-Essay-
BEIRUT — I wake up every day to the same sentence: “It was a violent night in Beirut’s southern suburbs.” While the details change, news of bombing has become so repetitive, it makes almost no difference.
There are heavy airstrikes on the Bekaa Valley and new warnings from Avichay Adraee, IDF spokesperson to the Arab media. His warnings have become an unwelcome daily occurrence in our lives: Adraee warns us, then bombs us, then tells us that he bombed us.
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In the villages of Bekaa — where my family, people and memories are — bleed silently. Few cameras reach the valley. Many don’t understand what is happening there.
I cried for every stone that fell in my village. I cried for every moment of terror experienced by those I love, on the roads and my memories. But at some point, I got used to this scale of terror. With time, the blood loses its ability to shake us. The many limbs become one corpse for someone we’ve already mourned.
That is perhaps the worst thing about war: it becomes a normal, mere repetition and rumination. The tragedy becomes familiar to the point of fading. The scenes of sadness and blood become rituals without astonishment or anger. It’s okay. It’s OK. We could die at any moment. It’s okay.
A false habit
In one of the shelters I visited, a woman kept inviting me to drink coffee. She insisted on the invitation as if I were in her home. She asked me if she looked pretty on camera, and begged me not to make her look fat, and laughed as if she was going to announce her birthday party in front of the lens.
But I understood her, because when things got serious, we exchanged the same tired look, she cried on camera, and I cried in my heart.
That day, I called almost all my friends, but I no longer do that.
War is a false habit. It’s more than a year since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and subsequent Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, more than a year of fighting — even if its intensity varies according to political variables and internal consultations in Gaza and Lebanon.
But what we felt in Lebanon on Jan. 2, when Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri was killed in Beirut’s southern suburbs, is not what we feel now, with every new night of bombing. On Jan. 2, I called almost all my friends. But I no longer do that — a painful indication that the trauma has moved to another, perhaps more dangerous, stage.
Just a war
We have become accustomed to the bombing. Can the world imagine what it means for someone to become accustomed to the bombing?
Does Amos Hochstein, the U.S. special envoy for Lebanon, know what it means to lose your sense of fear? Do the negotiations include, for example, a clause about the trauma of the people exposed to all this madness? Do the negotiators understand the fear, the long nights of terror?
One day, I stopped crying completely.
Since Sept. 23 — when Israel began its series of airstrikes in Lebanon as part of the ongoing Israel–Hezbollah conflict — I have been living in a psychological state that I have never experienced in my life. I told those close to me that I suffer from all the symptoms of depression and warned them that I could fall at any moment and lose my ability to hold myself together.
But one day, I stopped crying completely. I lost my anger. I became just a journalist who approaches the news and stories with extreme neutrality. I heard the bombing and its stories without any kind of provocation, as if I were outside the news and outside the war — and also outside the coverage.
It’s just a war. That’s okay!
