I guess I don’t often write about my life, about things that are personal. Mostly it’s about ideas and concepts and frameworks. But this is my life. Some of these words have been on my mind for a while now. To anyone from Lebanon, or from Israel, who reads this… I hope you’re doing well, that you and your family are safe, that things might be better for your kids than they have been of late.
For a long time, I thought that I could remain neutral with regard to the Middle East wars.
Though my parents are from Virginia, I was raised for 18 years in Beirut. I went to school with Lebanese classmates, studied in the Lebanese curriculum (/baccalaureate), took the infamous Brevet exam in French and Arabic, which includes the official Lebanese courses of civics, geography, and history. My childhood nickname even turned into my real name, and instead of Vance I went by Farouk until I moved to New York City at 25.
On the other hand, my family moved to Tel Aviv when I was in college. Though I myself am mostly Christian in my beliefs, I am Jewish through my mom’s side, with relatives that died or survived the Holocaust. I worked for an American-Israeli investor for several years, where I met lots of Israelis, almost all of whom had served in the IDF and were active reservists. I was in Israel on October 7th, saw the missiles in the night sky, and crowded in a bomb shelter.
And now, I live in New York City, a place that is both very far and very close to both Lebanon and Israel. Sometimes the comfort of American life lulls me away from the realities of the Middle East. But on any given day, there is just as much a chance I see Haredi Jews with payot, as a pro-Palestine protest marching down the avenues.
In recent years, I do not suppose many civilians have looked across both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli border, have been in both Lebanon or Israel, when Lebanon and Israel were at war. So I thought I, from my vantage point, might be able to see clearly through the mess of it.
But I don’t think things are so clear to me after all.
There is one feeling that sits deep within me, that war is a terrible thing: a tragedy, where inevitably the innocent pay the cost alongside the guilty. There may be good causes and bad ones, there may be principled approaches and unprincipled ones (or at least, principles I think are worth upholding), there may even be people who are unequivocally good and bad. But all who engage in warfare cross some line, know that they’ve crossed a line. Someone once told me that Orthodox priests used to bless soldiers on their way to wars, and then take their confessions and repentance when they returned.
As for the rest, I have felt in myself the swing of emotions that fire someone up and color the lenses through which they see the world. I am opinionated, and obviously I think my opinions are correct, but I also know my opinions have shifted over time and surely will continue to do so. I am biased just as any other. And in the past few years I have felt that swing me towards a darker place that I want to stay away from.
I miss parts of Lebanon deeply, especially knowing that I may never return: a Lebanese stamp in your passport means a long security interview when you enter Israel, but an Israeli stamp means you are forbidden from entering Lebanon, are turned away at the airport and forced onto an outbound plane. So I hold memories of the mountains overlooking the sea, the most hospitable people you’ll ever meet, the food, the streets of Hamra that I grew up walking on my way to school.
My family, and myself, must have been an odd sight in Beirut. The country was coming out of decades of civil war, rebuilding, trying to heal. And here were five green- and blue-eyed Americans, merrily living in Lebanon at a time when many Lebanese who could leave, had already left. The Lebanese dream, it was said, is to get a second passport and leave Lebanon. But many of my childhood memories there are happy ones.
Sometimes people would assume, with my Lebanese accent and my name, Farouk, that I was at least part Lebanese; I wouldn’t correct them unless they asked. But people did ask, all the time: ‘why are you, here?’ I would explain my dad’s job starting and running the Middle East office for a multinational corporation, try to explain that my parents had chosen Beirut over the artifice of Dubai, that they found something meaningful about living in Lebanon, this country of incredible hospitality still healing from decades of civil war. But I grew tired of it, of having to justify my parents’ decisions. How to explain that they were following the convictions of their faith in a way that ignored the typical search for wealth and comfort? It was a counter-cultural stance, and so not an obvious one to relate to. After Lebanon’s civil war, suspicion was the default stance. So where people could not understand my family, they explained us away as agents of the CIA (or, less often, the more dangerous accusation: the Mossad), as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. In high school my friends literally called me, C-I-A (pronounced with a pause between each letter, see-eye-aye).
