The Dining Table and the Drone
Lebanon, October 2025
wassila abboud
You are grieving, no doubt, you are grieving for your country, your people, and your cause. Ever since the Zionist-imperialist invasion spread through the veins of Lebanese soil. And that young man we were talking about, he is also grieving for the same reason. But does your grief and his grief coincide?”
— Hussein Mroueh
It’s hard to pinpoint grief in Lebanon: to name its beginning, middle, and end. How it mutates in joyful moments, where it hides in moments that demand urgency; how it settles like water tracing the cracked shoreline, the way it sometimes surges and turns around only to return uninvited; how it presents itself as a constant condition, since the colonizer enforced its perpetual present of domination. We often return to past griefs under the condition of domination in Lebanon, as if the psyche can only attempt to name or quantify today’s grief through a transference with a past one. We hear this in every شايفين أسوء (“we’ve seen worse”) or هيدا مش شي جديد (“this is nothing new”), or just yesterday, a taxi driver in Beirut who, after cursing the Israeli drone hovering above us, veered abruptly into a story about his lost love in Denmark — a young woman he never saw again after coming back to Lebanon for what he thought would be a brief visit during the Civil War.
I’m suspicious of these returns, not because I take them as a desire to exit the grief of the present, but because they model too controlled of a return, as if the return to a past grief is to refuse chance as a mode of being or becoming. I also don’t believe these returns are comparable with Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” analogy where the angel, imagined as a painting by Paul Klee titled Angelus Novus, looks back at history and sees a single, unending catastrophe while pushed forward by a storm called “progress.” In the image, the angel’s wings are caught open, his body pulled forward while his eyes stay fixed on the wreckage piling up behind him — a figure trapped between movement and paralysis. The irony lies not in Klee’s image itself, but in the afterlife of Benjamin’s reading. Angelus Novus, once a depiction of Benjamin’s double bind, between progress and his own personal exile, has now been absorbed into the very history it mourned. Progress, for Angelus Novus, has opened the door to the Israel Museum, Jerusalem where the artwork hangs today. The angel — which, in Benjamin’s eyes, was once trapped between the past and the future — has, through its very placement in the Israeli museum, been historicized, possessed, and displayed, revealing today how the violence of progress lies in who gets to freeze catastrophe and claim possession of its image. By contrast, in Lebanon, our entangled relationship to this violent progress means returning gestures to another mode of political becoming because in Lebanon, grief is a protracted condition, muddying our relationship to the past and future.
Perhaps the controlled returns are our refusals to be recipients of catastrophe or to break with history as events simply happening to us. I can’t conclude for sure, but the returns come back to us as symptoms of something unresolved, a grief that refuses to forget what has died. Where do these returns take us? How do these rhymes present themselves today?
The returns can surprise. Many returns lately, especially in Beirut and the South of Lebanon over the past several months, seem to cluster around a specific year: 1982. The grief of the present is drawn backwards, allured into finding a moment in history it recognizes as its companion grief, which tells it this present isn’t all too different from what we’ve seen before. It’s a familiar equation: the merciless occupier, the repeated choreography of forceful displacement and return. Perhaps the methods of violence then weren’t as sophisticated as now, but the weight of events feels similar or at least comparable — the immediacy of threat at every second, the fear of the war continuing once the bombs finally stop. 1982 was the year Israel launched its full-scale invasion of Beirut following its initial incursion up to the Litani River in the south in 1978, which laid the groundwork for the events during and after the invasion.
In a recent conversation with a friend in Burj al Shmali Sour, in the South of Lebanon, we spoke about precisely whether our condition of grief remains the same today as it was during the Israeli invasion in 1982. “We have all the time in the world. We aren’t fighting time — it’s them who are fighting time,”[1] he said while he pointed to where a watch would typically sit on a wrist and then continued to point to occupied Palestine, just a handful of kilometers from where we met. The grief of my friend today has found its comfort in transference, only for him to negotiate with it, reconfigure and redirect it to a new mode of becoming; a grief in a temporality that refuses to be measured, which moves into grief that fights to save what can be saved.
