Voices from Lebanon w/ Lina Mounzer & Justin Salhani (E216)

For episode 216, I am joined by Lebanese writer and translator Lina Mounzer as well as Lebanese journalist Justin Salhani to talk about the ongoing consequences of Israel’s war on Lebanon. This is an intra-Lebanese conversation that is meant to give you an idea of the sort of discussions happening in Lebanon while contextualising as much as we could so that you come out of it better informed as well.

Lebanon emergency relief

Episode Links:

The Markaz Review https://themarkaz.org
Salhani’s Al Jazeera profile https://www.aljazeera.com/author/justin_salhani_150211052541586
Israel’s Digital Occupation (Salhani, The Dial) https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/israel-drone-warfare-lebanon
Death and Destruction from the Sky (Mounzer, Equator) https://www.equator.org/articles/death-and-destruction-from-the-sky-iii
We live in a Time of Monsters (Mounzer, The Markaz) https://themarkaz.org/we-live-in-a-time-of-monsters/

Elia’s Links

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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 via Antidote Zine:

Again, Lebanon becomes a microcosm for how we need to find ways of living, in the entire world. Without each other we have nothing. The world is proving again and again that our existences are linked to one another; our survival is linked to each other’s survival. If there’s going to be any kind of future for this country, this is something that we’re going to have to figure out.

Elia J. Ayoub: [We’re here to] get a sense of what it’s been like to be in Lebanon over the past few weeks. For everything I can tell and explain to you, I’m not in Lebanon. And of course there will be things I don’t know how to describe—the bodily responses, the trauma responses that people who currently are in Lebanon have to deal with on a daily basis.

Lina Mounzer and Justin Salhani, both of them not just Lebanese but in Beirut, are some of the best people to talk about this, which is why I was so grateful for them to take their time to really explain what’s been happening.

This has been a difficult thing to go through—these past few weeks have been difficult, to put it very mildly. And again I’m speaking as someone who’s not even in the country. The situation is dire; there’s no way of sugar-coating or downplaying it. It’s just really bad. But stopping at that can promote helplessness. That’s not the purpose or intention of this podcast.

The idea was to bring the three of us together to talk about this very difficult thing. You can think of this as an intra-Lebanese conversation—the only difference is we decided to record it.

Let’s start with some brief intros.

Lina Mounzer: I’m Lina Mounzer, I’m a writer and translator and I’m the senior editor at the literary arts and culture magazine called The Markaz Review.

Justin Salhani: I’m Justin Salhani, I’m a journalist and writer based in Beirut, writing for Al Jazeera English mostly, and I’m a non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

EA: We’re recording this on March 26, 2026. I did a number of monologues and interviews; there’s a bunch of stuff that you two have written. I don’t know if it is possible, but let’s try and give some kind of summary of the past month. Who wants to try?

JS: Two days after the US and Israel started attacking Iran, Hezbollah responded to Israeli attacks for the first time in over a year. They said it was in response to the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. After that, Israel used the excuse to intensify, for the second time in under two years. Where we’re at now is: there’s over a thousand people in Lebanon killed; over 110 of them are children, according to the Lebanese ministry of health. We’ve got 1.2 million displaced people—that’s more than a quarter of the country’s population.

Israel issued mass evacuation orders—according to human rights groups, evacuation orders should be precise; these were mass, widespread, and essentially indeterminate—for the entirety of the south, the entirety of the southern suburbs, and for areas in the Bekaa Valley. The day before yesterday, Israel’s defense minister said that now they plan to occupy the south up to the Litani—that’s thirty kilometers of southern Lebanon that will be under Israeli occupation.

There are ongoing battles in the south. Inside the country, there seems to be an effort to stoke internal tensions and put people at each other’s throats. This is where we’re at now, going into the twenty-fourth day.

EA: I haven’t been able to summarize things; it’s always been, Where should I start? How thorough should I be? What’s too much information?There’s just so much happening, and I’m also outside of Lebanon.

I wanted to ask you how it’s been for you.

LM: First I want to address what you said about where does one begin?—I was writing this piece for Equator as part of their symposium: reactions to the US-Israeli war on Iran, which includes Lebanon now. Because I’m writing for an audience which doesn’t necessarily know the full background, I had to go all the way back to 1948. You always have to go back to the Nakba to talk about the current geopolitical landscape and what is happening to Lebanon and why.

There’s no avoiding it! You cannot begin any later than that to give people the big picture of it. What you brought up is correct, and it’s a frustration because if somebody begins at any point after that you feel they’re not really getting the full picture of what’s happening.

