long this history is, how this current genocide has absolutely nothing to do with Hamas, and has nothing to do with October 7 even. A lot of it is just pretext. The history is there.

There’s one other thing you wrote that I think is really pertinent and terrifying: that during the bombing of Beirut in 1982, Ronald Reagan called Menachem Begin and told him to stop this holocaust—and he used the word “holocaust.” Whereas now with Joe Biden we’ve moved so much more hawkish than Ronald Reagan, which is a terrifying prognosis.

JS: It really is. It shows there have been instances in the past where US administrations have told the Israelis: Okay, it ends now. Stop. In recent weeks we’ve seen things come out, leaks and statements talking about how every death hurts Anthony Blinken, or how Biden called Netanyahu an asshole. And it just rings so hollow. Nothing materially has been done, and we know that they can do things materially. We know there is the possibility, if not to put a full stop to this, at least to make it incredibly difficult for this war to continue. But they’ve done the exact opposite. And they want to play it both ways. It’s incredibly frustrating (that’s too weak a word here). It’s a political ploy to make themselves seem humane, when we know every action they’ve taken has been the exact opposite and has done nothing but fuel what the ICJ is investigating as a genocide and what various human rights organizations are calling out with utmost horror.

There are precedents in the past, and the ’82 siege was horrible, it was difficult, frightening, terrifying. What’s interesting is, talking to certain people about it now—it depends who you speak to and it depends where they were—they’ll talk about how at the time there was hope, there was a feeling of Maybe the world can change, maybe we can get out of this, maybe things will happen. The difference between then and today is that I don’t think anyone in Gaza has the smallest inkling of hope, or will one day turn around and tell you a funny story about this period they way some people shared humorous anecdotes with me about ’82.

A guy who owns a bookstore told me that Mahmoud Darwish lived a few blocks down in Hamra, and came out on his balcony one night because the bombing was so relentless, and started screaming at the warplanes, and he was laughing while telling me this story. I can’t imagine the same thing happening in this current conflict.

I don’t know if you want to outline some of the history of ’82, maybe for listeners who are less familiar with it, to know some of the historical events that led up to this happening and who was behind the siege and what justifications they gave? I can try to do it slightly anecdotally, and feel free to jump in.

I’ll do it through a family anecdote. My father at the time was working as a journalist, as I mentioned. And he had asked a security official in ’82: Hey, do you think the Israelis are going to invade? Because I’m going to invite my girlfriend to come stay with me here. And the official said, No chance. So my mom flew into west Beirut, and a week later the Israelis invaded from the south. Their objective was to dislodge the PLO and Yasser Arafat from Lebanon.

The invasion started in the south and made its way all the way up to Beirut, and they set a three-month siege around west Beirut, where the Palestinian forces were based. They cut off food and water, and there are anecdotes from people at the time saying they couldn’t get meat. There were things smuggled through—this is another divergence with Gaza today. At the time there were people finding ways to get things in, but they would say, If there was no flour we didn’t eat any bread. The situation today in Gaza is infinitely more severe and worse. But there were people genuinely suffering at this time, and the Israelis subjected parts of west Beirut to relentless bombing.

A lot of it was in areas where Palestinians were based, in various camps. I spoke to one Palestinian refugee who said they had to leave their home, and when they came back the entire area was essentially demolished. In Hamra, where my parents were based, there weren’t many bombings, but there was one when the Israelis tried to hit the ministry of information. Somebody told me they used to do “rounds of four,” and there were certain types of attacks that were particularly feared: from the warplanes, you wouldn’t know where it was going to hit.

The Israelis at the time were supposedly stationed in Yarze, which is just outside Beirut, so people would say at times you could hear a certain artillery attack coming in, and when you heard it being fired you knew to hit the ground. I had one journalist tell me: That’s not what we were afraid of. We weren’t afraid of artillery, we were afraid of the warplanes.

