Silence does the talking
While trimming my nails the other day, my manicurist Reem lifted her head and asked me in that quiet, matter-of-fact way that Lebanese resignation often takes: “Do you know what it means to leave your home in the morning and not know if it will still be there when you return at night?”
It was the afternoon of Dec. 2, the very day Pope Leo left Lebanon. The irony (or rather the obvious threat) was so sharp it could have cut cuticles: as his plane ascended, the Israeli drones that now circle Beirut like mechanical omens returned to their shift, as if the sky itself were declaring: The Pope has left. Brace yourselves.
I didn’t tell her: Of course I know, Reem. I didn’t say: I was born in the seventies, in a Beirut perforated by shrapnel and fear. I didn’t recite the litany of horrors that shaped my childhood: the shelters, the checkpoints, the nights interrupted by the percussion of bombs more faithfully than by lullabies.
There are certain things we, the war-seasoned, no longer declare. We just nod, and the silence does the talking.
Reem lives in Dahieh, a suburb in south Beirut. In October 2024, her apartment was erased: not damaged, not cracked: erased by an Israeli airstrike, like a word a rigorous editor decided did not belong. She had been married for six weeks then. Her new life was still wrapped in cellophane: unopened wedding gifts, a kitchen she had not yet cooked in, a bed that still held the smell of new sheets.
All gone.
Her story is not unique. It is simply another verse in the long, exhausting chronicle we Lebanese keep rewriting against our will.
That same evening, as I was telling my friend Diane about Reem over a glass of wine, she exploded: not at Reem, but at the injustice of it all, the uneven distribution of danger, the political fault lines that run straight through our friendships.
“This is the allegiance that she and her fellow Shia chose,” she snapped. “At least she is paying the price of her own choice. Not me! I am paying the price of something that was imposed on me!”
Diane’s only son had taken his family and left Lebanon for good in September of last year, after yet another war drained the last drop of hope out of him. Her grief has calcified into anger; the kind of anger that has nowhere to go but sideways, toward whoever happens to be standing in the line of fire of her disappointment. “Now I will die alone,” she said, her voice cracking under the weight of a loneliness she had not rehearsed for, “because Reem believes in the lie of the holy resistance. So please, tell her to shut up.”
Her words hung in the air: harsh, wounded, unfair, utterly human.
Everyone is paying a price
Because this is the other fracture of Lebanon: not just between armed groups and military powers, not just between rockets and drones, but between us. Between those who are brainwashed to feel protected by the “resistance” and those who feel imprisoned by it. Between those who see a moral duty in death and those who see a fatal dogma disguised as a “righteous” fight. Between those who lose children to “the cause” and those who lose children to exile.
Everyone here is paying a price. But not everyone agreed to the transaction. And so even our compassion is political. Even our grief has a sect. Even our friendships carry a tremor under their skin. I couldn’t tell Diane that her categorization was too generalizing, that not all Shia are Hezbollah supporters. She was in no state to choose reason over the grief that was devouring her. I didn’t tell her that my other friend Zainab, an ER doctor from a Shiite suburb, was more fed up than she was with Hezbollah, exhausted not in theory, but in flesh and blood. “I swore I would stay,” Zainab keeps telling me. “I swore this country deserved better. But every time I finish stitching up someone torn open by a blast, I wonder… for what? For whom?”
And yet she stays. She stays because leaving would betray something she still cannot name. Some people resist not with weapons, but with presence; the quiet, stubborn kind that keeps a country from collapsing completely.
In Mar Mikhael, my car mechanic Abu Walid shrugs in that particularly Lebanese way that mixes pride with fatalism while changing the engine’s oil: “If the place blows up, I’ll fix it, just like I did after August 4 [the Beirut mega-explosion in 2020]. If it blows up again, I’ll fix it again. I’m too old to emigrate and too stubborn to surrender.”
And then, always, there are the teenagers. Those strange, beautiful creatures who have inherited our traumas and yet refuse to carry them with our heaviness. I overhear a group in Hamra laughing about the drones overhead: “If war starts again, at least we won’t have to take the math test.” Macabre humor is their flotation device. But beneath their laughter is the instinctual clarity of a generation that recognizes both the absurdity and the resilience of this place.
Finally, there is my cousin Samer – every Lebanese story has a Samer, the tireless optimist. Over coffee he tells me: “This country won’t die. It has died too many times already. We’ve used up all our funerals.” He insists the fractures in our society are forcing long-avoided conversations, pushing communities to see each other without the false glow of sectarian myths. He trusts the diaspora that, despite its hurt, still feeds Lebanon with a stubborn filial devotion. He believes that, for the first time in a very long time, we finally stand a chance because of the integrity of our current president and prime minister.
He may be delusional. Or he may be the only sane one among us.
The refusal to disappear
Because the truth, the difficult, shameful, tender truth, is that Lebanon today is a place of simultaneous exodus and endurance. People are leaving in waves, not because they lack love, but because love alone cannot neutralize fear or rebuild homes. And those who remain do so either out of duty, defiance, helplessness, love, or hope – sometimes all at once.
The country is cracking under pressure, yet inside those cracks something else flickers: a refusal to disappear. And this is where Lebanon becomes impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it in their bones. Because while Reem loses her apartment, and Zainab loses sleep, and Diane burns with a fury she can hardly contain, and fathers keep suitcases half-zipped in the dark, Beirut glitters.
