Israel Bombed My Hometown – And I Worry About a Civil War (Monologue)

For episode 217, I talk about Israel bombing my hometown of Ain Saadeh yesterday, and why it worries me more than anything they’ve done so far.

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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:

This is still the Gaza genocide, it is just happening in Lebanon. This is still the 1948 Nakba. It is that same original wound that keeps on festering, because enough people in power have decided that it’s better for the whole world to suffer than hold Israel accountable for anything it has ever done against us. It has been nearly eight decades, and that original haunting is still with us.

Elia J. Ayoub: Israel struck my hometown and I fear the worst.

On 5 April 2026, Israel struck Ain Saadeh, my hometown. It wasn’t the worst thing they did yesterday—it wasn’t even in the top ten worst things they did yesterday—but what they did worries me more than anything else they’ve done so far, and I will try here to explain why.

By now there will be a hundred different explanations for the strike that killed a member of the anti-Hezbollah Lebanese Forces (or al-Quwwāt in Arabic). Within an hour of it I was already exposed to half a dozen different theories as to what happened:

The Israelis were targeting a Hezbollah guy who wasn’t where they thought he was going to be.

They purposefully targeted the Quwwāt guy to stoke further division between the Shia Lebanese and everyone else.

They wanted to target the Hezbollah guy, knew he wasn’t there, but were content with going ahead with the strike anyway.

Or,

This was all planned by Hezbollah to hurt the Quwwāt.

Whatever you can think of, someone probably said it.

Videos showing people fleeing on motorbikes have already been spreading on mainstream news outlets and let loose on social media. Interviews of angry locals with their own interpretation of what they think happened have only added fuel to the flame. Others made it even more explicitly sectarian. One woman even called on Israel “to finish them off.” It got genocidal quickly.

And all of this was due to a strike that wasn’t even in the top ten worst things Israel did yesterday. The top ten worst things Israel did were all in the “Shia” areas, largely in South Lebanon. The South has been given a different treatment than the rest of the country by the Israelis, and many Lebanese have complemented that differential treatment with sectarian hatreds.

Upon seeing the video of the genocidal woman, a friend said she looks like she’s come from the 1980s—i.e. the civil war. I responded, as I’m doing here, by reminding everyone that these people never went anywhere. The genocidal politics that found their peak during the civil war, most notoriously in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, were never confronted.

There was never any accountability for the horrors committed by various parties, most notably the far-right Christian nationalists that allied themselves with both Assadist Syria and Israel, to commit many of the worst horrors of the 1970s and 1980s—those same fascists I spent the first twenty five years of my life with. I grew up with posters of war criminals as part of the landscape. They were the wallpaper I couldn’t ignore, even though my own family rejected them.

This is why I thought “the resistance,” muqawama, referred to the Quwwāt, before I learned that Hezbollah also called themselves that: the Quwwāt were “resisting” foreigners—those Palestinians and Syrians, those Muslims—to defend Lebanon’s Christian identity.

That this required fighting Palestinian and Lebanese Christians who oppose Christian fascism, let alone allying themselves with the Assad regime, made no difference to the discourse. In typical Lebanese fashion (and Hezbollah, ironically, does the same), inconvenient truths are discarded in the name of a grand narrative. In the absence of any form of accountability, crimes got mixed in with tales of heroism: victors became vanquished, mass murderers became “defenders of the homeland,” enemies became allies, allies became traitors, and fascists became saints.

It is that world that Israel struck. But that world would not blame Israel for it. That world wants Israel to come and save them, because that world continues to believe that they can turn back the clock to some glorious past that never existed. No matter the realities on the ground, they will continue to tell themselves that Israeli actions are actually not what they seem.

That priest killed? That Christian village obliterated? Those were just rare exceptions. Errors that won’t happen that often, surely.

Surely Israel has told us who the enemy is, and it ain’t Lebanese Christians. Why would they lie?

Maybe this time is different. Seventeenth time’s the charm. Surely.

We are left with rationalizations packaged as solutions. Many Lebanese Christians who don’t live close to the Shia areas, and who have nothing else to rely on, are telling themselves that “safety” now means “we are not currently being obliterated.”

It is not like the rest of the world is giving them any alternative anyway. It’s not like we get anything out of the French fetishizing Lebanese Christians as being “the good Arabs.” Is France implementing a no-fly zone over Lebanon to protect us against their Israeli buddies? Do we get anything out of the fact that a Lebanese Christian married into the Trump family?

Instead of anything resembling real security, we get discourse. We get preferential treatment by fascists and racists and Islamophobes online, who never fail to jump on the opportunity to make us feel special. We’re not like those other ones. We’re special! We need to keep on telling ourselves that as the bombs fall all around us—as long as most of them don’t fall on our heads; that’s the only thing we can rely on now. We cannot rely on the future. We certainly cannot rely on the past. The present is like quicksand and we need to remain still. The ruins are all around us.

