StellarWitt

This beautiful, brave woman is older than the state of ‘Israel’ .

This 100-year-old woman in Lebanon is refusing to be forcibly displaced and leave her home amid intensified Israeli attacks.

I’m sharing a recent discovery about my family, who were expelled from Yaffa (Jaffa) in 1948. These are biographical details about my great-great-grandparents. My great-great-grandfather, Hasan Saleh Abu Toha, was born in 1876 in the Saknet Darwish neighborhood of Yaffa. This is the same neighborhood where my great-grandparents were born and owned land. I even found a 1946 newspaper document listing them as landowners in Saknet Darwish. One reason it is difficult or impossible to find information about our ancestors history is that Israel and the Zionist gangs destroyed or stole most of the documents that were in their houses. Note: The year 1292 shown in the photo follows the Rumi calendar, which the Ottoman Empire adopted in 1840."

Lebanon is a perfect model of what happens when two civilizations share geography without sharing a political philosophy. It’s a small country, same language, same food, same weather, same ancient history. No walls. No checkpoints. But each community, Christian and Muslim, lives behind invisible civilizational lines. They don’t mix in political life, educational life, or social life. These lines have existed since the Ottomans, and they hardened after the civil war. The Christian areas built their society around a European-influenced political culture: secular schools, mixed-gender social norms, individual rights, and a relatively open civic space. The Muslim areas built "Islamic society". The result is not “diversity," but dual sovereignty inside one state. In 2023, the country literally split into two time zones during daylight-saving time, one Muslim and one Christian. Neighbors who live in the same building had different times. It was an honest reflection of two separate civilizational logics refusing to follow the same clock. Lebanon is a failed state because it tried to fit two incompatible political visions under one flag. The West is repeating Lebanon’s experiment but pretending it will end differently. There is no historical precedent for that working.

The Onion meets Orientalism For Dummies:

Lebanon is a perfect model of what happens when two civilizations share geography without sharing a political philosophy. It’s a small country, same language, same food, same weather, same ancient history. No walls. No checkpoints. But each community, Christian and Muslim, lives behind invisible civilizational lines. They don’t mix in political life, educational life, or social life. These lines have existed since the Ottomans, and they hardened after the civil war. The Christian areas built their society around a European-influenced political culture: secular schools, mixed-gender social norms, individual rights, and a relatively open civic space. The Muslim areas built "Islamic society". The result is not “diversity," but dual sovereignty inside one state. In 2023, the country literally split into two time zones during daylight-saving time, one Muslim and one Christian. Neighbors who live in the same building had different times. It was an honest reflection of two separate civilizational logics refusing to follow the same clock. Lebanon is a failed state because it tried to fit two incompatible political visions under one flag. The West is repeating Lebanon’s experiment but pretending it will end differently. There is no historical precedent for that working.

In 1970, Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani sat down with Australian journalist Richard Carleton for what became one of the most quoted interviews in Middle Eastern history. Carleton keeps pushing the same question different ways — why won’t you just talk? Why won’t you negotiate? And each time, Kanafani flips it back on him with surgical precision. The exchange reveals something most Western audiences never heard at the time: the Palestinian perspective wasn’t anti-peace. It was anti-surrender dressed up as peace. Two years after this interview, Kanafani was assassinated by a Mossad car bomb in Beirut. He was 36.