A farmer prepares tobacco leaves for drying in Houla village, near the border with Israel, southern Lebanon June 22, 2023. Aziz Taher/Reuters
The village, where I have conducted extensive fieldwork over the years, hugs the border with occupied Palestine. Since October 2023, it had been forcibly and gradually emptied of life since. The October 2024 attack completely obliterated it.
Videos by the Israeli soldiers of their acts of destruction circulated on social media. In them, the olive-green clad soldiers count down in Hebrew, then break out in laughter and hoots of machismo in the wake of the explosion. An image of the village disappearing into a pink pillow of smoke under an iridescent early morning moon was shared on the village’s WhatsApp group. Members of the group responded with crying, angry and broken-heart emojis. They expressed disbelief, praising the heavens.
The haunting image of the village’s destruction contrasts sharply with a photo I took during fieldwork in 2008 after the village’s defiant reemergence from the previous punishing war of July 2006: Then, the intimate huddle of houses crowning the hill were all newly rebuilt and freshly painted in a rainbow of pastels.
Trying to fathom the world-ending loss of the place that centered my ethnography of life and war in South Lebanon, I sent a voice-note to my close friend Ghida asking how she felt about the erasure of her beloved village. She responded, “I don’t know. It is as if we have become numb.”
The recent bombardment of Lebanon is by no means the first Israeli effort to annihilate life on the Lebanese side of the border. But it is the most intentional, brazen and unfettered. During this round, Hizballah—the homegrown Lebanese armed resistance that emerged in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon and honed its skills over decades of guerrilla warfare in south Lebanon—suffered a major blow. Through bombing campaigns in residential areas across Lebanon that utilized massive amounts of bunker-blaster bombs, and through incessant drone attacks, Israel managed to systematically assassinate all of Hizballah’s top leadership—including the much-loved and revered face of the Resistance, Hassan Nasrallah, who led Hizballah for 32 years. Nonetheless, Hizballah fighters remained tenacious on the ground in the South, repelling the Israeli Army’s advances until the ceasefire came into effect.
As of this writing, Israel has breached the ceasefire hundreds of times, by some estimations, and continues to occupy south Lebanon, past the initial negotiated date of their withdrawal. Israeli forces are systematically destroying agricultural and residential landscapes as well as extensive road networks in the frontline villages—home to all kinds of resistant life and deep layers of history. Images recently shared on social media by the NGO, Green Southerners, illustrate the extent of this ecocide in the border villages of Yaroun: Before-and-after satellite images show the widespread destruction of pine forests and orchards. In Alma al-Shaab their famous groves of ancient olives were uprooted.
The occupation and obliteration of the borderland is not only a political and social problem but an environmental one. Just like the war in Palestine, South Lebanon is the target of a campaign of annihilation and destruction, which includes all those beings living on the land and the land itself. Shifting the analysis to the actual grounds of life in these landscapes of war offers perspectives and lessons about survival and ecologies of resistance at the end of the world.
Harvesting Under the Bombs
The latest and ongoing season of war in South Lebanon resumed on October 8, 2023, after 17 years of relative calm. Beginning on October 7, Hizballah fired a salvo of mortars across a dormant frontline in solidarity with Gaza under attack. Even as all kinds of life resurged along it, this borderland had remained in a state of expectant preparedness since the last war in July of 2006.
For more than two decades, I have researched life and war in South Lebanon: since the liberation of the South in 2000 (when I witnessed the collapse of the 22-year Israeli occupation) to the July 2006 war and its aftermath (when I did fieldwork in now-destroyed villages on life in a landscape of seasonal war and destruction).
In October and November of 2023, friends, who are farmers in frontline villages and who depend on the agricultural seasons of tobacco, olives and subsistence crops as well as on livestock such as goats, told me that they were being intentionally targeted by the Israeli military across the nearby borderline. One said: “They see us tending to our livelihoods, and they shoot at us because we are out in our orchards harvesting our olives and living our lives, while they cower in shelters.” As has been extensively documented, the Israeli army used white phosphorous and incendiary bombs along the border—attacking olive harvesters, setting trees on fire and targeting firefighters who came to the rescue.
Harvesting under the bombs is a defiant posture. Yet in the first year of the war, more than 100,000 villagers fled the borderland, seeking greater safety in the villages and cities outside the line of fire. For those who stayed, the regular bombardment across the South prevented the profitable seasons of harvest for tobacco and olives as well as the subsistence farming that eases the cost of living for most villagers. For many, there were also no winter crops, no foraging of wild herbs in the spring, no fresh bounty of the seasonal kitchen gardens appended to every village home, no hectic and rhythmic summer tobacco harvest. As the war entered its second year and, in late September 2024, precipitously escalated into a war of annihilation, the olive crop went unharvested again. The orchards were incinerated again. In just one year, 2,192 hectares of land were burned.[1]
Resistant Ecologies
My book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (2022), illuminated some of the ecologies that have sprouted in the war-torn landscape of South Lebanon, making life possible through many cycles and seasons of war. I describe these ecologies as resistant because they have actively taken root in this war-seasoned region, where invasions, bombardments, minefields and white phosphorous have become everyday challenges, inescapable like the weather. The book highlights the lessons of war and survival on a deadly planet from those who must face the end of the world time and again while pursuing their daily bread.
