Millenarian Fantasies

In Beirut, we start our days with the latest litany of places and people hit overnight, a deluge of stories and images: buildings targeted, cars struck on highways, families wiped out. Evacuation orders drop at 11 p.m., then midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m., 6 a.m.—then the bombing follows and the cycle starts again: more displaced families, more anger in the streets, more despair. The toll has now risen to more than 500 killed (including more than 80 children), more than 700,000 displaced, and more than 1,400 wounded. I am reminded of Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” though the kind of waiting his poem evokes now seems almost quaint: in Lebanon, the barbarians are no longer expected at the gates but have seeped into the very atmosphere of a disordered world. Here, violence is not a singular event but something in the air one inhales, gradually learning to domesticate and contain.

By March 3, a few days after the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, the Israeli military had issued evacuation orders affecting more than 100 villages and towns in southern Lebanon (an area two and a half times the size of New York City), as well as parts of the Beqaa Valley, while also approving further advances inside Lebanese territory, all in the name of prevention and self-defense. Human Rights Watch warns these sweeping orders raise “serious risks of violations of the laws of war”—but who’s listening? Israel’s specious logic is the same as that voiced by Marco Rubio, who claimed Washington struck Iran first because it expected an Israeli attack to trigger Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces. Preventive war is not, in itself, a settled legal justification under international law, and yet few are seriously contesting it. Apart from Spain and a few other dissenting voices, too many European leaders remain timid, unwilling to confront either Trump or Israel.

Beirut’s Corniche has filled with refugees and displaced families, the poorest sleeping in their cars or in makeshift tents nearby.

Surrounding all this is a broader collective delusion couched in the language of apocalyptic politics, where religion is weaponized to sanctify war. On March 6, Christian Zionist pastors gathered in the Oval Office to bless the president in a surreal spectacle of ideological fervor and denial. (Imagine if any other nation—besides Israel, that is—displayed such behavior.) War as prophecy, devastation as fulfillment, catastrophe as a necessary prelude to the Second Coming; the Third Temple rebuilt, history consumed by apocalyptic fantasy, and humanity somehow redeemed afterward. Absurd as it sounds, this is reportedly what some U.S. military personnel were told they were doing in Iran: waging a holy war to hasten the return of Christ. In any other context, this would be recognized as dangerous fanaticism, the mirror image of holy jihad, if not a symptom of a psychiatric condition. Yet this is no longer fringe rhetoric.

In Beirut, the “most moral army in the world,” as the IDF likes to call itself, appears, so far, to have practiced some restraint: the thousands living in targeted areas are issued orders and given neatly mapped-out routes by which to flee, all under the ceaseless buzz of drones—the strikes guided by AI-powered technology that feeds, in turn, on the personal reflections, data, and communications we have unknowingly surrendered. The banality of evil has been inscribed into an algorithm. The Israeli army seems restless, and increasingly innovative, deploying terror alongside a campaign of fear.

On March 6, we received a warning that the next bombing, set to flatten a chunk of Beirut’s southern suburbs, an area the size of lower Manhattan, might damage many more buildings across the city, too. Since we do not have bomb shelters, and since remaining indoors did not feel right—I have bad memories of spending nights in shaking buildings under bombardment, an experience I would not recommend—we chose instead to wait on the soccer field of the American University of Beirut, an area near the campus where displaced families have clustered.

The IDF seems less restrained when it comes to Sidon, Tyre, the south, and the Beqaa—biblical cities and territories whose soil one might have expected them to regard with some respect. In a surreal operation on March 7, Israeli helicopters dropped troops in Nabi Chit, a town named after the Prophet Seth (the son of Adam), to recover the remains of Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator who has been missing since 1986, when his plane went down over Lebanon. The fate of Arad, captured by the Amal movement and later believed to have been transferred to Hezbollah, has remained unknown for decades and has become one of Israel’s most enduring military obsessions. That night, the air and ground raids left at least forty dead, including Lebanese soldiers, and inflicted apocalyptic damage to the town.

In recent days, Beirut’s Corniche has filled with refugees and displaced families, the poorest sleeping in their cars or in makeshift tents nearby, the better-off finding whatever hotel rooms they can. At around 3 a.m. on March 8, a hotel in the seaside neighborhood of Raouché, famous for its views of the iconic Pigeon Rocks just off the coast, was hit in an IDF drone strike, killing at least four people and wounding ten. According to Israel, the four people targeted in the corner suite on the fourth floor were allegedly Iran-linked individuals planning an operation.

