On Lebanon and Loss

Part 2

Tylor Brand, author of Famine Worlds, reflects on the past and present of Israel and Lebanon

Tylor Brand

Aita al-Shaab, 2025. Photograph by Sally Hayden. Used with permission.

This is Part 2 in a two-part series. You can find Part 1 here.

Urbicide and Identity

This most recent bout of targeted violence has been demographically, structurally, intellectually, and epistemically transformative for Lebanon’s Shiʿa. Though for them, it would not be the first time. The Shiʿi villages that dotted the Keserwan region of Mount Lebanon in the medieval period all but disappeared following punitive Mamluk raids at the turn of the 14th century. Four centuries later, the opportunistic Ottoman governor of Acre, Ahmad al-Jazzar (“the Butcher”) Pasha launched a bloody campaign against the communities in the southern region of the Jabal ʿAmil, deliberately destroying centuries of Shiʿi religious and cultural artifacts in the process. Fast forward another century, and southerners who had endured the horrors of the famine of World War I suffered crackdowns against anti-colonial resistance by the occupying French army — first during anticolonial actions in 1920, and again during the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925-27. Perhaps the worst losses of all took place during the Civil War and Israeli occupation of 1978–2000.

However, the current onslaught has far more in common with al-Jazzar’s invasion than with prior wars. In deliberately targeting the Shiʿi community, Israel threatens to detach the people of the South from their land, their heritage, and their ability to sustain their culture into the future.

The most obvious erasure in this urbicidal campaign has been of the physical structures of the villages themselves. Israel has specifically targeted Shiʿi communities as a way to eliminate tunnel networks and weapons caches; but even if this was true in all cases, this would still amount to a war crime. Moreover, the selective pattern of Israel’s demolition has in the process explicitly expelled hundreds of thousands of its Shiʿi residents, even as neighboring Christian and Druze villages have been deliberately left alone. The effect is ethnic cleansing of a region that has for centuries been shaped by its Shiʿa population. Israel’s long-term annexation of Lebanese land south of the Litani, without permitting residents the right to return to their villages, could effect a demographic shift that extends into the future as generations lose connection to familial land. While past seasons of war have always brought seasons of renewal in Lebanon, the scale of the destruction of villages like Ramia in the current round of fighting means that even when they are rebuilt, their local character and identity will have been lost in the process.

Israel’s strategic application of force has similarly targeted the very identity of the South, and the connection between it, the Dahieh, the Shiʿa and the idea of Lebanon itself. Many commentators have pre-emptively refused this distinction, making it clear that the South is Lebanon, and the Shiʿa are Lebanese, and that the targeting of civilians is never permissible. However, the internal logic of Israel’s targeting strategy has conceptually cleaved predominately Shiʿi areas from the Lebanese whole in the discourse about the war. The media’s designation of Dahieh and the South as “Hizbullah strongholds” conjures an image of a walled fortress, not a neighborhood that would be difficult to distinguish from any other if not for the color of the political flags hanging on light poles.

This Orientalist sectarian logic has been demonstrably plastic over the course of the war. Since 2023, Israel’s definition of “the southern suburb” in its evacuation orders has expanded beyond a cluster of quarters that Beirut residents normally associated with the Dahieh to include any area south of Ras Beirut that have a majority or even large Shiʿi population. This has encompassed the pricey coastal quarter of Jnah and confessionally mixed communities like Choueifat and Hadath, which over time have become sites of affordable housing for many of Beirut’s middle class who had been priced out of other areas. However, the consequences of this conceptualization are very real. For detached observers, Israeli strikes on the “Dahieh” or the South are regarded as less egregious, or at least more understandable than strikes in areas associated with other Lebanese sectarian groups – even as this distinction has rightly been rejected by those those whose homes have been made targets by a trick of cartography. Still, as the Black Wednesday massacre on April 8, 2026 demonstrated, even that logic is flexible. Targeting systems using opaque proprietary AI platforms to track individuals through their mobile data have extended the possible war zone to anywhere a person who might be flagged as a target exists – and in all likelihood that person will be Shiʿa.