They’re getting closer. Some of our houses are already ruined, but not all. It is so much worse for Shias. Remain still. Keep them away. Hide, lower your head. Stay back. It’s fine.

We’ll be fine. We’re fine. We’ll be fine.

But they just bombed Ain Saadeh.

We know they bombed Naqoura and Taybe and Khiam and Bint Jbeil and Rsheif and Tyre and Dahieh—and Dahieh, and Dahieh, and Dahieh. But Ain Saadeh? Say it isn’t so.

Though I want to be clear; not everyone is like that. Many, perhaps most, are just afraid. My worry is that soon the distinction won’t matter, because the only ones who will take up arms are those who are waiting for an excuse to do so. It won’t matter whether the excuse makes sense. All it will take is for someone to say something online, or for a video to be shared that doesn’t show anything other than what we want to believe it shows. It doesn’t even have to show anything real.

Under the right conditions, you can just AI-slop your way into a civil war.

Israel has done everything in its power to make sure that everyone remains afraid. Israeli warplanes break the sound barrier throughout Lebanon on a regular basis to remind everyone that they can bomb whoever they want, whenever they want. Drones are so ubiquitous that it is the days one doesn’t hear them that now stand out. Children of Christians hear those just as clearly as children of Shias do. Psychological terrorism is the rule of the game, and Israel is the master terrorist.

Israel threatened Lebanese Christians, Druze, and Sunnis against hosting and sheltering Shias. One meme shared on Lebanese social media recreated the scene from Inglorious Basterds [dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2009] in which the Nazi asks the non-Jewish Frenchman if he was sheltering any French Jews. Here, the irony writes itself. The Israelis are the Nazis telling non-Shia Lebanese that sheltering any Shias could mean death.

Just give them up and you will be safe. Look the other way as the corpses pile up, as entire families are obliterated, as children’s toys are mixed with blood and dust. Just look the other way and we won’t hurt you. I mean, maybe we will, a bit, but it will be much worse for Shias, we promise you.

Israel is the master terrorist. They are good at terrorism. It’s kind of their thing now. There are those who don’t want Lebanese Shias to come to our areas because Israel often follows. And Israel is terrifying.

Even the stupidest, most hateful, and most deluded right wing Christian still has a pair of eyes that show them what Israel is capable of. Even sectarian idiots can put two and two together and understand that Lebanon itself cannot exist if Israel continues to destroy our agricultural fields, many of which happen to be in the Shia areas.

Not everyone has lost themselves in cyclical temporalities of hatred and suspicion. But if people are not given an alternative, all that will be needed for another civil war in Lebanon is a small percentage of the population willing to act.

Make no mistake, this is still the Gaza genocide—it is just happening in Lebanon. This is still the 1948 Nakba. It is that same original wound that keeps on festering, because enough people in power have decided that it’s better for the whole world to suffer than hold Israel accountable for anything it has ever done against us. It has been nearly eight decades, and that original haunting is still with us. Generations of Palestinians have been forced to endure Israel, and now the world is getting a small taste of what an unleashed Israel looks like.

I promise you, most of you still have no idea what it’s like.

The Gaza genocide is expanding, and in the absence of accountability of any kind, the Israeli obsession with mass destruction must go somewhere. Lebanon is ready to explode. The Israelis found their perfect opportunity; most of the world is looking at Iran. Lebanon is too small to matter. Israel knows that they got away with a live-streamed genocide, why wouldn’t they get away with another one?

A civil war in Lebanon would be terrible news for everyone, and that includes the rest of the world that continues to pretend that Lebanon doesn’t exist. Beware of small states; they are deceivingly small. Lebanon was ignored before and the world got Hezbollah.

There is a direct line between Israeli actions and your energy bill going up. Given that that’s the only thing that many people give a shit about, [then they must] understand that the world does not have the resources to sustain Israeli fascism. Either Israel is stopped or the fires will continue to spread. If you think it will stop at Palestine or Lebanon or Iran or the UAE or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Qatar or Bahrain, you are just wrong.

Supporting Israel will just get more and more expensive and it is up to us, up to you, up to I-don’t-know-who-the-fuck, to decide whether this shit is worth it.

But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it will only be Palestine and Lebanon and Iraq and Iran and the UAE and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Qatar and Bahrain. What’s that? Iran can just shut down the state of Hormuz and no one can do anything about it? Well fuck, who could have predicted it?

All right, everyone, there are still spots available for the May 2026 class on Modern Lebanese Politics and History—a class that’s so timely now it is basically haunting me while I’m talking about hauntings here and in the class.

All of the details are in the show notes. As always, thank you for listening everyone and take care.