On July 27th 2024, six months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza and military attacks on South Lebanon, my grandfather, Ahmad Mohammad Jaber, appeared to me in a service car (a shared taxi) in Beirut. I had seen Jeddo many times in my dreams since his passing, once in the kitchen of our old house in Beirut, coming to give me tawsiyah (a request or instruction) to take care of my grandmother in his absence. But on this Saturday morning, his appearance, in real life, was a warning sign of the violence and terror to come. I was taking the service to Beirut’s suburbs, where the South Lebanon van station was located. As I entered the car, I had an uncanny feeling, a kind of a visual double-entendre, that the driver was actually my grandfather. On our way to the station, he asked me: “Are you going to Nabatieh?” (his and my mom’s hometown). I told him, no, I am going to Sour (Tyre), but that I am also from Nabatieh. Jeddo laughed his familiar laugh, and I remembered how his favorite game was to ask me which city do I like the most, Nabatieh or Sour (my father’s hometown)? That question worried me as a child, as my paternal grandmother would ask me the same question when I visited her in Sour. I would insist to each of them that I love both cities equally, and they would always laugh at my diplomatic answer.

Jeddo then said “I am from Nabatieh too, from the Jaber family.” Taken aback, I shouted: “My grandfather is from that family! You look a lot like him.” Jeddo laughed again, as if we were both part of a cosmic joke I could not understand. I felt like a child when he dropped me off at the van station and said “take care of yourself on the road.” He waited for me in his car until I found a seat in the van, then he left.

That Saturday morning, I encountered my late grandfather in two forms. One as an intergenerational and ancestral family tree from South Lebanon, where every person resembles the other, making up extensive Jaber trees in Nabatieh and Moghnieh trees in Sour; the family trees that I intimately belong to, and resemble both physically and in kin. The second form was as a spectral revenant, as my own jeddo coming back to see me, to give me another tawsiyah about the family and warn me of the violence to come.

That weekend, in my village in Sour, all my fears became a reality. From illnesses striking family members to the intensification of the Israeli war on Lebanon,^[1] I could not shake the feeling that everything I was afraid of was literally coming to life. The threat of a larger and ever more devastating war was looming. We started preparing for its arrival that weekend.

I had been thinking about my grandparents ever since Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the terror attacks on Lebanon had begun. My grandparents, the origin of my family tree, my ancestors. On the morning after the Israeli massacre of the Al-Ahli Hospital on October 17, 2023, I stared at the beautiful picture of my family tree. The picture, taken in the summer of 1991, shows my grandfather standing in the middle in his balcony in Nabatieh, holding his youngest grandchild and surrounded by his grandchildren, his wife, and his children. Then, I wondered “Why did we survive and they didn’t?” By the beginning of December 2023, I had a sinking feeling that the dehumanization of Palestinians is one that dehumanizes us all. When the war and military attacks massively intensified in September 2024, I knew that my family members—all of them displaced—our cats, dogs and goats—now stuck in a warzone—and my deeply rooted family tree, were all simply sacrificable and killable. We were but a number, less than human, to Israel, the United States, and the so-called international community.

Besides the appearance of my grandfather that weekend, another (less kin-like) spectral appearance was that of the cluster bomb. On Monday July 29, 2024, a cluster bomb revealed itself next to our house in the south. Growing on our land were mainly orange and lemon trees, with some olive, avocado, and fig trees as well. We also had a new section of dragon fruit trees that my brother and mother had planted after the economic collapse, as a new income-generating project for the family. The cluster bomb made an appearance in this new section of the dragon fruit trees.

Revenant and returning bombs, like grandfathers, reappear in/on land as a sign of the Israeli violence to come. Millions of cluster bombs were dropped by Israel during Harb Tammuz or the July War in 2006. To this day, cluster bombs disturb binaries of war/peace and agricultural life in the South, where slow violence reconfigures land and life, long after the 2006 ceasefire (Touhouliotis 2018).

That Monday, Lebanese army soldiers arrived in our land in between Israeli raids. They told us not to be startled at the sound as they were going to detonate the bomb. We laughed in disbelief at their comment, as Israeli raids had been non-stop in the south, executing daily and massive sonic booms. We did not even notice the sound of the old cluster bomb exploding. That summer, my uncles and parents had tried to teach me the difference between an actual air raid, ghara, and a sonic boom, jidar sawt, so I would know when to sleep through a bomb and when to run from it. If you hear a whooshing sound, you run: this means the rocket is coming towards you. If you hear a bomb sound twice, then that’s a sonic boom. Otherwise, if there is only one bomb sound, it is an actual bomb, but not so close to you. These reverberating sonic learning practices (Al-Masri 2017) were both old and new forms of survival ecologies (Khayyat 2022), an accumulating repertoire of “living-in” the midst of Israeli violence (Moghnieh 2017) and of responding to new and continuing war technologies brought forth by Israel (Moghnieh 2021).

And yet, sonic learning practices, along with revenant bombs and grandfathers, family trees, and orange, lemon, olive, avocado, and dragon fruit trees, were all precarious and marginalized narrators of the history of Israeli violence in South Lebanon. Such “narrators” are both immaterial and material, supernatural and natural, and are all deeply rooted in land and place. They tell the life history of the accumulated experience of living-in and surviving Israeli violence, where past, present, and future are disrupted and intermingled.

I end this essay with another deeply-rooted and crucial storyteller of the ways-of-living-in Israeli violence: my grandmother’s fridge. A few years ago, my grandmother’s fridge broke down. Tata, like Jeddo, was from Nabatieh and had lived through at least five Israeli wars and occupation. Tata’s culinary practices and her relationship with her fridge was an intimate labor of love, care, cooking and feeding to her children and grandchildren. So the breakdown of her fridge was an exceptional event. When I asked her whether she was happy with the new fridge that her children had bought for her, Tata recited in a eulogy the life of the fridge that had accompanied her through her married life. She showed me the places where the fridge tsawab, “was injured,” with bullets during the Israeli invasion in 1982, and where it zamat or “barely survived” the violence: “Everything used to fit in the old fridge. Now they brought me this new one, it is all plastic and so light, two could carry it.”

My Tata’s fridge, like her, was heavily grounded in the kitchen and her home, signifying yet another agent of rootedness that is hard to dislodge or break; one with multiple hermeneutic and embodied narratives that tell the tale of Israeli violence in South Lebanon.

Notes

[1] On July 30, 2024, Israel conducted an airstrike on an apartment building in Haret Hreik in the suburbs of Beirut, killing Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, five Lebanese civilians, including two children, and wounding seventy-four others.