Soon after I finished high school and my parents turned empty-nesters, my mom began to reconnect to her Jewish heritage, mostly left behind after she married my (Southern Baptist) father. That heritage flowed through to us children, too. Traditions I had known so little about, holidays that had been celebrated by countless generations before us, stories about distant relatives who had escaped or been killed in the Holocaust. Until then, Israel was only that dark entity south of Lebanon, a country that Lebanon did not recognize, referred to only as The Zionist Entity. But slowly there was a new meaning to Israel: nation of the Jews.
There was also meaning to my family in the fact that Israel was a country where seven million Israeli Jews live among two million Israeli Arabs. A new seed of a thought entered the picture: we had lived among Arabs for twenty years - could my family, connected somehow to both sides, next live among Jews and Arabs? There was another question within it: might there be some chance, at tiny ways that we could bridge the gap? Not with some savior complex to fix things, but as a chance to add at least a few more voices for connection in a place where otherness meant fear, and fear meant hate?
After long deliberations and several visits, my sisters, then my parents, decided to move. I was in college in California at the time. But parts of Israel are remarkably similar to Lebanon, the Israeli-Arab neighborhoods almost identical if not for the Hebrew signage that sits below the Arabic, the shekel instead of the lira. I was surprised by how familiar it felt for me when I went to visit them in their new home, their new neighborhood.
If people had already been suspicious of the Americans living in Lebanon, my family’s move to Israel did little to help. But how can you explain something like meaning and faith? So we didn’t, felt no compulsion to explain ourselves anyways.
When I left for college in California, I had mostly cut contact with my high school friends as my family started to move towards Israel. It’s better this way, I said to myself - we all did. The cost of associating with Israel is steep indeed in Lebanon, where even casted suspicions can be dangerous. Lebanese laws criminalize communication with Israeli citizens and entities, with penalties of imprisonment and fines. What if I somehow got an old friend in trouble, if the wrong person found out they were talking to someone with clear Israeli ties?
With time, we wondered if we were being too cautious: would a simple Instagram message be okay? But it was then that we were reminded that it is not just impersonal laws that hold Israel at a sharp distance. One by one, each of my sisters and I, reached out to an old friend, who responded by swearing the end of the friendship based on our Israeli connection - or chose never to respond at all. Those tears stung with far more pain that I would’ve expected. Better to let the other friendships stay an open question, in Schrödinger dormancy, than reach out and risk that pain again. And perhaps with enough time, all these things might start to fade.
From afar, though, we watched as Lebanon’s fate unfolded. We had lived there during some of the best years of the last fifty. Life was not perfect, no one claims it ever was: the car bombs that punctuated the school years, the wars with Israel, the infighting, the continual dysfunction of the politicians, which everyone blamed even as they voted them in… But things got much worse after my family left.
My family grieved as Lebanon descended into another dark period, a banking crisis that meant hyperinflation had already set the stage before covid even entered the scene. The explosion at the port, a catastrophe heaped onto an already suffering nation. I still remember watching the first videos of that, showing it to my family, the sadness we all felt.
And yet my relationship with Lebanon did not stay so simple as grieving its tragedies. I kept in loose touch with a few friends, and through one of them heard that, in response to the port explosion, one of my high school classmates had released a barrage of messages on the old high school group chat about my family, Israeli agents, inexplicably connected to an Israeli conspiracy that had created the explosion. Ironically, that same classmate reached out to me privately, a few months later, asking for tech advice for his own blockchain initiative. You just can’t make this stuff up.
It’s been nearly ten years since I graduated high school. Though I live my comfortable life in New York City, my family is still in Tel Aviv. This war with Lebanon is mostly over, maybe? But the war is never over, only dormant, and headlines of attacks and missile strikes and bombings still leak through. Unless I can convince my family to move to some American suburb, unlikely given that they feel they are following their deepest convictions (and who am I to tell them otherwise?), the conflict of Jews and Arabs in the Middle East will keep pulsing through our lives, and time will not erase memories nor heal wounds faster than new ones will be born.
