Over the past two months, as Lebanon once again came under Israeli attack, it felt as if time had been suspended, interrupting whatever movement the country had managed to partially recover since November 2024 as the south remained under attack throughout the ceasefire. I thought of Lebanese artist and writer Walid Sadek’s description of Lebanon’s “protracted temporality”: a political condition in which violence, fragile truces, and deferred reckoning hold us in a prolonged present while renewing the conditions of the existing order. In today’s Lebanon, this order is neoliberal and sectarian, reproduced through repeated passages from crisis to recovery, each one restoring relations of dependence, abandonment, and unequal protection.
Displaced people are managed as humanitarian overflow, rather than recognized as rights-bearing residents entitled to housing. As a result, many have been forced to set up camp along Beirut’s shorelines. Photo taken by Soha Mneimneh.
The current order was itself consolidated through one such passage: the post-civil-war reconstruction. As Fawwaz Traboulsi argues, neoliberalism became the postwar economic form of Lebanon’s older sectarian-liberal order, reorganizing the country around finance, real estate, privatized provision, weakened production, and external dependence.
Israel’s latest assault reveals, once again, how Lebanon is held in this protracted temporality. Israel has displaced more than a million people, destroyed neighborhoods in Beirut’s southern suburbs and villages across the South, invaded southern land, and threatened entire ecosystems. In response, the political field narrowed around emergency response, return, repair, and “recovery.” These demands are necessary. But when recovery is reduced to managing damage, it risks treating Israeli violence only as an exceptional interruption, rather than as a devastating assault whose effects unfold through the continuities of unequal protection and state abandonment. It can then return people to the very conditions that made survival so unequal in the first place. In this way, violence produces rupture, recovery contains it, and the same order reappears not as part of the problem, but as the only available form of relief.
But Sadek also invokes the presence of the “corpse” as what unsettles this passage back to normalcy, a reminder of the violence that cannot be forgotten, or absorbed into another cycle of recovery. Today, as “recovery” is already being defined in practice through shelter, fiscal policy, food systems, and reconstruction, this article turns to those terrains to show what must not be forgotten. In each of them, abandonment is either reproduced or contested, and recovery either restores the conditions that made survival so unequal or becomes a struggle to transform them.
This also matters because Lebanon’s vulnerability to Israeli violence is not only military. Israel destroys, kills, invades, and displaces, but the ability to withstand that violence also depends on public, productive, fiscal, and political capacities that decades of neoliberal-sectarian rule have weakened. Rupturing this order is therefore not secondary to resisting Israel; it is part of what resisting more effectively requires.
Housing: displacement as privatized survival
Housing is one of the clearest sites where this temporality has materialized. Displacement is treated as a temporary emergency, even when the housing crisis that shapes it is a permanent feature of the system shaped by speculation, weak public policy, and the absence of collective protection.
Images of families sleeping on sidewalks, in tents, schools, and public spaces, often against the backdrop of Beirut’s modern towers, seem to show a city overwhelmed by sudden need. Yet the problem is not simply a lack of space: nearly one-fifth of Beirut’s housing stock is vacant, much of it habitable. In a neoliberal housing regime, apartments can remain empty as financial assets while displaced people are managed as humanitarian overflow, rather than recognized as rights-bearing residents entitled to housing.
For those seeking housing outside overcrowded shelters, displacement is pushed into the private rental market, where crisis itself becomes a source of extraction. Rents rose sharply even in areas far from Beirut, turning the search for safety into another mechanism of dispossession. As people lose their homes, wait to access damaged areas, or discover they have nothing to return to, Lebanon’s urban and social policies offer no meaningful framework for reintegrating them with dignity.
This does not only deepen existing inequalities; it creates new exclusions. Displacement has affected around 20 percent of Lebanon’s population, pushing broad layers of society into vulnerability in a context where social protection does not prevent shocks from becoming downward mobility. By offering protection only through narrow and targeted forms of aid, the system leaves many households to absorb the crisis privately.
