Beirut and Time

If, like me, you were in high school in 2006, when Israel and Lebanon fought a vicious 34-day war, you are now a grown up. The war unfolding now is to the young people of society as that war was to you: Formative, in that it reinscribed the second meaning of the word “Beirut,” the first being pretty city where a lot of people live and the second being a place where people die while sleeping.

In 2006 the war was illustrative for a child in that it had deep and precisely identifiable roots, making it very separate from the baffling American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan then in full swing. That one only really seemed to connect to itself.

The question of how long a generation lasts is an interesting one. Most would agree it’s not far off 20 years—the length of time it takes a baby to grow up and reasonably become a parent themselves. Generational discourse is ordinarily confined to domestic economic and culture discussions, where the new lot of young professionals works subject to generalizations, usually not very accurate, about how their cohort relates to money, discipline, and social orthodoxy.

The Baby Boomers are the last generation whose general features, however, related directly to international death politics. War was the reason for all that mating within the nuclear family context, the babies the fruit of Western hegemony. Gen X was a sensibility, millennials belonged an arbitrary marker in calendar time, Gen Z is marked by being less digital native than digital fetus.

Major conflicts at the border between Israel and Lebanon began with Israel’s founding and followed a rhythm of intervals. 20 years, then 5, 5, 7, 8, 3, 6, 6, 18:

1948

1968

1973

1978

1985

1993

1996

2000

2006

2024

One generation passed between the first and second. From 1968 to 2006, by contrast, a major formal conflict played out on average every five years—frequently enough to seem a permanent feature of geopolitics and to make Beirut into a symbol of beautiful cities destroyed (by what depending on your positions).

It is strange how a conflict of four generations’ standing has come to seem permanent, because 76 years is not forever. Not even Beirut or Jerusalem are forever, although both are at least 5,000 years old. That’s historical “time immemorial,” whereas 76 years is human “time immemorial.”

My only point here is that communicating urgency around conflicts that are currently killing people is a different task depending on the perceived age of the conflict. Palestine and Israel are both ancient words for ancient communities, but this time has been different, possibly for—again—reasons of perception by the under 30s, who have not necessarily tried to understand it before. There’s a sense in the youth activism of pushing back against the idea that the war between them is “eternal,” because of the growing realization that this is not really about religion, and is therefore about something to do with now.

The conflict killing people in Beirut feels temporally different. The meaning of Beirut as location for death is something that has been taught, over and over again, within living memory, but without the historical sense of eternity or fatedness that attends mentions of death in Palestine. There's no now, exactly, except for the now of the modern, the continued present that living people occupy, which oddly makes it harder, I think, to hear "Beirut" and think "emergency I am a part of" rather than "situation."

Temporality isn't a minor part of life although discussions of it can have the ring of the seminar room to them. Without a sense of where we are in the arc of something there is no sense of one's own involvement, and therefore of one's responsibilities.