How do you convince people to shelter with you? Two days after the latest Israeli assault on Beirut, I had thought it would be as simple as announcing my apartment’s availability:

9/25

Upon awaking this morning, I find a voice message from Hussein, thanking me for my hospitality but announcing they are looking for a place to rent and join the whole family together. “These things can go on for a year even,” he explains in his very soft voice. My house is big, as his wife Nuhad noted while taking in my living-room. It can fit more than the couple and their youngest son. But people staying with me would have to be willing and used to spending all their time together. Nuhad comically described all the ways she barely gets along with the rest of them: Ali is great because he’s abroad and independent. Hassan is her youngest and she nearly divorced Hussein over him (“I have a daughter and a son, what more do I want?” She shamelessly isn’t “hanuneh” [tender], and we both detest Mother’s Day). Her daughter, Farah, comes with her grand-twins—she can’t stand little kids, but she taught them to be clean. From the minute they were born she bathed them. We laughed, but it was deeply heart-wrenching: her worry over them all and relief to be away from them, and unending attachment. Yesterday upon arriving, she put her head in her hands and cried while I showed Hussein the house.

On a faculty messaging service, a professor announced an unaffiliated initiative, Saqf Wahid (One Roof), which encouraged residents to list spaces they could share with strangers in need. I immediately entered my rental’s details and my phone number. Then I discovered how hard it is to welcome people in your home without a fee or other form of introduction. After Hussein left his family in search of a more commodious space, a young woman also stayed only overnight (just to quell her jitters); a PhD student and her scholarship son—Amal and Hadi—came for a whole ten days until they found an apartment of their own way up in the mountains; a cat from Dahiya stayed for three weeks, until my cats made that unbearable.

Another family made it clear via Saqf Wahid they would love to stay with me—if we shared the rent and facilities. I wasn’t willing to give up that control and replied as such. I did seriously consider showing up at one of the main congregating points for people sheltering from Israeli bombing, but then what?

A survey circulated in November 2024 to faculty at the American University of Beirut, where I work, asked respondents to describe how they had been personally affected by the war. Among the multiple choices to describe current difficulties was the answer, “I am hosting displaced family/friends.” The option limited imagined relief to (and burden from) familiars. To be fair, I knew from having resettled the displaced from the 2006 July War that people will not let you offer them help unless it is clear what you might want in return. And one verges on insult by offering a comparable pittance to those who have lost so much. In the year after the 2006 truce, I had worked with colleagues, students, old neighbors, and new friends on a “civil resistance campaign.” We deployed the Maussian/Maori model of host and guest, in mutual need and generation. Yet, during this new war, now that my grown children’s bedrooms were empty, and my circumstances allowed me to host the evacuated and unhoused, I struggled to apply such a model. I kept failing and retrying.

10/6

Amal calls. Tired, I think of not answering but I do. She says she is on the way from Tripoli to meet me. I am delighted! So, I hadn’t fumbled it after all!? When we first spoke via the university’s Civic Engagement initiative, I emphasized that I have enough space for her, her son, and me to each be in our own rooms. I added, to prepare her, that I have a boyfriend, nude paintings on the walls, and alcohol in the cupboard. By voice message, Amal had responded: “It’s OK if you’re an alcoholic. Your life is your own business.” I tittered but feared she might take my description as a territorial assertion. But now she is coming! I send her my location and wash the dishes. Do not want to greet her with a messy house! Amal gets lost, walking past the alleyway twice. I go down to find her. Her first remark is to say I’m beautiful and that she wants to cry. She tells me she had fought with her son because his dignity wouldn’t allow him to ask his father for help with expenses. We commiserate about marriage. She asks if she can contribute to the rent. I say no; maybe if we need more generator amperes, she could contribute to that, but she should be saving her money for later. What could I say to make her feel better about staying with me? She keeps saying she doesn’t want to be a tiql (burden) on me. Tiql would be hearing the rain and knowing that she and Hadi didn’t have a roof overhead.

In my demographically challenging, lifestyle-laden Beirut apartment, I have cycled through a range of roles, not all comfortable, and bonded with guests over the southern za’atar (thyme), instant coffee, and sugared juice that they bring; over the maternal reticence and marital discontents they discuss; and over reminiscences of earlier wars. Agonisms exist even among loved ones, as Nuhad had reminded me that first night. Yet a more serious logic of paranoia threatened our nascent trust. When a truck backed into the car Amal had parked in our driveway, my neighbor called in a panic to know whose car it was. She wasn’t worried about the damage to Amal’s car but about the presence of her car in the first place. Did I know Amal she asked? With her question, she implied, if not quite the Biblical meaning of “knowing,” something deeply intimate and longitudinal.

I constantly fielded advice not to admit “anyone politically affiliated,” as if doing so would stop an AI program from generating our address for kill-lists. Mentally colonized by this logic of “targeting,” we searched out those whose presence could be blamed and hypothesized where the next missiles would detonate. The promise of safety was so seductive that I cannot count the number of times, during October and November of 2024, that my friends and I speculated about who had been present when some Israeli bunker buster pulverized a neighborhood. Fretting about such matters, however, felt like contributing to Israeli war-making. So, it seemed that the perfect match had materialized when I learned of a graduate student who sought to leave an exorbitant rent contract in the mountains and find somewhere closer to campus for her sister and herself. I was travelling the next day for a long conference trip, so I begged them to consider my flat and noted that my cats would be very grateful for their company.

11/6

No sooner had my flight landed than a series of WhatsApp messages from my expat landlord filled my phone screen. He urged me to expel the “suspicious people” staying in my apartment. He asserted that their presence put his family and the building in danger. “We don’t want unknown people in the building,” he added, “We choose our tenants carefully.” I assured him that they included an MA student whom I had known for years and whose entire family was affiliated through study or employment with my employer, the American University of Beirut. I let him know they were staying just until I returned from my conference trip, in a dozen days. Sympathetically, I closed with the words, “I’m sorry for your scare.” The landlord was not placated. His next message pointed out that the student’s family had arrived in a car without license plates, “Which is not normal,” he reminded me. In case I didn’t get his drift, he elaborated that just that morning, “In Miziara, a Christian area, the Israelis bombed a building because someone from Australia asked his friend to host his family.”

My landlord’s logic separating “tenants” from “targets” recalled a mantra that had irritated and unnerved me during the 2006 July War: “They’re killing innocent Lebanese,” government spokespersons incessantly intoned in appeals for international parties to pressure the Israelis for a cease-fire. As if it would be OK for Israelis to extrajudicially blast to smithereens other Lebanese or any people. Dividing the populace into “warring militants” and “innocent victims” invited inhabitants to engage in predictive mapping about where Israelis would direct their death machines and, when somewhere “unexpected” got hit, to blame the displaced seeking shelter there. Surviving that war had taught me that none of us really are “innocent victims.” We are all engaged in fostering society or eviscerating it.^[1]

“Target” suggests that our lives are separable into discreet units. Could I be a teacher without students, without students from Dahiye—a “targetable” zone in international and some local discourse? I ended the discussion with my landlord by announcing, “I cannot leave a student on the street. I teach whole people. I hope you understand.” I hope my rental lease gets renewed this February. There are still no innocent victims.

Notes

[1] See Kirsten Scheid, 2008. “No Innocent Victims: Postwar Activism and Lebanon’s Civil Society.” In The War on Lebanon: A Reader, edited by Nubar Hovsepian, 176–197. New York: Olive Branch Press. As in that essay, I use italics here to indicate fieldnotes.