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BEIRUT — Lubnan Baalbaki, chief conductor of the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra, posted a picture on Facebook of his family house in the border town of Odaisseh in southern Lebanon. Along with the picture, he posted a video released by the Israeli military showing the massive explosion that destroyed all houses in Odaisseh, including the Baalbaki family house.
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“Here we had a home where we grew up, built by my parents with their dreams and much love. Here we buried our parents,” he wrote in the post. “No, our home is not a ransom. And yes, we know the perpetrator and we know his crimes.”
Before Baalbaki, my friend Nada Mohammed wrote about how the same explosion destroyed her grandmother’s grave, which was always the first place she visited when she came to Odaisseh on visits from Britain. This was in addition to her parents’ home, which was also likely destroyed by the 400 tons of explosives that the Israeli occupation army later revealed it had planted in Odaisseh.
Successive generations of houses end up in piles of rubble. It is not only the houses that our ancestors left to us. In the last 20 years, thousands of southerners have built houses hoping that a time for peace would come, after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 and the July war in 2006.
These two wars, as well as other previous wars, were breaks between wars and urban renaissance. But it seems that the war of 2024 will not be one of these breaks: the scale of the tragedy this time requires another level of imagination to help us with what awaits us after the war.
Children of the front edge
We, the children of “front edge” villages, are losing thousands of homes. Our loss is not limited to memories and dreams, but also to the stories of our villages. These houses are what those who died between two wars, two eras and two or more generations had left for us.
The house of the late educator Jaafar al-Amin in Chaqra is not the house of his heir Akram, rather a house that contains the stories of “Mr. Jaafar” with generations of students from the 1950s and 1960s when he was at the head of the educational mission from Nabatieh to Chaqra. A few days ago, Akram too posted a picture of the destroyed house on his Facebook page.
Erasing these villages to turn them into an uninhabited buffer zone involves a degree of madness never tested before.
The mission, then, is not “uprooting Hezbollah,” as its members can move north of the Litani, then later expand to its south. What is being uprooted today instead is the spirit of the place, and the time during which these villages were formed, and their people built their homes, mosques, schools and lives there.
Genocidal erasure
The five kilometers that the occupation says it intends to turn into an uninhabitable and unlivable area are not just demolished houses. They are much more than that. They are not an area charged with emotions that can turn into mere memories.
The genocidal decision to erase these villages and turn them into an uninhabited buffer zone — if the occupation is allowed to implement it — involves a degree of madness and intentions that have never been tested in reality.
To say that the neighboring Galilee villages were emptied during the first “transfer” phase in 1948 (the Nakba) cannot somehow make the step of erasing the front edge in Lebanon realistic or rational. In the Galilee, settlers replaced the uprooted habitants, while Benjamin Netanyahu’s current project calls for turning the villages of the “front edge” in Lebanon into a buffer zone devoid of life!
Israel has a tremendous but unrealistic power to destroy. Destruction has no mission other than destruction itself. The genocide here has no more than its vengeful function. A process of continuous generations of grudges.
Another annihilation in the works
Once the mission is accomplished, its irrationality will be fully revealed.
This is not optimism about the inevitability of the mission’s failure. The destruction it is causing and the death it brings will form a bleak horizon. Israel has been tested in these villages for decades. The border town of Hanin was wiped off the urban map in 1978. Its residents returned in 2000, and today it is on its way to a second annihilation.
As for Houla, which is next to Odaisseh, its story began with the 1948 massacre that has resumed today with dozens of victims and hundreds of destroyed homes.
In my town of Chaqra, dozens of homes that were destroyed by Israeli commando units in the 1980s were rebuilt. Today they face an unknown fate, and a number of them have already been destroyed once again
We, meanwhile, continue to investigate the fate of our own homes. Without official confirmation from the Israelis, the best means we have is the updated satellite images of “Google Maps,” which can only give a partial accounting of which homes are destroyed. Its overhead images do not reveal the damage to the walls and foundation of buildings.
A home is not just a building, but a special place. Not all surviving homes have completely survived, and the war is far from over.