The proposed reconstruction law in December 2024, after that year’s escalation, shows how recovery can restore the very order that made people vulnerable. It focused on rebuilding damaged structures, without adequately addressing the right to housing, compensation, tenants’ rights, informal or legally precarious housing, urban planning, land pressures, or the participation of affected communities.
This is how protracted temporality reproduces the regime, by allowing recovery to rebuild the same relations of abandonment.
Fiscal policy: the state is not absent
Fiscal policy reveals the same temporality from another angle. During war, as households were facing bombardment, displacement, and loss of income, the cost of basic survival also rose. By the third week of March, gasoline prices had increased by around 62 percent, with more than a third of that increase linked to the government levy of 300,000 Lebanese pounds—about $3.4, imposed on every gasoline canister. The rise was therefore not driven by market conditions alone. It was also produced by government policy.
The fuel case matters because it shows that the state was not simply absent. It continued to act, but in ways that made survival more expensive. This is one of the clearest ways protracted temporality operates: crisis appears as an emergency, while the ordinary machinery of extraction continues beneath it.
This machinery long predates the war. Lebanon’s state has appeared weak when it comes to protection, redistribution, and relief, while remaining active in preserving fiscal and financial arrangements that protect wealth. Residents are taxed through consumption and daily survival, while wealth, property, and profits remain largely protected. Lebanon’s tax system relies heavily on indirect taxes such as VAT and customs duties, which weigh more heavily on lower-income households, while direct taxes on income, capital gains, inheritance, wealth, and property gains remain limited, capped at low rates, and riddled with exemptions that benefit the wealthy.
In an economy where the richest one percent receives around 25 percent of national income, the poorest half receives less than 10 percent, and the richest 10 percent owns almost 70 percent of total wealth, this is not simply a technical fiscal weakness. It is a political choice: a model that extracts revenue from daily survival while leaving concentrated wealth largely untouched.
Monetary policy followed the same logic. Sifr’s analysis of the central bank shows that, despite the ongoing war, Banque du Liban made almost no wartime adjustment to support households or expand relief. Rather than putting more money into circulation to help people absorb the shock, the bank pulled money out of the economy, prioritizing currency stability over social protection. At the same time, the government left large sums idle at the central bank instead of spending them on relief or aid.
This is how continuity is produced through crisis. War narrows public debate around survival, relief, and security, while fiscal and monetary policy remain insulated from political contestation. Protracted temporality is therefore also produced through policies that make crises feel exceptional while keeping the ordinary machinery of extraction intact.
Food insecurity: the accumulated time of crisis
Food insecurity shows another way protracted temporality operates: the crisis appears as a wartime emergency, but its force comes from the unresolved failures that each previous crisis has left in place. By the end of April 2026, the latest IPC assessment reported that nearly a quarter of Lebanon’s population faced acute food insecurity. This hunger is intensified by Israel’s destructive military campaign and rising fuel and input costs, but it is rooted in a food system that was never designed for domestic resilience.
Lebanon’s rentier, finance-first economic model, governed by a sectarian elite that redistributes rents rather than builds productive capacity, has long starved agriculture of investment, credit, and protection. State policy pushed agriculture toward external markets while leaving the food sector dominated by a small number of powerful, state-backed traders. As a result, Lebanon depends on imports for roughly 80 percent of its food needs, a vulnerability that every successive crisis — from financial collapse to the port explosion to war — has turned into catastrophe.
The current hunger crisis is therefore what a rentier economy looks like under fire. Not only because war has made food harder to access, but because each previous crisis was absorbed without transforming the food system that made hunger so easy to reproduce.
Aid, dependency, and the outsourcing of recovery
When crisis is managed without challenging the structures that made people vulnerable, public goods become humanitarian services, rights become aid packages, and citizens and residents become beneficiaries.
This is not an argument against assistance to people facing war and displacement. It is an argument against making aid the substitute for redistribution, public capacity, and political transformation. The Lebanese government’s appeals for humanitarian aid to support reconstruction risk repeating a destructive cycle: each round of post-war rebuilding stabilizes the consequences of state failure while deepening dependence on external actors.
