The essays in this series were written during the summer of 2024, and may not fully address rapidly escalating violence in the region.

Beirut is about 180 miles from Gaza City. There is an impossible closeness to this estrangement—it feels suffocating. We share the same sky, the same sea, and the same land. We share the same language, the same food, the same music, and the same families. Before 1948 land ownership, marriage, railroads, labor regimes, baptisms, business, and trade practices welded us together as part of a larger, symbiotic region.

Since 1948, we live and die apart, separated by a relatively new, arrogantly confident border. In this latest chapter of our shared history, a different form of intimacy knits us together, the intimacy of violence. We share the experience of siege, displacement, mass detention and torture, the deliberate destruction of roads, hospitals, electric plants and schools, occupation, resource extraction and surveillance. We share an embodied, embittered understanding of vulnerability, carved into us a little deeper every time an Israeli plane or drone flies over us. We share the experience of war crimes by one of the strongest militaries in the world, armed with nuclear weapons, the shiniest U.S.-made death machines, and with an impunity that comes wrapped in a U.S. flag. We understand that our bodies are testing grounds and marketing spaces for “innovations” in how to kill, maul, and otherwise subjugate people who occupy the lower rings of this hierarchy we call humanity. We know that nobody else—neither from the region nor the “international order” is coming to “save” us.

In Western Europe and the United States, Palestinians and to a (slightly) lesser extent, Lebanese and other Arabs occupy a discursive space both surreal and hegemonic. Whatever we do, and whatever we say, we are inherently angry, hateful, and dangerous—even antiwar protests are seen as a form of war. These racist caricatures are absurd, powerful, and dangerous. Racism is much more than the weaponized alienation between who we are to ourselves and who we are to others. Racism is a time machine. It can make history begin on October 7, 2023 (Seikaly 2023), and it can resignify occupation, siege, apartheid, displacement, and massacre as “self-defense.” Racism can make genocide a fringe electoral issue in the country that is enabling it and can retroactively turn the fact of our killing into proof that somehow, we must have deserved it. It can curate the past into histories that command attention and must unfold into redemptive futures, and histories that, when acknowledged, must be stripped of futurity itself.

In this surreal discursive space, no part of Lebanon is occupied, South Lebanon is not laced with landmines left over from two previous Israeli invasions (Khayyat 2022), and the skies have not hummed and burst with drones, flyovers, and sonic booms for decades. Palestinians in Lebanon do not have the Right of Return, and Lebanon is not, out of all Arab countries, particularly invested in that right. U.S. Marines have not already twice deployed to Lebanon, in 1958 and in 1982 (Gendzier 2006).

This hall of mirrors has no room for even the most basic of truths: if justice is not the foundation of peace in Palestine and in Lebanon, were Hizballah were to disappear, another, popular resistance movement would quickly take its place. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the modern and contemporary Middle East knows this, but wars and war-mongering are never the time for learning. Instead, it is the time of propaganda and manufactured panics that entrench ignorance, reward silence and in doing so, facilitate our annihilation.

While Lebanese and Palestinians may share so much, they are not the same. Lebanon is just one theater of this one hundred–year war on Palestinians (Khalidi 2020). Lebanon is an independent country, and Israel has not practiced settler colonial policies there. Yet this description is insufficient. In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees have been massacred by some Lebanese militias allied to Israel and fought alongside with by others, against Israel (al Bayan 2004). They have been blamed and arguably punished for the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War (Sayegh 2005), a narrative that functions as an alibi for fascism and sectarianism. Even the denial of women’s full rights to citizenship is massaged into sense by the supposed “demographic threat” that Palestinians (and now Syrians) pose to Lebanon’s commitment to secular, religious pluralism and engineered demographic equilibrium between Muslims and Christians (Mikdashi 2022).

Lebanon became an independent state only five years before the Nakba—when the Israeli state was created through the partition of Palestine and displacement of over 750,000 of its Muslim and Christian inhabitants. About 100,000 were displaced into Lebanon and since then Palestinians have been an integral part of Lebanese society. In many ways national identity crystallized and fractured in relation to Palestinians. Our histories are as complex and as contradictory as anybody else’s. Intimacy, sameness, separation, union, difference, alliance, love and violence structure the relationship between the people who are, in this latest chapter of their long history, “Lebanese” and “Palestinian.”

The carceral structures of fragmentation, domination and separation that shape Palestinian life—the Nakba as an architecture of oppression and destruction—do not end at the borders of historic Palestine (Rabea Eghbariah 2024). They extend, at various levels of dehumanization, to wherever Palestinians live. If they are refugees in Lebanon they cannot work in most professional fields or own property. If they live in the United States and are American citizens they are called “terrorist supporters” for demanding the end of genocidal violence funded and diplomatically protected by their government. In Germany when they demand freedom from the oppression that structures their lives from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan, they are breaking the law. If they are refugees in Syria they have been besieged in Yarmouk. If they live in Egypt or Jordan, this past year they have been forced to witness presidents and kings bow down and offer assurances to their genocidaires. Perhaps we should not expect more from regimes who can massacre and injure thousands of protestors in Rabaa square in Cairo, or kill, maim and displace millions in Syria, regimes that agree that Arab life is cheap and can, or should, be sacrificed in pursuit of their own interests.

The Nakba and one of its motors—the dehumanization of Palestinian, and Arab life more generally—is global, and so the intifada must be global as well. As the late Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury wrote: “Every Arab is a Palestinian. Every poor man who carries a gun is Palestinian. Palestine is the condition of us all” (Khoury 2007).

When Palestine is framed with Zionism and/or Israel as its only reference point, Palestine and Palestinians are emptied of history and of agency. They are the foil, never the subject. They are the cause, never the catalyst. Their role in quilting this contemporary pattern of the Middle East is obscured. This is a colonial, Nakba epistemology that repeats the enforced separation between them and their kin— the residents of the land, holy and not, that also became Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. It scaffolds the suffocation of watching that same sea shore, that same sunset over Gaza and Beirut, and feeling the phantom limb that was, and is, only miles away.

The history of the land and the people that became Palestine and Palestinians did not begin with the history of Zionism, and their future—our future— will not be determined by it either. One day, we will return to each other. The tree roots and the bones, the mountains and the flattened buildings, the birds and the bombs in that same sky, the water that runs freely under the ground and the blood that seeps through it remind us that, above all, borders should be humble.