How has it been? No one can see it, but Justin gave a thumbs-down—that’s exactly what it’s been. It’s been pretty difficult. Justin gave the journalistic rundown of what was happening, but the way we all experienced it here, especially in Beirut, is that we woke up in the early morning hours of March 2 to some very large airstrikes. I think they were hitting with naval ships, and those really echo. They’re much louder than anything else. So everybody leapt out of bed. I don’t know anybody who slept through it. That was a very clear indication that the war has begun.

This absolutely nauseating feeling of waking up and hearing the explosions reverberate through the night—they were hitting all that night, hitting all throughout the next day. The first few days was just trying to adjust to this new reality. In my apartment, almost immediately—because my neighbors upstairs are from the southern suburbs, within twenty minutes I was hearing people arriving and commotion on the stairs, people running up and down the stairs, children crying, cars out in the alleyway and in the street. This is like two, three in the morning.

So immediately people started fleeing Dahieh and arriving in different places—if they’re lucky enough, at homes of relatives. I also have friends whose parents were living in the south; in the first two days there were people who were stuck on the road for eighteen hours trying to come from the south to seek shelter in Beirut. That’s how many people were heading away, heading for shelter.

Of course, there were a lot of people who defied the evacuation orders. But I’m talking about the displacement that happened before people were forcibly displaced. This was people running for their lives, not knowing the extent of what would happen. Within two days, the area where I live, Hamra, Ras Beirut, was filled with displaced people. It is extremely crowded; the population of the city feels like it has doubled overnight.

There is a lot of fear and tension, and a general sense of gloom and a sense of not knowing what’s going to happen next, what the future looks like not just a month from now but even tomorrow, the next day. It’s just really hard to gauge.

JS: We’ve lived through at least two days of dystopia in the last two years. The last time we had these major evacuation warnings, it was similar. Suddenly you wake up one morning and everyone is on the streets, cars parked wherever you can. Also, a little over two years ago we had the pager incident, which was also something out of a movie. We keep living these days that are intensified, something out of science fiction, again and again.

I really try to hammer home that it feels like we’re living in a dystopia. There’s different levels to that; people in the south have lived it—luckily Lina and I are both still in our homes, whereas more than a million people are not. There are people who have family they can stay with, there are people who can afford to rent apartments and hotels, and then there are people who have been sleeping on the streets or who have had to go to shelters—which in a lot of cases is just a roof over your head. There might be fifty people to a bathroom; there might be one shower for an entire shelter.

Conditions are really rough. I was at BIEL, which is the Beirut waterfront area, a place where there are some of the most lavish nightclubs in the country, and talk about dystopia: I saw displaced kids kicking empty plastic water bottles, and right behind them was a gated-off playground. I was with a group that was volunteering to provide medical care for people, and at one point these kids came over and said, Hey, can you open the playground for us? The volunteers don’t have the keys.

There’s a sharp juxtaposition of some of the most vulnerable people in the country staying in an area that caters to the wealthiest, that’s completely emptied out, not operating, not hosting people. Last time, in 2024, a few of the clubs opened up—or at least one of them did—and let displaced people in to stay there, but this time that doesn’t seem to be the case.

These are the types of things that we’re seeing here: people sleeping out on the streets with very few things. I’ve had people come up and tell me they haven’t had their insulin in ten days. I spoke to a family that was displaced in this area, and they told me they have no access to a bathroom, which is really bad for women in particular. A doctor told me that women are not drinking water because they don’t want to go to the bathroom, which leads to them having things like kidney stones.

This mass displacement, this huge crisis, is hurting people in very small to very large ways.

EA: When you read out the numbers at the beginning of the conversations, these are the things that are difficult to picture. Because ultimately, even when we say over a thousand people were killed, this does not include someone who couldn’t get their cancer treatment, or all those people who will die because they couldn’t get to another place, or the place was destroyed.

LM: All of these things echo the stories we heard from Gaza: not enough sanitation; women not having access to being able to wash, or to bathrooms; people not having access to medicine; the humiliations of displacement. This is exactly what Israel is doing, what they have normalized.

They dropped leaflets on Beirut a couple weeks ago, the second week into the war. I was sitting in a cafe in Hamra and we all heard this explosion, and everybody rushed to the doorway and looked out, and they had released these pamphlets over the city. Of course they did them via rocket—the rocket exploded and fell, and crushed a car. It could have easily killed somebody. But the pamphlets they dropped were openly threatening, saying: Either you guys disarm Hezbollah or we’ll do it on our own terms. Another one said: After our stunning success in Gaza, we’re here to re-create it in Beirut and Lebanon.