In the South of Lebanon today, the term “ceasefire” holds a paradoxical meaning. On the one hand, its declaration strikes at the edge of comical because bombs and drones continue to fall, indifferent to its status. On the other hand, the meaning of the word suggests the end of violence, and the condition of something more: an end to something and a beginning of something else, a moment where control leaves and reenters as a new variant. The variant has revealed itself as the enduring war of subjugation evolving into its most advanced stage: the systematic targeting not only of people, but of the very infrastructures of life. On October 16th, Israel bombed a cement manufacturing complex and large machinery sending one clear message: there will be no reconstruction as long as the resistance in Lebanon is still armed. Wars don’t end here when the orange man in the White House declares they do; they only change shape. In the South today, the war and its illusionary ceasefire aren’t events. The violence met under the guise of calm expresses the conditions of a long war of subjugation ever since Zionism, in Mroueh’s words, “spread through the veins of Lebanese soil.” When war is “over,” another one has already begun.
Israel isn’t shy about its intentions for this new post-ceasefire phase. Michael Freund, former deputy communications director for Netanyahu, has declared — and with an ease that inexplicably doesn’t disturb those governing the Lebanese state — that “[h]istorically speaking, southern Lebanon is in fact northern Israel,” citing the Book of Joshua and a handful of local shrines as proof. In recent months, and under the illusion of a ceasefire, the language itself has shifted, adopting the cadence of diplomacy. President Joseph Aoun has doubled down on the stance that there is “no choice but to negotiate with Israel using diplomatic language,” while, at the same time, media and political narratives circle relentlessly around a single objective: the disarmament of Hezbollah.
“[T]he conclusion I can draw is that Gaza, today, has shattered the illusion that stability in Lebanon, the region, and the world can exist within an order sustained by capital accumulation.
There is much to say about the consequences of the genocide, and there are people far more versed who have taken on this task. But the conclusion I can draw is that Gaza, today, has shattered the illusion that stability in Lebanon, the region, and the world can exist within an order sustained by capital accumulation. There is no possibility of real life where profit depends on the continuous extraction of that life and the dehumanization of those whose who transmute their grief into a mode of becoming, of those whose grief fights to save what can be saved.
Long before 1982, grief in Lebanon had been about fighting to save what could be saved. When I return to 1982, it’s driven neither by a desire or nostalgia for a lost secular militant left (which is not to diminish the period of Islamic resistance over the past thirty years) nor a melancholic utopian drive for self-emancipation from an irretrievable era. I suspect that what draws us back to 1982 is how grief was reconfigured during this year: it split, multiplied, and altered our language. I return here cautiously. I’m not in search of where our grief began—this task is for the bravest. I want to locate how grief visibly fractured under the weight of subjugation during this period in Lebanon’s history many describe as the turning point: when Lebanon was handed to Israel only for Israel, as Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amel observed in “An Introduction to Critique of Sectarian Thought: The Palestinian Cause in the Ideology of the Lebanese Bourgeoisie,” to return that power as a gift.
In the midst of the Civil War, a sequence of events, starting in 1978, set into motion the forces that would lead to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In 1978, Israel launched Operation Litani under the pretext of driving the Palestinian resistance from the South of Lebanon and, with support from the South Lebanon Army, effectively carved out a buffer zone under Israeli control. That same year, the Camp David Accords were signed between Egypt and Israel, inaugurating a new era of normalization in the wider Arab region, which resulted in isolating the Palestinian cause in the Arab world. Between 1978 and 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in alliance with the right-wing Christian forces led by Bashir Gemayel, outlined a plan for the paramilitary commander Gemayel's rise: Israel would invade Lebanon, Lebanese President Elias Sarkis would dissolve parliament, and Gemayel would be installed as head of state. On June 6, 1982, Israeli forces launched a full-scale invasion, advancing toward Beirut under the pretext of expelling the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
I was sitting at a familiar dining table recently, just a few streets from my home in Beirut. Around this table, the first عملية (“operation”) in Beirut against the Israelis in 1982 was planned within the Lebanese National Movement (LNM). In the tense months of the middle of the year, as Israeli forces advanced toward the city, nine fighters gathered in secrecy and urgency: hands pressed heavy around the table planning what would become the Bustros Pharmacy Operation —the first attack against the Israeli occupation forces in Beirut on September 20 — led by LNM member Mazen Abboud, a militant and intellectual from the South of Lebanon. When grief appears here, it’s in the ordinary spaces and intimate cartographies of our lives. It returns to us through dining room tables — and the Bustros Pharmacy in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood, which remains as a protest site — the clefts in the rocks of Jabal Amel, the sea we share with Gaza. It comes back to us as the unresolved attempts to survive the conditions of the world without accepting them.