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In the wake of the genocidal onslaught on Gaza, Lebanon is once again being drawn into a familiar cycle: abandonment, impunity, and the normalization of violence as the language of international law and human rights is hollowed out in real time. Has anything changed? Yes—and yet, not much. Hezbollah is markedly diminished; some displaced families are even angry with it. Israel’s army seems to be following the same logic it deployed—or rather perfected—in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts, in effect, to ethnic cleansing, used both as military tactic and psychological warfare against the population. The displaced then move to other parts of Lebanon, which in turn become potential targets, fueling local resentment and intensifying public anger toward Hezbollah.

The Lebanese army has managed to deploy south of the Litani River—the area Israel wants to demilitarize and effectively cleanse of Hezbollah’s presence—and has confiscated some of the group’s weapons caches there. But it remains weakened, overstretched, and poorly paid; it is clearly not in a position to fully disarm Hezbollah, a party that has entrenched itself militarily and politically since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In the past, the Lebanese army, wary of provoking civil strife, has been reluctant to confront Hezbollah directly. But the new government, formed last February under prime minister Nawaf Salam after president Joseph Aoun’s election, has given the army greater political cover to curb what the state now considers as Hezbollah’s unauthorized military activity. In a historic step, the government has moved to ban its military operations and to reinforce the principle that arms should be held exclusively by the state.

Nevertheless, pockets of Hezbollah remain, especially beyond the areas where the army has expanded its presence. The organization appears more closely tied than before to Iranian strategic calculations and to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. At the same time, Hezbollah and its supporters continue to frame their role as being part of Lebanon’s defense against Israel. Since the cessation of hostilities took effect in November 2024, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and others have documented thousands of Israeli air and ground violations north of the Blue Line, while Hezbollah’s own military activity has been far more limited. In that context, it would be premature to describe the group as simply “disloyal” to its Shiite base, especially if Israel ends up occupying part of the country.

What exactly will the latest round of Israeli bombings set in motion? After years during which Hezbollah and its allies in power hollowed out the Lebanese state’s capacity to act, this may mark the dramatic end of an era that began with the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979—or simply usher in a new era of chaos or renewed enmity.

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I have often wondered what it means to be a witness in a place where empires have treated the landscape as a ledger, arriving, departing, returning, and always leaving behind a record of their passage. Just north of Beirut is Nahr el-Kalb—Arabic for “Dog River,” or Lyco Flumen as it was known to the Romans. Along the cliffside pass above it, armies and rulers have for centuries carved stelae and inscriptions to mark campaigns, roadworks, occupations, and political events, forming an unusually dense in situ archive that stretches from Pharaonic Egypt through Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian rulers, into the Greco-Roman periods, and then into the modern era. To stand at Nahr el-Kalb is to confront the old fantasy that violence can somehow be made decipherable once it is inscribed; that domination becomes historical, and therefore settled, once recorded in stone. But stone does not settle anything. It only shows that the impulse to mark, to announce We were here, has always accompanied the impulse to destroy. This archive does not console, teach, or redeem. It simply accumulates as generations of traumatized populations endure and persevere.

The displaced  move to other parts of Lebanon, which in turn become potential targets.

Today, as empires rise and wane around us, we seem to be living through a similar moment. Lebanon is caught between two narrow theocratic projects: that of Iran and that of Israel. Yet however unsustainable and self-destructive each may be, only the latter possesses the power to turn its designs into reality, backed by the military might of the American Empire. What we are witnessing, then, is the renewal of a nakedly imperial project: a politics of permanent siege, existential paranoia, and millenarian last stands.

The war with Iran also looks like a convenient distraction from the accelerating dispossession of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the catastrophic situation in Gaza. Israel’s strategy is by now familiar: strike, ethnically cleanse, move, and expand. Its incursions into southern Lebanon and even Syria look less like a new doctrine than the revival of an older strategic vision associated with Ben-Gurion: preemption, cross-border force, and the reshaping of neighboring realities through military power. Whatever form this strategy takes, Palestine will remain the region’s deepest and most enduring wound.

Our hospital at the American University of Beirut is preparing for an imminent disaster, including chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear scenarios. In my classes I teach these very histories, along with their devastating implications for ethics, bodies, and minds. Never did I imagine that one day, I would be living through them myself. What happens next is hard to predict. Yet again, the lived and felt and lasting certainty is damage and destruction, wrought by fantasies of unchecked domination that play out as if the long nineteenth century never ended.

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