Lebanon Haunts the World (Monologue)

For episode 214, I talk about how Israel’s war on Lebanon will haunt our world, and why Israeli impunity is creating monstrous realities that can engulf us all.

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Transcription: You can help ⁠Antidote Zine⁠ transcribe TFTT episodes here.

Credits:

Elia Ayoub (host, producer, episode design), Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design), ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics) and Antidote Zine⁠ (Transcriptions).

Note on sound quality: The monologues are done while I pace around which is why you might hear some audio changes, but hopefully pretty minor stuff.

Transcript prepared by rosa and Antidote Zine:

These ghosts are now being multiplied. All of the people being killed, all of the people who witnessed their loved ones being killed, all of the people who are traumatized for life: all of these people are now hauntings to this world order.

Elia J. Ayoub: Hey everyone, Elia here, and you’re listening to another episode of The Fire These Times. This will be yet another monologue because I feel like the situation requires it.

I’m about to start teaching a class on modern Lebanese history and politics, in less than two hours from when I’m recording this. I was rereading the syllabus, and I realized there are a couple of sentences that require updating, directly related to what I wanted to talk to you about today, so I’m going to read them. This is from a description of today’s class:

“The Lebanese wars, usually referred to as the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990, officially ended in 1990—but the Israeli occupation of Lebanon continued until 2000. The two decades in between included a full-blown war, in 2006, and multiple escalations along the southern border, until the most devastating war so far would start again in 2024, with good reasons to believe it will continue into the future.”

That’s the first sentence. In the second one I ask: “How does this relate to the international status quo vis-a-vis Israel, which continues to this day despite their genocide in Gaza?” The second one doesn’t need correction—it’s being answered by the Israelis themselves.

The first one is what you might call a “haunting.” I started my doctorate in the field of cultural analysis in 2017, focusing on a thing called hauntology. Those who have done philosophy or critical theory, or some other fields, may have heard of it. You would hear the name Jacques Derrida, or, in different fields, you might hear of Mark Fisher and capitalist realism. All of this is hauntology. Derrida was the founder; Mark Fisher, another noted theorist. I used a Lebanese artist called Jalal Toufic, who wrote a lot about it in the context of the arts and cinema, like the undead and other figures in “post-war” Lebanese cinema.

In my PhD, I ended up focusing on these films, and went through dozens and dozens of movies, all Lebanese films produced since 1990 until roughly 2020/21. Initially I wasn’t looking for it actively, but I noticed an obvious pattern of the undead, of hauntings, of the past still being with us, of the past being incomplete somehow and as a result, the present is haunted.

Hauntings and hauntology is interesting because it’s intuitive, in the sense that anyone who asks me what it is, I can almost always find an example that speaks to their own experience directly, their own culture and individual experience. If I don’t know the details of where they come from, there will still be popular reference points like movies, TV series, and books—American or Western films that a lot of people are familiar with because of Hollywood and so on. There’s a reason there are stories of ‘Indian’ burial sites, burial sites of Native Americans in the Americas, and there aren’t those same stories of hauntings in, for example, Italy. There are different types of figures in different cultures, even today with [global] cultures merging into one another.

My entire life, because I was born in ‘91, “post-war” Lebanon has had this wave of cultural productions. I focused on movies, books, plays, art installations, anything you can think of that’s creative in any way. It was almost impossible to avoid the war—”al-harb,” as we would call it in Lebanon, or maybe “al-ahdath,” which is “the events” (talk about a euphemism there!). Because there was this sense, pretty accurately, that they weren’t really gone, they were always around the corner. In the class I will do a separate monologue exploring these specific concepts more in depth. They’re not as relevant right now, but in the class I explore things like wartime and anticipation of violence.

