Last week, I made my first trip to South Lebanon since the war began. Having traveled a fifth of the world, and been present during “wars” in Iraq, Palestine, and New York - I can honestly say that I have never seen such complete devastation in my entire life. The only thing that even comes close are the pictures I’ve seen from World War II. Much of South Lebanon simply lies in ruin. In the South, Israeli warplanes occasionally break the sound barrier, rattling people as they fly off on God knows what missions. Israeli drones constantly fly overhead. The low, insistent hum of their engines serves as a continual reminder that Lebanon is not yet safe. Read more about A Resistance to War  

Two days ago, my mother and I watched a building disappear. We had been taking a walk around our house in a mountain above southern Beirut when we saw it - the mad cluster of life, mediated through concrete buildings of different heights, starting at the coastline and spilling inwards. The city. It lay there, exposed. At first it was difficult for my American mother to discern where Beirut “proper” ended and its southern suburbs began. It all looks the same from a distance, especially from an elevated one. Read more about Smoke and Resolutions 

This will probably be my last letter to you. I will miss you all. Some of you I never met, but I feel that you are all so close to me. More than that, you probably already know it — without you I would not have made it throughout this hell. You were there by my side and that made me stronger. Every day, you gave more meaning to all this — peoples’ stories were heard, peoples’ suffering was shared. This was what I could do for my people: tell some of their stories. Knowing that you would listen, knowing that you would care made the whole difference. Read more about This will probably be my last letter to you 

Mahmoud Zeidan with Lens on Lebanon conducted interviews with citizens of southern Lebanon after they had been evacuated to hospitals. They and their doctors tell of indiscriminate bombing, the targeting of civilians and the use of unknown and exotic weaponry. Ahmad Ibrahim Hachim: “I lost my wife (31 years) and my three sons (2 years, 8 years and 12 years). My brother lost three sons (10 months, 7 years and 11 years). My third brother lost his two daughters (2 years and 4 years), and I lost my father (67 years). My cousin also lost his wife and five sons.” Read more about I was crying and shouting, but nobody was answering 

Before yesterday, an Israeli missile slammed into an old, unused lighthouse in Beirut, near the Lebanese American University. Debris from the attack found its way to my father’s office building. Inside it was my father. When he left his office, he found a paper on the ground that warned him that he was in danger, and it was due to Hezbollah’s, not Israel’s, rockets. All over Beirut papers fluttered down to the streets, arriving in pieces sometimes (like snowflakes, Ahmad said) - perhaps exhausted from their long journey to the ground from the heights of an Israeli warplane. As the papers neared the streets cars stopped, bodies stooped, and people read. Read more about Beirut, the Incredible Shrinking City 

It has been much harder to write from here than from Lebanon or Syria. And I realize now that this is what I need to tell you all today. Especially today - because the reasons I haven’t been writing are I think an example of the obstacles we face as loving, caring people in this violent, angry world. I cried all day when I arrived in Jordan - for many reasons - but mainly because it felt so removed, so distant not just geographically, but mentally and emotionally, from the devastation being wreaked on Lebanon. Every day since, I have struggled here with the balance that plagues so many of us: How to participate in both our own daily lives and the world that often seems so distant from them. Read more about The struggle for balance