For episode 177, Leila is joined by Serge from Buzuruna Juzuruna, an agro-ecological farm and heirloom seed producer in the Bekka Valley working on food autonomy, and Abir from Hostel Beirut, a worker owned cooperative in the heart of the Lebanese capital committed to social and economic justice for all. We talk about the current situation in Lebanon following the Israeli invasion, the mutual aid initiatives both guests are involved in during the current crisis, and what international solidarity looks like in their context.
Episode links:
Lebanon Solidarity Collective/Buzuruna Juzuruna fundraiser (in French)
Mutual Aid Lebanon (From the Periphery)
Credits:
Host(s): Leila Al Shami | Music: Rap and Revenge | TFTT theme design: Wenyi Geng | FTP theme design: Hisham Rifai | Sound editor: Elliott Miskovicz | Team profile pics: Molly Crabapple | Episode design: Elia Ayoub
From The Periphery is built by Elia Ayoub, Leila Al-Shami, Ayman Makarem, Dana El Kurd, Karena Avedissian, Daniel Voskoboynik, Anna M, Aydın Yıldız, Ed S, Alice Bonfatti, israa abd elfattah, with more joining soon!
The Fire These Times by Elia Ayoub is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
In this country we’re always obligated to do the government’s work, because the government is busy robbing us. We’ve been doing this for so many years and it’s not our job. So we are disgusted at having to do it all over again, but at the same time now we have experience; we are quick; we know how to talk to each other; we are all connected; everyone knows everyone.
Leila Al Shami: Hello everyone and welcome to The Fire These Times podcast. I’m your host, Leila, and with me I have two guests from Lebanon, Abir and Serge. Today we want to talk a bit about the situation in Lebanon, given the conflict there, and also to highlight some of the amazing solidarity initiatives that they’re involved in, because I’m sure many of our listeners will be wanting to know how they can support in the current situation.
I’ll hand over to you guys to introduce yourselves.
Abir: Hi, I’m Abir. I started the Hostel Beirut project with a friend; we currently manage the Hostel as a worker cooperative, that we also run as a collective space. Thank you for hosting us.
Serge: My name is Serge; I am from the north of Lebanon, currently moving around between the north and Beirut, and a lot less in the Bekaa, where I usually live. The project we work on is a farm, so I’m kind of a farmer—let’s say twenty percent farmer and eighty percent admin stuff, networking and all of that.
The struggle we carry is the food sovereignty struggle; what we do is mostly reproducing heirloom peasant seeds, and fighting the man.
LS: Thank you. I’ve actually grown some of your seeds in Scotland! They worked—not everything, but some things worked very well.
There’s been a big escalation in Lebanon; there’s been bombing in the south since the war in Gaza started, but in the past couple months it really escalated. Could you tell us a bit about what the current situation is like there now?
S: I can say a few words about that. The whole south is unliveable now. What we call the “south” is the area that starts after the Litani River. I’m not sure of the numbers, but that’s probably one-eighth of the Lebanese surface, or one-ninth of it. Most people living there have moved because of the bombings, and the Israeli occupation forces are pushing more and more, so it’s getting more and more violent. The areas that were supposed to be “safe” are not safe anymore, which means a bit more than just the borderline. The villages on the borderline were known not to be safe from the beginning of the new hostilities, the new season, the September season.
This is the situation in the south; there’s probably a million people displaced now between the Bekaa and the south. The northern Bekaa is almost emptied out. Everyone from Baalbek and the region have fled farther up north—Akkar, Tripoli—or down to the center of the Beqaa, where our farm is, in Saadnayel. A big part of this population has been crammed up into smaller surfaces.
Then there is the southern suburbs of Beirut, which have been pounded for a while now. There is very a big destruction rate. I don’t have the numbers, but visually you can already see it’s a huge devastation; whole neighborhoods, whole blocks have been destroyed.
Right now the “safe” areas are maybe half of the country—so the other half is impaticable, unreachable. Every time there’s new targets; now we are out of the principle they were pretending to follow, which was to attack “Hezbollah strongholds,” so there’s a lot more civilian casualties. There’s also casualties from the Lebanese army, and from the UNIFIL blue helmets. It’s mayhem.
At the same time, because of the inherent schizophrenia of the region, there are all the areas that are safe, where life goes on, with this very weird stomach-feeling that everything is bad, but you do not see it directly. This is, very quickly, how things are from our perspective.