We have lived in Lebanon as people waiting for something bad to happen, because something bad tended to happen every now and then—you couldn’t trust the peace; it was too fragile. You can feel it in the air, that’s the best way I can explain it. There’s a local dynamic to this: the Lebanese have killed one another for so long, and there was no truth and reconciliation committee like there was in South Africa after the fall of Apartheid, or Chile, or Columbia and other examples (which isn’t to say that these have all been perfect mechanisms). But the absence of them, as Lebanon can testify, is much worse than anything that’s incomplete or not good or even problematic.

Lebanon had no truth and reconciliation committee after 1990. In fact, there was just an amnesty law, in which, as it sounds like, any crime committed before 1990 was forgiven—unless it was committed against a political or religious figure. Which already tells you the hierarchy of life, of who is valued and who isn’t. For example, Samir Geagea, one of the leaders of the Lebanese Forces today: the reason he was imprisoned in the nineties is that exception. He did kill a political figure.

The haunting is there; it can be an entirely intra-Lebanese haunting without any external component to it, without foreigners; it’s just purely between the Lebanese. But that’s not sufficient. That’s part of the story, but it’s not the entire story: the Lebanese civil war (I call them the Lebanese wars or the Lebanon wars, but I’ll say “the civil war” or “the war” right now) had an external component. It wasn’t just Lebanese against Lebanese. There were Palestinian factions allied with one side against the other. There was the Syrian regime at the time—Hafez al-Assad invaded in 1976. And, of course, the Israeli invasion of 1982.

The Syrian one is relevant today. The Assad regime collapsed at the end of 2024, and the people who took over are also problematic, but they broke that link, at least for now. I can’t speak of future politics and tensions that may or may not arise, but as far as we can tell for now, there’s a distinct break in terms of the Syrian state’s foreign policy when it comes to Lebanon. Clearly it is not the same as it was under the Assad regime (father and then son).

The Israeli one, however—I’m recording this on 14 March 2026, and the Israelis are actively planning for a full scale invasion of southern Lebanon. They’ve been bombing bridges above the Litani River, which is one of the borders between south Lebanon and the rest of Lebanon. They’ve been planning, as they’ve done in Gaza—basically the same playbook. They’ve been spreading rumours and suspicions in anticipation of what they want to do.

The way the Israelis usually do it is they say, for example, We have reasons to believe that they (Hamas at the time, and now Hezbollah) are using ambulances as part of their terrorist activities! There is no evidence of this, there’s never been any evidence of this, but that doesn’t matter, because then they say, This is our right, under international law, to take action against them. Then they’re not the ones violating international law by bombing ambulances; they’re not the ones violating international law by bombing UNIFIL positions (the peacekeeping forces sent by the United Nations with the approval of the entire human race, with the exception of the Israelis).

It’s not us. We’re not violating international law by doing this. We’re doing this because they’re being co-opted by those terrorist groups that want to destroy us. And therefore we have no choice but to bomb a kindergarten. We have no choice but to eradicate entire bloodlines, bombing entire families, reducing their entire homes to rubble and their own bodies to dust. We have no choice. We’re doing this because we’re being attacked. And of course we have the right to defend ourselves. Are you saying that we don’t have the right to exist? It’s blood libel!

Yesterday, or two days ago, the Israeli court, or whatever is left of their justice system, decided that those soldiers who raped a Palestinian prisoner in that infamous prison, and who were filmed doing so, did not commit a crime. They can’t be prosecuted. That’s one version of the story, and you can say, Well, that’s obviously corrupt and it speaks to the obvious lack of accountability in Israel—and you would be right.

But what also happened in addition to that makes it even worse: when there was the case in the first place, a bunch of Israelis, including members of the Knesset, tried to break into the prison where that Israeli soldier was being held. There was fundraising for those soldiers. And in the end, the government’s argument against prosecuting those soldiers, those rapists, is that it would be blood libel.

That’s the argument that the Israeli government made against the prosecution of the soldiers who raped a Palestinian prisoner. It is effectively legal now in Israel to rape prisoners. They’ve been doing this for a long time, but now you even have it in writing. So it’s just going to happen again—it’s been happening since. It’s just going to continue happening and there’s going to be no repercussions for these people.

