Sometime in the autumn of 2000, when I was a sophomore at Columbia University in New York, I was browsing the shelves of the university bookstore and came across Edward Said's The Question of Palestine, published in 1979, the year after Orientalism.
At the time, I had no idea who Said was or, really, what Palestine even was, raising the question, perhaps, of how I had managed to make it this far in my educational trajectory in such a state of cluelessness.
In my defence, the education system in the United States doesn't exactly encourage an interest in understanding the world and how it works, since that would no doubt produce a whole lot of graduates with a negative view of the US itself and its habit of tormenting people at home and abroad.
I bought the book and read it, wide-eyed, over the winter break. I'd never had an opinion one way or the other about Israel either, but it had not occurred to me that the state might owe its entire existence to the mass killing and dispossession of Palestinians.
My real education began in 2003, when I abandoned the US after finishing university and set off to travel. In Greece, I met a young Polish woman named Amelia, and together we developed an obsession with hitchhiking that would take us across countries and continents for years.
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In the summer of 2006, having already traversed Turkey and Syria, we planned to thumb our way through Lebanon, but the trip had to be postponed slightly on account of Israel's 34-day war on the country.
The assault killed approximately 1,200 people, with the help of rush-shipped bombs from the US, and left swathes of territory saturated in unexploded ordnance. Neighbourhoods and villages were reduced to rubble.
I returned to Lebanon countless times after 2006, but that first visit remains one of the defining episodes in the formation of my political consciousness
Amelia and I arrived in Lebanon in September, one month after the war's end, and spent two months on the receiving end of relentless hospitality from Lebanese of all sects as well as Palestinians.
Our hosts not only picked us up on the side of the road but also carted us home to be stuffed with food and given free accommodation, often with an invitation to stay for as long as we liked.
Along the southern border with Israel, we stayed in various villages that have now been more or less obliterated by the Israeli military, which, after launching its genocide in the Gaza Strip in 2023, once again expanded its manic destruction to Lebanon.
I returned to Lebanon countless times after 2006, but that first visit remains one of the defining episodes in the formation of my political consciousness. I found myself thinking a lot about it when I recently reread Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir by the Palestinian writer and scholar Jean Said Makdisi, sister of Edward Said.
Born in Jerusalem, died in Beirut
Originally published in 1990, at the end of Lebanon's 15-year civil war, which, like many a "civil" conflict, boasted plenty of outside participation, most notably by Israel, Beirut Fragments was rereleased this year.
A sort of homage to Lebanon's capital and its inhabitants, the text is a collection of memories, anecdotes and analyses - political, societal and psychological - by a woman who lived a war intimately rather than just hitchhiking through its aftermath.
Makdisi writes: "I was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Cairo, aged in America, and died in Beirut."
Although her extended family was directly affected by the Nakba, resulting in the "broken lives" of all of her relatives in Palestine, Makdisi recognises that her own privileged upbringing is not representative of the Palestinian condition, and at times seems to consider herself almost unworthy of identifying as Palestinian.
She is an amalgam of various identities and international experiences, including a stint at the Cairo English School.
There, students are "trained not only in the fine art of playing cricket but in the even finer art of applauding it" and inculcated with "good English manners, sometimes with uproarious results such as occurred when we were required, against all custom and reason, to eat dates with knife and fork".
In the late 1950s she travels to the United States for college, where, to her astonished dismay, an invitation to take part in a panel discussion on the place of women in the Arab world ends with a hounding by the audience: "Why do you hate Jews?" "Why do you want to throw all the Jews into the sea?"
Armed with nothing but an awareness of the clear distinction between Zionism and Judaism, and the knowledge that Jews are under no circumstances the "victims" in Palestine, Makdisi admits that she "had no dates, no names, no maps, no newspaper clippings" with which to back up her convictions.
"I was in fact very ignorant of politics and would probably have remained so had this episode and a thousand like it never occurred."
Instead, she heads to the library to read up so that she can "argue a case that, the greater the blind opposition to it, the clearer it became to me and therefore the more compelling". Unfortunately, she soon finds that no wealth of dates, names, logic and history can counteract the stubborn hallucinations of Israel's American defenders.
Roots in a city at war
Makdisi marries a Lebanese man, Samir, who is "firmly rooted in Arab culture", and after living in the US for a spell, they move to Beirut: "I thought that in going with him I could attach myself to his firm roots."
He is a professor at the American University of Beirut, she teaches a class here and there, and they raise their young children.
Then the war starts - the booming artillery, the ubiquitous shattered glass, the endless trips to the garage shelter, the end of sleep.
Makdisi begins to write "as a witness to the common experiences of common people, feeling that in the trial of history there should be a record, a vindication, of their pain… Sharing that pain, and writing about it, I came to love the place."
In the end she puts down her own roots, and after 15 years of war feels "more committed to Beirut than ever, even dependent on it in a strange sort of way", a commitment that is partly "based in anger, in a kind of furious defense of the collective humanity so outraged in Beirut".
In describing the "lingering magic" of the city, Makdisi never succumbs to the trite nostalgia for the so-called "Paris of the Middle East" that has afflicted so many of her contemporaries, as well as younger generations of observers.
Under no illusion that pre-war Beirut was some sort of cosmopolitan paradise where beautiful women lounged in bikinis and no one had a worry in the world, Makdisi addresses the role of acute socioeconomic inequality in fuelling the civil war, a conflict that is often erroneously reduced to "Christian versus Muslim" and otherwise oversimplified.