LS: Dahiyeh has been having some of the worst attacks. For those who don’t know Beirut: it’s a very densely populated area; it comprises a number of municipalities and informal settlements, and also two major Palestinian refugee camps—Bourj al-Barajneh and Shatila. It’s a very densely populated area that’s being targeted, and the bombing is quite indiscriminate.
What’s the feeling in Beirut, Abir?
A: I wanted to add something, a tiny, important thing: they’re also head-hunting, like what happened yesterday. Important people (and not-important people) in Hezbollah are being head-hunted. Usually there is a bit of, Okay, we know this area is being targeted, but they are also targeting other areas in Beirut. Yesterday Mar Elias was targeted, and also Ras el-Nabaa; Kola before. They follow cars and kill them in areas that are supposed to be “safe.” Usually we’re used to hearing that they’re bombing Dahiyeh, but they’re also bombing other places.
I thought it was also important to say this, because it led to a place where even I, to be honest, sometimes feel scared of going out of the Christian area. They are actively doing this, which also led to people now not accepting displaced people—and not only because of their nationality. There are criteria like if you’re Syrian or Palestinian, it’s very hard to find shelter, but also if you’re Shi’a: in our area they don’t allow (or there’s a lot of questioning if they’re going to allow) Shi’a people to rent houses, because they’re scared of being bombed.
LS: Where are those people going, then?
A: Schools did open, but it was not enough. There are people who rented houses, and Lebanese people took advantage of the situation and raised the rent quite a lot: a house that used to be $250 is now $1,000, and they ask you for six months in advance. There were a lot of people on the streets, but they’re also being forced out of the streets. It’s a very chaotic thing to watch.
For me personally the shock was—we know what Israel is, and has been for years, especially since the start of the genocide, so we expected Israel to do this. But we did not expect what Lebanese people will do to each other. Personally for me, this was the really heartbreaking part. I expected Israel to bomb here and there; I did not expect Lebanese people to be so selective.
LS: We really see that sectarian divide, even in terms of who is getting assistance and who isn’t. Some communities have been very much impacted; there are so many Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and even in this situation they’ve been targeted and are facing racial discrimination, not being allowed into shelters.
And in fact, many of them have returned to Syria, and they’re taking a very dangerous route to get into the north of Syria to avoid Assad-controlled areas, because we know that many people who went back to Syria from Lebanon during the current conflict have already been arrested and detained. They’re in a very dangerous situation: not safe in Lebanon, and certainly not safe in Syria.
Another community that’s been badly affected has been domestic workers. We saw at the start of the conflict that many people who have domestic workers in their home just left them to fend for themselves; they fled, and there were people from African communities just gathering on the beach not knowing where to go.
Could you tell us a bit about what’s happening with that community?
A: From what I know, there was a state of panic, but now almost two month into it, things have been a bit more organized. In the beginning, because of the overwhelming numbers, assistance took some time, but from what I know, now there are a lot of shelters running for migrant workers. Certain NGOs, but also individuals, are making sure they are getting help—maybe not according to international standards of what it should be, but trying as much as possible to provide.
Serge, maybe you want to add something.
S: Yes, it’s been more of the self-managing thing. What has worked, especially for the Sudanese and Bangladeshi communities I’ve met with, was that they were able to organize within their community and then connect. Because we have contacts (we are connected through workers and so on), we were able to have a kind of grassroots reaction to the problem.
However, the problem was so intense at first that you don’t know what to do where. Everything is happening at the same time. People are leaving; everyone is on the road; there are huge traffic jams. At the same time, workers who live in other people’s homes find themselves in a double problem, because they depend, through the problematic Kafala slavery system, on those people whose houses they live in, and they depend also on help. They’re blocked on two sides.
So organizing was complicated, but when it started with all the self-organizing groups, the reaction of the grassroots movements all over the country was pretty effective. We were able to have canteens very quickly; we were able to have shelter very quickly. But the shelters were something that ran out quite fast as well.
All of this is to say that there was a grassroots movement taking care of whatever they could, but at the same time we are still in this system where there are first-class and second-class citizens. Even within a displaced community from one religion, there’s also the class system that divides. I see it up here in the north, where we have at least double the population that usually lives between Tripoli, Zgharta, and Koura, and it’s very obvious that poor people were sent to schools and sheltering zones with very low everything, from electricity to water, and then those who can afford it rented houses in Ehden and they’re good.
It’s all of this at the same time. In all of this, you take the situation of a migrant worker whose passport is being held by their former employers (I don’t think anyone is working anymore) so there is one more layer to the situation—but, to be kind of unhealthily optimistic, the ground reaction was there. It kind of reminded me, very briefly and weirdly, of the revolution, when people actually did stuff together for something more than just their small little persons. Of course it’s a completely different context and situation.