Israeli political culture is genocidal. Israeli political culture is fascistic.

Are there voices of dissent here and there? Of course. I’ve had them on The Fire These Times. They will tell you, as they did on the podcast, and as they do when they write for, for example, +972 Mag: they are a very small percentage of Israeli society. A majority of Israeli Jews today support the Israeli war on Iran, for example. A majority of Israeli Jews today, to this day, after two-plus years, support what they would call “the war on Gaza,” which is the genocide on Gaza.

I just saw an article headlined (I’m not even kidding you): “For a nineteen-year-old, killing twenty people a day is not normal.” This is the headline. The subtitle says: “Children no longer want to live. Soldiers are tormented by their experiences. Three wars within three years are plunging Israeli society into a state of psychological emergency.” The category under which this [article] is published is “Trauma in Israel.”

For a nineteen-year-old, killing twenty people a day is not normal! I mean, I tend to agree. You can reasonably say that there are more nineteen-year-olds today in Israel who have killed hundreds of people than there are, say, kindergarten teachers. You can make a good argument that the numbers are close—closer than they should ever be in any society. But this is the type of society that Israel has now. It’s a political culture that can absolutely be defined as genocidal.

As in: not just the state has been committing genocide, but the political culture of Israelis is genocidal. With exceptions here and there, but that’s the dominant trend, that’s what’s hegemonic right now in Israel. Israeli society has been fascistic for decades.

Oh, I was talking about Lebanon, wasn’t I? And hauntings and ghosts. What’s the connection to all of this? Well, those are our neighbors. That nineteen-year-old killing twenty people a day is our neighbor. That nineteen-year-old killing twenty people a day has billions of dollars worth of American funding and American weaponry, and German funding and German weaponry. That nineteen-year-old can kill hundreds of people, thousands of people, on his own, right now, as a drone operator, or with various weapons that they have—those mostly American weapons they love to film themselves blowing up apartments with.

That person can then take leave and be paid by the Israeli military to go on a holiday in India or the Philippines (I saw a bunch of them a while ago when I was there), Sri Lanka, Thailand, and other parts of south and southeast Asia. There are entire trails in India, for example, that are known to be where the Israelis go. There’s a place in India called “Mini Tel Aviv” or “Little Israel,” something like that. It’s a touristic town in India that has so many Israelis that locals there speak some Hebrew, the menus are written in Hebrew, stuff like that. That nineteen-year-old can eradicate entire families on his own (it’s usually a “he,” but there are lots of women as well in the IDF), and then go on holiday in India to deal with his trauma.

Meanwhile, I just saw a video report on CNN where they spoke to this kid called Muhammad, who’s a Syrian refugee living in Lebanon, breaking down as he talks about the Israeli strike that killed six family members, including both of his parents. He says he saw his father cut in half.

I’m sorry about those details, guys. I don’t even share bloody videos, and when I do, you don’t see the details. You don’t see corpses or anything like that. But if a survivor is being interviewed, you get to see that survivor’s wounds, because I don’t think we should pretend that’s not happening.

But this kid, Muhammad, whose family fled the Assad regime first and were then killed by Israel in Lebanon: Muhammad is what I would describe as a haunting. Hauntings are not just people who died or were forcibly disappeared, but also people who walk among us. Muhammad’s life story right now is a life story that moments ago wouldn’t have happened, but now it is, thanks to the Israelis and their American and European backers—and he poses a problem now for the Israelis.

There’s a type of commentary that’s like, Well, this guy will be radicalized. He can join some extremist group and join the war against Israel. There’s a component of: Israel was so obsessed with destroying the PLO that it got Hamas. And, in fact, it prioritized, funded, and armed Hamas for a good decade under Netanyahu, because their priority was to make sure they would always have a bogeyman in Gaza they can routinely use as an excuse to bomb, as we’ve been seeing.