Very openly proud of their war crimes, using their war crimes as advertisement for future war crimes! We are past the point of saying they enjoy impunity and they haven’t been punished—it’s beyond that. They are reveling in the sadism. They call them “accomplishments.” A “stunning success”—they are allowed to advertise them as accomplishments. It’s a kind of psychological warfare.

It’s really difficult to overstate the terror of being on the receiving end of airstrikes from a country that has openly committed genocide and suffered no consequences for it. You really feel like there is absolutely no safe place, and it’s terrifying. Everybody is living beneath that same murderous sky that they have made their own. We are constantly reminded of their presence, whether it’s with the drones that are constant and very loud, or the warplanes that are circling overhead.

Justin and I were talking yesterday about how there were two nights where we just could not sleep because the warplanes were so low and so loud. It just gives you the heebie-jeebies, you feel it in your stomach. It’s really destabilizing and terrifying. So everybody is also exhausted and underslept.

JS: These psychological terrors are a thing they seem to be playing on quite a bit. A number of people have gotten fake evacuation orders; we don’t know who these have come from, if they’re pranks or if this is something the Israeli army is doing, but either way it all fits into the same pattern of terrorizing the population.

I’ve counted nine strikes within a one-hour walk of where Lina and I live. The closest one to me was five minutes away. The other night there were one or two different buildings—so much of this is rumor and it’s hard to verify, especially in the heat of war, exactly what has happened or not, because things happen so fast, especially this time. There were a couple buildings near me that got evacuation orders, and I’m fairly certain they were fake ones. There’s no strike that happened, at least until now.

But as Lina mentioned, when you’re laying in bed and you know a building within a certain distance has gotten this warning, now you’re sitting in bed and you hear the warplanes fly over, or you hear the drone buzzing incredibly loud—louder than we’ve heard it before—and you start to imagine different scenarios. It’s very surreal. You start to get into a situation where you ask yourself, What do I do now? Do I leave my house? Put something up against the window?

Should I crack the windows? Everyone here has started to, because you know when there’s a blast, if the window is cracked, maybe it slams and ostensibly just breaks and the glass shatters and hits the ground, rather than a shut window, which the pressure will push through and the glass goes flying into you. These are the sorts of calculations we’ve started to make on a daily basis. We all live in a veil of an idea of, We kind of know where they’ve hit so far, and the ones near us are maybe more targeted, but you never know who’s next to you, you never know where you’re going.

I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people, including Lina, and with other neighbors: Are we crazy? Are we crazy for staying? Should we go somewhere else? The other side of you is like, This is my home. This is important. Maybe part of the strategy here is to get people riled up and disgruntled, and to get you out and away from your place and your home. Maybe it is a kind of resoluteness or steadfastness to stay in your home.

But again, is it worth your life? These are the psychological things that are playing on us constantly, and they’re not ending.

LM: This question of staying versus going—the closer you get to the epicenter of what’s happening, the more it becomes an existential question. Think about the south: part of the reason they are giving evacuation orders is because they want to seize the land. The only way that people have to prevent them from doing that is to literally put their bodies on the line. Forget the fact that there’s also fighters in this town, people actually fighting to repel the Israeli forces from the land—there’s also the question of the people who are physically refusing to leave their homes.

They are placing themselves as facts on the ground that are contradictory to the “facts on the ground” that the Israelis are always trying to establish with their settlements. It’s really a terrifying thing, when you think about the choices people are being forced to make. They really is a fear that those who leave are never going to return—and we’ve seen this happen. Again, Israel has shown us exactly what it is willing to do, and the world has shown us exactly what it is willing to tolerate from Israel.

This fear reverberates across time; it sees itself also in the specters of what has happened Gaza, what has happened to Palestine in general, and in what has happened to Lebanon as well, when they came in and occupied the land in the south all the way up until the year 2000. This repeated dispossession and destruction builds on a lot of historical memory, so the fear for the future, and the fear for the present, is that much more compounded.

JS: I will add that there were sixty-four thousand people displaced before March 2, according to the IOM [International Office of Migration]. These are people who were never able to go back home. Now Lebanon is back in the news again, but there was a long period where people, day after day, were suffering these injustices—especially people in the south who had to live through the warplanes and drones overhead.

