Waiting for War in Lebanon by Vera Kachouh

I put my body into the sea in Lebanon only once. Its warm, salty water extended a liquid embrace, beckoning me like a lover I could never have. From the shore came my aunt’s laughter, rolling in at odd intervals on the back of the wind. I turned toward the horizon, away from my family, away from solid ground. I faced nothingness. A huge blue expanse stretched before me. The sea was so salty, so buoyant, that I didn’t need to swim. I could release all physical effort and let it carry me. I did, for a time, though I wasn’t brave. I stayed within earshot, going just beyond the point where my toes could touch. 

What word could I give to what I felt then other than love? The sea took my body and threatened to never give it back. Or maybe it was the other way around: A part of me broke off there, in the Mediterranean. All I could do was leave it behind and swim to shore. 

I was twelve years old, and it was my first time in Lebanon. We visited Raouché, Gemmayzeh, Achrafieh, Souk El Gharb. The land curved around the sea off the coast of Beirut and then soared up to the mountain villages before finally reaching the ancient cedars—the same old growth forests that had been there since the time of the Phoenicians, who used the cedar wood to build ships and conquer the Mediterranean. 

As we went from place to place, my father acted as a sort of missionary, unveiling the beauty of his country to the uninitiated—his two kids—one day, one landmark, one beach visit at a time. This was a family vacation, but underneath it all was another plan: to make his half-Arab children Lebanese. To make us fall in love with the place he had left behind two decades before. 

There were dozens of family members in Lebanon who I had never met: aunts, uncles, cousins, my maternal grandmother. There was also the grandfather who I hadn’t seen since I was a baby, whose scent I vaguely remembered as a mixture of cigarette smoke and old wool. I didn’t speak Arabic or French. I could not converse with any of them. The most I could do was occupy the same physical space as these familial strangers, break bread, and smile. 

My father always longed for his home country, and, wanting his love, I longed for it, too. It was not hard to love the Lebanon that lived inside of our rented apartment in New York throughout the 1980s: the sound of an oud, for instance, my father with his handsome friends gathered around it, laughing and pouring araq. Or the table that overflowed with mezze—soujouk, labneh, olives, whole sprigs of mint, spinach pies with sumac, oozing persimmons balancing on ice, cut from their undersides and spilling open like stars. The music of Fairuz reverberated against our walls, singing the nation’s mythology. 

But there was another Lebanon, too. It came to us through the nightly news in the form of assassination attempts, kidnappings, bombings, refugee camps, evacuation alerts, and airplane hijackings. My father would sit there, glued to the screen, waiting for newscasters to utter the name of his town or an adjacent one. He would jump to his sandaled feet, shouting “Souk El Gharb!” “B’Mekene!” 

My mother, sister, and I competed with the war for my father’s attention. He was mentally there. We were physically here. He sent back money to his parents and siblings—the money for the house my parents would have bought in the U.S. had it not been for the war. 

I learned as an adult that my parents had originally thought they would raise us in Lebanon, for at least a part of our childhoods. They would enroll my sister and I at the French school in Beirut, and we would become trilingual, citizens of the world. 

When my father came to America in 1971, in pursuit of a “better life,” he left behind his mother and father, his brothers and sisters, many cousins, and countless childhood friends. No one there wanted him to leave. The plan was always that one day he would return. 

Less than two months after I was born, the 1982 Lebanon War began with the Israeli incursion into Lebanon. For the sake of “peace,” Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) planned to secure a 25-mile buffer zone from their border into Lebanon. Instead, they bombed 50 miles north into Beirut, laying siege to the city and killing thousands of civilians. They weren’t the only aggressor. Lebanese Phalangists (Christian militiamen) were instrumental in aiding the IDF in the massacre of 3,500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shia Muslims at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. 

Lebanon was a hard place to love. 