And Israel contributed to the destruction of the resistance in Lebanon before the advent of Hezbollah, essentially giving rise and raison d’être for a group like Hezbollah to exist in the first place. That’s been the rulebook of the Israelis for some time, because it is a deeply cynical and genocidal political culture.

So that’s not what I’m saying with this. That has happened, but most of the time that’s not what people do. Most people don’t get engulfed in rage and join a radicalised group, willing to take up arms against the killers of their families, though many do do that. What more often happens is they live with this trauma for the rest of their lives. They deal with it in different ways, but they are haunted by this now-absent future, this potential future that will always be with them.

There will always be moments in your life when you pass some milestone—I don’t know, you get married, you graduated, you have kids, whatever it might be—and you’re reminded that your parents will never get to see those kids. That’s what people go through who have lost family members, even those not in contexts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. It’s just that in situations like Muhammad’s, we’re not talking about one but multiple members of your family killed, sometimes at the same time.

That’s the sort of trauma and horror that my brain can’t even comprehend—and I am from fucking Lebanon! I genuinely can’t comprehend it. I lost my dog in December and I’m still fucked in my brain—I’m still grieving, is what I meant to say (I’m not actually fucked. I need to be a bit kinder to myself as well).

So how is Muhammad? How are other people going through what the Israelis are forcing them to go through right now? How are they types of hauntings? Because they now pose a contradiction: they are witnesses to a lie. They testify that there is no justification for what the Israelis are doing. There isn’t a good reason that will explain why Muhammad had to see his father cut in half, why he saw his mum killed, and his aunt killed, and two of her children killed. There is no good reason for that.

It has nothing to do with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. It has nothing to do with the killing of the Ayatollah. It has nothing to do with the bombing of oil depots in Iran, or Iran retaliating and bombing both US bases, which is valid under international law, and civilian targets, which is not. None of that has anything to do with that, that moment of them being killed.

The way this is often reported is that they are “casualties.” They are numbers. It’s unfortunate. We won’t celebrate that, that would be too cruel (although the Israelis regularly celebrate the mass murder of Palestinians, and in Lebanon as well). We won’t do that, that’s not not OK. But what can we do about it? It’s sad, but, you know, collateral damage. It happens in a war. It’s inevitable.

It’s not. Not when you strike a house knowing civilians live there. That’s intentional.

And people like him [Muhammad], as in the case of Lebanon: all of those people who were forcibly disappeared were themselves hauntings—forcibly disappeared by the Syrians, forcibly disappeared by the Israelis, and forcibly disappeared by Lebanese factions. And the many who were killed, tortured, and exiled were also types of hauntings.

But so were their relatives who witnessed their loved ones being killed or exiled, or witnessed them come back from torture, never the same again—or those who are still waiting, because they’ve been told for so long that those who were forcibly disappeared are dead, and then the Assad regime collapses at the end of 2024, and among the many who were released from Assad’s dungeons were some Lebanese people, some of whom were there for forty years.

There is a documentary called Sleepless Nights [dir. Eliane Raheb, 2012], in which there is a woman called Maryam Saiidi confronting a guy called Assaad Shaftari. She’s confronting him because Assaad Shaftari was part of the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing Christian militia that was very active during the civil war and that committed multiple war crimes. Maryam’s son, Maher, at the age of sixteen, was forcibly disappeared by the Lebanese Forces; there was a battle between some of the communist factions that Maher was part of and the Lebanese Forces, at one of the universities, and Maher was forcibly disappeared. Maybe he was killed. If he was, his killers hid the body and never told anyone. Or he was forcibly disappeared, taken somewhere else and then who knows—executed or still held somewhere. Maybe. The point is, you never know.