What remains unresolved in Lebanon is not only the psychic architecture reminding us that people we knew lived within a reality without surrendering to it. It’s also waking up and hearing birds echoing the drones; the bombs relentlessly striking the South, sparking wildfires that at this present moment are burning through the valleys, turning olive groves into pyres; the refugee camps; the rising cost of bread; and the bourgeois state that conspires to produce immobility through this very grief. Grief here is inseparable from and shaped by the conditions of subjugation, and in this sense, the external violence and internal grief rhyme, but the presentation of this rhyme diverges often into contradictory states. Where Freud understands mourning as a deference to reality, Douglas Crimp, in his reading of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia in “Mourning and Militancy,” argues that a militancy in mourning means learning to live within the reality without surrendering to it. This state of becoming is where grief doesn’t dissolve or resolve but reorganizes the conditions of living. Like Crimp’s militant mourning, what surfaces through these familiar sites in Lebanon isn’t a completed process but a continual reconfiguration that keeps questioning both the internal and external architectures that sustain loss.
“This state of becoming is where grief doesn’t dissolve or resolve but reorganizes the conditions of living.”
In a tender reflection about the year that Lebanon saw its grief split, three months before the Bustros Operation in 1982, Lebanese Marxist Hussein Mroueh describes this reconfiguration of grief through the distinction between the الحزن القاتل (grief that kills) and the الحزن المقاتل (grief that fights). He starts with a visual scene, asking: “On the beach at sunset, we see the sun and the sea meeting at the illusory line that marks the horizon — do they actually meet?” Through this image, he situates his split in thought analogous to the deception of that illusion: the asymptotic relationship between one kind of grief and the other, feelings that appear to meet but never truly do. Like the sun and the sea, they share the same surface of affect but differ entirely in their returns.
The first, the grief that kills, returns inward and ossifies, unable to detach from what has been lost. In Freudian terms, this is akin to melancholy: a grief over a loss (sovereignty and dignity) that becomes an incomprehensible fixation crippling the self within defeat, disillusionment, and loss of balance. The second, the grief that fights, sees its pain outwardly and transforms grief into a mode of becoming: loss becomes grievance, and grief becomes the ground of resistance. Crucially, in a separate text titled “Kalimāt Ḥayya,” Mroueh argues that sadness becomes combative when it is anchored in an intellectual foundation that facilitates its enlistment in the decolonial struggle.
To think through Mroueh’s analogy in Lebanon today is to start with the grief that kills, which has traveled miles to arrive here. In Mroueh’s words, that grief is “a killer sent by the killers on the enemy’s side”: it searches for its most restless subjects, knowing that restlessness will falter first in the face of chaos. This grief has been planted here, stitched with metal on a land that does not recognize it. When the restless subject welcomes grief in, he agrees with Fanon when he argues that colonialism does not stop at convincing you that you are a slave, and that you are unworthy of freedom, as summarized by Marwan Abdel-Al. The subject sees the injustice clearly and knows the bombs haven’t stopped, knows the term “ceasefire” is the beginning of something else. It knows many have been martyred in the South protecting their land, yet the awareness itself becomes a burden too heavy to carry. Grieving subjects understand acutely the terms and terrains of these griefs and their resolutions through and within a liberated future, but each understands drastically different and often contradictory psychological and political methods through which freedom can be achieved. The grief begins its slow work beneath the skin, teaching the restless subject to turn this paradox inward.
The paradox isn’t lost on me. While both the grief that kills and the fighting grief might desire a liberated future, the former looks inward and notices a split. On one side of the split, the grief has the awareness that liberation could be the way to stop the reproduction of our own subjugation in Lebanon, yet the other side sees itself through the eyes of the façade of what imperialism (masked as neoliberal security) can offer. The subject negotiates with its split in grief until it accepts the present as a lesser evil, turning grief inward until an individual becomes complicit in their own slow erasure. This grief is allergic to change and seeks a frictionless normativity — the very condition against the mode of the fighting grief.
The incongruency between the grief that kills and the one who ends up being killed is why I don’t take Mroueh’s distinction as one between life and death. While both have collapsed under the weight of the colonial condition, the grief that kills is more likely to evade the physical death of the subject who bears it. Today, the ones who end up being killed are the parents driving to pick up their children from school or the lone fighter breathing silently in the folds of Jabal Amel.