And where I once tried to see the conflict through neutral eyes, I am no longer innocent, either. I was in Israel on October 7th, was actually hosting my old college roommate, who I had finally convinced to come visit. What I felt that day, the adrenaline, then the fear, then the anger… And watching people’s response, reading Al Jazeera headlines before Israel had started any counterattack. My heart hardened, and I saw in the Arab world only hate, even as I began to feel it myself. Any potential for bridging the gap between the two sides, I burned as I stepped squarely onto the Israeli side. After all, I, a civilian Jew, was one of the targets of the attacks of October 7th, too, and I felt no sympathy from any Arabs, indeed felt their condemnation, even as Israel mourned. I know full well the irony: my family wanted to bridge the gap between Jews and Arabs in Israel, and here I was rejecting neutrality.
When October 7 happened, none of my old high school friends reached out, to see if me or my family was affected. When the war with Lebanon started, and Israel began bombing Beirut, even the streets of Hamra when I had grown up, I did not reach out to any of them, either.
Eventually there would be an occasional text, short but touching. Once, an old high school friend reached out to say he was in New York, that we should grab coffee. We met in the East Village on a Saturday morning, and started by catching up on some eight years of life.
Then we talked about the war, our agreements, our differences… I am sure I said some things that he vehemently disagreed with, as he did for me. But he was trying to have a conversation. I am grateful that he did. That conversation stayed on my mind: his attempt to bridge a wide gap with a reasoned two-sided discussion, face-to-face, is surely a driving force of why I am writing this today.
Since the war had started, I had mostly avoided the realities of his narrative. This was the first time I faced the truths within it, and the truth that despite the pieces I disagreed with, my friend was a reasonable, intelligent, empathic person.
I do not know how to process the fact that the country I grew up in is at war with the country my family lives in - has been, officially, since the 80s. When Lebanese attacks Israeli, and when Israeli attacks Lebanese, and people I know are innocents on both sides. When the latest war started between Israel and Hezbollah, my family grieved. Whatever people believe, all of us care deeply for Lebanon and the people there who were part of our lives for so long. There are few times in my life I have really wept, but this war was one of them. With every headline, my family and I hoped and prayed that people we knew and their loved ones were safe.
At any given time, I cannot always figure out the mess of my own emotions around Lebanon, Israel, the wars. When I can name what I’m feeling, I am sometimes proud of it, other times not. I know I have made mistakes. I probably will make more.
Now, a year later and over two years since October 7, I hope that my heart is slowly un-hardening.
There is one thing I see with absolute clarity: that war is an absolutely terrible thing, that I want to see a time where it is over in the Middle East, and hope that is within my lifetime.
This does not mean I don’t blame, that I think all sides are equally at fault. I still blame Hamas far and above any others. There were so many other paths they could have taken. The world became far worse on October 7th and the days that followed, because Hamas intentionally started a war with indiscriminate attacks that had no aim but pain, fully knowing the unbearable cost that would fall on their people. In Lebanon, I blame Hezbollah for large swaths of Lebanon’s ruin in the past few years, up until and including their role in starting the latest war with Israel. I will not defend that here, am not trying to justify that belief or make a case for it. And I know that to start pointing fingers in the Middle East is to ask for endless discussions of ‘who started it’ and rules of warfare.
So it is easier to start by faulting all those who preach blind hate, and who feel no remorse at the killing of women, children, and innocents. Alongside Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, there are certainly a few far-right Israeli politicians who I would accuse of this. I fault those who see as the only sustainable solution, the complete wiping out of all of their enemy’s people, and the ending of their nation. I fault all those who care more about hating their enemy than they do making a better world for their children. To a lesser degree, I still fault all those who in their own small ways, contribute to the conflict instead of diminishing it. In that sense, I fault myself. For I have surely committed my own faults.
But now, mine is not a high and mighty position, to say I condemn hate, and preach love. Make love not war is a slogan best left to the flower children hippies of the 60s. I do not know what position I can lay claim to. But the only words I’ve heard that seem to have potential for hope in the Middle East are a command, “Love thy enemy.” And I know I fall immensely short of them - how then could I preach them to others? So I will leave the preaching to others.
Yet the alternative is to wish the worst for your enemy. At the most to kill them, at the average to celebrate their death or suffering, and at the least, to numb one’s self to their pain. The alternative is the status quo: to hate your enemy. In the same breath, I might hate that status quo, while being guilty of it myself. And so I hope that my heart my continue to un-harden, and with my heart, many others.