So Maryam was confronting Assaad and telling him, Why won’t you tell me where my son is? Just give me his body if you’re telling me he’s dead. And Assaad Shaftari is not responding.
He’s not proud of what they did, but he keeps on using the various excuses that a lot of Lebanese have used: It wasn’t just me. I can’t just reveal these things, because it can be dangerous, for me or for other people. It requires the collective. I find that sentence fascinating.

It’s from another film, Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible by Ghassan Halwani, whose mom Wadad [Halwani] is the founder of the Committee of the Families of the Disappeared. Ghassan’s father, Wadad’s husband, was forcibly disappeared during the war. At the beginning of that film, Ghassan is interviewing a photojournalist. You don’t see the photojournalist, and you don’t even see Ghassan at first. There is a photo they’re commenting on, and that photo was blurred out; you don’t see what’s happening, so they describe it to us. The photojournalist describes a kidnapping (he witnessed it) done by the Amal movement, Harakat Amal: they are kidnapping one or two Palestinians, at a time when Harakat Amal was at war with Palestinian factions.

Ghassan asks him: Why can’t you tell us who did this? Do you know who they are?

And he [the photojournalist] says, Yes, I do. I know where they live. I can’t tell you who they are. I can’t tell you. I can’t give you more details, because it requires the collective.

“It requires the collective” is true, but it is also a cop-out. You don’t want to take responsibility for what you’ve witnessed—or what you’ve done, in the case of Assaad Shaftari. And this is what brings me back to Israel and Lebanon.

Lebanon has been threatened by the Israelis for decades. Before the latest war of 2024—which is technically not the latest war, because now there is 2026—the Israelis were talking about sending Lebanon “back to the Stone Age” (I quoted them in this article that I wrote for +972 Mag). About a week ago, [Bezalel] Smotrich, one of the far-right figures in Israel, said that Dahieh will look like Khan Younis. Another Israeli minister said that Lebanon doesn’t meet the definition of a state, and that all Shia Lebanese are a “hostile population.”

Yet another one, the ex-chief of staff of the IDF, says we need to apply the “Dahieh Doctrine.” The “Dahieh Doctrine” is basically what the Israelis did the first time around in 2006, named after Dahieh itself, and it states thatthe Israelis “have to” disproportionately target civilian infrastructure in order to put maximum pressure on the groups that they are opposing (which they call “terrorist groups”).

War crime as a state policy: that’s Israel. Israel has war crimes as state policies. And we all know this! They say it. They just tell us what they do. But when you read articles covering these actions, you see: The BBC reached out to the IDF for comment, and The IDF hasn’t commented, or They are doing an investigation.

That’s their favorite sentence: They do investigations. Obviously, none of these investigations lead anywhere, because why would they? This is state policy. What are you investigating? It’s not some independent body investigating, it’s the IDF investigating the IDF. Should I even say it is a “conflict of interest” or is that too banal to even bring up?

But this has always been the trick. These ambulances are being used by Hezbollah to do their terrorist activities, and therefore don’t blame us if we end up bombing these ambulances—as though they haven’t already been doing that anyway. But that’s what they do. That’s the rule book. And the Israelis have been told by the rest of the world that they will get away with this. Gaza wasn’t enough. Iran is not enough. Lebanon is not enough. Syria is not enough.

What distinguishes a fascistic ideology like the one dominant in Israel, which is a monster combination of Zionist ethno-supremacy, European settler-colonialism, and South Africa-style Apartheid, and other ‘-isms’? Authoritarianism, the glorification of the army, and so on?

The Israelis know—they believe—that they will get away with invading all of south Lebanon again, for the third time—fourth time? I’ve lost count. That’s the thing with the Israelis: In 2006, they committed the massacre in Qana, in south Lebanon—but if you look up “Qana massacre,” there are two of them. If you hear of the Israelis besieging Beirut in the coming weeks or months, you might be forgiven for writing “siege of Beirut” in your search engine and being first directed to the 1982 siege of Beirut—that’s how often the Israelis have been bombing Lebanon.

