Resources To Understand What’s Happening in Lebanon Right Now
The violence and atrocities that the Israeli occupation’s army is inflicting on Lebanon are not new. Today’s events sit within a long and bloody history that traces its roots far beyond October 7. Western media selectively forgets and deliberately omits the key historical context that situates today’s violence within the broader Zionist agenda. In the face of what we’re enduring in Lebanon, we have been seeking out resources — fiction and non-fiction — that help us trace this long history and contextualize today’s violence. We reached out to our community to find the best books and films out there and have added some of our own. This is intended as a growing list, so please share your suggestions with us too.
Pity The Nation: Lebanon at War
Robert Fisk
Recommended by Professor Eugene Rogan
“This is an account of war in the late-20th century both as historical document and as an eyewitness testament to human savagery. Written by one of Britain's foremost journalists, this book combines political analysis and war reporting: it is an epic account of the Lebanon conflict by an author who has personally witnessed the carnage of Beirut for over a decade. Fisk's book recounts the details of a terrible war but it also tells a story of betrayal and illusion, of Western blindness that had led inevitably to political and military catastrophe. Fisk's book gives us a further insight into this troubled part of the world.”
Though there are many recent works addressing Israel’s historic violence against Lebanon, Professor Rogan picked this one out as a classic for the beauty of the writing and the humanity behind the narrative.
Available via Amazon
Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Soha Bechara
Recommended by Professor Ghenwa Hayek
“In 1988, at the age of twenty, Souha Béchara attempted to assassinate General Lahad, chief of militia in charge of Israeli-occupied Southern Lebanon. Immediately apprehended, interrogated, and tortured for weeks, she was sent to Khiam, a prison and death camp regularly condemned by humanitarian organizations. After an intense Lebanese, European, and even Israeli campaign in her favor, she was released in 1998. In a time when special attention is paid to the violent conflicts in the Middle East, and Americans despair of understanding what motivates Palestinian suicide bombers, the story of a secular Orthodox Christian left rebel risking her life to rid her country of occupying forces will resonate with Americans looking to understand why young Palestinian girls blow themselves up in crowded Jerusalem markets.”
Via Shake and Co
Memory for Forgetfulness
Mahmoud Darwish
Recommended by Professor Ghenwa Hayek
“One of the Arab world's greatest poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day). This book is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage.”
Via UC Press
The Arab Apocalypse
Etel Adnan
Recommended by Professor Ghenwa Hayek
“Translated from the French by the author. “From time to time, there occurs what suspends time, revelation—at least for certain people, martyrs. But then the apocalypse, revelation, is withdrawn, occulted by the ‘apocalypse,’ the surpassing disaster, so that symptomatically apocalypse’s primary sense (from Greek apokalypsis, from apokalyptein to uncover, from apo-+ kalyptein to cover) is occulted by its secondary meaning, and martyr’s primary sense, witness, is occulted by its secondary, vulgar meaning: ‘a person who suffers greatly or is killed because of their political or religious beliefs’… While the Arab ‘apocalypse’ as surpassing disaster leads to a withdrawal of Arabic tradition, the apocalypse as revelation leads to Arabic tradition’s vertiginous extension.”
Via Litmus Press
A Balcony over the Fakihani
Liyana Badr
Recommended by Professor Ghenwa Hayek
“The title story of Liyana Badr's remarkable collection of three short novellas interweaves the narratives of three Palestinians, two women and one man, relating their successive uprootings: from Palestine in 1948, from Jordan during Black September in 1970, to their final exile in Beirut. Badr's intensively evocative contrapuntal style allows the reader to glimpse the joy and despair of these lives rooted in exile and resistance. There is an attention to detail in these stories that brings the grand narrative of Palestinian history alive: a horrified mother spotting a white hair on her baby's head the morning after a mortar attack in Beirut; a woman hiding a Palestinian resistance fighter's gun moments before he is picked up by the Jordanian security police. The final movement of A Balcony over the Fakihaniis a deeply poetic and harrowing account of Israeli air strikes during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, told from the perspective we so rarely encounter: that of the disenfranchised people whose courage and suffering cannot fail to move the readers of this extraordinary book.”
Via Interlink Books
Gate of the Sun
Elias Khoury
Recommended by Professor Ghenwa Hayek
Khoury’s “Palestinian odyssey” reminds us that the stories of Lebanon and Palestine are inextricable from each other.