The Israelis put this siege around west Beirut for a few months, until the point where the Palestinians, through talking with local militias and politicians, decided, Enough is enough, the people here are suffering. They worked out a deal with the international community, including the US, to leave west Beirut and to take their bases over to Tunis. Of course after that, the Israeli occupation didn’t exactly end. A month after the PLO had left, there was the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

The importance of knowing this history is also knowing how it connects to today. Obviously there are parallels between how the Israelis are acting in Gaza today versus how they acted in Beirut at the time. There’s one incredibly important aspect here which informs the Israelis’ behavior today: there’s been a few times when we could see, through the rhetoric of Israeli officials, that it’s as if they see Gaza today as they saw Beirut in ’82. There’s this idea that if they bomb the population hard enough in Gaza, people might turn against Hamas. This is what their actions show. They have this idea that if they hit hard enough, people will turn against Hamas and ask Hamas to leave.

Of course the situation is very different: as much solidarity as the Palestinians had in west Beirut, they weren’t of west Beirut the way Hamas is of Gaza or Hezbollah is part-and-parcel of south Lebanon. We can talk about why that is and how that is, and the problematic pitfalls of both of those things. But it’s inevitable to realize that you cannot through sheer force remove this aspect of society, or this party or this actor, that comes from the conditions that have been created through Israeli action and behavior.

In ’82, we should mention that when the Israelis came in and invaded Lebanon, it led in steps to the creation of Hezbollah. In a lot of way, 1982 informs a lot of Israeli behavior today in terms of how they’re acting towards Gaza. It doesn’t just show that this has happened before, but it shows their thought process and why they’re doing what they’re trying to do.

AM: There’s a lot of the same rhetoric. There’s something really scary about—it’s obviously a lie, because the real goal at the moment, which is very obvious, is complete ethnic cleansing and a land grab in Gaza. But there is rhetoric about the Israelis being “against Hamas,” and wanting people to turn against them. Even if you take that at face value, it’s the definition of terrorism. Beyond that, another reason why these historical parallels are really important to point out is because that’s what they did in ’82: once they kicked out the PLO, you’re right, they elected the fascist Bachir Gemayel—he was elected president of Lebanon on the backs of Israeli tanks. And he was assassinated, because he was widely unpopular and hated, not by a Palestinian but by a Lebanese of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

And like you said, then they orchestrated Sabra and Shatila alongside the Lebanese Forces. And part of the reason that’s one of the most disgusting massacres period, and why it’s so remembered, is because there was no one to defend the camp because all the fighters that could have defended it had left. All who were left were old men, women, and children.

JS: The man who was accused of assassinating Gemayel was Habib Shartouni.

AM: I think he’s still alive, actually.

JS: Yeah, he is.

AM: One thing that’s really difficult to stomach is how things have changed. We naturally have a tendency to feel that as history moves on, we become more civilized or whatever, but what we’re seeing happening in Gaza is barbaric. It defies all precedent in terms of—there are so many terms of engagement for urban warfare; there are conceptions of minimizing damage of civilian infrastructure, but they’re just completely flattening it.

They bombed Beirut; they definitely did carpet-bombing—but there was still a Beirut to speak of. What’s happening in Gaza, it’s terrifying that it’s allowed to happen. It’s a scary thing that we obviously saw as well in Syria only a few years ago. Again, I think it’s really fucked up to think about the fact that Ronald Reagan, the devil, thought the bombing of Beirut was too much, and now all we can get from Genocide Joe Biden is these moans. I agree with you: I think these are intentionally leaked just to save face. I don’t care how much someone moans if they are still sending literally billions of dollars in extra funding for military equipment for Israelis to continue the genocide.

These parallels definitely exist, and exist in the rhetoric and the actions and the tactics, and also demonstrate how dire the situation is.

JS: It’s shown the pitfalls of international humanitarian law and these international institutions. If we can’t stop what’s happening despite the blatant horror, we’ve moved well beyond—this conflict has unfolded in stages. At first there was the fierce, visceral anger coming from many of the pro-Israel crowd at how October 7 played out. From the other side maybe there was a bit of shock, almost: few people in our camps would celebrate violence against civilians or the loss of civilian life, but there was almost a shock at the outrage. Considering all the things that have happened in recent years, all the attempts at peaceful protest that were repelled violently, at some point we knew there was going to be a violent reaction. That doesn’t make the loss of civilian life any more palatable.