There’s a Time magazine cover that I shared on Bluesky from August 1982, and it shows Beirut under bombardment. The title is something like “Destroying Beirut: Israel Tightens the Noose.” That’s in 1982. Because what the Israelis are doing in Lebanon is not new. It’s what multiple states have been trying to do elsewhere. It’s what the Russians have tried to do and, to some extent, have done in Ukraine (except that Ukraine has support from other states. Many of those same states are the ones supporting Israel in doing to Lebanon what the Russians do to Ukrainians).

So where does this leave Lebanon? Lebanon is a small state, right? It’s one of the smallest states in the world, and therefore tends to be underestimated, and the things that happen there are dismissed because they’re not as important as things happening in Iran (now, don’t get me wrong, it is extremely important what is happening in Iran, just as it’s extremely important what happens elsewhere: where Iran is retaliating, or Iraq for that matter, where the Americans and Israelis have also been bombarding).

But because Lebanon is small, it’s almost deceiving. It hides within it a certain a logic of violence: the Israelis test it out, and then do it elsewhere. The Israelis do this first and foremost in Palestine, against Palestinians. The book called The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein talks about this. But they also do that in Lebanon; they do that everywhere they bomb—because the Israelis are very good at bombing. It’s one of their main talents.

So the “Dahieh Doctrine” was developed in Dahieh. The various AI tools they’ve been using, they’ve been mostly developing those in Gaza first. There’s an excellent piece in +972 Mag by Yuval Abraham, from [2024], that is still among the most read on the website. These are being tested out in Gaza and now, to some extent, in Lebanon as well. Palantir is one of the companies that is part of that experiment. Those same technologies, those same logics of power, domination, and mass violence get exported elsewhere.

It’s not the same as the so-called “imperial boomerang,” or, as I would prefer to call it, “Aimé Césaire’s boomerang” (and I think the boomerang is often overused). It’s simpler: there is a profit incentive in all of this. You make a lot of money sending these weapons. These weapons get “battle-tested,” as the Israelis would call it, against Palestinians or Lebanese, for example, Iranians as well now, and others, and then you go to an arms fair advertise the weapon as “battle-tested.” There’s a purpose to this; it’s not just doing it for the sake of doing it. There’s also a way of offsetting the costs, because war and genocide are very expensive. You offset the cost by selling your technology to the highest bidder.

And so, what you’re seeing done to us—there is no reason, really, why this wouldn’t be done to other people at some point.

We have very short memories, culturally speaking—in the West, but honestly in the world as well. And we’re pretty bad at long-term thinking, and at expecting certain consequences of our actions today, even though it’s easy to explain why destroying the rainforest will lead to particular repercussions. But it’s not a one-to-one, and it’s not happening immediately—you don’t destroy today and the repercussion is tomorrow—and also, the repercussions are not equalized. There are more repercussions in some places than others.

So it’s easy to adopt a precarious mindset, or what I would call a logic of precarity, whereby we think, It’s not happening to me right now; it may happen one day in the future and that’s scary, so I’m not going to think about it too much, otherwise it might overwhelm me, make me anxious.” That’s understandable. It’s a normal human response. But what we miss when we do that is the linkages between these things, the links between what Israel is doing in Lebanon and what Trump is doing against Americans and non-Americans with ICE in America. The links do not mean it’s the same thing. It means that there is a logic that gets replicated.

A lot of analysts tend to be pretty bad at seeing these links beyond those that they want to see. So, for example, it’s relatively easy for historians and political analysts who are already anti-Trump, and historians who are experts in the rise of authoritarianism in Europe, to look at what Trump is doing and compare it to Putin—there are all of these analogies between Trump and Putin, which are valid. But what I’ve noticed is that a lot of those same historians and political analysts, even though they would reach those conclusions by applying the exact same argument to the case of Israel, don’t do so.