We had the drones in Beirut, but there weren’t many strikes. There were a couple, but we had this illusion of, Okay, we’re going to try to go about our lives as best we can. People in the south were doing that to an extent within reason as well, but there were constant drones that were managing the population, telling them where they can and cannot go. There was some amazing reporting done about this issue, about how shepherds and other people who were just trying to access their land for clearly civilian reasons were targeted and attacked, were harassed, had a number of different things happen.

I recently visited the National Lifeline Center, a suicide prevention hotline and a center for people suffering through mental health crises, and one of the operators there told me that in Lebanon since 2019, there’s been no time period where people are allowed to sit and develop their trauma. It’s just one trauma after another, it’s unceasing. PTSD tends to show up six months after an event—but the event has to end. Here, it’s never ended for people. We’ve not been able to deal with the things that we lived through two years ago, five years ago.

These things are ongoing. They told me that the number of calls they get has doubled compared to the last crisis, but they expect that the peak will be more later on. The peak was not during the 2024 intensification, which lasted from September to November; it came around July the following year, because there had been this period of time where maybe people had “settled into” their displacement (as I was told), or “settled into” these conditions.

If things continue on this path, even if they were to stop—there’s no indication as of now that they will; Trump has made some claims that they’re doing ceasefire discussions, and some analysts have said Iran would include Lebanon in those discussions, but we have no indication one way or another. No one even knows if Trump is telling the truth; the Iranians seem to be denying this. But going back to trauma-after-trauma: there is no end in sight, when we’ll be able to sit and deal with everything that the people of this country, and the people who live in this country, are going through.

EA: You need the P for the PTSD to even start. There’s no “post” in this case.

You mentioned the tensions—we’ve heard, in at least two different places, of some locals not allowing some of the displaced, and these tensions being played out. Part of the worry has always been there: the ghosts of the civil war and sectarianism, all of these things playing out in different ways.

Both of you, what has been your sense of what is happening? A lot of people are standing in solidarity, a lot of people are helping, a lot of people also don’t know what to do. All of the spectrum is there. But as this continues, how has that aspect of it been?

JS: The Israelis are clearly playing on this. In the southern village of Rmaish, which was a Christian village, the Israelis threatened them and said, You cannot host anyone who’s communicating with Hezbollah. What does that even mean? So many people in the Shi’a community, whether they support Hezbollah or not, might have family or relatives in or connected to the group. It’s really a form of collective punishment.

We should start off by saying: there is genuine fear. People are afraid of attacks, because the Israelis have attacked displaced people even when operatives are not available—or at least they haven’t shown any proof that operatives were available. As Lina justly pointed out, if we go by behavior in Gaza, the Israelis do not need to show the burden of proof for anyone to hold them accountable, which no one has done. When we take what’s happening in Lebanon, people are afraid to host people. But at the same time there’s been a justification for discrimination. Those things have mixed into this ball of tension.

Another thing we need to point out in addition to the fact that there is genuine fear and genuine discrimination happening: like you mentioned, there are a lot of people who are resisting in different ways, who are providing aid, volunteering, donating, and doing different things.

There’s also a lot of frustration with Hezbollah inside the country. A lot of people are not happy that they took this decision to re-enter the war. A lot of people have been frustrated with Hezbollah for years and years. And there is [a tendency], which is an incorrect analysis, to project Hezbollah’s decision onto the entirety of the Shi’a community. I’ve heard people say things like they’re frustrated and angry and they don’t want to help, because Hezbollah took that decision.

I’ve heard people talk about the “individual responsibility” of making good political decisions. That’s a means of collectively punishing the entirety of a community that has been displaced that has nothing to do with Hezbollah one way or another. And even if they do support the group, a political choice versus giving them their human dignity is a certain way of thinking—but this is all culminating into a circumstance within the country whereby people are frustrated, people are suffering economically and security-wise, there is palpable fear, and there are sectarian and historical communal divisions that are coming together at once.

We have a powerful neighbor pushing on them. We have a government that’s been relatively listless at opposing this. We have domestic parties that are adding fuel to the fire. And outside, anyone who has tried to see and help good-faith actors inside the country come to some sort of agreement or conclusion that might serve the people of the country, including the people of the south (Hezbollah supporters, non-Hezbollah supporters, and everyone in between), have not done anything to hold Israel accountable.

In effect they’ve allowed Israel to undercut any effort for that to happen. So now we’re in this place where people are increasingly afraid of each other, they’re afraid of Israeli attacks. We’ve also seen this talk, and I’ve had people say to me they’re very afraid of rising sectarianism and discrimination. People feel indignified, people feel discriminated against by other communities. This was always there, but in times like this when you’re being pressed from every side, it’s becoming more intense.