Since the inception of Zionism, the fighting grief has reconfigured and projected the people’s grief outward and toward the structures subjugating us into their economy of implication. The economy of implication, best summarized by Islam Khatib in a recent talk, is one rooted in the fear of political contagion, one that has framed the inseparable link between Palestinian and Arab liberation not as a just cause, but as a threat to regional and global order. The security narrativization of political contagion has only then succeeded in its task of framing resistance to Zionism as a threat in Lebanon by presenting Israel as a rational entity. Through this lens of rationality, Israel’s expansionist violence becomes explainable, negotiable within the very rhetoric of the contagion: there is always room to reason with a rational actor but only if faced with other rational actors. The insinuation of contagion is clever because it holds that Israel’s rationality is not the opposite of disorder (what US envoy Tom Barrack highlighted when he criticized Lebanese journalists by saying “act civilized, act kind, act tolerant” because behavior to the contrary “is the problem with what’s happening in the region”) then renders the very organization of disorder through the soils and into the infrastructure of our region through economic, diplomatic, media, and security channels. When grief accepts this rationality, every atrocity becomes measured, justified, and confined within the framing of the "reasonable" instead of invoking the healthy response — to resist. In the collapse of the validity of resistance itself, the capacity to resist is dissolved from any broader architecture of strategic retaliation or maneuvering and, instead, rationality becomes the mask that normalizes Israel’s annihilistic fantasy, sanitizing its brutality as policy.
This organization of madness into order is what Mahdi Amel was diagnosing in the wake of the 1982 invasion. After the profound loss of the 1967 Naksa, when Arab armies and ten cities fell to Israel in six days, the counterinsurgent strategy to curb Arab armed resistance mutated from a strategy of containment into one of total eradication. Amel refused to read the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 as proof of this defeat in 1967, but rather as the consequence of a deeper shift. Lebanon’s identity was altogether reconstituted not as part of the Arab liberation movement, but as its adversary and one where the Lebanese ruling class, to maintain their own sectarian system and financial interests, adopted the framing of Israel as a rational entity as a means for its own protection and survival. The following year, this alignment was formalized in the May 17th agreement between Lebanon and Israel — a political contract reflected by Amel’s aforementioned sentiment that the west effectively “handed Lebanon to Israel so that Israel could, in turn, give Lebanon power as a gift.” The alarmist logic of the political contagion reached its new stage of domination and the two competing ideas of grief, in turn, reconfigured themselves: one surrendered to the war of subjugation, and the other, living within reality, refused to surrender.
Through the logic of implication, the contagion today in Lebanon convinces the colonized that health resides in the stability that Israel brings and that liberation itself is a pathology. The real irony, though anticipated by the very mechanics of this logic, unfolds with relentless precision in both 1982 and today: resistance to fascism became the pretext for civil war, just as resistance to occupation became the justification for occupation itself. The paranoia of political contagion fulfilled its task: it spread through the channels of containment, convincing us that to preserve the fragile illusion of order, we must carry illness as our companion.
Under these conditions, the oppositional splitting of grief is not a denial of our shared losses —the grief that kills can see the violence — but its restlessness. The subject has also mastered the act of tempering its imagination, but it can’t begin to imagine what the region can or cannot do under the conditions of subjugation. Instead, it reads the land as a passive acceptor of tragedy, one that has remembered to forget the dead. Since Lebanon accepted Israel as a rational entity, the idea of resistance has come at an even steeper cost. This means that for anyone whose grief fights, their grief is constantly reconfiguring itself toward time and history and in constant becoming. We saw this in the way the people of the South returned to their homes after the “ceasefire,” even in villages along the border and even under the imminent threat of Israeli soldiers and their fantastical maps. In January and February 2025, thousands of Lebanese people defied Israeli orders not to return to their villages. They marched back and entered their villages, with casualties reported in the days following the ceasefire. The people of the South return not to normalcy (and that defiance is not to be romanticized) but because while they might be up against the most vicious violence, but they aren’t “running out of time,” in the words of my friend. Without positioning conditions in the South as favorable in any way, the people nevertheless inhabit a temporality that refuses the obedience of being measured.
Four days after the Bustros Pharmacy Operation in 1982, Khaled Alwan, a young militant from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), along with two other members from the same party, heard a group of occupying Israeli soldiers debating whether they could pay for their coffee in shekels. Alwan then opened fire at soldiers drinking coffee in the heart of Hamra in Beirut; this event, on September 24, 1982, would come to be known as the Wimpy Operation. The propaganda steeling against this political contagion nurtures the grief that kills. It tells us that overhearing “Shalom” instead of “Salam” in a café in Hamra in 1982 isn’t so bad if the currency of occupation, a currency bearing financial security, enters the ordinary spaces of our everyday lives. It persists in convincing the grief that what’s gone is gone and it’s time to stop returning to the past grief; life will be simpler this way.