But I’ll speak personally here: I was taken aback by the viscerality of the reaction. Not the hurt for the loss of life, but the anger and the bloodlust of the response. And over time, as we’ve seen the destruction on the Palestinian side become more and more severe—obviously Gaza is the worst part of this, but we can also talk about what’s happening in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and we can talk about the suppression of any criticism of this war in a number of different countries—while there had been ambivalence from people who had been vocal about acknowledging the crimes committed against people on October 7, over time it’s become so beyond the pale for anyone to depart from the most fervent Zionist, let alone do any kind of action to stop this.

South Africa stepped up at the ICJ in an attempt to stop what is being called akin to genocide and could potentially be genocide. And despite all this, the reaction was not to slow it down or to check oneself or to start questioning funding of the Israeli military. The reaction was to further punish and to intensify a lot of these operations.

This has left a lot of people in the Global South and people with roots in the Global South questioning these institutions. For years and years, a lot of us have not necessarily been questioning these institutions’ validity, though that has happened widely; a lot of people have simply asked for fair treatment, to apply international humanitarian law to everyone rather than just to those who fit the right demographics.

I wrote a piece two years ago, shortly after the expanded invasion in Ukraine. There was an outcry because there were a number of Black people, many of them African students though not exclusively, who were trying to flee from eastern Ukraine, and they experienced racism by Ukrainian soldiers and civilians not prioritizing them, not listening to them, not taking their safety into consideration. Some people grabbed onto this outcry in bad faith to push an agenda that was pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine, but the majority of cases were good-faith reporting on issues of racism which are important. And there was a reaction to that: Now is not the time to talk about this.

I wrote a piece at the time saying there’s never not a time to discuss or to critique racism. We should always talk about racism. That doesn’t mean that Ukraine being invaded is merited. That doesn’t mean that Ukraine does not have the right to defend itself, to oppose an invasion. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t lend solidarity to Ukrainians. But we must also be vigilant about cases of discrimination, and we have to call those out and we have work to build better societies.

The other side of that was: at this time Ukrainians in Europe were getting first-class treatment as refugees or as displaced people. My argument in that piece was that this was not wrong—in fact, this is how all refugees should be treated. Again, oftentimes what we see in Europe when it comes to refugees coming from places like Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq, the Global South, parts of Africa, whether it’s north, central, east, or west Africa—obviously they’re not getting first-class treatment. It’s not just that, but the law itself is not being applied to them. Asylum laws are being violated.

Essentially what we’re seeing is the further degradation and erosion of international humanitarian law, because it’s not being applied universally to everyone. Now the question is, how do we move forward in a world where these laws are not being applied to us? As people trying to work in global solidarity, how do we try to enforce these universalist standards, apply them to everyone? What sort of avenues do we have to make this happen?

AM: I hear you. The double standards are completely there, and many people have been pointing them out in terms of how EU and US politicians talk about attacks on Ukrainian hospitals versus the complete denial—there is a return to form for these imperialist states. It makes me think of Orwell’s conception of unpeople: the general dehumanizing of non-white people.

But I want to move back to your essay, and some of the things you said. We started this conversation because I had seen you write online about how there’s so much more you wanted to write, but it was an Al Jazeera essay with a word limit. Do you want to talk about some of the interviews you’ve been doing post-essay?

JS: I haven’t been able to do as many as I would have liked. Where would you want me to start?

AM: You told me a really interesting anecdote about a parrot.

JS: I don’t know if this was during the siege, to be honest, but I guess it must have been, because it was a time when there was bombing in west Beirut. A lot of anecdotes were passed to me through my dad. You mentioned earlier that a lot of our parents don’t talk about the war; my dad did. He talked to me a lot about the war. There were a lot of things in his life that he didn’t like to discuss, but his time covering the Lebanese civil war was one of the things he was happy to talk about. Maybe part of that was because it was also his work.

So there’s this story about a parrot that many journalists from that period may know. There’s an interesting podcast called Maabar. They took people from all over the country, didn’t identify them so they wouldn’t have any sectarian or religious or political identifiers, and had them speak about their experiences, just common people. That was season one; they’re going to go through other seasons. They’ve got a season one-point-five right now where they talk to journalists. A lot of my dad’s old colleagues talk about this: they bring up one place in particular called the Commodore Hotel.