EA: This also comes in a context of Israeli ministers explicitly stating that all Shi’as are a “hostile population.” Diaspora affairs minister Amichai Chikli said this in September 2024. There have been lots of these quotes—Smotrich threatening to turn Beirut into Khan Younis, the city in Gaza they obliterated.

You mentioned the pager attack two years ago. The fear is now that they can literally blow up whoever they want even without a missile or a drone. Human bodies themselves have been weaponized against people’s will. You can’t know anymore entirely, you can’t be one hundred percent certain that the person you’ve just been talking to across the street who’s from the south won’t be targeted for some reason or another. You just don’t know.

The Israelis have always played on that: mixing both being “precise” (from time to time they will have a drone attack that only destroys one apartment and everything around it is relatively unharmed) and the next day an entire building is brought down. They’ve always done this. The point is to show that We can do whatever we want, whenever we want, and we decide when and where.

LM: This idea of collective punishment of the Shi’a population is enshrined: they call it the Dahieh Doctrine. The way we are going to get to Hezbollah is, we are literally going to punish anybody who we perceive as associated with them. You don’t have to be part of Hezbollah, you just have to be part of the Shi’a community.

The Shi’a community is very much feeling that. There are a lot of people in the Shi’a community who do not support Hezbollah and who are explicitly angry against Hezbollah. But what happens is, when there are people inside the country who are also vilifying the Shi’a community for being “part of Hezbollah,” you are essentially forcing people to band together in these sectarian ways.

Over the last years, especially since 2019, there had been so many attempts to redefine the way we want to conduct political life in this country, what sort of replacement for the sectarian system there could possibly be. It seems hopelessly naive to look at it that way now, and a lot of people will tell you that as well, that it’s hopelessly naive, for their own particular reasons. They’ll tell you it’s hopelessly naive because Hezbollah exists; other people will tell you it’s hopelessly naive because Israel exists.

This is the thing: we have always been stuck with this. The formation of the state of Israel in 1948 is a central wound to which so many of the ills of this region can be traced back. This is not to fall into the regular line of blaming the Israelis for all of the problems of the region—obviously things have grown out of that, like geopolitical reality, but you also cannot deny the fact that the formation of the state of Israel created a vast wave of refugees from Palestine, who came into Lebanon and the various countries around it, and this is a colonial entity that is expansionist; it never tried to “get along” with its neighbors.

It understood that it was an interloper, that it was foreign there, that it had dispossessed people, and that in order to continue to exist it had to continue to dispossess people. This is why this idea, this crazy focus on Israel’s “right to exist,” without ever asking what that right to exist actually requires—it requires dispossession, killing. It requires establishing your self-determination by crushing that of others.

How can you avoid having the political reality in all of the surrounding countries being profoundly affected, as long as Israel continues to exist as an ethnostate? Lebanon in particular—for many different reasons, including the way Lebanon itself has treated its Palestinian refugees, the status it has imposed on them; the fact that Lebanon also has a sectarian political system that has never been reformed or modernized or adapted; the fact that we had a sectarian civil war—Lebanon is particularly susceptible to all these tremors, big and small, that are coming from Israel.

And Lebanon also poses an existential threat to Israel in certain ways, because it embodies, at its best, a kind of pluralism that is directly antithetical to the concept and idea of an ethnostate. This is why Israel has always courted the most hardline Christian nationalists in Lebanon, because they make perfect bedfellows. They’re like, Look, we’re a minority among these Arab hordes, you’re a minority among these Arab hordes! We should form ethnostates! The only way to survive and be safe is to form ethnostates.

That battle in Lebanon, to me, feels like a battle for the soul of what kind of world we want to live in.

JS: I think you’re right. If you look at the foundation of Lebanon, there were people who had a more nationalist identity, a nationalist idea of what Lebanon could be within the region. The ideas at the time were of an Arab country that respects that Christian identity is part of the greater part of the country, but there were people who understood Lebanon’s place in the Arab world. What we have now, today—and this is not exclusively the fault of Israel of course, this is also internally our own problems—is “Christian” leaders who are extremely rightwing, extremely seclusionary, and they mirror what Israel has become in its own right.

They fed each other in a lot of ways: these are the people who come to power, and these are the ideas that “work,” because of Israel’s presence. The impact Israel has on Lebanon is that we struggle to exorcize our own demons because every time we might be on the pathway to do it, they come along and pour fuel on the fire.