“This book is the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. After their country is torn apart in 1948, two men remain alone in a deserted makeshift hospital in the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut. We enter a vast world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes, he begins a story, which branches into many. Stories of the people expelled from their villages in Galilee, of the massacres that followed, of the extraordinary inner strength of those who survived, and of love. Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people. Originally published in Beirut in 1998, the novel has been a sensation throughout the Arab world, in Israel, and throughout Europe.”
A Landscape of War
Munira Khayyat
“What worlds take root in war? In this book, anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these ecologies make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as a place where life must go on.”
Via UC Press
Memoirs of a Militant: My Years in the Khiam Women's Prison
Nawal Qasim Baidoun
"'In order to carry on with life in prison, you must believe you will be there forever.' In this haunting and inspiring book, Nawal Baidoun offers us her first-person account of the life of a young woman activist imprisoned for four years, as well as the events leading up to her arrest and detention. Born into a nationalist family in Bint Jbeil, Lebanon, not far from the location of the prison itself, Baidoun, like so many others, found herself compelled to take up arms to resist the Israeli occupation. Her memoir skillfully weaves together two stories: that of the oppressive conditions facing ordinary people and families in South Lebanon, and that of the horrors of daily life and the struggle for survival inside the prison itself."
via Interlink Books
Films to Watch
Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon
In this award-winning documentary, directors Mai Masri and Jean Khalil Chamoun focus on the women who played a crucial role in fighting the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. Preserving their stories on camera, Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon is a poignant documentary about courage, resistance, and hope.
Watch the full film here
Beirut, My City (1982)
“Beirut, My City (Beyrouth, Ma Ville) by the renowned Lebanese director Jocelyne Saab, is one of the most important films to be created during the Lebanese civil wars - particularly during the Israeli siege of Beirut. The bulk of the film utilizes images captured by Saab with a narration written by the Lebanese poet and artist Etal Adnan. A moving and poetic film, it paints a complex painting of West Beirut as a place of misery and resistance, of discord and community, of madness and clarity. Truly a unique film.”
Words in the wake of War / Lebanon summer (2006)
“Summer 2006. In the midst of preparing my album The Astounding Eyes of Rita, I watched as Lebanon descended into turmoil. In retaliation for the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah, the Israeli army launched a large-scale offensive. Within a month, the country was devastated. When the fighting ceased, I found myself deeply shaken, unable to return to music as if nothing had happened. Driven by an inner necessity, I rushed to Lebanon to witness firsthand, to feel the reality of what had happened, and to become part of it. This is how the idea for this documentary was born. I wanted to capture the voices of Lebanese artists and intellectuals, structuring the narrative around their testimonies. Men and women from various generations and religious backgrounds shared, with raw emotion and rare sincerity, their personal accounts of what they had just lived through. They spoke freely, with no pretensions, exposing the diversity of opinions that characterize Lebanese society, its fears, and its hopes. Through this intimate and candid speech, a deep wound is revealed — a human dimension beyond the mere facts of war. Political issues are not sidestepped, but rather, it is the participants themselves who approach them with remarkable nuance, far from the usual stereotypes. The film reveals a people and a country that our camera traveled from north to south, offering a glimpse into the many faces of Lebanon.”
A World Not Ours (2012)
"An intimate, and often humorous, portrait of three generations of exile in the refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh, in southern Lebanon. Based on a wealth of personal recordings, family archives, and historical footage, the film is a sensitive, and illuminating study of belonging, friendship, and family in the lives of those for whom dispossession is the norm, and yearning their daily lives."
Aïnata (2018)
"Here we are in Aïnata in south Lebanon, a place where the Eye follows the stream to its source, where the tales from the land of Ugarit intertwine with our modern rituals and myths. I try to define a point of view, to recast the whole from a detail, to map out one's own space. History is to be told, and its stories unfold into a territory, where the archaeology of times owes its survival to fiction." – Alaa Mansour
Untitled part 1: everything and nothing (1999)
"The first installment from the ongoing tape, ‘untitled’. An intimate dialogue that weaves back and forth between representations of a figure (of resistance) and conversation with Soha Bechara, an ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter in her Paris dorm room. This was taped during the last year of the Israeli occupation one year after her release from captivity in El-Khiam torture and interrogation centre where she had been detained for 10 years, 6 years in isolation. Revising notions of resistance, survival and will, recounting to death, separation and closeness; the overexposed image and body of a surviving martyr speaking quietly and directly into the camera juxtaposed against her self and image, not speaking of the torture but of the distance between the subject and loss, of what is left behind and what remains.”