You might be familiar with it; it’s still there. All the journalists would hang out there and get drinks in the evening because they had a basement bar, so even if there was shelling you were safe. There was this running gag, because there was a parrot there: whenever a new person would come to the bar, and you would hear the whistle of a shell about to fall, they would dive under the bar. You’d hear the whistle coming, but at the end just a tame fake explosion sound. The parrot had learned how to mimic the whistle of the shell falling so accurately that people thought it was real. If they didn’t know that the parrot was making the noise, they would dive under the bar only to hear the fake ending, and the rest of the bar would break into laughter.

That was one of the many moments of charm through what was obviously a very difficult period, especially for those who didn’t have shelters.

AM: The reason I find this an interesting and telling anecdote is because like you said, there is, in some times and some ways, a sentimentality for this period. And I don’t think anyone is going to be telling such stories about Gaza and what’s happening now.

I wonder why that is, and part of it might be that Beirut did resist, and it did push out the occupier, and it did kick Israel out, eventually out of Lebanon as a whole. So I wonder if we experienced a greater defeat maybe we wouldn’t have these sorts of stories. I think about the fact my parents didn’t tell me anything; they refused to.

JS: No experience is universal. Different people have different experiences. This story of the parrot is humorous, but it’s also one of an enormous amount of privilege, in a sense. It’s weird to say that there are people with privilege under shelling. But it’s true in the sense that these people were the ones who could afford and could find shelter. There are a number of people who couldn’t—obviously a lot of people were killed—and if you talk to those people there won’t be that space for those humorous or charming anecdotes.

In Gaza, the destruction is so widespread: up to sixty percent of buildings have been partially or completely damaged. More than one percent of the population has been killed. The number of children that have been killed! The things we’ve read in news stories and Twitter, the images we’ve seen with our own eyes, are so beyond horrific. And a lot of those images were things that people would see coming out of Beirut at the time too. But it’s the level of destruction.

Another thing people told me is that it’s the updated technology. The weapons that were being used to hit Beirut in 1982 were nowhere near as deadly or precise—or in some cases purposefully imprecise—as those that are being used today. There have been stories coming out about how the Israelis are using AI to generate targets. In that way, you and I are two Lebanese people who had Lebanese parents who are telling us—I don’t want to speak to individual suffering, but the likelihood is that there were less constant attacks on them than there were on parts of the Palestinian camps.

I went to visit a friend of my dad’s recently. My father passed away in August of 2022; he was seventy years old, so not that old. He told me a lot of stories over the years, but after you lose a parent, what you realize is you know all their stories but suddenly they kind of dissipate, and the details get a bit foggy and the dates start to melt together. So I went to talk to one of his old colleagues who was with him at United Press International at the time. Her name is Mona Ziade (her husband, Ed Blanche, was also a journalist; he passed away a few years ago himself). Mona and my dad worked together at the time, and she told me how the first time they hit Hamra was the time they were trying to hit the ministry of information, and at the time the UPI office was in the An-Nahar office.

I don’t know if you know where the office is now, on Hamra main street; before, An-Nahar had a big building in downtown that overlooked the sea and they had a five- or six-story building in Hamra. On the fourth floor was the United Press International office.

Again, the Israelis would strike in hits of four. You’d have these four hits with short spaces in between them. At this time they knew they had to get out and go try to get below ground. My father, in one of these times, had run into his office to grab his cameras, which were quite heavy at the time, and the impact of one of the blasts that was trying to hit the ministry of information, apparently, hit outside the office, or maybe even hit the office itself, and propelled him forward. The rest of the people had run down the stairs, including my mother who was in the office that day. And this hit had propelled him forward and he ended up breaking his leg in two or three places, and still had to continually run up and down the stairs.

What Mona told me is that a day or two later they had to evacuate and get out of west Beirut; they got the order to evacuate. And to get across they had to go through pretty harrowing experiences of crawling across sand dunes at the Galerie Semaan crossing. It’s interesting—my father was wounded two or three times in the war. He was never shot, but there was this shell that led to him breaking his leg through the impact of the fall, and another time he was driving and a shell fell and he ended up driving into a wall and had his front teeth dangling by the nerve. He said that was the most painful experience of his life.