Take this recent “ceasefire” period, where the government got together, put together something relatively popular outside of Hezbollah’s most fervent support: the general idea of disarming Hezbollah under these conditions, while Israel is still occupying parts of the south, was way more controversial, but still something that a lot of people wanted to see, especially if the Lebanese army was going to be deployed in the southern region, and well-supported, well-armed, and internationally backed.

But rather than work in good faith and see how that can happen in a way that might be mutually beneficial both for Lebanese and everyone living in the greater area of Israel, including millions of Palestinians who don’t have equal rights, Israel just continued to attack and provoke, continued to say the Lebanese army was not doing their job. They continued to threaten, to say, If this doesn’t sort out, we’ll attack civilian infrastructure.

They are blatant about how they are violating international humanitarian law.

LM: They’ve also killed members of the Lebanese army.

JS: During the ceasefire period, as well. Absolutely. And over a hundred civilians during that time.

EA: Not to mention attacks on UN peacekeeping forces at the same time.

JS: Repeatedly. Not to mention the damage they’ve done to the ecology, not to mention infrastructure, not to mention bombing reconstruction equipment that was very badly needed. Reconstructing in the south would have been something that might have undercut Hezbollah. Again, if the government is able to build, people don’t feel the need to rely on Hezbollah as much.

Internally, we’ve seen very strong provocations from this Christian right wing. The grandson of a former president recently said the Israeli army is “quite a moral army.” To say something like that when they’ve killed a thousand people in your country is absurd. We’ve seen recent provocations in the area of Karantina. For some background: it was an area that was very mixed prior to the civil war in 1975; the Christian rightwing Phalangists committed a massacre there [in 1976], to make a pathway from east Beirut up to the coastline. My father was there on site as a photographer at the time. Some of his most powerful photos are from the Karantina massacre.

In 2024, there was a Christian NGO that managed a space there for displaced people, hosting about a thousand people. They’ve now reopened it, they’re running it again. The government decided that they will open another center there for displaced people, hosting around three thousand people. I was told yesterday by an aid worker that the people running the campaign against it are the Christian parties, the Lebanese Forces and the Kataeb. They’ve said, This is a Christian area! What, you’re sending a bunch of people here who are not of our community? If a civil war breaks out, they’ll be surrounding us!

These parties are still in this mentality. At this point, I’m not even sure they believe that a civil war is coming, but because of the sectarian system, because of how our politics work—and because of how Israel exists, and we reflect them and they reflect us in that way—the people who succeed politically are incentivized to speak in this way. They rile up the population in this way.

If this war is to end at some point, I’ve thought a lot about how we can try to mobilize and bring back this idea that has been very prominent in secular spaces and civil society, to really put in effort—this country, if we can’t get away from the sectarian system and staying in these ideas, not just allowing it and letting it run in the background, finding a way to allow people to feel secure in their religious and communal identity but not have it dominate us politically…it’s becoming a more and more existential issue.

LM: Very much agree. I will add that I personally am terrified of civil war. It really scares me. It feels very real, actually—the possibility of it feels very real. I have repeatedly affirmed my desire and my right to make my life here even though I could live elsewhere. But if a civil war were to break out, I don’t know that I could remain here. The devastation of it would be psychologically, emotionally, physically too much to handle.

This is also adding to the profound despair—of this time, and of this war—that people feel. We feel attacked both from within and from without. It feels like the future of this country really hangs in the balance. I don’t see it remaining what it is. I hope I’m wrong, but in a lot of ways this war is rewriting the reality of this entire region, and we don’t know what the fallout is going to be, what it’s going to look like. It’s really hard to picture even a few months from now; I don’t think things are ever going to go back to the way they were. Not economically, not geopolitically.

There’s entirely new structures of power that are going to be rebuilt—and not necessarily for the better, at all. That’s really, really scary. It adds to the sense of anxiety. It’s not like, Okay, we just need to hold on until this war ends, and then inevitably a ceasefire deal is reached and we go on with our lives. It feels so much bigger and more hopeless than that.

JS: At the time of speaking, Israel is really pushing into the south, and will really press and reshape it. The IRGC is holding on in Iran at least for the moment, and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. If anything, everyone I’ve spoken to who knows about the subject seems to believe that they will come back with a vengeance, double down. We’re a country where Israel is doing the vast majority of the physical damage, the killing—but we have other people also contributing to the situation in negative ways, and Iran’s regime is one of them, so it really looks scary in a few different ways, I agree.

