Video after video, massive explosions were wrecked upon apartment buildings.
It was footage of the drone strike on 30 July, which killed Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr and Iranian military adviser Milad Bedi, in the group’s Beirut stronghold, Dahiyeh.
In between the clips was footage of bearded demonstrators waving yellow and green flags, followed by a hijab-wearing anchor speaking in Arabic.
A foreshadowing of the assassinations that killed five senior Hezbollah figures in late September, including leader Sheikh Nasrallah, the attack, which brought down Shukr’s building in a densely populated neighbourhood, took many media by surprise.
What I couldn’t figure out was the Arab broadcaster. Displayed in portrait mode on a teenage girl’s iPhone standing ahead of us in line, the branding was unrecognisable.
It wasn’t Al Jazeera, as the camera work was far less refined. In all likelihood, it was Al-Manar, the Hezbollah television network, framing the context for the rising Israeli attacks.
Lebanon was coming under increased strikes by the IDF, and Hezbollah was undergoing a second day of pager and walkie-talkie explosions, killing 42 persons and injuring nearly 4000.
Standing in line outside the Questura (police headquarters) in Torino, waiting for visa appointments, it was a particularly appropriate sampling of the Middle Eastern-heavy applicants.
The further my partner and I progressed in the queue, the more we bumped into people watching the same show on their phones, chatting with friends and family about the news.
The situation was so charged that a man in front of us pulled out a second mobile phone to discuss what he was watching on his smartphone.
Despite the drama, I was grateful to bear witness to it.
As an Israeli national, I’m all too aware of the distance between Jews and Muslims, both in the Mideast and abroad.
Any personal experience of the conflict between us is impactful, like being a fly on the wall like this. I imagined myself in a Palestinian living room, watching the news together.
We might be at war with each other, but for this brief moment, we were taking it in together in Italy, pursuing visas to escape the violence.
If only it were something we could discuss. I savoured the moment’s irony and felt comfortable not asking for more.
Covering a protest against the fighting in Lebanon on Saturday, I had the opportunity to clarify who I am.
“Are you English?” asked an activist who handed me a flyer. “No,” I replied. “I’m Israeli.”
She shuddered. Her body language said it all.
“What are you doing here?” the woman asked, sounding surprised. I told her I was a journalist and against the war.
She introduced me to a Lebanese friend, who told me she was concerned about my presence. I reassured her and explained that I edit a media outlet in Brussels.
In the background, I could hear several people speaking Hebrew. They looked perfectly at home at the event and were still hanging around when I headed home.
The protest, which I found out about from Telemeloni, AKA RAI, Italy’s much-maligned public broadcaster, brought Jews and Arabs together—at least some of them.
I hadn’t felt this good in a long time. Getting out of my office and into the real world, if still for work, was like taking a cold shower.
No crisis is as dispiriting as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and going to an antiwar event helped.
Torino has been a magnet for Middle Eastern migrants for decades, with Israelis fleeing the war being the most recent addition to the mix.
Some come as students, others as professionals seeking second homes. A family from Kfar Saba even looked at flats in our building and told me they were bailing on Bibi.
Having lived through every single Arab-Israeli war since I was born, six months before the Six-Day War, I should be even more pessimistic than I already am.
Yet, no war has made me as uncomfortable as this one. Not because there’s anything morally worse about it. But because of how much it feels like a regression in time.
For those doing body counts, nearly 50,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians are estimated to have been killed and wounded in the first Lebanon war between 1982 and 1983.
The proximity, in numbers, to Gaza war casualties – 42,000 dead estimated amongst Palestinians to date – should give us pause. Time stopped in the early eighties, at least politically.
Indeed, we have learned nothing. The precision with which we repeat such tragedies, without consideration of past conflicts and what this one means, should be deeply troubling.
No wonder we find ourselves in Lebanon again. We never left, really.
Chalk it up to how historically consistent our use of the Holocaust and Antisemitism is to rationalise violence. Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon mined them just as much as Bibi.
The problem was that Beirut was not Warsaw, and Yasir Arafat could never pass for Adolf Hitler.
Now, we blame Hamas for genocide for their 7 October pogrom, which killed 1200 Israelis, even though Israeli leaders openly call for it, and the IDF has killed nearly forty times more Palestinians.
Perhaps Hamas would have done the same thing in our shoes. Despite their brutality, they didn’t, and the difference matters. No amount of claiming the Palestinians could or would will change that.
Seven months before the war, I took a last-minute flight to Tel Aviv. My eighty-year-old stepmother was in ill health, and my family had told me to hurry home and see her before it was too late.
Thankfully, it turned out to be a false alarm. She was fine, albeit fragile. I apologised for being absent, explaining I’d applied for an editorial gig in Tel Aviv to be closer but got turned down.
“They did you a favour, Joel,” she replied. This isn’t the Israel you grew up in. It’s a much nastier country now. Just look at how Bibi is handling the judicial protests. It’s going to get very bloody.”
While repression of the demonstrations has been fierce, particularly after 7 October, few anticipated the carnage that would follow – even though the IDF observed Hamas’ preparations.
Ignorant of that, assuming something apocalyptic was on the horizon wasn’t wrong. It was more about when. The results reflect the politics of Bibi’s government. It’s a racist, populist war.
Covering the early Kaplan Street protests, I wandered in and out of the crowd with my camera and field recorder, capturing every sight and sound I could.
It was like being a kid in a candy store. Everything was meaningful. Editing the audio a year and a half later, the demonstrators’ anxiety stands out.
Engaging in long, drawn-out chants of judicial coup-relevant words like democratia, the fear everyone felt became increasingly palpable.
This wasn’t just about the end of Israeli democracy, such as it is. It was about a much larger cataclysm that had yet to start.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