Every day, a new restaurant opens in the capital, as if gastronomy were our alternative to agency. Every day a new building rises: fast, shiny, indifferent, as if concrete were a national antidepressant. Christmas lights lace themselves around every streetlamp, every balcony, every tree. Entire neighborhoods look as though they have decided that survival is too modest a verb and that celebration is the only fitting answer to despair.
It is not denial. Or maybe it is. But it is also strategy: a people’s attempt to negotiate with doom, to trick it, to seduce it, to distract it with sequins. Because how else can you live here? How else can you breathe in a country where one alley smells of roasted chestnuts and mulled wine, and the next smells of gunpowder and sectarian arrogance? How else can you reconcile a skyline sprouting new towers with the ghost neighborhoods just a few kilometers south? How else can you explain that on the same night someone loses their home, another someone clinks champagne glasses in a rooftop bar overlooking a city that doesn’t know whether it is dying or reinventing itself?
Lebanon today is not one country. It is two (at the very least); superimposed, coexisting, contradicting, colliding. There is the Lebanon of fear: the drones, the threats, the firefights on the border, the calculations of how far one lives from “likely targets,” the whispered debates about Hezbollah’s disarmament, the unspoken dread of another all-consuming war. And there is the Lebanon of ferocious, almost insolent vitality: the restaurants booked solid, the pubs overflowing, the galleries opening, the young people dancing, the investors building, the shopkeepers decorating windows as if expecting Santa to broker a ceasefire.
If insanity had a capital, Beirut would apply proudly.
Foreigners call this resilience. Lebanese call it Tuesday. We live in a constant state of emotional bifurcation: one eye on the sky in case the drone returns, and the other on Instagram to check which new spot is worth visiting before it gets destroyed. This is not schizophrenia in the clinical sense, of course, but in the existential one: a country experiencing two opposite realities simultaneously, each one insisting on its own truth. A nation that has mastered the art of celebrating while it mourns, of building while it collapses, of hoping while it prepares to flee.
And yet, paradoxically, within this fragmentation lies the only real clue to Lebanon’s endurance. Because the nightlife and the rubble are not opposites. The restaurants and the ruins are not contradictions. They are the two lungs through which this battered place still breathes: one gasping, the other singing.
Lebanon’s state, crushed by outside forces
But no analysis of our fears, or our hopes, can avoid the two forces that continue to hold Lebanon hostage: the armed certainty of Hezbollah and the industrialized terror of Israel. Two giants locked in their own mythologies, and we, the civilians, and our hostage State, crushed in the middle, left to sweep the shards of their certainties off our lives.
Hezbollah tell us their weapons “protect” us, while we –- and they – know very well they are a mere proxy army for Iran. Not to mention that protection that does not ask for consent is not protection; it is guardianship, and guardianship is just a more polite form of control. Hezbollah refuses to imagine a Lebanon where its guns are not the spine of national identity. Its unwillingness to disarm has become a permanent state of exception, a justification for every external threat and every internal paralysis. And we are expected to bow our heads in gratitude for living under a “shield” that doubles as a ceiling, low, immovable, suffocating.
But if Hezbollah’s weapons steal our political agency, then Israel’s relentless violence steals our breath altogether. Because what do you call a state that has perfected the art of collective punishment? What do you call a military that bombs homes, schools, ambulances, entire neighborhoods, and then calls it self-defense? What do you call drones that hover above your bedroom window like metallic angels of death, picking their targets with algorithms instead of conscience? Israel spreads terror with the cold efficiency of an institution that has stopped seeing human beings on the other side of its borders. The message is always the same: We can reach you. We can erase you. We can make your street, your building, your existence disappear. And so we live between two absolutes: one that feigns it is our savior, and one that insists we are dispensable. Caught between an armed party with an Iranian agenda that refuses to loosen its grip on the country, and an occupying power that refuses to loosen its grip on the sky.
Lebanon is not governed; it is squeezed. By internal rigidity and external aggression. By a militia that believes it owns the definition of resistance, and by a military power that believes fear is a reasonable form of diplomacy.
And yet, somehow, we continue to exist. Exhausted, disillusioned, but not erased, thanks to the unkillable Lebanese instinct for continuation.
Not “survival”: that word is too small, too passive. Continuation. As in: despite everything, we continue. We continue giving birth, falling in love, getting married, getting divorced, raising children, raising glasses, raising our eyebrows at the absurdity of it all. We continue telling our stories, quietly in nail salons, loudly in hospitals, jokingly in school courtyards, drunkenly in bars, stubbornly in shops still being repaired for the third or fourth time. We continue because what is the alternative?
Extinction? Silence? Submission?
No. Lebanon is too restless to die, too contradictory to disappear, too fractured to collapse entirely, and most of all, too unique to be discarded (and this is not the Lebanese chauvinism speaking). It keeps reinventing itself, not because reinvention is noble, but because it is necessary. Because this country knows, better than any country I know, that death can be a temporary state.
And yes, people are leaving. In waves. With tears. With shame. With longing.
And yes, people are staying. With anger. With resignation. With love.
And yes, we are tired: bone-tired, soul-tired, future-tired.
But fatigue is not defeat. Fear is not surrender. Hope is not extinction.
Somewhere between the ruined apartments in Dahieh and the new rooftop bars in Gemmayze; between the ER doctor stitching flesh and the teenagers laughing at drones; between Diane’s scorching resentment and Samer’s stubborn optimism, a country is still insisting on happening.
Lebanon lives. Not effortlessly, not peacefully, not coherently. But it lives.
And for now, for today, that is enough.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
Joumana Haddad
Joumana Haddad is a Lebanese author, journalist, and activist.