LS: Are many of these groups that are self-organizing now, groups that grew up out of the recent uprising in Lebanon?
S: Yeah. Most of the people we’ve been in contact with are people we were already in contact with since the revolution. It’s mostly the same groups—those who remain. Maybe ninety percent of the people have already left since 2019, but those who remain have good reflexes.
In this country we’re always obligated to do the government’s work, because the government is busy robbing us. Now it’s the complete prise de conscience [awareness] that we’ve been doing this for so many years and it’s not our job, unless we are the government. So it is being completely disgusted at having to do it all over again, but at the same time now we have experience; we are quick; we know how to talk to each other; we are all connected; everyone knows everyone. We have this network of trust that is deep and pretty solid.
Again, I’m an optimist, so I would say it’s all wonderful. It’s not, but you know.
LS: It’s great that those initiatives are happening, and I suppose the situation in Lebanon even before the conflict was extremely dire because of the economic situation—and the port explosion had such an impact.
Has the government’s ability to respond been much weaker in this situation than it was in, say, 2006 when Israel invaded? Do you see a difference, or a difference in how people are self-organizing, given the experience of the revolution?
S: For me, there’s a huge difference in almost everything. The scale of the attacks and the bombings are—I’ve never seen anything like that. In 2006, I was in Beirut for the first two weeks and then went up north; the bombings were different, the weapons used were different. Now we see something that is of a completely different scale. There are bombings all around the farm, all around—maybe six to eight kilometers away. We hear them as if they were here. The buildings tremble. So the scale of the violence is very different.
The situation of the government is very different, because it’s—I don’t know how to call it; they’re not supposed to take care of everything, they just have to do the daily work, and they cannot even do that. We’ve seen mobilization in most of the public schools, but then again there is the problem that if the public schools have refugees, how do kids go to school? There’s this whole thing where kids are learning online in a country where the internet is shit because the government did not do any effort and has stolen the fiber-optic links.
The failed state is a hundred times more obvious than in 2006. There were still institutions back then. Honestly it was completely different.
A: Also this is following the economic crisis. This is following five years of utter disasters—and then this at the end! So they were for sure not prepared at all. So many things have happened that we forgot the pagers and the walkie-talkies. This attack was actually to target people in Hezbollah who usually are responsible for taking care of civil services; medics. This was just before the expansion of the war; this happened right at the beginning and then there was the expansion, which was a tactical move. Because now Hezbollah doesn’t have the power or the means to help on the ground. Maybe they still do, but nothing compared to 2006.
I recently found out that the government still didn’t declare a state of emergency, which is outrageous. This is why students in private schools still get to go to private schools, whereas students in public schools don’t have the privilege—which is absurd to say in a country where we’re not even on the same page of saying that this is a state of emergency! They’re bombing half the country, but this is still not a state of emergency? I don’t know what is, for them. They’re really not prepared at all.
LS: Like you say, with the pager attacks they took out many medics, but we’ve also seen this specifically as a tactic by Israel, to target medical and rescue workers, hospitals—and also journalists of course. Because Israel doesn’t want witnesses to its crimes, and wants to ensure that the Israeli narrative is dominant. We’ve seen that tactic very much in Gaza, and now we’re seeing it in Lebanon.
So tell us a bit about some of the activities that you’re involved in, how you’re organizing now.
A: Just now, as we are speaking, they just hit another region that is five minutes away from here. It is just absurd, the whole thing! Me being on the phone now and this is happening—life is just absurd.
For me personally, and also for us in the Hostel—we fulfill our duty. I mean it from the heart. I speak for myself and all the communities around that we do whatever, wherever we can fill in. Specifically for us in the Hostel, we collaborated with different groups on different things.
We try not to publicize it, because of where we are; we’re really next to the fascists, a few seconds away from each other. It’s a nice picture: you see them with their flags and their people, and they’re always looking at the streets, controlling—and then you see us and the Hostel, full of colors and stuff. It’s a nice image, actually, but we try as much as possible not to disseminate more information.
Mainly we collaborated with a group of friends that became an independent group—that also transformed with time, but the main purpose was to work with people who would not benefit from the help of NGOs. The NGOs don’t want to help Syrians, most of them; don’t want to help the LGBTQ community and the migrants. We mainly focused on this (but I would like to be clear that it’s not the Hostel leading on this; we are collaborating with different groups); this is what we mainly do. In-kind donations, medications, food—we redistribute food. That’s what we’re doing at the moment.
