Lebanese Resilience Fund

Like so many Lebanese, my life and upbringing have been shaped by ongoing conflict and displacement. Over the past months, Israel and the US have manufactured consent for their invasions of Gaza, and now employ the same justifications to launch a full-scale attack on a second front, in Lebanon.

On Monday, Israel launched its most deadly attacks on Lebanon since its 2006 invasion of the country, targeting heavily civilian populated areas throughout the South - hundreds of air strikes, systemic bombardments and psychological warfare. The updated known death toll from yesterday's US-sponsored bloodbath across Lebanon stands at 558 martyred, including 50 children and 1,835 injured. Lives as vital and yours or mine, that have been reduced to numbers and statistics.

As we approach an anniversary of the first year of an ongoing genocide on Gaza, how can we allow our lives to roll on unaffected?

The US's state sponsorship of these massacres through their unrelenting provision of funding and weapons to Israel implicate us all. We need not look far back in our collective memory to understand how the forces of Empire utilise these means against their own subjects. Days ago in New York City's subway system, the over-policing of public transit systems resulted in 4 people shot over a $2.90 fare evasion. This past spring, the violent repression of encampment protests in support of Palestine saw thousands across the U.S. unlawfully dispersed, arrested, beaten and detained. The suppression of the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, where police fired rubber-coated bullets, tear gas canisters, pepper spray and stun grenades at protesters - methods employed in Palestine for many years. The tactics of oppression formed and shared between these sites of colonial rule have and will continue to be employed on us in order to repress freedoms and instil subservience.

The veil we construct daily through the safety of our lives in Europe or America, and our participation in industries of culture and capital that perpetuate that sense of remove are at odds with the ways in which our safety, freedoms, and future are wound up in the struggles and oppressions unrelentingly acting upon those elsewhere. We cannot allow the ongoing normalization of the suffering of oppressed peoples, be they Lebanese, Palestinian, or the diaspora of the Global South.

The silence of my industry and my peers has been deafening. Throughout my life I have yet to call on my community, relying on the strength and resilience characteristic of my people in order to persevere through difficulty. But despite my necessary strength, or the power you perceive me to hold, Lebanese and Palestinian people do not owe us their resilience. We owe each other our humanity, and life.

For now, I wish to invoke my community, and my network of colleagues to support in what ways you can. I have organised a fundraiser in order to direct resources to displaced families in the South of Lebanon through direct aid.

Please share widely and directly, and considering donating, and resisting in the ways you can.