A lot of people are really confidently saying, There’s no civil war because there’s no one to fight, and, The army would hold, and even if they didn’t, there’s no community that would want to engage with Hezbollah. But I think people are overly confident. I don’t think it takes a lot to start sectarian strife, and I don’t think it’s just about the will to fight, it’s also about economics. We’re a country suffering through intense economic crisis, going on our seventh year now. All you need is a few very wealthy benefactors to come in, or a foreign actor to come in and start funding or finding ways to get people arms, and suddenly a reality is changed. It takes one incident to lead to the next, to lead to the next.

This is why I share this wider idea of doing something right now, like helping displaced people, or providing aid, or even just building cross-communal relations one way or another, being there for your neighbors. Lina and I live in a pretty mixed area; one of the reasons I like this place is because it is a mixed area; I don’t like to be in an area that’s homogeneous, with homogeneous ways of thinking. My neighbors are from different countries, different sects, different religions, different ideologies. Building these relations actually undercuts the puritan ideologies that are being pushed on us in all these different directions.

When people say things to me like, I don’t want to help displaced people because maybe they support Hezbollah, or, Maybe I’ll be attacked—I think we should also see it’s not just about doing something that’s morally just, it’s doing something that’s in your personal self-interest. It’s doing something that’s serving your country—and not in the join-the-army elusive imaginary. You’re concretely helping other people to feel less alone; you’re concretely helping other people to feel like there’s a force to help them, that they are part of something, that there’s something there to catch them—and that thing is not Hezbollah or another political party that will come in and manipulate them and use them, or mobilize them to carry out some sort of agenda.

These are very powerful things that we can all—it’s all at our fingertips right now. We’ve seen cases of that. I remember the day of the ceasefire in 2024, I went to a church in Hamra. Again, it’s a mixed area, but it’s predominately Muslim now, and the entirety of the people staying there, as far as I was aware, we’re Shi’a, either from the southern suburbs or from the south. And the different people there kept saying to me: The fact a church opened its doors to us really meant a lot to us. It shows us that we’re all one country, we’re all one people, we’re all together in this.

Those sorts of messages are powerful. That might make somebody think twice before picking up a weapon and mobilizing against somebody else. It’s not foolproof; there’s forces bigger than that, and I still think the economic plays a big role. But the thing that we can do at this point as individuals—of course there are things that fall on the international community, on our government, our elected leaders and parties, but as individuals it’s so important for us to undercut these narratives that are being pushed on us by the Israelis and by other parties or political actors that say, We’re the only ones who are working in your interest.

We need to show them that’s not true.

LM: While I totally agree—if we’re talking about potentialities for a civil war and the kind of environment that breeds that sort of hostility, definitely economics is a huge part of it. But also, again, the idea of land dispossession and the government not having any kind of answer to that—I’ve heard people say things like, Oh, let Israel take the south, khalas, it’ll get them off our backs. There’s people who are not implicated in this who are literally willing to bargain land, give it to the Israelis so they don’t have to worry about this “question” of Hezbollah anymore.

For me it’s very dangerous that the government is not finding a solution to that rhetoric, to that idea. Acting like the south belongs to Hezbollah, and is only for Hezbollah to protect, is also deeply problematic. You want to try and counter the narrative of Hezbollah? This is your country, and the sovereignty of this country that is being invaded—they are declaring they’re going to invade it and take over parts of the south. I can see there’s a lot of bitterness and rage that is being fomented by that situation. How much is the government willing to bargain away in order to achieve “stability” with Israel?

That essentially just means, Okay, we’ll lie still if you don’t move the boot on our necks too much. This is a very difficult position that everybody is in.

JS: I completely agree.

Figuring out ways for solidarity, having that cross-solidarity, includes showing people that we care about their causes. It doesn’t have to be a staunch political cause in the sense of Hezbollah, but it can be a cause of We care about your land, we care about your home. You’re right, there are people who have said, Let’s negotiate, let’s give this away, and they don’t understand the impact that will have.

Because it’s not like you can draw a hard border. You can’t draw a hard border around the south and say, Okay, that’s finished, that’s done, now we get to live in peace. It doesn’t work that way. There will be repercussions, whether they’re economic, social, or demographic. There’s going to be a number of things that change the inherent nature of this country.

