Author and Columnist
10.02.24
-Golda Meir
When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.
Fear of Loving in Lebanon
Israel disrupts and infiltrates the supply chain, disseminating pagers imbued with an explosive, which they trigger to go off all at once. Some in Hezbollah--their target and enemy--are grievously wounded or killed. Bystanders, some children, face the same fate. On the internet, the predicable sorts do not mourn for the dead children, referring to them as larval terrorists. Zionists are unsubtle.
I struggle to fully express how little I want to discuss issues of geopolitical importance in what is an online diary. This is not the place, no matter my stance on apartheid and ethnic cleansing. (Opposed.) However, these are not atrocities I see only on this side of a screen. My niece, Ayannah, remains there with her boyfriend. She tells my mother she hears the sonic booms of Israel's bombing campaigns but has not seen any of the aftermath. She is a forty-minute drive from Bierut--one of Israel's primary targets--but it does not bother her.
It would exceedingly bother me. I would have been on a plane home within a week of arrival--if I lasted that long. Love is the spice of life, but indifferent death lasts.
Yan says her boyfriend is not Hezbollah and does not own a pager.
When Israel blows up walkie-talkies the next day, she tells us he also does not have one of those.
Her boyfriend does not have to be Hezbollah. They simply have to be near someone who might run afoul of Israel--or simply someone whose life is irrelevant to that nation, which does seem to be most people. Collateral damage not only isn't Israel's apparent concern but seems to be welcome. Their attitude appears to be If you don't want us blowing up children, support our bombing instead of valuing the life of anyone swarthy.
My niece could catch shrapnel, and she would be maligned as a terrorist for falling in love. It is not an academic concern. The little girls dead from a beeper explosion to the face were committing no greater sin than being Lebanese when Israel decided to commit war crimes--which this attack categorically was. This truth is not popular in the Western world.
Their ambassador wounded in the attack, Iran ramps up pressure on Israel, then adds bombs. Israel responds by sending missiles into Lebanon, specifically near Ayannah, who remains frustratingly unbothered by this.
In a fit of curious morbidity, I do minutes of research into the particulars of repatriating remains. My mother says this is an awful thing to have done, then asks how much that would cost.
"Between two and ten thousand dollars."
She pauses. "We would have to take up a collection from all the family members."
Ayannah is not doing any great work in Lebanon. As far as my mother divulges, in the absence of her community and a steady internet connection, she mostly makes furniture for her boyfriend's family's business. I don't know how the internet escapes her now, given that her boyfriend met her online gaming, but these might likewise not be questions we are meant to ask.
She won't come home simply because Israel wants to obliterate the country out of vengeance. I do not know what would make her return, if anything. I suspect her boyfriend would not let her go without a fight, though I would encourage my beloved to be as far as missiles and war crimes as I could manage.
last watched: Beastars
reading: Sight Unseen