“Professor, you are living in hell, tell us how the Greeks in Beirut feel?” So asked the journalist on the other end of the phone, on the other side of the sea. “How are the Greeks?” This was the constant refrain I heard the relatively few times—considering the magnitude of events—that Greek media contacted the only “Greek professor” of politics living in Lebanon and the Arab West Asia in general.^[1]

No questions were asked about the Lebanese. None were asked about the Palestinians. No one inquired about the country I live and teach in. Nor about the history of colonial violence, the identity of the permanent aggressor, or about those who arm both on the other side of the sea and the ocean.

“Why don't you tell me instead how the people in Greece feel, especially those who voted for this government,” I reply. The Greek government has been one of the most supportive of Israel’s actions in Gaza even after the ICJ proceedings—a rare manifestation of disregard for international law, basic human ethics, and the sentiments of the majority of its own citizens. I refuse to give her the dose of ethnocentrism she asks for, the individualized “Greekness” of the pain; I decline to contribute to the requested patriotic filter to a universal crime.

I refuse to be the perfect close observer. The witness and bearer of the pain that makes spectators in the West feel a sense of pity for victims here; the cry-heart witness of a widely witnessed genocide who will make Islamophobic goons in Greece and the wider West rejoice. We decline to be the “perfect victims” for your mercy, we refuse to be showcases for “smart weapons”—especially when smartness means the readiness to blindly and massively kill unarmed people in urban settings.

Yes, we are under siege.

Drones armed with rockets are constantly hovering above our heads, ready to sow death on women, children, and passersby. One of them killed Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and 300 other civilians with him. Thermopylae has always been here, not where you worship the battle of humanity against invading “barbarism.”

Yes, we are under siege.

We are trapped in our homes, glued to the news, restless on our balconies, helping out refugees stranded in schools closed to students and open to the displaced. When a now familiar sound suddenly pierces the air, the entire building shakes. “Did you hear that?” We look at each other without another word. Yes, I heard it (or did you imagine it, but I won’t tell you no).

Did the kids hear it? Are they Ok? That is the immediate thought. You go into the room with light steps, peek into the room through the door, okay, they’re playing. Maybe they heard it and don’t want you to know. They know you’re worried. They’ve learned to hide their fear. They’ve learned to eavesdrop when, for example, we talk about war in encoded messages. They learned to discern the “talk of war” everywhere—even when we use secret languages, codes and passwords.

First the bang, then the shake, then the image. You enter Telegram to check the news. Another bombed apartment building in the middle of the city. It collapsed like a deck of cards. This time it was a medical center. They murdered people in their beds of pain along with their doctors and nurses.

Yes, we are under siege.

But we are not in panic. We are . . . living in pride. Can you call it this? Displaced people from the South are flocking to Beirut, to the mountains, to Syria. Yesterday’s refugee hemorrhage is inverting course today.

Back and forth, an eternal caravan of pain and pride in this land since the crusader set foot again.

Families are spilled across the sidewalks, on the streets, on the Corniche. Did I say they are spilled? Wrong. I should have said: upright, straight, vertical with dignity. No violence. No theft. No screams. Only—since a few days now—a permanent empty gaze.

Everyone, every person—even the children—have that permanent empty gaze. Their eyes keep searching. They look around as if totally lost. They turn to his smiling face, his reassuring voice, the raised finger at the monster on the southern border. To no avail. They can’t find him. He alone is missing. This loss only darkens the faces, withers the eyes, empties the gaze. “And now what will we do without him?” the gaze asks while the mouth remains silent.

A Saudi—in his gold-plated abaya outside the embassy—shouts at displaced people from the South to vacate “his street” [or what?], Rabih, a neighbor, friend and medical doctor at the American University Beirut Medical Center, tells us, with a mixture of tears of anger and pain. “Did you see how they have already started to raise their heads? Now we are helpless, unprotected, alone.” We have lost a parent, a father, a person of our own.

Yes, we are under siege.

But we are also “in solidarity.” Taverns are cooking meals for displaced people—300, 400 a day. Community kitchens are everywhere. Empty houses—many of them luxury apartments bought by Saudis and Gulfies and Lebanese overseas—are being summarily expropriated by Hizballah and its allies to settle refugees from the South. Squatting the empty rich houses for the needs of the displaced, without much pomp and circumstance. Simple and self-explanatory. An empty house means a potential place for the displaced. There are already three in one street in our neighborhood. I think of Western anarchists and their inability to acknowledge counter-powers here.

On the street across AUB I meet Hassan, my old student, and current friend, with his brilliant mind, plebeian origin, sweetness, kindness, and endless dreams for him in the big world. He smiles when he tells me that he is now staying in a hotel here, after being forced to leave his neighborhood, the famous Dahiye, which Western media often describe as a Hizballah stronghold.

Is your house still standing, I ask? I don't know, he answers. El Hamdulillah (Praise be to Allah), he adds, everything will be made again. But I can discern a shadow in his eyes, I know where it comes from, I know what he’s looking for, I know who he can't find.

I won't tell you how the Greeks feel if you don’t include in your answer that this Greek, by name, a university professor of politics and anthropology in Beirut, publicly declares that the Greek prime minister and his government are complicit in war crimes. Mitsotakis belongs in The Hague along with Biden and Schulz.

You’re not far away. You’re not safe. And above all, you’re not innocent. Be sure of that.

“I don’t know if they'll let me include this—I’m however with you,” the journalist tells me in a hushed voice. If this doesn’t get included, nothing else will. I bid her farewell. I know she won’t include it. Nobody does. The omerta is spreading like a net over the entire Mediterranean and further beyond.

I hang up the phone. A smell of blood, iron, and phosphorus permeates my nostrils. How I wish I could transport it to the other side of the sea through this cable. Sometimes I wish to know what they would do if the bombs they themselves send or approve of, fell upon themselves.

They think it will never happen to them. They think this is something that only happens to others, the dark-skinned, the Muslims, the Arabs, the Palestinians, those across the Fortress.

This assumed distance is the quintessence of murderous racism.

The presumed safe distance is what arms the aggressor.

The distance that allows them to show some kind of feel-good concern when hospitals are blown up in Gaza, to go on with their lives while children and women are being slaughtered, to put under their Eurocentric Procrustean bed the movements that resist and find them lacking or not good enough.

This distance that is growing—you think—with walls that separate, borders that drown, experts who scream “terrorism” or “human shields,” is in fact much smaller than you think. You are much more involved than you want to admit. You are already part of the war.

Alas, I haven’t dispensed the worst part yet. Unlike us here, about whom some of you (secretly or loudly) smirk when we are under siege, you are not ready at all for what is to come. You are not ready for the moment when the safe distance will be erased and you will be dispensed for as well. Europe is rearming, for the first time after World War II. The safe distance is disappearing fast.

Maybe, instead, you will prefer to become one of the stenographers of the empire who think that serving lies and spreading dehumanization campaigns can increase the safe distance.

Yet, they are already vampires, and they know it. They feed on blood. Now ours, tomorrow yours. You are not safe, you are not innocent, but most importantly you are not ready.

An earlier version of this text was published in EFIMERIDA TON SYNTAKTON, a Greek daily, during Israel’s intensive bombardment of Lebanon—including capital Beirut—in October 2024.

Notes

^[1] My refusal to ascribe to the mainstream media discourse about “Hamas terrorism” and Israel’s right to . . . genocide led to my early exclusion from many Greek media. Instead, they went for the generic IR types—diethnologoi in Greek—who readily and shamelessly justified mass murder on live TV.