Israel is somehow an exception to this. Which isn’t to say that they say Israel is good or that Netanyahu is not an authoritarian or anything like that, but it’s as though Israel has a special status, and this special status is absolutely mixed with racism, Islamophobia against Arabs, and treating Israel as a specific, special, fragile experiment that one ought to understand why it happened, because of the Holocaust and so on.

There’s a lot that then gets missed because you’re seeing these trends that the Israelis have not just taken part in, but have in some cases pioneered, and you’re not understanding that the fires within Israeli political society—the political society that has nineteen-year-olds that kill twenty people a day—these are not fires that can be contained to even the immediate neighbors of Israel. It won’t stop at the Lebanese or Palestinians, or even Iranians.

(And to be clear, for those who haven’t listened to previous monologues; this is not coming from someone who has any sympathies whatsoever with the Ayatollah’s regime. You can listen to previous episodes if you want. It’s pretty self-evident that I would be fine if that regime collapsed. It’s just that what really matters is how that happens, and in which context, and who does it.)

These fires will not stop at us. When they’re done with us, who will the Israelis turn their eyes to?

In the recent +972 Mag article, I cite Naftali Bennett, who was Prime Minister of Israel and is reportedly planning on standing for elections again. He was doing a conference around the same time as they bombed Iran, and he said that Turkey is the new Iran. They haven’t even finished with Iran yet and they’re already thinking about Turkey—Turkey, a member of NATO.

The Israelis have talked about this “Shia axis of evil,” which Hezbollah and co would call the “Axis of Resistance,” for such a long time now, that happens if their big enemy, the biggest existential threat that they’ve been talking about for so long, since the nineties (in the eighties, the Israelis were actually sending money and weapons to the Ayatollah as part of the Iran-Contra affair)—what happens when that threat is gone? Do they go back to a Sunni axis, maybe?

And who would be the head of that Sunni axis? They’ve been talking about the Muslim Brotherhood plot behind Hamas, about Hamas as part of a wider conspiracy, for a long time now. There are Israeli politicians saying that Ilhan Omar is connected to Hamas via Qatar, via the Muslim Brotherhood, or whatever it is. That’s been going on for a long time now, parallel to the “Shia axis,” because it depends where the audience is and who they’re talking to, and what their current political priorities are.

The point is, there will always be some “axis of evil.” There will always be some bogeyman, some enemy to defeat. They will use the religious arguments when they need to; they will use nationalist arguments when they need to; they will even appeal to international law when they need to. The specifics don’t matter.

What matters to the Israelis is being able to continue to do these wars for as long as they can, because the second they stop, Israeli society itself is in trouble—not because of Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims or whatever, but because of other Israelis. What does it do to society if there are a lot of nineteen-year-olds who have experience killing hundreds of people? Where do these nineteen-year-olds go, in a society where their actions are glorified?

Some of them will become politicians. Some [current] high-ranking politicians have said, I’ve killed a lot of Arabs in the past, and I see nothing wrong with it. Ben-Gvir has said something along those lines a thousand times, but so has Naftali Bennett. Virtually all of these politicians have had experience killing Arabs; a lot of them have directly participated in war crimes—directly. Not just ordered them. Directly.

Do you think after doing that, they went to a therapist? Do you think most of them then became, I don’t know, fighters for peace, putting their bodies on the line in the West Bank to defend Palestinian farmers and villagers from settler attacks? Or did they become politicians? They redirect that experience and do something that feels good instead of something that feels bad. It feels good to have tens of thousands of people applauding what you’ve done and celebrating you as a hero of the nation.

The Israelis have dubbed the operation, the war, they are currently undertaking against Iran: operation “Roaring Lion.” All of these people killing Iranians are lions and lionesses. That’s a nice thing to be! That’s a cool thing to be. That feels good. It’s almost like this is geared to appeal to a certain nineteen-year-old who is being asked to kill twenty people every day. “Epic Fury,” which is what the Americans call it, is not necessarily targeted towards American soldiers, but to the MAGA base who love this cartoonishly macho American shit.

