Beirut Beirut
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The Israeli missile hits and the building collapses like a layer cake. The air fills with fulgent exhalations of dust. That was my great uncle’s apartment, one man wrote on Instagram. He had a massive library. I loved going there as a kid. It made me want to become a writer.
Was was was.
I am in Athens drinking my eighth thimble of raki, at a table of full of people, who come and go over the course of the long Athenian night. We are all from different places, but everyone looks the same, more or less, because the Mediterranean is just a petri dish, and ideas about our intrinsic difference are delusions born from the Victorian mania to categorize, hierarchize and control, which would be better left with the skull charts and calipers of the previous century’s race scientists. Who could tell who was Puerto Rican or Greek, Jew or Lebanese, Italian or Syrian, just be looking? Not me. Probably not you either. We drink, and I think about the nights I spent in Beirut, a place I first visited a decade ago and kept coming back to, despite its extensive and well-documented fuckedupedness. I think about the electric thrum of Gemmayze Street, the fineness of Beesan bookstore, the pitch black humor of my friends.
Some people at the table are from Beirut. Others live there. Seven hundred and seventeen miles away from Athens, Israel drops another bomb.
Drunk off our asses, we stumble down the gloamy giallo streets, so similar to the streets of Beirut. The bombs fall on Gaza, on South Lebanon, near the temple of Jupiter at Baalbek. Bombs on Tyre, birthplace of Jezebel. As if one country could erase everyone else’s history from the sky.
I get home and flip through my phone. On Instagram, someone posts a photo of a team of uniformed Lebanese civil defense workers — the guys who dig people out of bombed out buildings. They are handsome, and smile brightly. Israel killed them all with a bomb. Israel has killed two hundred Lebanese rescue workers since September. Tributes appear Adnan al Bursh, the beloved surgeon of Gaza’s Shifa hospital. He had vowed to stay with his patients till the end. The Israelis arrested him, tortured him horrifically, then threw his half dead body in the prison courtyard, naked from the waist down – given the prevalence of rape by Israeli prison guards, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. He died from the wounds shortly after.
On Lebanese Instagram accounts, a man plays his cello in the rubble. A florist delivers flowers to the rubble. A group saves cats from the rubble (ungrateful beasts, they scratch the shit out of their rescuers). These performances of beauty, courage, and creativity have several goals. They lift the spirits, but they are also attempts to show the world that the performers are worthy people, too worthy for Israel to blow to bits. I think of Renad, a beautiful little girl in Gaza who makes cooking videos with what little food makes its way past Israel’s blockade. “Make chocolate the Gaza way,” she says, grinning mischievously, so full of life it ought to shatter our iPhone screens. In Gaza, the most beautiful, most charming, most witty children on earth perform for the camera, to convince the world to stop Israel from incinerating their families. What about charmless children, like myself at that age, sullen brats who hid in corners? I would not have been able to convince anyone of my worthiness.
More videos of Israeli bombs.
How can you scream for a place you love, while it is destroyed inch by inch by a country that claims to speak for you, with missiles bought by your actual country? Beirut ya albi ya hayati, I’m sorry that we failed. Last month, me and two hundred other Jews got arrested trying to blockade the New York City stock market, with Jewish Voices for Peace. It felt like the least I could do.
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If you follow me, you know I spent the last five years working on a book on the Jewish Labor Bund, the brass-knuckle socialists of Eastern Europe who rejected Zionism from the start, foreseeing the tidal wave of blood it would entail, and instead insisted on their right to stay in their European homes. I finished in June. My manuscript has been sitting with my editor for five months. While I wait, I give interviews about the Bund. Here’s one for Jewish Heretics.
Here’s one for E-Flux, an art magazine of such white-cube fanciness I never thought they’d let me on their pages. I blame Andreas and Shellyne.
My friend Frank Barat interviewed me with Nan Goldin and Morgan Bassichis.
Marc Steiner even played the Bund’s anthem, The Oath
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In a few days I’ll be in London, to document the latest event by the Palestine Literature Festival in my sketchbook. If you’re around, buy a ticket and say hi.
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“Journalists often call Beirut “the Paris of the Middle East”. The phrase reveals only the laziness of the journalists themselves, who cannot conceive of an Arab city that drinks and dances and loves. Beirut is the Beirut of the Middle East — electric in your eyes as you careen down Gemmayeze on the back of a motorbike, as you pour arak down your throat in hipster bars and the bomb that just hit the Iranian embassy feels terribly far away.
After I finished interviewing them, the guys insisted on escorting me back to my hotel. We walked through downtown, rebuilt by the former prime minister Hariri, past Saint Georges Hotel, scarred by the car bomb that would send Hariri into sainthood. We walked past Hariri’s tomb.
One of the guys asked me, “In America, do people really think we’re all, what’s the word, terrorists?”
I paused, wondering whether to be honest.
“Yes.”
- Something I wrote eleven years ago, the first time I visited Beirut.