LS: And you have a fundraising initiative for this, and people can support what you’re doing there.
Serge, what do your activities look like now? Has work stopped on the farm? How are you organizing?
S: Work has not stopped; it is still and always a priority to produce food. So regardless of everything, we planted the two hectares of the farm, and we’re working the land of the other twenty-five hectares we will be able to plant this year. We’re still doing this, and it’s more important than ever.
We are also able to distribute dry food from our stocks, from the summer’s harvest, and we can only do that because we have summer harvest, which means we were prepared last year. The point of it was to have seeds and food for everyone, and yeah, it turns out, in some way or another, intuitively we knew at some point this was going to be needed.
So we distribute three or four hundred kilos of dry food weekly. It’s mostly local stuff from the culture’s cuisine; lentils, fava beans, and hummus and all of that. We’re working directly with canteens; there’s a few: some in Beirut, some in Tripoli, some in Zgharta, some in Baalbek as well. The one from Baalbek, we lost contact last week, so we don’t know right now what the situation is.
But we’re also working with the local movements to be as helpful as possible. Sometimes if there is no canteens, we organize with other people—donors, people who want to help—to set up kitchens. When there’s villages that were cut off, we were able to get them the basics, the essentials, so they can at least cook three meals a day. That’s mostly it.
Mostly we need to produce food, so we’re doing that. And we need to deliver, so we’re doing that. Most of the admin team is in France right now; there’s the farm team that is still on the farm; and me, I’m between Tripoli, Beirut, and Saadnayel, and so on.
LS: I recently met some of your friends in France, and they’ve gotten stuck there, unfortunately—I saw them more recently than you! Also, we’ve been working together over the past couple of years trying to create a network called The Peoples Want.
For people who don’t know, it’s a transnational network that’s trying to promote internationalism from below, and mutual aid and solidarity—and our first big action is to support you guys and other friends in Lebanon. Do you know a bit about what’s being planned for that, Serge? I know you’ve been involved in those discussions.
S: We’ve been talking about it; we were supposed to talk with Abir the other day, but then I got taken by life (and you I suppose also, Abir)—it’s very complicated to see each other these days. But the idea is to have one day or one week of solidarity all around the globe. So everyone who is involved in one way or another with The Peoples Want network would set up an event—a movie screening, a protest, whatever they want or can do—and link it to the main problematic at hand, which is the genocide in Palestine and the destruction in Lebanon.
Mostly the destruction in Lebanon right now, because—it’s a very sad thing to say, but it’s more of an actuality right now. It’s still buzzing a little bit; it’s terrifying even to speak these words.
Anyway, the idea is to have events all over the globe, and maybe some crowdfundings; a lot of advocacy, a lot of information so that the world actually understands what is really happening to normal people in the West Asia region. Basically that’s it; if you’re somewhere in a country where you will not be shot for protesting, I say go ahead and do it. Raise a flag or two, at least.
LS: And we have actions taking place in December; I know there’s events planned for Mexico, Santiago, a number of places in France, Berlin, and Beirut already.It will be nice to see those joint actions and a bit more focus on Lebanon, because Lebanon hasn’t got the kind of focus that Palestine’s received.
What are your feelings about that?
S: It’s still fresh: Palestine is being murdered for the past eighty years now—us, it’s only sixty-two, sixty-three years.
I’m sorry, I need to make dark jokes about this! It’s a completely absurd situation.
A: Problematic, Serge!
LS: I remember when this escalation started in September and I reached out to you, Abir, to see how you’re coping with the situation, you said something to me that really hit me. You said, Leila, we’ve seen this already with Syria, with Palestine, and there’s nothing special about us. I just feel that it’s our turn now.
This really hit me, because I sometimes think our failure to really stop the genocide that was happening in Syria (or in other countries: the failure of people to really raise their voice about the genocide of Rohingya) has emboldened states to act with impunity. We’ve seen the Assad regime has carried out such horrific human rights violations and war crimes, and there was not a big response from the left.
To what extent do you feel that that weakness has impacted the fact that Israel feels emboldened to act with impunity now?
A: And I remember—let’s not mention everything that happened in the last seventy-five years, but also I remember the first time they hit a hospital in Gaza, it was outrageous. But the world accepted it. And then, looking at it now, for the last year, they’ve raised the level of how much we accept violence.
