“nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch”¹

–Theodor Adorno

On Barbarism

Ramia, the village in South Lebanon where I conducted fieldwork, was blown up in an act of war. On October 20, 2024, one month into a two-month war of annihilation,² in a two-year (and counting) war, in a 78-year war that has not ended, Israeli soldiers detonated explosives they had wired throughout the village, forcibly and gradually emptied of human life, blowing it up completely. Videos by the young Israeli soldiers of their acts of destruction circulated on social media. The cellphone footage showed the young soldiers counting down and then howling with glee in the wake of the explosion that pulverized the village. An image of the village disappearing into a pink pillow of smoke under a glowing early morning moon was shared on the village’s WhatsApp group. Members of the group responded with crying, angry, and broken-hearted emojis, and with verses beseeching the heavens. I juxtaposed the haunting image of the village’s destruction with a photo I took during fieldwork in 2008 when the village had defiantly reemerged from the last punishing war of July 2006 and had just been rebuilt, shiny and new. Along with a few words, I posted the collage on social media.

The post was widely shared including on the front page of the New York Times, who stole my photo for their story. Helplessly trying to fathom the world-ending loss of this beloved place, I sent a voice note to my friend Ghida, who is from the village: “I can’t believe what has happened, sister,” I cried in an anguished tone, “How are we supposed to comprehend this? How do you feel?” Ghida, who is my age and has lived with war her whole life, like me, but has suffered much more, responded calmly to my distress: “I expected this would happen – all the villages, Aita [al-Shaab], Mhaibib, Mais al-Jabal, Blida – all of them – they’ve blown them up and are razing them flat with bulldozers, so I wasn’t surprised when I saw what happened to Ramia.” Then, in answer to my more existential question, she added: “It is as if we have grown scales (ka’ano tamsahna) and are no longer capable of beautiful feelings (il-ihsass il hilo).”

In the months that followed, I searched for ways to respond adequately to a reality that had made us into scaly creatures with no beautiful feelings, desperately seeking answers. How do we feel at the end of the world? How do we exist in catastrophe? And how do we speak of it? Write of it? I hounded friends with these thorny questions, angrily rejecting what I felt were inadequate answers. I floundered and despaired and grew monstrously resentful of scholarship – at what I felt was its inability to respond in any meaningful way to the catastrophes that we were actually living through (most of us at a distance). What was the point of scholarship in general and anthropology in particular if it could not help us now? I smoldered with barely concealed rage in classrooms, talks, and seminars, loathing the academic habitus that imprisons us in the proper way to perform—as the world fucking burns.

More than a year later, I am still full of rage, and wars are still raging. During this time—two years and counting into this genocide and ecocide and more than one year into Israel’s complete destruction and ongoing occupation of South Lebanon’s frontline villages—I have had to awkwardly bridge the distance between catastrophe and the performance and place of scholarship in its presence.

To be honest, I never turn to him for guidance, but I found Adorno’s infamous line about poetry after Auschwitz helpful here: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”; to write (ethnography) during Israel’s wars of annihilation is… barbaric. Sounds about right. In life, we grow scales to inhabit this barbarism, but what of our writing? It feels barbaric to write as the world burns. But we must bear witness, and we must write. Witness the barbarism, write about it in a way that feels adequate. (So little does). It is hard to write as a scaly monster. And it feels most of the time that our anguish has nowhere to land. What language can hold such rage and such sorrow? What words can keep a world now completely shattered whole? What tense does one write in? Where does one stand and speak when there is no ground beneath and no horizon? And who is the audience?

In the beginning, the audience was me. I walked around with a notebook, scribbling in it jagged sentences that attempted to bring the present into focus. The sequence of short texts below is gleaned from my writing during the time of cease(less)fire, (renewed) war, and continuous displacement in Lebanon from November 2024 to the present. It is stitched together flimsily. The writing is barbaric: It illuminates the barbaric destruction of our world and, in this way, confronts it, resists it.

Fall: In the Time of Olives 

The olives are ripe. The Hajji leans down and picks one off the ground and squeezes it to make the green blood ooze out of the crinkled black flesh. She offers it to me. “Eat it,” she says. I bite into the fruit, anticipating the wonderful bitterness. She smiles knowingly as she watches me. Those that fall to the ground are the most delicious because they have ripened on their own, she says. She sits back and her eyes take on a far-off look as she summons a world that no longer exists: her village in the time of olives. The landscape is lit from within, and the ground is peppered with God’s bounty (rizq).

Her olive grove is all burnt and uprooted now, but she doesn’t know the extent of the damage because her children have tried to shield her from that reality. In her heart, though, she knows, and she insistently tells me now, without missing a single detail, how they would harvest, press, and pickle the olives in season. Now is her third season of displacement and yearning, after the loss of a world that remains raucously alive in her heart.

