A Letter from a “Safe Place”

Hello Teta,

I apologize for not writing to you over the past period. I still don’t know whether we should articulate the feeling of fear or kill it. As the horrors of this catastrophe grow, searching for an answer to this question feels like an exhausting endeavor and a luxury I cannot afford. In the to-do list in my journal, I’ve written that my priorities are either survival or death before death claims the ones I love.

I find that every time I write, I address you. Perhaps I summon you because you belong to a time before the genocide. This is how I’ve come to divide life into two eras: before and after the genocide. Maybe it’s a way to hold on to a memory that today is under threat of erasure, or a refusal to accept a future that will be shaped over the remains of tens of thousands of us.

I will try to recount to you, in some ways, how our lives have become under occupation. Let me first reassure you that we are in a “safe place,” as they call it. Strangely, the geographical boundaries of this so-called safe place from which I am writing do not include any of our homes, all of which have become “unsafe.” The simple human equation that equates home with safety has become impossible. This was determined, executed, and declared by the occupation, supported by the world with its policies, economies, armies, weaponry, technologies, and missiles laden with tons of iron.

Imagine, all of these forces are enemies to our homes.

Just as life has been divided into two eras, our lives have been split between their past and present as well. My parent’s home in Tyre, my heart’s sanctuary and final refuge after so much weariness, is unsafe. Your home in the Beqaa, our destination through every wave of longing, is unsafe. My home in Dahyeh, where I tried to carve out a life with whatever contentment I could muster, is also unsafe.

Lately, I’ve been contemplating a burden I once treated as a blessing: the burden of belonging to all these places at once. 

Of being shaped by them all and then robbed of them all at the same time. 

Of watching the television screen split into squares, each showing them being bombed, destroyed, and set aflame simultaneously, leaving me to wonder which corner of my heart aches the most.

Numbness creeps into the corners of a heart that refuses to answer. My throat dries up, tears turn to stone in my eyes, and crying becomes a stifled sob lodged in my chest. Questions pour in, like daggers waiting for a weakened heart to wound it further. Will we return? When will that be? What losses shall we count? Which faces have vanished from existence? What familiar and constant elements have disappeared? Which streets have been erased, and what landmarks defaced? What life can we possibly regain?

In a land where entire towns are annihilated, where people mourn cities and loved ones as the occupation demolishes buildings over their heads and exhumes the graves of others, where 1.5 million people are displaced from their homes to find themselves caught between the oppression of the occupation and the tyranny of a system that despises the poor, where young men, women, and children face the distilled essence of the world’s engineered evil and lose their eyes and limbs in the safety of their homes, I hesitate to share with you the details of our lives as if they were a form of suffering. Yet, perhaps it is my attempt to document even a minuscule part of the crime.

On September 23, the monster drew closer to our yard in Tyre.

It had been circling the skies above the city around the clock for nearly a year, violating our daily lives and attacking so-called “targets” deemed legitimate by the world. But that day, it was provoked by scenes of normal life practiced by the city’s people despite its presence. It bared its fangs, unleashed its fire, and drove them out of their homes into an unknown that it would later extend indefinitely.

“I don’t want to die,” was the message my younger sister sent me before beginning her journey to Beirut.

The twelve hours my family spent on the road were long, difficult, and surrounded by flames.

That night, I experienced my worst encounter with waiting after losing contact with my father. Do you remember the painting of yours that I loved and inherited? I sat in front of it, as though praying with you to God, begging Him to protect Baba because he is the greatest gift you left me. And I was granted that prayer.

In my home in Dahyeh, we gathered. Only a few days passed before the last remaining sense of safety we had retreated completely.

On September 27, the ground shook beneath us.
The occupation’s planes dropped 85 tons of iron and explosives on the southern suburbs. They claimed they did it to kill one man.

The thunderous explosions echoed throughout the city; they seemed endless.
It felt as though the earth itself was trying to warn us of the horrors to come.

Within minutes, I became displaced for the first time, and my family displaced for the second time in mere days.
Amid the chaos of survival, I couldn’t choose between my belongings. I couldn’t decide what was worth saving.
I refused to choose or to be forced into a choice, so I left everything behind.

All of life or no life. All of safety or no safety at all under occupation.

We watched our city, now abandoned, burn live on television.

And then came the announcement: the tons of iron that had displaced us had fulfilled the monster’s eternal dream—they had killed Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Only two thoughts came to my mind upon hearing the news.

First, it is a profound honor, perhaps the greatest, to trouble Israel so deeply that it feels compelled to use 85 tons of explosives to eliminate one man, to terrorize and punish his followers.

Second, I thought of you. If you had been with us, you would have been heartbroken. I remember how much you despised the loud sounds of television and how you especially avoided political news. But he was an exception. His presence delighted you; you listened to him, believed him, and prayed for his long life and greater victories. I remembered your eyes fixed on his image, your hands raised in prayer for him, and I cried.