Also, if you see how people—like what you see on TV. I don’t really watch interviews, I don’t really watch anything anymore, but I saw a clip of someone who told an interviewer on TV: I hope your beeper doesn’t go off. And this was normal! Just because you don’t agree with a person, khalas! There’s no limit anymore to violence, even among people.
And just a reminder, before the start of the genocide, there was a rise in very racist and fascist groups against Syrians. I remember, on the night of Eid al-Fitr, they (we don’t know who) threw a molotov at a Syrian family’s house across from the Hostel. It was a very sad, brutal moment, to look at all of this and see to which level humanity has degraded. For us, in our culture before, we used to celebrate each other’s holidays. Even if you want to attack, you would never do it on Eid. This is the big Muslim holiday!
And to see that a family was attacked on Eid, when all the kids are all dressed up and excited to have their little fireworks—it’s just a small testament of how much we don’t care. The violence has exceeded all levels, honestly, and I feel like they’ve set the bar so high, and it’s going to keep getting higher and higher.
LS: That’s really my fear too. I feel that we’re entering a period where such extreme levels of state violence against civilians has been completely normalized, and there isn’t the outrage now, like you say, when hospitals are being bombed, when journalists are being targeted.
When it was the pager attack, that was my first thought: Oh my god, they found another way that states can just get rid of undesirable populations. And there wasn’t mass outrage—people were remarking on it as though this were some James Bond kind of moment. It was celebrated! It’s horrific.
A: And the pager attack was as big, in terms of casualties, as the Beirut explosion. This was so big. And then to see that some people celebrated this just because they are from the opposite political party is just so sad. No words. I am beyond heartbroken at the level of humanity.
And this is international. Also the rise of Islamophobia—what happened in London maybe two months ago, when there were the attacks on anyone who they suspected looks like a Muslim. I feel they’ve set the bar quite high.
LS: Yes, we saw in Britain quite extreme levels of violence, and racist mobs on the street, and they were attacking mosques; they were attacking Muslims—and they actually set fire to hotels where refugees were inside.
A: This is all linked. I don’t think you can just look at what is happening in Lebanon; all of it is just one big link. When you accept the pager attack, when you accept bombing a hospital, when you accept killing paramedics, you will accept people being followed to a hotel just because they look Muslim. It’s all one big link, I feel.
LS: In terms of solidarity, what do you think are the best ways that people outside Lebanon can support at the moment? What are the priorities?
S: There’s two things—and I want to link it to what you just said, Abir, which is extremely important. We are getting to a point—Leila, you said it also—where the dehumanization is crazy. Fascists are only able to do this because they do not consider us human. So maybe the first thing people can do outside of Lebanon is remind others that there are humans here, just like them, who are in this dark situation. Talk about it as much as possible, be as vocal as possible, be as insolent as possible.
Honestly this is the century; it’s being decided right now what it’s going to look like, this epoch of monsters—and you see them! The monsters are in charge, are in control, from Netanyahu to Trump to Putin to Bashar, to cuter monsters, like the French guy, Macron.
You see what I mean? It’s a phase—I have this feeling that everywhere, those who are using violence and those who are allowed to continue being in charge—even if they’re a fucking minority in reality!—the peoples can actually, literally, eat them.
But to go back to what can be done, for me it’s two things: be vocal as much as possible, and insolent, and don’t be afraid of talking about it, because it’s reality. Genocide is a reality. Occupation is a reality. It isn’t an opinion of what is real, it is what we are living every day. Destruction and murder and killing is a fucking reality. We are under it now, so there shouldn’t be any fear of being called an antisemite if you are saying that Israel is doing a genocide. We need to get over this, we need to have the narrative right to show that the truth is actually real.
That’s one, and the other one is: send money!
A: Also something you can do is be radical. We cannot afford not to be radical anymore. I always say this: if you’re a dancer, if you’re a clown, if you’re a farmer, whatever you are, we need to be radical in our politics and keep our voices heard, however you want.
S: And remember the “Never Again” idea. This is what especially drives me crazy in the European mainstream and even the left: why does “Never Again” apply in specific places, but it doesn’t apply to us?
LS: It’s “Never Again” to certain populations, but never to humanity as a whole.
S: How come?
If you want to help out people dying in Palestine, just figure out where they stand from this.
LS: Before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to talk about or share with us?
S: Maybe just to remind ourselves and everyone who’s listening that there is love. There is rage, but there is love. Love and rage is here, let’s use it in one way or another.
LS: I’m so grateful to both of you for joining us today; I know you’re living a nightmare situation and have so many demands on your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to come and talk to us. Thank you so much.
A & S: Thank you for having us.
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