In the book's prologue, Makdisi reflects: "Outsiders look at Beirut from a wary distance, as though it had nothing to do with them; as though, through a protective glass partition, they were watching with immunity a patient thrash about in mortal agony, suffering a ghastly virus contracted in forbidden and faraway places."
The outside world, though, has much to do with perpetuating that agony.
At one point, Makdisi finds herself pondering, "for the ten thousandth time since this damnable war began, on the happiness of the manufacturers and salesmen of arms and ammunition. Every roar, whistle, and crash translates itself in my mind to the sound of a cash register, the tinkle of champagne glasses."
Yet another Israeli air raid
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 occupies a full chapter of Beirut Fragments, since it is this event that finally, halfway through the civil war, provides Makdisi with a prolonged moment of macabre clarity.
Of course, Israel has been bombing the country from the get-go, not to mention performing its signature move from the psychological terror playbook: the sonic boom.
Early in the war, Makdisi recalls, she wrote "more than one piece entitled 'The Morning After an Israeli Air-Raid'", then modified the title to "The Morning After Another Israeli Air-Raid" and then to "The Morning After Yet Another Israeli Air-Raid - Five Years Later".
'There was no doubt in my mind that the Israelis wished… to stamp something out entirely: principally, the idea of Palestine in the minds of Palestinians and their supporters'
Without fail, the Israelis claim they are hitting "Palestinian targets" or "terrorist bases" (sound familiar?), and yet "the pictures in the papers were always the same: babies and old men, Palestinian and Lebanese, lying dead or dying; bits of bodies, shops, and cars; houses reduced to unrecognizable rubble; an old woman, wiping away her tears, picking her way through the ruins of her home, holding up a picture, perhaps, a saucepan, a bent and twisted vase - items that had once been part of her life and now had lost all meaning."
Although Makdisi criticises many aspects of the conduct of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Lebanon, these criticisms are summarily dispelled in 1982.
"Until this point, perhaps, the war that began in 1975 had never been clear, had never been pure; now, in the confrontation I felt something akin to a sublimely clear revelation… Out of the muddy waters of the last seven years had emerged the true evil: Israel had presented itself thus at last, in open, undisguised, unpardonable ferocity."
Tens of thousands of people are killed in the invasion, "the sky orange with the unnatural light of exploding phosphorus bombs", and Makdisi muses that "the accusatory word genocide no longer seemed exaggerated".
"There was no doubt in my mind that the Israelis wished to destroy not just an organization or just an army but to stamp something out entirely: principally, the idea of Palestine in the minds of Palestinians and their supporters."
It bears recalling that the US gave Israel the green light for the 1982 operation, a subject into which Makdisi does not delve.
The cosmic stink
At the start of the invasion, Israel announces that its aim is to create a 40km "security zone" to protect its citizens against "terrorists". This, again, might sound familiar to the present-day news consumer.
As the invasion gives way to an apocalyptic siege of the Lebanese capital, however, it becomes "less clear that the Israelis were only after the PLO and not Beirut", as Makdisi puts it.
It has never been in Israel's interest to have a thriving multi-sectarian society right next door, and an Arab one at that. The shelling eventually gets so intense that Beirutis are unable to make it to the cemetery to bury their dead, and instead have to throw bodies into the sea.
It is during this time that Makdisi focuses on "the necessity of resistance, which became to me the most meaningful political act of my life", and which in her case simply entails surviving in place and refusing to abide by Israeli orders to leave.
Residents of Beirut assert their humanity through weeks under Israeli bombardment without water, food or electricity, and feel "a kind of closeness, a kind of unity that in normal times would have been unthinkable".
The "grand climax" of the Israeli assault takes place on 12 August 1982, coincidentally after the PLO has already agreed to withdraw from Lebanon. Makdisi has taken her children to her brother-in-law's house in Mansourieh, in the hills just above Beirut, where she stands on the balcony and watches "as wave after wave of bombing continued".
"It was as though the Israelis had gone stark raving mad; as though they had achieved a paroxysm of violent hatred; a lunatic, destructive urge to kill, to blot out every living thing, to leave nothing standing, to eradicate the city."
Yet the "most extraordinary aspect of the occupation" is discovered only when the Israelis pull out of Beirut, leaving behind a "great heap of excrement". The soldiers have literally defecated everywhere they have been, on school desks, in bathtubs, in shop windows, making their olfactory mark on the city in the form of a "cosmic stink".
Fast forward half a century from the start of the Lebanese civil war, and Makdisi's war memoir reads at times like current events. The "accusatory word genocide" is as far from an exaggeration as ever in the Gaza Strip.
Israel is once again engaged in lunatic urges to eradicate sections of Lebanon, pulverising entire villages in the south of the country under the age-old pretext of maintaining a "security zone" to protect itself against the "terrorists".
Now, of course, the appointed "terrorists" in Lebanon are no longer the PLO but Hezbollah, which formed as a direct result of none other than the 1982 Israeli invasion. Fancy that.
If history is anything to go by, people generally resist their own destruction, meaning that Israel's ongoing paroxysms of violent hatred will likely only breed more violent resistance and more war.
But that, unfortunately, seems to be the whole point.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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