Finally, the scale and methods of destruction threaten to push the consequences of this ethnic cleansing far into the future. Like in 2006, the Israeli air force has used cluster munitions with a built-in failure rate, and as in the previous war, unexploded bomblets will remain scattered across the South, threatening residents with random death and dismemberment for years to come. Israel has also illegally deployed white phosphorus in both urban and agrarian areas under the guise of setting smoke screens for troop movements, which will have long-term somatic and environmental consequences on the people who return and on the landscapes they inhabit, long the immediate dangers of the hot-burning substance fades. Israel has also deployed large amounts of glyphosate herbicide to defoliate its occupation zones, in the process scorching the soil and rendering large swaths of agricultural land toxic. The loss of this farmland has immediate economic consequences for the already beleaguered Lebanese agricultural sector and the struggling national GDP, but it also threatens the cultural heritage and identity for the people whose ancestors have tilled the same soil, tended the olives, nurtured the bees and cured their tobacco leaves for untold generations. The destruction of the soil itself is by its very nature the destruction of a way of life, even when people return to their land to try to reclaim it.

An Attack on the Past

This present destruction is in many ways a further scattering of the shreds of past erasures as rare (possibly unique) texts, archives, and sources that have survived centuries of devastation are now lost. Gone are the offices and paper files of the baladiyya, the mosques, the schools – or at least those that had survived the past wars. Their loss means the loss of vital documents and proof of ownership of lands that go back centuries. Gone too are the libraries and book shops that were repositories of rare local histories. Even more devastating is the scattering of the social memory of the community as its members are displaced. The supermarkets, salons, butchers, roasteries, and fruit and vegetable shops that make up the connective tissues of local communities are rubble. The people who ran them and the people they once served are scattered across the country (or the globe), many living in precarity, nobody knowing exactly when they may return, if ever, and to what. Even if they do persist, the community memories, stories, and oral histories that circulate and maintain the cohesiveness of community identity are suddenly untethered from the places that rooted them.

The urbicide has been agonizing to watch unfold, not just because of my empathy for my fellow humans in suffering, but because I know that the areas that have been destroyed are more than just the concrete and rebar that comprise their visual facade. These are communities whose living heritage persists in the people who inhabit them. Kinship ties many in a neighborhood by blood, and the rest by shared participation in daily life and the innumerable daily interactions that it entails. In my mind, I can still stroll through my old neighborhood in Beirut, street by street. I recall friendly faces that I would greet reflexively. I remember ornate old facades, dangling ficus trees and broken sidewalk panels I had to sidestep. I can still smell the scent of melons wafting in the summer at our fruit stand and the taut feel of the little green janerik plum’s skin in my hand. I can see myself politely shuttling my 3 year old son away from the old men gossipping in front of their shops, whose perpetual attempts to sneak him candy had landed him in the dentist’s chair more than we could afford. Or the shopkeepers at the market, who led him off to nibble on bananas and dates while I did the shopping for the day. Those experiences were replicated thousands of times in the lives of people whose communities were destroyed.

Objectively, those of us watching in horror from the outside should not apply a hierarchy of sympathy to those communities that have been targeted. Khiam, like Bint Jbeil or Nabatieh or Ghobeiri or Rafah or any of the other villages and quarters in Lebanon or Palestine that had been destroyed over the past three years deserve every bit of the anger and sympathy that I felt for Ramia. Since Munira’s post, I have been periodically shocked by tweets announcing the demolition of places whose histories I tried to capture in my own work. Like Ramia, the villages of Khiam, Chakra and Naqoura were emptied of their people, extensively mined, and then deliberately wiped off the face of the earth while the Israeli forces who destroyed them filmed for the world to see. Though the people I read and wrote about were from another war, another calamity and a century removed, those stories somehow connected me to the people who call these places home today.

It feels like there is still little solace to take, even as people begin to stream back to the South once again in the hopes that the current ceasefire will prove more durable than the last. The defiance of the Southerners returning home makes the remainder of Khayyat’s tweets from October 2024 seem prescient.

“I learned from those inhabiting this landscape of war that living with war is like rain or shine and the important thing is to stay calm, and to quietly resist by holding on to life and remaining rooted. Today, like so many of the villages on the frontlines of life and resistance in South Lebanon, Ramia was destroyed under the peaceful glow of the moon at dawn. But this is the thing that those masters of annihilation cannot comprehend: red hot resistance will rise and rise again from the very rubble of your deadly devastation.”

While the future of the village, and of the South (and of the country) remain deeply uncertain, her defiant historicization of the moment reminds us that as in past wars, the present is not permanent, even if we have no idea what the future may bring.