“Hizbullah strongholds” are places where people live and work […] one such area, the southern suburbs of Beirut, referred to as “al-Dahiya” (the suburb) […] is in fact a vibrant conglomeration of urban neighborhoods where residents have varying political perspectives, religious beliefs and identities, and lifestyles. Elaborate homes exist alongside run-down buildings, as do shops […], Internet cafés, vegetable stands, salons, charity organization offices and corner markets. (Deeb 2006b, 10)

I wrote those words for the October 2006 issue of Anthropology News. Nearly everything I wrote in that piece applies today; it could be reprinted as is with a new introduction and a few updated details: The July 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon is now the 2023–24 episode in the long Israeli genocide of Palestinians with a concomitant war on Lebanon; Internet cafés are now coffeeshops with hookahs and lattés.

We are caught in a time loop horror film, images seared to retinas and archived deep in hearts and bellies and souls, dates and places blurring.

– – –

An Israeli army unit locks 58 civilians in a building, men who remained in their village after everyone else sought safety. The soldiers are blowing the building up with the men inside. It is 1948, in the southern Lebanese village Hula, during the Nakba, hardly five months since the Israeli state unilaterally declared its existence. The building collapses, burying the men in the rubble, as colonial Jewish militias grow into a new state army that continues to massacre Palestinians and drive them out of some 500 villages, as that same army occupies fourteen villages in Lebanon, claiming part of the Litani River’s waters until armistice negotiations force them back across the still-contested border (Shlaim 1998).

Between October 7, 2023 and October 18, 2024, the Israeli military bombed Hula 311 times. Images suggest that invading Israeli soldiers have desecrated the memorial to Hula’s martyrs from 1948.

– – –

On May 24, 2000, the Resistance liberates most of South Lebanon from a 22-year Israeli occupation. I am driving south that day with my friend Aziza and her mother, passing abandoned Israeli tanks with children climbing all over them. I’ve written about how we were

among the first people to enter the notorious Khiam Prison. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, the townspeople had stormed the prison and freed the 145 prisoners. The rooms were exactly as they had been when the prisoners left: tiny, dark, a horrible stench. A book one prisoner had been reading lay on the bed, blankets, clothing, cans of food. Writing on the walls of the cells. A former prisoner who had been released some years earlier was guiding journalists and the curious through the detention rooms, describing in painful detail the torture methods used in each. In one room you could see the electrical wires attached to a chair where they were tortured. There was still an Israeli flag in a pile at the entrance; a group of young boys began ripping it up. (Deeb 2006a, 86)

Today Aziza and I remember that visit to Khiam each time we see images of Israeli torture camps, each time we hear an Israeli politician say that sexual torture is legitimate, each time we watch videos of Palestinians separated by gender and age, each time we see men tied up and driven off in Israeli military vehicles, presumably to sites like Khiam. Israel holds some 9,500 Palestinians hostage as detainees, many under administrative detention with no charges and no fixed sentence.

When Israeli bombs destroyed Khiam in 2006, Hizbullah rebuilt the detention center as a museum and hired former detainees, like the man Aziza and I met in 2000, to give tours.

Between October 7, 2023 and October 18, 2024, the Israeli military bombed the town of Khiam 285 times.

– – –

Israeli ground troops invade Lebanon in 1978 and 1982. They don’t leave until 2000. They still occupy an area near the Golan Heights, which is Israeli-occupied Syria. The Zionist movement unsuccessfully lobbies to include South Lebanon and part of the Litani River in the Palestine Mandate at the end of World War I. David Ben Gurion repeats that aspiration in 1956. Netanyahu holds up a map of “Greater Israel” in the United Nations that appears to include South Lebanon. An Israeli settler movement, Uri Tzafon, imagines what Hebrew names will replace Lebanese village names.

The Israeli military kills over 1,000 civilians in one month. Israeli planes drop thousands of U.S.-made bombs on Dahiya, flattening whole city blocks. In just one of its many neighborhoods, three thousand residences are destroyed. It is July 2006. This Israeli war on Lebanon causes three billion dollars of infrastructural damage.

As Dahiya rebuilt, some people altered their businesses. A flowershop owner opened a café, a new trend as the area became a leisure destination for pious youth (Deeb and Harb 2013).

Between October 7, 2023 and November 24, 2024, the Israeli military kills over 3,500 civilians across Lebanon and displaces a quarter of the country’s population. Israeli warplanes drop U.S.-made bombs on Dahiya every day. Some are 2000lb bunker busting bombs that don’t just level buildings, but leave massive craters in their place; estimates suggest twenty billion dollars of damage.

– – –

Aziza doesn’t live in Dahiya anymore. During Lebanon’s economic collapse, when generator fuel became too costly, her parents could no longer climb the stairs to their eleventh story apartment so they moved to a neighborhood further from the city. She and her family now depend on remittances to survive. We both turned 50 this year. For decades, whenever life is hard, Aziza has said, “Yalla, the first 50 years are difficult and then all will be well.” As she hears and sees and smells Israeli bombs destroying the neighborhoods where she grew up yet again, Aziza gathers winter clothes for the displaced and tells me, “I’m used to war. This is just another war. I cry for Gaza.”

Dahiya is still not a “Hizbullah stronghold.” And the “Dahiya Doctrine” that Israeli General Gadi Eisenkot described as using disproportionate force to destroy civilian infrastructure has become a Gaza doctrine that targets civilians themselves.

In films, characters break out of fictional time loops by analyzing their situation to bring some new insight into it. They must do something different to break the loop and restore the timeline. Stuck in an apocalyptic time loop of genocide and devastation wrought by an evolving Israeli war machine, a time loop enabled by decades of Israeli impunity, itself enabled by decades of U.S. impunity, both a continuation of centuries of European colonial impunity; the way out is not a matter of missing analysis or insight. The loop cannot be broken conceptually. It must be broken materially. We have run out of bandages, and words. The only imaginable possibility is a temporal rupture with structural consequences, a rupture that leads, somehow, to the dismantling of settler-colonialism and the powers enabling it, a rupture that shuts down colonial cycles of violence, including this one.

Acknowledgments

My gratitude to Munira Khayyat, Maya Mikdashi, and Joanne Nucho for their suggestions.