Having lived through those things, and having been wounded—his front two teeth were fake for the rest of his life—he still was able to tell stories of funny things that had happened. I’m not sure if other people will have shared that experience, but it is an interesting thing to think about in terms of your position.

Again, I spoke to a few people who told me there really was a sentiment of hope during that period—of hope, of resistance, of solidarity. And I don’t know if that had anything to do with the international response, but today we’re seeing a lot of despair. We’re seeing a lot of organizers and people coming out and rightfully saying, We cannot give up. I agree with that. I have had my own moments of despair, but we cannot stop fighting. Because what other choice do we have? But we’re seeing a lot of people despairing and saying, Everything we’ve done until now has still not been able to stop this. And with all the awareness, with all the documentation—you mentioned Syria before, Aleppo and other places. Syria is probably the most well-documented war in history. And to still not be able to gather the political will to protect a group of people being eradicated is a terrifying thing.

AM: I agree on the levels of despair and the propensity towards despair, and also the need to resist it. Because despair is a form of defeat. But the reason I wanted you to tell the parrot story, and why I find such a story interesting, is in how those who survived—anyone who survived a war is in some weird way privileged—narrate history and how our parents and generations pass history on.

I was recently reading an essay about a book by a Palestinian writer, Radwa Ashour, called The Woman from Tantoura. In the book, the protagonist is doing a journalism thing and talking to her grandmother who lived through the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and asked her, Tell me about the massacre. And the grandmother says, Leave that page blank. With my parents’ refusal to talk to me about the war, they wanted to protect me. They wanted to raise a generation that was freed from the traumas of it. That’s a futile effort, because the trauma is really ingrained, and permeates the society, because the violence of war continues and perpetuates intergenerationally. By not telling us about it, there was an attempt to save us from despair, or from trauma.

One of the saddest things for my parents is that they couldn’t save us from those types of traumas. There was this feeling: We really tried to protect you, but this is just Lebanon. There is a bit of a denial, or a necessary delusion. The only stories I have ever heard from the war, some of them my grandmother tells me—they’re morbid, but there’s always a bit of humor. There’s an insistence on it. There’s one story my grandmother tells me of heavy shelling in Beirut; they went to the mountains, and the day they got to the mountains, there was heavy shelling there. I think about how history forms these narratives that are intentional: not just the narratives of what happened, necessarily, it’s not just facts. It’s like, how does my grandmother want me to remember her as a person in the war, or remember the war itself?

That’s why I find these stories interesting—not necessarily because they have to be funny, and not necessarily because they’re better for being funny. Good for them for having a sense of humor! But there’s an intent there, there’s an attempt. So much of their agency is stripped by the fact that they are being attacked by warplanes, and you’re defenseless against these warplanes, but you can still have agency over how you recount it, how you narrate it.

JS: Yeah. And it fleshes out that we are more than victims. We are humans with fully fleshed-out lives and identities and communities. I think you’re hitting on something there. We are more than just victims, and people want to show that. There’s been a lot of talk about dehumanization—I’ve said this a few times now to different people: I’m not convinced. I think to be dehumanized, you have to first be seen as human. I’m not sure that people in our region have ever really truly been humanized by the Orientalist gaze or the Western gaze.

A lot of this is also showing that we are more than just victims. We do have agency. That doesn’t mean that you can single-handedly have the power to duck a bomb or dance between them. It just means that we’re more than our pain. We’re also joy. We’re also love. We’re also all these complex emotions. That’s a really important thing.

When you talk about how our parents don’t want to talk about some of the things that happened, that doesn’t change the fact they carry trauma and they pass down trauma. We also know that trauma can skip generations sometimes. There are studies showing that grandparents can pass down trauma to their grandchildren. When you’re talking about this idea of narrative versus facts and everything else, a lot of the issues that we have in Lebanon today can maybe be taken back to the fact that we’ve got these strong emotions.

