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In Lebanon, Grief Is Everywhere. But So Is Our Defiance.

We are reeling from Israel’s massacres. But people are tirelessly organizing on the ground, and are not giving up.

Last Sunday was Easter—a day theologically dedicated to the triumph of life over death. But here in Lebanon, the air was heavy with grief. On April 8, Israel killed 303 people in at least 100 air strikes conducted across Lebanon in around 10 minutes—a day we have collectively called “Black Wednesday” since—with many still lost and unaccounted for.

Since the wider Israeli war on Lebanon began on October 8, 2023, there has been black Wednesday after black Wednesday. At The Public Source, the news outlet where I work, I’m part of a team that is counting our dead; there is no official toll being provided by our government. We meticulously note their names, their photos, their hometowns. We ask: Did they die alongside their entire family? Are they the children of fighters killed before them? Was a massacre committed by Israel in the strike that killed them? So far, Israel has killed at least 6,691 people, by our count, since October 8.

For the last two and a half years, being around the elders in my family at times like this has been the natural lens for reflection. Against all odds, we celebrated my mother’s Easter on Sunday. Her family is Syriac Orthodox, and my great-grandmother watched Ottoman soldiers stab her mother to death when she was just a girl. My maternal great-grandparents survived the Sayfo—the “sword” of Ottoman genocide that forced their people, the Assyrians, to flee the heartlands of upper Mesopotamia a century ago. My grandfather’s village, Azekh (now İdil), is known for its prolonged resistance to Ottoman erasure.

The Sunday before, April 5, we celebrated my father’s Easter. My paternal grandparents were forced out of Palestine in the Nakba that began in 1948, uprooted by the same Zionist death machine that today issues forced displacement orders and unleashes scorched-earth policies on the steadfast Lebanese villages of our south. And its goals for them are the same. The settler colonial state seeks to depopulate so that it may expand, to erase and destroy so that it may occupy.

To be all of these things in this moment in Lebanon’s history—a moment that has continued in perpetuity since the inception of the Zionist project—is to recognize that I live in a home built on survival. A century ago, my maternal great-grandparents fled Ottoman soldiers to find refuge here. Decades ago, my paternal grandparents fled Zionist militias. Today, I watch as Israeli occupation forces attempt to ethnically cleanse the entire south up to the Litani and Zahrani rivers, under the guise of a “security” belt.

Fifty-five years ago, Imam Musa al-Sadr foresaw this expansionism. In a televised speech, he emphasized that the danger “is not limited to Palestine…but will extend and extend, forming a threat to all regions of the east, and even to the west.” He mocked the “global stupidity” of colonial powers who believed they could rein Israel in.

The Sayfo and Nakba are not isolated tragedies. They are casualties of the same imperial line in the sand that today attempts to cut the south out of Lebanon; the very same imperial line through which the “Greater Israel” vision attempts to manifest on our soil.

During World War I, to secure their military service, the United Kingdom promised its “Smallest........

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