On the day that I graduated from college, my father took a taxi straight from the graduation ceremony to the airport and boarded a flight to the Gulf. He moved to Dubai where, for the first time in his life, he was able to advance in his career. He told me once that in Dubai, his accent was an asset, not a liability. He wanted to be closer to his parents, whose health had begun to decline. Eventually, he moved back to the village where he was born, overlooking Beirut and the Mediterranean Sea. By that point, he had been away from Lebanon for over thirty years. 

It is August 7, 2024, and for the past ten months, I have begged my father to leave while he still can. The U.S. State Department sends him daily alerts, because he is registered as an American citizen at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. After October 7, those messages escalated in intensity. He sent me a few, like breadcrumbs:

The State Department warns all American citizens living in Lebanon to evacuate while commercial flights are still available. 

The State Department is urging all American citizens living in Lebanon to leave immediately. 

The State Department would like to inform American citizens living in Lebanon that they will not be evacuated in the case of a wider regional war. 

Yesterday, Israeli war planes broke the sound barrier over Beirut three times. My father writes that 100,000 people have fled Beirut to his village of Souk El Gharb thinking that they will be safer there when war eventually comes. The Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport—the only operational airport in the country—is engulfed in chaos as thousands of people try to flee. All major European and American airlines have suspended their flights in and out of the country. The last Arab airlines with scheduled flights out of Lebanon will depart today.  

War will come and Lebanon, a failed nation that has been in a perpetual state of collapse for as long as anyone can remember, will sink further into the abyss. 

Still, my father refuses to leave.

I have puzzled for many months over why this might be the case. I still don’t have a good answer. There are logistical and familial concerns, of course, but I think the real reason has more to do with the messy and impossible human heart. 

How many times can a person leave behind what they love before they begin to feel that they, too, are being left behind with it? Perhaps we spend our entire lives trying to reclaim the pieces of ourselves that we lost by loving something that could never love us back—that hurt us with every gesture of love that we gave. 

I think my father stays in order to know that he exists. 

A few days later, I receive a text message from a friend: 

“I was wondering if your dad is still in Libano? I read in the news that the streets in Beirut are empty. Nobody is going out.” 

I wait a few moments before responding, “He is there. He is not leaving.” I add a heartbreak emoji, for her sake. I am past heartbreak. I feel nothing. 

It is now November 2024, and the war we’ve been waiting for has come. On September 17, Israel exploded pagers in the hands of Hezbollah fighters, blinding and maiming thousands, and killing 42 people, two of whom were children. Five days later, Israeli air strikes killed over 500 people in Lebanon, making it the deadliest day on record since the civil war. On October 1, Israel invaded Lebanon by land, in the first ground invasion since 2006, the fifth since the creation of Israel. 

The U.S. embassy continues to issue alerts to its citizens, urging them to take any remaining commercial flights out of the country that they can, but those flights are scarce, if they exist at all. To date, only one American aircraft has been sent to evacuate U.S. citizens. My father was not on that flight. 

Looking at a picture of Raouché, I stare at the Pigeon Rocks, into them, past them, and try to memorize their shape. In between these two massive rock formations that reach from the sea to the sky, there is a narrow passage. Just beyond that, the larger rock has a tunnel at its base. It is shaped like an eye with its gaze cast upon the sea. I look there, through the tunnel, and into the blue of the water, indistinguishable from the color of the sky. I see this portal and imagine a great escape across those waters, perhaps to Cyprus. 

“Baba, you are Phoenician,” I want to whisper to him, “remember? Knock down a cedar, go to the sea, and sail!”

I don’t say any of this out loud. Instead, I try to gloss over the present and look toward the future, to a time when we will be able to travel there again. When flights to Beirut have resumed and the streets of the city teem with life. When it will have persisted and, in the sheer fact of that, managed to exist. Maybe we will sit at the cafe cloaked in glass that overlooks Raouché and share a nargile. Maybe I will bring my son to those shores and we will put our bodies into the sea and together feel its warmth. Maybe I will be brave enough to swim away from the shore.