The fighting grief refuses to normalize this real moment. In Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World, Nouria Gana describes this reconfiguration as the “melancholy act,” in which grief refuses to remain internal, refuses to normalize the present, and instead channels itself into action. Distinct from European modes of thought that separate melancholy from action, they are inseparable in the colonial condition: grief itself becomes an act of defiance, where the affective life of defeat becomes the ground of struggle. If, in Lebanon today, the contagion anxiety’s power lies in transforming madness into a rational action, the subject who maintains fighting grief knows that an attempt to reconfigure affect into armed struggle — an attempt, summarized by Abdaljawad Omar, to deform the colonial fantasy in real time — is one of no return. It also knows that, just as in 1982, when the Lebanese state wouldn’t stand in the way of an Israeli bulldozer and a Lebanese house, it wouldn’t today stand between a drone and his car. His struggle becomes a paradoxical one. He struggles to stop the necessity of struggle: terror, counter-terror, violence, counter-violence. Fanon’s observations still hold true: the native’s violence unifies the people, even as colonialism structurally enforces divisions. This violence challenges these imposed separations and lays the groundwork for the people’s unification.
Today, the same fortification against political contagion has worked to convince us in Lebanon that resisting it is the country’s most decisive issue. Simply put, the contagion thrives by the rifle, exploiting it as its excuse, as the rifle, in the eyes of this repressive myth, is the country’s own sin and misfortune. I don’t believe that, and neither does the fighting grief. Lebanon’s real problems lie in its failings as a neoliberal sectarian state structurally and economically dependent on Western colonial interests: a collapsing banking system with 44% of the population living in poverty, and the Lebanese pound losing 98% of its pre-2019 value.
Washington, via Tom Barrack’s speech on October 20th, has adopted a more forceful strategy to position disarmament as Lebanon’s most decisive issue, moving away from multilateral frameworks and insisting the country “accept and adapt” to post-ceasefire realities. The local forces managing the contagion now face their new dilemma with its rational entity. They can enforce Washington’s demands for Hezbollah’s disarmament and a demilitarized zone south of the Awali River or they can reckon with the enduring truth that what persists in the fighting grief continually returns to the dining tables and Bustros Pharmacy carrying one constant: it will reinterpret itself, but it will never recognize Israel as a legitimate or rational actor.
So which grief cripples more? The grief that is neutralized and implodes under the logic of implication or the grief that reconfigures itself in relation to the structures of Zionist hegemony spreading through the veins of Lebanese soil?
“To see the horizon is to engage in an act of witnessing beyond the spatial and temporal limits imposed by domination.”
Like 1982, grief in Lebanon today is once again at an impasse, one that risks fracturing the country under the weight of an advancement of the war of subjugation or a war of resistance that perpetually reconstitutes Lebanon and all of us. While these two, like the sun and the horizon may only ever meet in illusion, their eventual meeting point is hallucinated by the eyes of the enemy who will continue to destroy both in the only way it knows how. Perhaps, though, the illusion of the horizon carries another deception beyond where the sun and sea meet. If Mroueh’s image separates these griefs from one another, then perhaps the horizon isn’t the line that divides them, but the impossible place where both live and perhaps even long for a liberated region — each eye sees a different grief, both contained in the same act of witnessing. From a distance, they appear to meet, but the closer one looks, the more that meeting recedes inward, into the body that sees it. To see the horizon is to engage in an act of witnessing beyond the spatial and temporal limits imposed by domination. Perhaps undoing the horizon’s illusion means seeing it not as a division between sea and sky, life and death, or Lebanon and Palestine, but as something that collapses into us — where grief is not what lies, but what returns, and will continue to return in this perpetual state of unresolved.
It’s up to us to figure out how to channel and return our grief today. If I were to sit with Mahdi Amel around the same dining table where the first operation was orchestrated, I’m certain the conversation with my uncle would be one of grief. It would emerge from the position of asking: Have we prepared for this grief? How can we defend ourselves for what’s to come? Whatever fragments of this country remain, and whatever approaches in the days ahead, no colonizer can undo the enduring truth of our historical returns to past grief — 1948, 1982, 2000, 2006, 2025. To return is to reconfigure. To persist with the dining tables that return to us, reminding us that until the liberation of Palestine, like the sea and the horizon, our present will remain unresolved. Like the sea and the horizon, the grief of resistance never meets the grief of defeat. As our beloved Ziad Rahbani used to say, if there’s anything good that’s come out of Lebanon, any true achievement in its history and any collective experience upon which to build a national identity, it’s our long history of resistance against the Zionist occupation.
[1] “!نمتلك الكثير من الوقت، بل كل وقت العالم. لسنا نحن من نصارع الوقت، بل هم”