This is another way protracted temporality is produced. When recovery is outsourced, fragmented, and administered through aid rather than rebuilt as a public project, it removes the pressure for structural transformation and allows the cycle to continue.
What the previous sections show is that this dependence is not inevitable. Pushing against Lebanon’s economic, urban, agricultural and financial model can open space to mobilize domestic resources before external aid: taxing wealth, property, profits, and extraordinary gains; using public funds for relief rather than leaving them idle; and treating housing, transport, and recovery as rights rather than markets. This would limit the delegation of post-war Lebanon to external actors and reduce dependence on foreign powers.
Lebanon itself offers precedents for such an approach. After the 1956 earthquake, the state introduced a National Solidarity Tax, pooling domestic resources for reconstruction. More recently, Sifr has shown that, had Lebanon imposed a 2 percent net wealth tax in 2010, it could have raised more than $12 billion — more than the funds promised at the 2018 CEDRE conference, an international donor summit held in Paris to support Lebanon’s economy. International examples point in the same direction: after the 2010 earthquake, Chile introduced temporary corporate profit taxes to help finance state-led reconstruction, despite significant economic constraints.
But mobilizing domestic resources is only one part of the question. A more substantial transformation would require breaking with the economic model that has subordinated production, wages, and redistribution to commerce, finance, real estate, imports, and external inflows. As Fawwaz Traboulsi argues, Lebanon’s problem is not simply that it has a “rentier” rather than “productive” economy, but that its political economy has long pushed households to depend on remittances, debt, aid, and private coping instead of secure work and public provision. Dependence on wages never became central to this model, with the wage share of GDP falling below 30 percent, compared with more than two-thirds in many advanced economies. The result is an economy repeatedly steered away from productive development and toward sectors that preserve elite power while deepening dependence.
Food is one example of what this shift would require. Moving away from import dependence toward more resilient, agroecological, and sustainable food systems would help rebuild agricultural capacity, reduce exposure to external shocks, and strengthen the country’s ability to provide for those living in it during regional escalations.
Limiting dependency and reclaiming sovereignty therefore requires more than funding reconstruction locally; it requires rebuilding an economy organized around productive work, progressive taxation, public services, food security, and collective needs.
Against the amnesia of recovery
Across these terrains, the danger is not only that Lebanon will be rebuilt unevenly, or that relief will remain inadequate. It is that recovery itself will become another passage back to the neoliberal-sectarian regime. In Sadek’s terms, the corpse marks what recovery must not bury. To manage crisis without confronting the structures that make it so unequal is to reproduce them and prolong the order that keeps delivering us back here.
This is also the lesson Elias Khoury and Jad Tabet draw from the postwar struggle against the neoliberal reconstruction of Beirut. Reflecting on why that struggle was defeated, Tabet argues that opposition to the emerging order was not enough; what was missing was an alternative political-economic project capable of confronting it. For Khoury, the task today is to search for the openings through which the spirit of the October 17 uprising can endure, even in Lebanon’s profoundly tragic present: “If we want to find such entry points, we have to look for ways in which the spirit of the October 17 uprising can continue, in the deepest sense of the word. We need to find new openings for the spirit of the uprising to endure in this profoundly tragic moment that Lebanon is living through.”
This remains the challenge today: building a project capable of confronting the neoliberal-sectarian order, rebuilding collective capacity, and making reconstruction a terrain of political transformation — a rupture in the protracted temporality that keeps turning war, recovery, and reconstruction into passages back to the same regime.
Ghida Ismail
Ghida Ismail is a policy and research specialist at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), leveraging data and evidence to shape global programs and strategies. Her research spans social and economic issues in the Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia. Her work has appeared in UntoldMag, The Markaz Review, The New Arab, The Harvard Kennedy Review, GlobalDev Blog, LSE Africa Blog, and L'Orient-Le Jour.
- Ghida Ismail