And these narratives are still very cantonized. Parts of the country may see a certain figure as a savior, and others see them as something else. You mentioned Bachir Gemayel before—there’s still a big poster of him in Sassine Square. A percentage of the population still adores this man. When I spoke to a member of the civil defense forces, and he was telling me about his experiences in Sabra and Shatila—and that was post-siege, so I didn’t get to it in my piece, but I’ve written other pieces since with my colleague Mat Nashed about Sabra and Shatila survivors. But I spoke to this guy named Ziad Kaj, who was a part of the civil defense force in his late teens or early twenties when Sabra and Shatila happened. He told me at the time in west Beirut, people used to whisper Gemayel’s name and call him The Bogeyman.

So much has been hidden from us, and a lot of us are now going back and trying to learn and also unlearn a bunch of things that have happened in the past or things that were told to us in the past. I used to think that what we need are facts, what we need is truth. I don’t think that’s necessarily untrue, but I think going forward, looking into history, it’s also important to take into account people’s traumas and what they lived through. Whatever is factual about the intent of certain groups or political actors, other people will have lived through things that put them in a certain way and make them feel a certain way, and we need to deal with these emotions.

AM: There is a Toni Morrison quote: “The crucial distinction for me is not the distinction between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth.”

Again, it’s not just that our parents didn’t tell us these things because they didn’t want us to feel the trauma, but that they didn’t want us to repeat the same mistakes of their generation. My parents refused to talk about west Beirut and east Beirut. Beirut is still a divided city in many ways, but there’s this We don’t want you to fall into the same cycle of sectarian violence, so we’re not going to tell you anything, because we don’t want to raise another generation that will do another war. That’s how I’ve been thinking about it. They want to protect us.

JS: Everyone has their reasons. For a lot of parents it was to protect their kids in one way or another: You won’t be political. But there are other families that do talk about it. Everyone’s main focus postwar was to protect their kids.

The Morrison quote hits it on the head, because narratives differ from neighborhood to neighborhood, and they are taken as truths. These aren’t facts. There are things you can say with total comfort in some parts of town that you can’t say in another part of town. I don’t want to paint it as stricter than it is, but yeah.

AM: I’ve been thinking a lot about Motaz [Azaiza], the Palestinian journalist, and there’s a thing he wrote when he was photographing in November, the first photographs of “Nakba 2.0,” of mass movements of Palestinians from the north to the south. He’s photographing this historic, horrible, horrendous, godawful thing that’s happening to his people, and he writes, I hate that I’m the one to be documenting this; I hate that I’m taking these photos.

I was thinking about this when you were talking about us being more than just victims. I hear Palestinians say this kind of thing: I don’t want to take a photo of my dead daughter. There was a surgeon who operated on his daughter in the living room without anesthesia, amputating her leg. And they publicized this video. This is a very universal thing, but even more so for Arabs: we have so much pride. You don’t want to show yourself in town with greasy hair, let alone show the world, Look, we’re suffering, we’re miserable. But we need support, we need solidarity, we need action, we need someone to stop this.

So they send out these broadcasts, and they send out these horrific things, but to no avail, or to very little avail.

JS: The other day I was clicking through YouTube videos—I watched this video on the Palestinian dialect. The presenter was going around and asking people something simple like, “What country would you like to travel to?” And it took me a minute, but suddenly I realized the host of the video was Bisan. I don’t know her family name [Owda], but the one name should resonate with a lot of people because of her work on Instagram and other social media outlets. It was this really sharp contrast between the way we see her now—hair pulled back and speaking with great purpose—and that previous time when she was full of life and energy. She didn’t want to be a journalist in this sense.

Motaz used to take photos of beautiful things, of sunsets. If you go far enough back on his Instagram account you see it, the stuff he used to take photographs of. None of these people—there were journalists in Gaza who did this, but these ones in particular, some of the ones who have become the biggest, this was not their intent.

In Beirut—imagine if the top food blogger today became a war correspondent. It’s maddening to think about. At the time of the siege there were international Western media outlets here. There were dozens and dozens of newspapers here. There was access to many things, and we didn’t have the pervasiveness or the democratization of media the way we do today, but many things got covered, and got covered by people who had chosen that line of work. I’m sure there were a number of people who fell into it because it was a job that paid money at the time, but to see this is crazy.