Take tobacco, a cash crop that was introduced to South Lebanon during the Ottoman Empire and then taken over by the French colonizers during the mandate period. In 1960, it became a Lebanese state monopoly under the Regie Libanaise des Tabacs et Tombac (a public company under the ministry of finance). Flexible, fleeting and hardy, it thrives in adverse conditions such as poverty and war. Growing in the arid highlands of the Lebanese borderland, tobacco needs no irrigation. Its lifespan in the fields is brief: planted in February, transplanted in March and April and harvested in June, July and August. It requires no storage facilities apart from the village home. It is worked by the many hands of village households—those who have not left the village to earn a living elsewhere or to fight: women, children and the elderly. Through their cultivation of tobacco and the income it brings, inhabitants of the frontline villages hold onto home and land.
The long-suffering villagers of this borderland have always relied on the profit guaranteed by tobacco as a key supplemental income. And although it has a difficult history—they also call it al-nabti al murra, “the bitter crop”—tobacco is a lifeline to those who steadfastly remain in their villages through ever-returning seasons of war and devastation. This fact is known to everyone, including Israelis who target tobacco fields and harvests in every war. In South Lebanon, tobacco is lionized as nabtit al-muqawama, “the crop of resistance.” Underwriting life in war and occupation, tobacco vividly exemplifies a resistant ecology.
Goats are another example. While scenes of starving horses stumbling through the streets of southern villages circulated on social media throughout 2024, and cats and dogs in borderland villages were reduced to skin and bones, goats are known for their abilities to thrive in adversity. They nimbly browse across the hills and valleys of the borderland, defying the explosives mined in the ground because they are too light to spring them. It is not a failsafe strategy, but it has allowed goats and their human companions, who make a living alongside them, to continue to thrive in a deadly landscape and resistantly re-occupy land that has been made deadly by US-made and Israeli-planted mines.
In the summer of 2024, an Israeli attack on a farm in Jezzine killed 700 goats and ruined the livelihood of a livestock farmer. This pattern is repeated across the South, as in Palestine: The Israeli war-machine targets those resistant ecologies that have, until now, enabled life to continue in a land it wants to empty of life—and resistance.
After the End
When the ceasefire went into effect at 4 am on November 27, 2024, the roads heading South were already jammed with traffic. People rushed back to the rubble of their homes, their fields and trees and livestock. The inhabitants of the frontline villages, however, were not allowed to return until January 26, 2025—the date the ceasefire was set to end and on which Israel was supposed to withdraw, handing over the occupied South to the Lebanese Army. At the time of publication, on January 29, Israeli forces continue to occupy the South, shooting and killing residents who have tried to return.
On the morning of the ceasefire, however, someone who remained in the South throughout the war, defiantly drove to the village and filmed a video on his phone that he shared on the village WhatsApp group: “This is the village guys, there is not a single house standing,” he says in the video as the car bumps along a broken road, brown earth and rubble on either side. He slows down as he drives past a destroyed home, stopping briefly beside a dead tree slumped on its side: “look at that poor plum,” and a few meters further, “look at this chestnut, poor wretched thing,” he sighs. “This is the village, there is not a single house left standing,” he says again as if to deliver an incomprehensible message to his fellow villagers. The sky is washed-out gray and the landscape on all sides unfolds in jagged, warped textures and shades of cement, rubble and dust.
In the video, he drives past a charred van flipped on its side outside of a crumbled structure. “This is your van,” he says naming someone. As he continues past accordioned houses, he names their owners: “this is your house… this is your house…” The windshield wipers of the car scrape against the dry glass, adding a grating staccato to the depressing reportage, while a smiley-face air freshener sways back-and-forth in the camera frame, at stark odds with the scene of devastation. Finally, he arrives to the entrance of the village, to the home of Bou and Im Sahel, on the southern edge of the village, near the road closest to the border. “This is the entrance to the village, but you wouldn’t know it,” he says. “I believe this is where Bou Sahel’s house was.” Twisted rebar, a few standing pillars, the root stump of a tree and beige nothingness is all that remains. “This is the village… to be honest there is not a single house left. They did not leave a single house in the village.” The video ends.
Two weeks into the 60-day ceasefire, in December 2024, I gathered in my family’s garden on a hill south of Beirut with Hajji Im Sahel, her daughters, her son, Sahel, and his wife and their children and grandchildren. The many generations of this family had been staying with my family since the war’s escalation. Only the Hajj Bou Sahel was missing. He had died in the spring of 2021 at the age of 90, taking with him, like all those who die, the many stories he lived, the wisdom he gathered, including his idiosyncratic and level-headed views and rooted responses to endless seasons of war. He is buried in the village. The Hajji and her daughters recall him fondly: stalwart in the southern village he loved, in the home he built, the trees he planted, the animals he cared for, resisting until the end.
As Sahel, once told me at the close of another war in 2006: “My love for this land is not ideological. It is ihsass waqi’i (a real, practiced, present, placed feeling). This is why I fight for it.” This sentiment is key to resistant life in the South, and it is what the war-machine cannot comprehend. In an asymmetrical battlefield, even when all hope appears to be lost, it is not. Because life remains.
[Munira Khayyat is clinical associate professor at New York University Abu Dhabi.]
Endnotes
[1] National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS): “CNRS-L report on Israeli Offensive against Lebanon 2023-2024 English,” Beirut, October 12, 2024, p. 26.
