It took a while for people to grasp what was happening as thousands of pagers beeped then detonated across Lebanon last week: in pockets, hands, and in front of faces; on streets, in cars, at homes; in grocery stores, schools, and offices. “I reported the news as it emerged but did not understand what I was saying,” a journalist friend told me. When there are attacks and explosions in Lebanon, as has too often been the case in recent history, messages on my family WhatsApp groups usually come in a quick cascade. This time none arrived. I learned later that people had been advised not to call and text to protect the identity of targets, thought to be Hezbollah fighters. The silence was filled by ambulance sirens.
The thousands who lost eyes and fingers, whose faces were mangled and loins torn up; the dozens killed across the two days of pager attacks; the dozens more killed and injured in a Hezbollah commander’s assassination the day after; and the many scores—at least 182 as of this writing—killed in this morning’s bombardment of the country’s south: these are my fellow Lebanese people. I am related to them less by civic unity or national fervor than by our shared experience of wars and the uneasy truces between them. I was born during the Lebanese civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, and grew up hearing shells and bombs and listening to sombre news announcements. My parents passed down their own stories. My older brother was born on September 17, 1982, as right-wing Phalanges backed by the Israeli army, which had invaded Beirut, massacred Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. My father flew a white flag from the car as he drove my mother to the hospital.
The civil war ended when I was six. What I remember most vividly are the Israeli bombings in the years that followed, when I was twelve, fifteen, and then twenty-two, which struck bridges, airports, power plants, and buildings in the southern suburbs. The glass in my childhood bedroom rattled so hard I was afraid it would shatter all over me as I slept. I thought a lot about the last of these, the war of July 2006, when I was in Beirut this summer, as the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel escalated. Deliberating whether to stay or to leave, I imagined living through it again, this time with three little children. Could I bear to put them through those sounds? When the Israeli planes started breaking the sound barrier in Beirut—they had been doing so for some time in the south—we knew we had to go.
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The pager attacks’ targets are also my people in a more particular sense: I belong to the community who live in the southern suburbs of Beirut and the south of Lebanon, and from whom Hezbollah draws its members. I belong to it not so much because my national registration papers list me as “Shiite Muslim” but because I grew up in and with its rituals, practices, and ideas. In 1979, when they got married, my parents moved to central Beirut, but we often visited grandparents, uncles, aunts, and extended relatives in the southern suburbs, as well as in villages in the south. In recent years the street where my parents live—once also home to Sunnis, Druzes, and Armenians—has itself become Shiite-dominated.
Shiites make up around a third of Lebanon’s population. The particular corner of the Shiite world in which I grew up included both the leftist and the pious. A number of my eleven uncles and four aunts joined the Communist Party during the civil war, when leftist and Arab nationalist movements were active in the southern suburbs. The Shiites had felt marginalized in the formation of the Lebanese state, which Sunni Muslim and Christian elites spearheaded. They also tended to be poorer, less educated, and more isolated than their co-nationals. When Hezbollah rose in prominence after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Beirut and its occupation of the south, many Shiites came to view the group as providing what the state did not: security from Israel, welfare in the form of schools and hospitals, and a sense of dignity.
Rabih Daher/AFP/Getty Images
Smoke rising from an Israeli airstrike in the Jabal al-Rehan area of southern Lebanon, September 21, 2024
Hezbollah’s part in liberating the south from fifteen years of formal Israeli occupation in 2000 was widely celebrated, but disagreements slowly emerged over the group’s continued military influence. At family lunches, my extended relatives would debate its right to bear arms, its involvement in the Syrian civil war on the side of Bashar al-Assad, and its relations with Iran. Enmity toward Israel was, on the other hand, never a subject of debate. Not only had its occupation of the south formed our shared recent history, its occupation of Palestinian lands felt like a continuation of the British and French colonial history that shaped our part of the world.
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Hezbollah prevails in my father’s village, which lies south of the Litani river, just across the border from southern villages that Israel had occupied. In my mother’s village, further north and west, it is the Shiite Amal party, which the cleric Musa al-Sadr founded in 1974 as “the Movement of the Deprived,” that runs and wins in elections. Amal fought—with the Syrian regime—against both Hezbollah and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the War of the Camps in the 1980s, but it has since become Hezbollah’s ally. Its current leader, Nabih Berri, has been the speaker of parliament, the foremost Shiite government position, for the past thirty-two years. During our visit this summer I saw, on a lamppost by the building where my parents live, a photo of Berri and the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with the caption “the sacred pair.” But Amal lacks the ideological zeal as well as the discipline of Hezbollah. For their critics, where Hezbollah is authoritarian, Amal is corrupt.
The liberation of the south made it safe for my parents to buy a small piece of land in my father’s village and build a house. Until last October, they spent weekends there, longer during the summer holidays when we visited; they showed their grandchildren how to pick mulberries and introduced them to the local grocers, who, on our last trip, greeted the children by name. We are all registered to vote in the village, even for municipal elections. When there at the right time, I voted for small, leftist parties, and I suspect a few relatives did too, even as we knew that Hezbollah would win.
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When I think of the young men who were killed by the detonated pagers, my mind goes to the faces of a few I met in recent years in the village. I do not share many of their values. They do not shake my hand, and a few look away to avoid glimpsing my uncovered hair. But neither do the people around them necessarily share their commitments. In the families I know, some siblings are more pious than others, some fathers are wearier of military involvement than their sons, and many mothers do not want to give their children up for a cause, however much they believe in it.
That we cannot tally Hezbollah constituents neatly is not simply due to the party’s concern with secrecy. It is also because its pager-carrying members are ensconced in networks of family relations, local ties, and political solidarities. Their relatives, the people who live in the same villages and neighborhoods, and those whose lives intersect with theirs support them without agreeing with all their decisions, policies, or ideas. A pager that explodes in a quotidian setting, severing limbs and blinding eyes, never inflicts neatly bounded damage, both because it invariably harms civilians and because it hits its target squarely amid his social world. It spreads fear, but it also reinforces communal solidarities—or at least the conviction that Israel is the enemy. We have been here before. The war of July 2006 was said to sow doubt about Hezbollah among its supporters, but it was also a reminder that Israel had the capacity and will to do indiscriminate harm in Lebanon.
When I heard the news about the pager explosions, I was looking at tickets to Beirut for December. To assuage my sadness and guilt about cutting our trip short this summer, I had vowed to return soon: to see my children play in the house I grew up in, to have them share a meal with the children of my cousins and friends, and hear them speak in Arabic out on the street. In my conversations with friends and family in Lebanon since, we have talked less about the prospect that we might go than about the possibility that they might have to leave.