Motaz wrote something on his social media just yesterday (he’s outside of Gaza now): that he can’t sleep, he can’t eat. He’s got this constant horrible feeling within him. This is probably what comes before PTSD, as PTSD takes some time to settle in. My dad, until later in his life, used to sometimes wake up screaming, from things that he’d seen while covering war. The intensity of what’s been happening in Gaza is so much. I forget which UN agency said that every child in Gaza today is experiencing extreme trauma.

And the thing is, you can’t treat trauma until it’s past, until the action is over. So we’re in this period where the way that our parents lived and inhaled trauma—it’s a generational thing. It passes on and passes on. It’s a great privilege to be born and raised without having that in your blood. But I want to leave people with this idea: imagine your favorite influencer, your favorite blogger, your favorite media personality, who’s not a war reporter, who’s not a journalist by trade, is forced into this kind of documentation.

AM: And incredibly young.

JS: Yeah. They’re all in their early twenties. I think Motaz is twenty-four. Plestia [Alaqad] was twenty-one, twenty-two. Not to mention what somebody like Wael Al-Dahdouh, who is a journalist, and a lion of a journalist, has gone through: losing his mother, losing his children, losing a grandchild, losing his wife.

I’m really not one of these people who is like, You take a hit and then you keep going, you persevere. Perseverance is great, but people should also recognize when there’s time to take off. And when you’re in such a situation, I’m not sure what else you can do. In the continuing attempt to eradicate your people, what else can you do but carry on? Any journalism award that doesn’t go to the journalists of Gaza this year is a joke, as far as I’m concerned.

AM: It’s true. It’s impossible to talk about mental health in such conditions and situations. And they themselves have spoken a lot about this. People ask Plestia, people ask Bisan and Motaz: How are you doing mentally? And it’s the most absurd question for them, like, What are you talking about? I have no mental health. It’s gone.

The only time you can ever potentially even consider it is once you’re out of an immediate war or genocide situation. But even then, it’s still really painful. It’s incredibly painful.

JS: I want to say one thing here, which is: imagine the pain to have thoroughly documented the things that are happening to you. It’s beyond a doubt now (to the point that international legal bodies are taking action) that this is something that can be stopped that we allow to continue to happen, as an international community. So you’ve done everything—you’ve debased yourself by showing your most intimate, personal moments, your community’s lowest moments: women screaming, men crying, charred bodies, limbs everywhere, destruction. The worst and the best of humanity side by side. And you’ve done all this for months on end, and it’s not enough to stop it.

My question is, how do you come back from that? How do you build up enough faith in humanity to carry on and carry forward? This is going to be the biggest challenge we have, as people who believe in humanity, moving forward.

AM: I recently read an essay by Edward Said from the late seventies, entitled “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims.” Already then, he’s describing how the sheer violence, the brutality, the cruelty of Zionism makes it such that it’s continuously closing any avenues for empathy, for anything other than monstrosity.

JS: And this will continue, too, right? Franz Fanon has written how the colonizer as well as the colonized suffers from such dynamics. Albert Memmi has written about this as well. You can’t compare the suffering of people here, but it will have an impact on the occupier’s society—particularly the people who are on the ground actively committing the violence, but across the society as well. We’ve seen that in years when Israeli society gets pushed more to the right. We’re seeing that now as cross sections of different political leanings block aid trucks into Gaza.

This violence is going to be repeated, and it’s going to continue. Again, we lived it in ’82 and people have lived it since, and we’re living it again today, and it’s a very heavy prospect.

AM: Indeed. The hardest thing to do these days with these conversations is to sum it up in some way that’s positive or actionable, or so there’s some conclusion. But there is no conclusion. We have no idea what is going to happen today or tomorrow, and what the effects of all these things are. Especially since we’re not talking about something new—it’s a new level, it’s a new escalation, but it’s the Nakba 2.0, as many are saying. For many Palestinians it’s the seventh or eighth Nakba.