Almost two years ago, in the season of olives and under a glittering shower of white phosphorous rain that set the earth on fire, the Hajji and her daughters fled their home for the last time. They left everything behind (the Hajji told me recently, in a random moment of recall: I left the masbaha worry beads under the pillow!), expecting to return soon, as their neighbors in Palestine once did, as they had done so many times before. The Hajj remained behind—in death as in life—rooted in the soil of the village.

My journal entry from almost a year ago: At 4:00 am, November 27, 2024, the ceasefire came into effect. The Israelis were bombing up until the last second, but the moment the ceasefire was official everyone went pouring back home—to South Lebanon, to their homes, their land, their lives—or at least what was left of them. O what pain, seasons of pain, of hellfire, and devastation. I can’t stop crying—my life in war is unfolding like an accordion in a hall of mirrors before my eyes: all those seasons of destruction, of fear, and worry for loved ones and homes and all of our histories and memories, again and again and again and again. I cried and cried and cried. Resistance, return, rejoice. We briefly give in to a moment of release unleashing a depth of sorrow that threatens to drown everything. We can’t allow that flood to inundate us: we must be strong and carry on, rebuild, replant, return.

The war is not over.

Winter: A Return to the End of the World

Birds fly south for the winter. But what if they returned and their habitats were gone?   

January 27, 2025 marked the end of the first 60 days of “ceasefire,” when the Israeli occupiers said they would withdraw from Lebanon. The roads to the South were already jammed with traffic at 4:00 am, but many eager to return to their villages were turned back with bullets and bombs. The Israelis were not withdrawing as agreed. The occupation-under-ceasefire was extended to February 17. But even after that date, the Israelis would not withdraw. They would continue occupying South Lebanon indefinitely.

At the end of February, a few days after the funeral of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,³ we returned to the destroyed village for the first time. My sisters and I, Ghida and her family, and three daughters of the Hajji, Khawla, Nawal, and Zahra.

My fieldnotes from the end of the world: Starving, shrieking cats. Men in their dugout festooned with portraits of the village’s martyrs—handsome youths, smiling, all gone. Those with only houses destroyed can’t express their sorrow beside this kind of loss. Zahra says “I don’t care so much about stone and stuff; it’s the massacred orchards that pain me the most.” Israeli graffiti and trash and exploded and discarded missiles piled up amid the wreckage. You look around as far as the eye can see: ruin ruin ruin rubble rubble rubble. Truly, theory stops here. This is a place of lamentation—but it is even beyond that. The eyes can’t comprehend, and neither can the heart. We didn’t know how to feel or act. It came out in awkward jokes: “I found the Key of Return (muftah al ‘awdi)!” Ali proclaims as we all screech with laughter. “They turned my pretty green dress into curtains!” calls Dunya from the next scorched room in her aunt Munya’s house, the only structure left standing in the entire village of 500 homes. “I told this guy a thousand times not to park it here!” Ali shouts as he stands atop a crumpled tractor drowned in piles of rubble. The Israelis were working with their diggers on the hilltops, building up their illegal occupation. The woodland, with all its innocent creatures and its good and naughty spirits, was being methodically denuded and destroyed (damar mumanhaj, Sahel calls it) all across the borderline. Standing in this landscape, I sense a strange disconnect between what the eyes see and what the brain understands. How does one understand the end of the world? “This is apocalypse,” my sister Rola standing beside me says to herself in a whisper. Indeed, I think to myself, that is what it is. Zahra explodes: “They have destroyed us! We are never coming back! We are never rebuilding! Even in 20 years we won’t be able to bring our village or the South back.” “Don’t say that!” says Khawla, “be hopeful—we will resist!” Nawal doesn’t say anything. The three sisters sit in silence amid the rubble. Just being here now was the most that any of us could offer.

A few days later, Rabih says to me: “I am so tired of this shit. How many times are we going to go through this: our homes are destroyed, and then we rebuild, our homes are destroyed and then we rebuild. It’s so boring—I’m done.” He described the Sayyed as a magician who believed his own spells, and everyone else did, too. He paid for this with his own life and the lives of so many others. “The southerners are the last samurai: They took the last stand for this world, and they lost and now we are done for. The South is gone and it will never return.”

But Riad says to me: “Listen, we [Shi’a] have lived with massacre and defeat for centuries, from Karbala onwards. This is nothing new for us, and we know how to survive in the face of oppression and erasure. We will bide our time. Hayhat minna al-dhilla! Never to humiliation! We will wait out this darkness.”