So, where was I? Right, these hauntings. The Israelis are now doing to Lebanon a fraction of what they’ve done to Gaza—but it’s getting closer and closer to becoming one-to-one. Parts of the south are experiencing similar types of bombings to what parts of Gaza did for a long time. They may send troops on the ground and invade Lebanon, try and occupy it long term, maybe try to annex it at some point. That’s how they operate.

The rest of the world has a choice. They can do what Spain has done and start putting pressure, rejecting normalization with Israel. They’ve recalled their ambassador; they’ve refused to let the Americans use their base. Or, you can be like most of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and so on, and not do any of that, express reservations like the Brits do, but ultimately let the war run its course—and meanwhile spend time accusing the Iranian regime of various crimes (which are probably accurate, because the Iranian regime has committed a lot of crimes).

And not talk about the elephant in the room: that the Iranian state has posed no threat whatsoever to those who bombed them, and that this war was started by the Israelis and Americans. As long as this elephant in the room is not addressed head on, there isn’t much hope of this changing anytime soon.

This comes just weeks after Trump threatened to invade Greenland, a European territory, a member of the European Union. Weeks after that, Trump bombs Iran, and EU members, most of them, are on the side of the Americans, either vocally or de facto, with very few exceptions—Spain is one of the few. What does that tell you about Europe’s understanding of what the threats are?

This is where hauntings end up being useful as a more accurate way of understanding, a useful tool. That’s why what happens to Lebanon, despite being such a small country, has repercussions for the rest of the world: it is the Israelis bombing Lebanon, and the Israelis are backed by the Americans, and American influence on the world is still very strong.

So these ghosts are now being multiplied. All of the people being killed, all of the people who witnessed their loved ones being killed, all of the people who are traumatized for life: all of these people are now hauntings to this world order. And should the world order just collapse—which, at this point, risks happening—then all these war crimes, all these crimes against humanity, instead of becoming the exception to the norm, become the norm. People who underestimate the difference between those two are making a mistake.

It is true that this so-called order has been hypocritical from the beginning, and has failed multiple peoples around the world, in this case most notably Palestinians. That’s true, and there is an understandable sense that we need to just get rid of that international order, because what’s the point of keeping it if it is betraying so many people?

By getting rid of certain norms like those that are defined as “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” and “genocide”—things that are not just “not to be done” but need to be legally prosecutable—we shouldn’t get rid of them, because the only people who would benefit are the Netanyahus, Trumps, and Ayatollahs, the Modis, Erdoğans and Sisis. Putin, Kim Jong Un and so on.

Those are the people who will benefit from all of this first and foremost, and everyone around them. That entire logic, that entire structure of power and violence becomes even more prominent than it’s been since the Second World War. That’s where we start talking about the open risks of a third World War.

Lebanon is small; it’s insignificant, it seems, to most people. But what is happening there is a mirror, just like Gaza has been, of what is happening in large parts of the world and what could happen in even more parts of the world unless this is stopped.

So, what can we do? While this will depend on where you live, as a general rule, whatever we can do to weaken the link between America and Israel, we need to do. We should continue to try and isolate the Israeli state from the world stage as much as we can. This has had some successes, but not enough—please do not think this means it doesn’t make any difference, because that’s not true.

The Israelis have to continue going to war again and again, but these wars are becoming more and more expensive, especially for the rest of the world. Just look at the current one. Imagine if they do something even a fraction of that against Turkey—if you think it’s bad when Iran is at war, imagine what happens if Turkey is at war. So they’re getting more and more expensive, which means that pressure against the Israelis can be enacted to the point where even they wouldn’t be able to ignore them.

And please do not conclude there’s nothing you can do about that. Organize locally, find existing networks, connect with them, add pressure wherever you can, however you can.

What else can I say? To be honest, I’ll end here. This is an attempt at a monologue; hopefully it was coherent. As always, everyone, take care.