I don’t often write about my life. Mostly it’s about ideas and concepts and frameworks. But 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 the next generation might have it better than the last.
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. My childhood nickname turned into my real name, and instead of Vance I went by Farouk until I moved to New York City at 25. I went to school with Lebanese classmates, studied in the Lebanese curriculum (/baccalaureate) through the infamous Brevet exam. All my childhood friends were Lebanese, all my childhood memories have Lebanon as the backdrop.
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 are active reservists. I’ve befriended people who are active military still. Israel is the place I now go to visit during holidays.
Today I live in and write this from New York City, a place that is 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, 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 understand the tragedy of it. Someone once told me that Orthodox priests used to bless soldiers on their way to war, 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 biased just as any other. And in the past few years I have felt that swing me towards a darker place that I’d rather 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, someone said to me, 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 never quite knew what to say. I would talk about my dad’s job, or why my family preferred Beirut over the artifice of Dubai. That my mom thought it would be a two-year stint, but it had kept going as they found something more meaningful than they had ever had in their previous suburban American life. The faith-based and interfaith humanitarian volunteering that my family took on, in a country of incredible hospitality still healing from decades of civil war, then as of 2012 one that received millions more refugees once Syria erupted into its own civil war.
I grew tired of it, of having to justify my parents’ decisions. How to explain that they were following their convictions of meaning and faith in a way that ignored the typical search for comfort, wealth, even safety? It was a counter-cultural stance, and so not an obvious one to relate to. After Lebanon’s civil war, suspicion was the default mode. 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).
After high school, I left for gap year internships then college in the US. My sisters were also spread out, and my parents now empty nesters. My mom began to reconnect to her Jewish heritage, mostly left behind after she married my father, who was raised Southern Baptist. That heritage flowed through to us children, too. Traditions I barely knew 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: home to more Jews than anywhere else in the world.
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 so easily turned to hate?
After long deliberations and several visits, my sisters, then my parents, decided to move. I was in college in California at the time, chose and have chosen to stay in America for the foreseeable future. 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.
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.
Note: Suspicion is a funny thing. Because it is not based in facts - that would be conviction - suspicion places the burden to disprove. I do not mean to say that suspicion is not a rational response at times. But when I sent a draft of this to an old classmate, he responded with more suspicions than I could try to refute. So no, neither I for my family ever served in the Israeli military, nor worked for the Israeli government in any capacity. He wondered if I was ‘in too deep’ and could not now freely speak my mind (because one of my investors is Zionist? When people in Israel disagree on everything, all the time, and Israelis themselves are often the ones protesting against the wars that Israel is involved in). It’s a funny thing to know that every word I say, even these, is considered merely a confirmation of people’s suspicions, ‘well of course he would say that, that’s exactly what he would say if he were a spy.’ Maybe that’s why my family and I stopped feeling like we had to explain ourselves - because why bother?
When I left for college in California, I had mostly cut contact with my high school friends as my family started talking about moving to 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?
It was only a year or more after the move, that we started to wonder if we were being too cautious: would a simple Instagram message be okay? But it was then that we were harshly reminded that it is not just impersonal laws that hold Israel at a sharp distance. There were some exceptions, but each of my sisters and I had at least one 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 a 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.
So far, I had been committed to seeing the conflict through neutral eyes. Though I was close to so many people, on both sides of it, I was so far only an observer, a third party.
I was in Israel on October 7th, 2023. I was actually hosting my old college roommate, who I had finally convinced to come visit. That day, as headlines and alerts blared, we crowded in my parents’ bomb shelter with my sister and her husband. The news of entire kibbutzim murdered… We learned about the Nova music festival a little later, the next days and weeks more stories of bodies found, survivors interviewed. Israel is a small country - everyone was one or two degrees of separation at most from a victim.
What I felt that day, the adrenaline, then the fear, then the anger… It hit hard that my family would have been considered legitimate targets of the attack, had we been in the wrong place at the wrong time. 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.
Note: There is a long history that precedes the attacks of October 7th. Much of that history is disputed, full of blame and ‘who started it.’ I won’t open that door here. The fighting started almost 80 years ago, the attacks of October 7 are just one more chapter in that book. But that day was the first time it felt viscerally connected to me, which was a strange thing to feel and now strange to get across.
Note: Many of my Lebanese classmates would probably chime in to emphasize, they hold nothing against the Jews, only against Zionists, against Israel. Even further, that they hold nothing against Israeli civilians, only the military. That they hold nothing against me for being Jewish. I understand their distinction. But most Israeli Jews serve in the military (the two million Israeli Arabs are exempt from military service, although several Bedouin villages still volunteer in the IDF). And even my classmates would assume that my family, being Jewish and now living in Israel, are Zionists. Maybe my point is that they might not assume that if we weren’t Jewish, so somehow the Jewishness is a part of it, even if it is not the focal point.
When October 7 happened, none of my old high school friends reached out, to see if I 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 was 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.
I know the anger I felt, that still flares up sometimes - and I had only fear, not loss. How much deeper would hatred be if I had buried someone, on either side? And so many have been buried. Time alone does not heal all wounds.
Now, 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 isn’t to say that war might not be necessary. And even though war paints all its participants with a sort of guilt, that does not mean all sides are equally at fault, either. I blame certain parties far above others. But none of these things change the suffering of the innocent.
So I also fault all those who preach blind hate, and who feel no remorse at the killing of women, children, and innocents. There are many I might 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 fault all those who in their own small ways, have contributed to the conflict instead of diminishing it. In that sense, I fault myself.
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. 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. That alternative is the status quo: hating the enemy. In the same breath, I might hate that status quo, while being guilty of it myself. And so I hope that my heart may continue to un-harden, and with my heart, others, too.