Spring: No Horizon

The season of renewal arrives like a slap in the face. The purple and red anemones are in bloom; the almond trees are dressed in white petals; and the earth is deeply wounded. It lies in shards, emptied of life. The only activity in the frontline villages are the preparations for the mass burial of the martyrs—95 in Aitaroun and 45 in Aita ash-Shaab. Flags, photographs, blasting music that sounds defiant, militant and upbeat, but where does one go from here? There is a sense of waiting, but for what? Elections, compensation, reconstruction… or the next round of war?

Right now, there is no movement—no return—just stasis, suspended time, and endless piles of rubble.

The Sayyed’s funeral was the event that everyone anticipated in this wounded time, and it was an occasion for collective mourning. When the six Israeli jets swooped low above the crowd of a million mourners in the stadium, everyone immediately raised their fists in unison. And now what? He is in the ground now, no longer among us, and the loss is real. The present is hard to understand, harder to feel, and hardest to act on purposefully. I asked the people we were with that day how they are managing to make ends meet, and they said barely. Almost no one has an income.

There is a guy from the village, the goatherd who lost his 1500 goats, who is defiantly planting tobacco in the Marj despite constant Israeli harassment with gunshots and stun grenades. He collected his remaining 30 or so surviving goats and kept them in a nearby village, taking them for walks through the blasted landscape still coated in lush green. One day an Israeli drone attacked his remaining goats with a missile. It was a massacre.

A few weeks later, we go to visit Jihad and his family in yet another home. How many different homes had I visited over 20 years? In the entrance to the two-story building where he is renting the second floor, there is a small cage with some quails in it, a male and some females. Jihad loves birds and adores hatching eggs. In my book, I included a picture of one his doves flying home to roost in the coop in the garden of his home in Aita. Both his home and town, doves and garden, are now gone. “I have an incubator and am waiting on some baby quails now,” he tells me. “Let’s see if they hatch.”

Jihad feels bitter: “Iran has betrayed us,” he says, smoking a cigarette on the terrace of the rented apartment he is living in with his wife, daughters, and grandkids, squinting angrily through the smoke at a middle distance in his mind’s eye, with an unsettled heart. But he can’t see. “There is no horizon,” he mutters.

Summer: Dreams of Return

Khawla speaks of the general malaise she feels, her elevated blood pressure. “We are not used to this heat in the city. In the summers, we would be in the village sitting outside in the cool air, we would be together with family and neighbors. This was taken away from us suddenly (insalakh ‘anna faj’a) and this weighs on us.”

“The moment they say the war is over, I will get a prefab house and go back to the village and stay there. I will close my eyes and imagine that all that has happened these past two years is a dream.”

In a voice note sent to me, Batoul, a young architect from Khiam, a border village known for its French colonial military barracks turned Israeli prison during the occupation, speaks of waves, of processing and mourning and working through things. The first return: “It was a moment of discovery lined with a bit of joy. We came back, and fatahna (opened) our villages, but mostly we returned to check on our houses and see the damar (destruction). And those were the first waves of people coming in the first few days; they went to check on the village to see what remained of their homes and of the village, to bear witness to what had happened. The second wave was one of grief, of mourning, when the shuhada (martyrs), buried in wadayi (temporary graves) far from the village, returned to their villages in the hundreds: fighters and civilian martyrs, the glorious dead. And people gathered in the village again to take part in funeral processions. And then there was a third wave: Okay, how do we plan a life back in this place that is lined with so much death? They held an iftar during Ramadan, people went to the village during Eid, there was a sahra khiyamiyeh (evening gathering in tents), they made a bonfire in the middle of the village square, people were organizing gatherings on the WhatsApp groups. They were finding reasons to be there; these moments were the first times people had reasons other than checking on their houses or burying their dead, to return to the village. And now it feels like there is a fourth wave: cafes have reopened and shops and dakakeen (corner stores). And now there is the season of planting—wheat, for example: Those who harvest wheat were working hard in the sahl (the plain), and you feel there is more life because there is harvest and movement. But that has to do more with the valley and the surroundings of the village and the harvest coming back. That is how it feels now, with the occasional sounds of bombs and drones. But it’s beautiful. It is so fucking beautiful—I love this land so much. I am working on a piece, writing on this for the first time. I have struggled to write since everything. I sometimes write in bits and pieces, but I am trying to work on something that has to do with the return to Khiam.”  

But that is Khiam.⁴ Along the occupied and mankoub (catastrophe-stricken) borderline, life has been allowed to return in some pockets and not in others. Ramia and other destroyed villages under direct occupation, are another story.

Zahra, who since September 2024 has lived with her mother the Hajji and her sister Nawal at my mom’s house, shrieks at me in a moment of despair: shoo maseerna? What is our destiny?