But the violence in the region as a whole, and the Zionist colonization—it’s a hundred-year process. 1885 was the first Zionist settlement. We’re talking about 1982, which, sure, is forty-one years ago. But it’s the same entities. Like you said, when we talk about Hezbollah now, they are a product of the 1982 Israeli invasion, which also—they’d invaded in ’78 as well, just didn’t go as far as Beirut. There had already been skirmishes even before. All these histories are very much still happening. It’s not just context, it’s not just justification or narrative, stories. It is something that is still lived.

Again, that’s why I think watching some of these documentaries—we’re recording this episode on February 16; on February 18 I’m screening a film, Children of Shatila, from 1998. It’s still very familiar, but also really shows that this is a very long process, and that these tactics and this violence has a very long history. It builds up.

I have no idea what the future holds for Palestinians, for our region.

JS: We think that history is “the things that happened before,” and people often say that we learn history so that we don’t repeat it. But we need to understand that history is not just what happened before; it’s why things are the way they are today. Like you mentioned, there have been multiple steps within the Nakba, but it’s one continuous process. It’s one continuous act that’s now being further pushed on today.

If there’s anything that can give us hope, it’s that our grandparents saw a free Palestine. Our grandparents saw a region where you could take trains or buses between different stops in the region. You could take a bus from Beirut all the way down to Cairo and then into north Africa, or you could take it into the Gulf. Today we’re at one of the worst points: if you’re in Lebanon, you’re essentially landlocked, unless you’re someone who can travel through Syria (a lot of people can’t, and wouldn’t). My hope is that while just over a hundred years ago you could do those things, maybe in a hundred years the world can be radically changed again. It’s not always super hopeful or moving in the best of directions, but the world can radically reshape.

While we’ve been moving in a bad direction, our individual actions, if channeled well and connected with others, can enact important changes. So I guess my hope would be that although maybe I won’t get to see it in my lifetime, the generation of our children or our children’s children will be able to have that liberty and dignity, and be able to experience that.

AM: Thank you for that. I wouldn’t have been able to formulate as powerful a conclusion for this episode. There’s a nice sentiment in the fact that if you look further back into history, that the future opens up new possibilities.

I didn’t ask you about three books beforehand, but if you have anything that you’re reading or that you want to plug, now would be the time.

JS: The last sentiment comes from Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s book You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, which was a series of letters he wrote from prison. It’s crucial to anybody who is trying to maintain hope and have a wider view of the struggle. He’s a very pertinent thinker; his different moments in jail, and coming out of jail, and experiencing the world with fresh eyes, are very useful. But it’s also a radical means of hope.

What other books could I give? There’s always Kamal Salibi’s House of Many Mansions. For me it’s probably the best history book written about Lebanon, particularly in that it addresses this question of fact versus truth which you so eloquently pulled from Toni Morrison. It discusses different narratives over time, fact-checks them, but also shows how myths become important—they become someone’s truth. That’s a good one for the context of Lebanon.

I also recently read Tareq Baconi’s book on Hamas, and that’s a great academic read for anyone who wants to know about the history of how Hamas has chosen to act, why they’ve chosen to do what they’ve done. The book was published a few years ago now, but it goes from their genesis all the way up until recent years, and looks at their decisions through their own explanations. He thoroughly researched different newspapers and articles written by Hamas journalists.

These are things that have shaped my knowledge of the region and shaped my thinking towards this particular subject. I also always like to throw in some fiction; in that case I might say something like Naji Bakhti’s Between Beirut and the Moon, or Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, or Beirut Hellfire Society is another good one. All of these show different stages and different times. Rawi Hage deals more with the civil war, while Naji’s book is more contemporary, I’d say late aughts to early 2010s, going up through the start of the Syrian civil war. But fiction often tells us things that nonfiction or history cannot. And I think it’s important to see the range and the humanity of a people.

I hosted an episode a little while ago, and Karim Safieddine recommended Fawwaz Traboulsi’s latest book. I picked that up and I’m working my way through it.

AM: Nice. I remember that suggestion. These are a lot of things that are on my now-very-long shortlist.

JS: Get to it!

AM: Thanks so much for this Justin, I thought this was a wonderful conversation, if a bit difficult at times.

JS: Thanks, Ayman. Thanks for the opportunity and for sticking to this.