We can even say, the daily life of a person who just wakes up and goes five times a week to work, and home, and on the weekend goes to the cafe or the bar or whatever—even that process of yourinsular bubble will be altered one way or another, whether it’s through cost, demographic and social change, lack of services—so many different things can happen.

I think our challenge going forward is how to build this kind of solidarity; how do we build the resistance that also resists what Israel is doing, and how do we bring people into this in a way that makes them engaged and care, and see the reality, see that this is in their interest?

LM: Again, Lebanon becomes a microcosm for the way we need to find ways of living in the entire world. Because without each other we have nothing. The world-as-it-is is proving again and again that our existences are linked to one another; our survival is linked to each other’s survival. If there’s going to be any kind of future for this country, this is something that we’re going to have to figure out.

I do want to say one thing: we’re talking in the abstract right now, and we’re talking about non-military solutions—which I am one hundred percent for. But we’re also engaged with a country that imposes military solutions on you constantly. At some point, yes, it is incumbent to respond with military resistance, one hundred percent. For me the question has never been about whether we have military resistance or not. We need to have military resistance against Israel. The question has always been that this should be a resistance that everybody feels they are a part of.

This is really the question: how do we do that? In the end, yes, we need a resistance force against Israel. It just has to be one that somehow represents the entire country.

EA: The point I keep on making is that Lebanon is deceptively small. Because it doesn’t feel, in the ways it’s talked about, important geopolitically—it’s not Iran, it’s not Saudi Arabia, it’s not Israel; it doesn’t have that gravitas to it—it can also be overlooked. It’s a microcosm at the end of the day, and Lebanon is the world, because the world is in Lebanon via Israel.

Whether it’s treating the country as a laboratory (which obviously they do in Gaza even more), whether it’s exacerbating existing sectarian tensions that ultimately become its own creations—at what point is it them exacerbating sectarianism and at what point is it them creating it? At some point it’s the same thing. They also create one another. I don’t think we can talk about sectarianism in Lebanon in 2026 without talking about Israel’s role in the seventies, eighties, and nineties (or the Assad regime’s role, for that matter, but that bit is gone).

I struggle, with these conversations now, in the past month, to have my trademark We can do this! [attitude]. Hope is a discipline, and Jesus, this really requires discipline now, because I’m struggling with it. And I’m not in Beirut, I’m not in Lebanon.

I appreciate both of you taking the time to do this. If you have final thoughts, feel free to share them.

JS: Lina’s absolutely right that we’re in a situation now where the theoretical is secondary. The enemy is in the land, they’re on the land. They’ve made their decisions clear. We are talking very much in this way of thinking and planning for what we need to do, and how we can counter. We still need to do those things, but at this moment in time there’s also an imminent need. People’s homes are being destroyed daily, people are being pushed out daily, and people are being killed daily. We need to find ways to make this stop, we need to find ways to make Israel be held accountable. We need them off the land, we need them out of the south. We need these things to happen imminently.

And all the different ways these things might happen—maybe they’re imperfect; maybe they’re things done by actors we’re not one hundred percent aligned with on everything, but we’re in a situation where this is the reality.

Having hope in such times is really difficult. I’ve never seen so many people struggle with envisioning the future—because that’s where hope comes from. Lina said it very well: we don’t know what next month is going to be like; we don’t really know what tomorrow will be like. Here in Beirut where I am right now, it’s a bit cold, but there was no drone overhead, there were no warplanes. The south is a different story. Different parts of the country are different stories.

We’re taking it day by day, and we need to figure out ways to keep going, but also recognize what is in front of us and what is actually happening.

LM: I completely agree, and I will say there is a kind of beautiful solidarity of everybody experiencing this thing together. War is a great clarifier, in a lot of ways, of what the values are that are most important to you, the people who are the most important to you, what the principles are that you hold most dear. Sometimes it feels really difficult to just get up and get on with it, and have any kind of day. But doing it alongside other people—that’s really the only way we can survive this.

Honestly, thank you also for this podcast. Thank you for this community. Thank you for us being able to talk—a lot of us have been brought together by your work, and through that. So I’m very grateful for that, and any time you want to have us on to vent and talk about it, it feels really good to be able to have these conversations. You feel just a little bit less crazy to be speaking in a group rather than ranting to yourself all the time.

EA: That’s good to know, because that’s the purpose of this.

Lina has been on a few times—we will try and have Lina on also when things aren’t very bad.

LM: What will we talk about?

EA: Friends, thank you so much for doing this, hopefully in better circumstances.

LM: I hope so, I really do.

JS: Happy to do it. Thanks for setting it up.