Fall: Incendiaries   

It is the warmest November on record with temperatures close to 30 degrees Celsius, unheard of in Tishreen 2.⁵ The dry brush coating the hillsides is tinder awaiting any spark, and usually this is the season of wildfires. Wildfires are rampant, and many are sparked by drone and white phosphorous attacks. They are impossible to contain.

Winter: Pray for the Souls of the Dead

After the hottest and dryest November on record, the rains have finally arrived. On the village WhatsApp group, the advice below is circulated:

On the occasion of the beginning of the rains – a reminder:

A single sound and a quake (rajji) = bomb

Two sounds right after one another = sonic boom

Sounds that extend without accompanying quakes = thunder

If you don’t hear anything = pray for the souls of the dead: In the name of God the Merciful. Do not count those who died serving God among the dead, but as alive with their Lord.

Far from the village, in my mother’s garden, we are planting winter crops. Under Zahra’s supervision we are doing it the village way, circular plots for each variety: cauliflower, cabbage, onions, parsley, coriander, broccoli, lettuce.

Last night, Israel assassinated a Hizbullah commander in Dahiyeh—in an attack with no warning, in the heart of Beirut, in a time of ceasefire. Zahra had gone to her brother’s home in Dahiyeh for a visit, and at the time of the attack she was buying bread. She said she saw the missiles hit and described the scenes of fear and mayhem in the aftermath. On every single day of this ceasefire, Israel has attacked Lebanon. In 15 months of ceasefire, 15,000 breaches were logged. Around 400 people were killed. This fire will never cease. 

Again, Zahra turns to me with the unanswerable question: Where are we headed?

Spring: Another Season of War

From Palestine to Lebanon and Lebanon to Palestine. From the Dahiyeh doctrine to the Gaza doctrine to the South Lebanon doctrine. In February, leaflets thrown over Beirut from Israeli jets threaten: “In light of our great success in Gaza, the ‘New Reality’ arrives in Lebanon!” Drones buzz in the sky from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, an incessant sound, utterly invasive and always deadly. 45 days of cease(less)fire, including “Operation Eternal Darkness” when, on April 8, 2026, 20 jets jumped out of the blue sky without warning at 2:15 pm on a Wednesday, to rain 160 missiles on Lebanon that killed hundreds across Beirut, including the parents of my sisters’ friend Khaled, his mother an acclaimed poet, and the mother and older brother of my friend Wael.

Katz says emphatically: We will turn South Lebanon into northern Gaza. As in Gaza, Yellow Lines will demarcate Dead Zones methodically made devoid of all life. In this season of green and amid another cease(less)fire, South Lebanon is being systematically annihilated. An endless stream of chilling videos depicting detonations, absolute devastation, and the hills are covered in a bright emerald green, dotted with freckles of purple, red, yellow and white wildflowers, and the fruit trees are in angelic bloom. Horrific devastation amid relentless life. Birds flying north for the summer are attacking Israeli killer drones.

Yesterday they blew up Qantara. This was one of the first villages to be liberated in May 2000. I was in the South that day as a young journalist, and the first yelp of joy I heard heralding the collapse of the violent and hated 22-year Israeli occupation of South Lebanon was: “Qantara has been liberated!” On April 28, 2026, Qantara was pulverized with 570 tons of explosives that made a purple mushroom cloud in the sky and sent seismic tremors across the region. Now it (and every other village in the dead-zone) is gone, gone, gone.

On Resistance

My first book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon, researched in the wake of the 2006 war and published in 2022, is an ethnography of resistant life lived through endless seasons of war in South Lebanon. Now it is an archive of heartbreak, erasure, and loss. A document of barbarism. Before this infernal season of war, I had called the forms of life that remained rooted in this wretched earth during and after seasonal catastrophes “resistant ecologies.” After the apparent defeat of the Lebanese military resistance at the end of the last round of war in November 2024, these living ecologies became the very targets of relentless annihilation by the war-machine: orchards, fields and homes, flocks and herds, beehives and gardens, wells and rivers, forests and woodlands. What must resistance be when life itself is the target of barbaric war?

This is one of the most important questions of our moment. This essay has been an attempt to answer it.

1. Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Surhkamp Verlag, 1955), 31. [↩]
2. Locally referred to as harb al-sitteen yom (the 60-day war) or Israeli Operation Northern Arrows. [↩]
3. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who led Hizbullah for 32 years and was widely revered, was assassinated in a massive strike on Beirut on September 27, 2024. He was buried in Beirut on February 23, 2025. [↩]
4. Khiam was a major battleground in the latest round of invasion. The resistance put up a valiant fight but now, as of March 2026, the town has been completely and utterly destroyed. [↩]
5. In the Levantine calendar, October and November are Tishreen 1 and Tishreen 2 – they are the months of olive harvest. [↩]