Since that day, events have unfolded at a dizzying pace. The oppression has grown more ruthless, the injustice more entrenched. The world has granted Israel an even freer hand to prey on our flesh. The vengeance has become monumental. Blood flows like rivers. Minutes separate massacres; hours separate funerals. Cities are scorched; places evaporate along with memories and lifetimes.

A monstrous routine –meticulously crafted by the occupation– dictates every detail. Each day of survival is spent awaiting maps accompanied by so-called “evacuation warnings” that are, in fact, notifications of spatial annihilation, of further killing and displacement.

We gather around a map that some transient authority on this earth has drawn for us, marking in red dots the homes and places it plans to erase.
How does life in all its dimensions shrink to a single red dot?

“No, [it’s] not near us. It’s two streets over. Looks like we’ve escaped this time.”

Luck granted us a video of our neighborhood, filmed by one of the steadfast souls still in the city. My father tries to hide his phone from us, hoping to shield us from the sudden sight of our destroyed home. “I’ll check it first, and then you can see it,” he says. He is still trying to spare us grief, this man who has twice now fled with his family toward a mere possibility of survival. Just as he carried us, he will continue to bear the burden of our hearts as well. The roles I wished to reverse with him will remain unchanged.

We managed to return to our house in Dahyeh for just an hour.

The moment I entered, my shoulders tightened, and my head bowed instinctively as though my body was bracing for the moment a missile might strike us.

For a few fleeting moments, the occupation succeeded in severing my bond with my home, just as it had on that night when I reposted an “evacuation notice” for two buildings, entirely forgetting that they were adjacent to the one I lived in. Perhaps I have become a machine programmed by evacuation orders. A machine now waiting for the notification that will dictate how much longer it may remain in place.

This time, I returned to the house knowing exactly what I would take with me.
I came back to retrieve your painting. One of your final instructions to me was to keep it.

I carried it alone and left everything else behind in Dahyeh, where it all remained.

My mother asks me repeatedly, “Do you think it’s almost over? Will we go back home?” I have no answer for her, for there is no reference point other than Gaza. Gaza, which the world has watched endure over 400 days of annihilation. Gaza, slaughtered, starved, besieged—where over 44,000 have been martyred and 100,000 injured.

“We have to be patient,” I tell her. For in Gaza, too, there are those who refused to leave the north. Some chose to die in Gaza rather than seize a chance at survival elsewhere.
My mother and I wish we had stayed in our home. That we had died in Tyre. We are consumed by regret, not longing. We imagine our house standing, cold and alone, surrounded by flames, trembling with every airstrike, just like our souls. It waits for its turn, and we wish we could have carried it on our backs as we fled.

Let me not burden your heart any further, Teta. But know this: this is not like the 2006 war we lived through together. They call this a war of existence.
It’s a war over whether the land can accommodate both us and them. And we understand this perfectly and are paying the price today. This is also what you taught me.

One day during that war, we ran out of laban. You insisted on making the trip on foot, and I accompanied you to the neighborhood shop. Neither the reconnaissance drone circling above us nor the sound of rockets exploding in nearby villages could deter you.
At that moment, the bucket of laban mattered more.

This is how you simply defined the equation of resilience. Many people fail to understand that it is as straightforward and clear as that.

Like your equation, two other scenes remain etched in my mind:

In the southern town of Haris, the voice of a man was trapped under rubble. Above the rubble, another man stood alone, telling him, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you water. I’m talking to you just to reassure you.” I was struck by the serenity in his trembling voice, the kind of calm that becomes the final thread of life for the man below. In his bare hands, he held all the world’s safety.

In Jabal Amel, too, a video of a resistance fighter, armed modestly, stood against their aircraft, firing in multiple directions. His steps were steady, his gaze unwavering, as if fixated on a certainty only he could see. He completed his mission and entered a modest home, whose humble stones terrified the occupier, prompting them to destroy it. Later, we would learn he was Ibrahim Haidar, a martyr. We didn’t know him, and he didn’t know us. Yet he alone was able to comfort our hearts, cutting through every doubt that comes with questions of return and its possibilities.

I cannot imagine the day after the war ends. But I know that on that day, I will drive to the Beqaa, to your grave that I pray the monster does not disturb. I will sit beside it, finally unleash my suppressed tears for the first time in months, and tell you that I’ve learned to love this country anew.

I will tell you that I wished I hadn’t tried so many times to flee to a world that rejects me. That I wished I had cherished it more. That I wish I had taken more photos of me and you in it.

I’ve learned how lives can turn to rubble upon which we sit, comforting a loved one who has lost their memory. And that death no longer frightens me.

What terrifies me now is the thought of living in a world that accepts all this—a world that includes Israel.