Looking back, it feels like the war that slammed into Lebanon approached in slow motion. For almost a year for sure, since the beginning of the war on Gaza, but also for much longer than that (also as in Gaza). As usual, everyone in Lebanon was expecting it, even as they were not, going about life as usual. In any case, when “the big war” finally arrived on September 23, 2024, it hit us hard. And it showed no mercy. For two months and three days, a relentless Israeli assault on Lebanon left a massive wake of destruction: ruined city quarters, villages reduced to rubble, scorched and uprooted orchards (and lives), and so many martyrs. But of course, this is hardly the first time. Lebanon has been living through war (with Israel) since the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. In Lebanon (as in Palestine), war is a seasonal affair.

The essays in this collection were written in the middle of the maelstrom. They retain the rawness, confusion, shock, and horror of that time. Stuck as I was, for the first time in my life, away from a war in my homeland, I reached out to folks in the middle of it (most of the contributors were in Beirut throughout the war). Cognitive dissonance crushed me as I was surrounded by the beauty of a Vermont autumn all rust and gold, cerulean skies and marshmallow clouds, and my soul roiling with flashes of angry missiles, acrid smoke, incessant drones, dark nights of oblivion and unfathomable loss (the night of September 27 killed us all), collective lamentation, searing anger, shattered hearts, burning tears. Words, if they even came, felt useless (only endless existential howls would suffice it felt). But I did it: I asked for words, because writing is a form of witnessing, one of the sharp and useful items in the ethnographic toolkit that is necessary and relevant in such times.

The feeling of overwhelming helplessness in the face of massive war is real. Can anthropology rise to these moments? I needed to know, as I saw our discipline remain largely unruffled, snug as a bug in the heart of empire while catastrophic world-ending wars went on elsewhere (compare that moment to the closer-to-home-panic gripping academia in the wake of the U.S. elections—and now). Leading Anthropocene debates about the end of the world, despite their hegemonic ubiquity and trendiness, somehow do not theoretically or empirically muddle with real ends of worlds happening in front of us right now. From Palestine to Lebanon to Sudan and now Syria (again), these actually-happening-now! ends of worlds remain at an experiential (and hence theoretical) remove. The distance is empire (see Bulushi, Ghosh, and Tahir 2020).

In Lebanon (and in Palestine and Sudan, and other places) war is up close. In such worlds, war is the environment in which life is waged. War here can be described as a seasonal affair: always latent, periodically explosively present. In either modality, it is a structuring force that shapes every contour of life (plus, it is far from the only problem, see Khayyat 2020). Thus, war is the environment in which life is rooted, and actively resistant responses in the explosive season are vitally shaped over the longue durée by this perennial seasonality: generations of children grow up in war (beautifully illuminated in the pieces by Khayyat and Perdigon), genealogies of (military) resistance pass on the burning torch in the face of the same enemy (George), resistant ecologies of mutual aid, food and shelter are latent, yet spring into presence in catastrophic seasons (Kanafani and Scheid); similarly, the unsung vulnerability of migrant workers shapes solid communities of resistance and survival (Kassamali and Saleh); spectral returns of loved ones guide us with care along enduringly violent paths (Moghnieh), and scarred landscapes of war resistantly bloom through seasonal devastation (Zurayk). This is by far not the first time that people are living this (Deeb), although we continue to learn (Hammoud, Sbaity, and Wick); no side is neutral or impartial (Kassem) and no one stands at a distance (Kosmatopoulos).

The latest season of war in Lebanon escalated precipitously on September 23, 2024, less than a week after thousands of pagers exploded across Lebanon, killing scores and blinding and maiming thousands as they went about their daily lives in streets, supermarkets and homes: men, women, and children. On that single day of military escalation, almost 600 civilians were killed by a relentless Israeli air attack on South Lebanon, Beirut, and the Bekaa—the deadliest day in Lebanon since the close of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990). A few days later, on September 27, the widely-revered Secretary General of Hizbullah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated by a simultaneous strike of 85 one-ton bunker blaster bombs on Beirut’s densely-inhabited southern suburbs. As the sun gorgeously sank into the Mediterranean in hues of fuchsia and gold, 85 U.S.-made monster-bombs pierced Beirut’s earth and exploded underground in several waves, killing the face of dignity for many, the leader of our resistance. Even for seasoned war denizens, this was a new scale of terror.

Two months and three days of all-out war followed. Lebanon was once again living through the relentless daily terror of Israeli military assault: aerial bombardments of the capital city, the constant buzz of “Im Kamel” armed drones (a new constant and nefarious presence this war), attacks on Palestinian camps in Beirut and Saida, the flattening of towns and villages across the South and in the Bekaa, white phosphorus scorching orchards and woodlands in the South, and also in the South, a land invasion and occupation. In two months of relentless terror, more than 4,000 people died and more than 16,000 were wounded. 1.5 million were displaced. This in a population of 6 million (a third of whom are refugees). Thousands of families slept in the streets at the beginning of the rainy season: on the sidewalks, along the Corniche shivering in the gusting wind and lashing rain.

The feeling was apocalyptic and shattered, so very exhausted, but also angry and defiant. As this collection of essays shows, Lebanon is no stranger to war, especially with the state of Israel that has invaded and attacked the country on numerous occasions (most notably in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2006) and that occupied its southern borderland from 1978 until 2000. In Lebanon, like elsewhere, war is not an event, but a structure, an environment of living, a landscape (see Khayyat 2022).

This collection of essays illuminates the seasonality of war in Lebanon (its present and its longue durée), looking at how those who inhabit Lebanon’s many wars variously live with and through them and (continue to) resist them ordinarily. This collection contends that although death and destruction may be the goal and the threat viciously wielded by the war-machine, those (humans and others) who live with and through deadly wars are defiantly, resistantly concerned with life and with living. The two months of the “war of annihilation” came to a shaky close on November 27, 2024. A 60-day ceasefire-that-wasn’t saw Hizbullah, the military resistance in Lebanon, disengage, but Israel continued its daily attacks, expanding its destruction/occupation of the borderland, digging in.

After the “ceasefire,” the Israeli army occupied the entire South Lebanon border strip and continued the complete destruction of all of the “frontline” villages (37 in total were wired and detonated, bulldozed and completely destroyed): multiple-family homes, fields, gardens, businesses, stables, extensive and ancient orchards (which were not only slashed and burned but also uprooted and stolen), pine forests and woodlands, churches, mosques and even Jewish shrines, Roman ruins, water reservoirs, roads . . . As of this writing, Israel continues to bomb Lebanon as it pleases (127 have been killed in over 1500-and-counting recorded violations of the 4-month-old ceasefire) and it continues to occupy its South.

Anthropology has the tools to bring war into experiential purview, to show that war is not merely the exotic habitat of distant savages to be theorized (or theoretically resisted) from afar. Grasping war as an arena of recognizable, relatable life on this planet alongside (and not exceptional to) the violence of capitalism, nation-states, empire, is a necessary first step in resisting war broadly, effectively, collectively. Those who inhabit war know the great power of life as resistance. We should take note.