The Smell of Rubble
destruction reeks. It is a sharp smell, one that digs itself into your nostrils and burns your eyes, a smell of ammonium and stone and violence. Mix that with the rotting stench of trash that nobody has been able to collect and you get the smell of a bombed house, or as it has now become, rubble.
I have a piece of rubble in my apartment in Berlin. It was given to me by a Lebanese theater maker during a performance in Beirut. The audience sat in a circle around the center stage in a dark room, a piece of rubble large enough that you needed two people to wrap their arms around it suspended in the air between us as he spoke about the bombing of his village in the south. At the end, trance-like, slowly, he unhooked fist-sized pieces of rubble hanging by invisible threads like satellites around their sun and handed them to the crowd. Now mine sits on my windowsill, a reminder of what was lost.
I was supposed to go to Lebanon on March 9, to my father’s home. On March 1, a Sunday, I was sitting with friends who were planning to visit me, talking about where in Lebanon we’d go — I want to see the UNESCO sites in Sour! And Baalbek! I want to stroll around Beirut! You have to see the mountains! One friend cautiously asked about the situation. We don’t know how it will develop, I told him. If you’re always waiting for the crisis to be over, you’ll never visit Lebanon.
How wrong I was.
Monday morning brought news of another war. I watch videos of bombs raining down upon Lebanon, paralyzed in my safe European home. Just like that, it’s September 2024 again.
I spent the summer of 2024 in Palestine, where I worked with Al Haq and the Ashtar theater in Ramallah; and Lebanon, where I spent a month in Beirut, volunteering with a social circus and visiting my family. In this time, I wrote a play about a queer couple at the beginning of their love affair, escaping Beirut for just a weekend to the mountains, under the shadow of yet more violence. The characters popped into my head pretty much fully formed, knowing what we knew then too: that the question of another war was one of when, not if.
And another tells me how important my play is, especially now. I wonder, did our lives not matter yesterday?
After the war broke out, I couldn’t finish the play. I briefly worked on it in November 2024, when the so-called ceasefire was implemented and the people of Lebanon could, if only barely, breathe again; but I couldn’t finish it — it was too close to an open wound, oozing blood and debris onto my desk. Only in summer 2025, a year after the first draft, could I return to it. In April and May, it will be read at two major festivals in Germany.
The cognitive dissonance is jarring: I fumble through preparation talks for the readings with artistic directors, playwrights, dramaturgs. One tells me she would love to have Lebanon as a guest country, but they can’t send anyone there to scout theaters — we are just civilians, after all. Another asks bluntly about the Palestine necklace I’m wearing in my author photo, oblivious to the fact that it was taken amidst the rubble of a house destroyed during the Lebanese Civil War. And another tells me how important my play is, especially now. I wonder, did our lives not matter yesterday?
I wrote the play in English because I didn’t want to give it to Germany. But now I have anyway. Is the curse of the artist the foolish belief that one day, our work will make a difference? To paraphrase Mohammed El-Kurd: what is a word against a 2,000-pound bomb?
Intellectual ghouls cheer the war on Iran, justifying it by saying Iranians are happy their authoritarian leader is gone. They can’t comprehend parts of a population feeling joy at the death of an oppressor while simultaneously feeling incomprehensible fear of the violence and overwhelming grief at the death and destruction wrought upon them by the West. The goal of the US-Israeli bombs was always submission, never liberation.
Here, life goes on. It seems, to the German discourse, the suffering of the Lebanese, the Iranian, and of course the Palestinian people, means little. There’s always war there, they say, so why bother getting too invested?
In just two weeks, almost a million people have registered as displaced within Lebanon, a country of only about six million inhabitants.
It is precisely because of the length of our suffering, not despite it, that it loses meaning.
My aunt in the mountains, a head nurse responsible for war and mass casualties — what a brutal reality, war specified in a nurse’s job title — is working overtime. My family in the south is sheltering in place. There is nowhere for them to go. In just two weeks, almost a million people have registered as displaced within Lebanon, a country of only about six million inhabitants. In 2024, it took months for this many people to be displaced. This time, it was a matter of weeks.
At least 1.5 million residents of Lebanon are already refugees — Palestinians who fled north during the Nakba and have been denied return for decades, and Syrians who fled during the brutal 14-year civil war, a number only topped by Lebanon’s own devastating 15-year civil war (1975-1990).
Houses in Beirut still carry 50-year-old gun wounds, and now, they are being bombarded again.
Most refugees have been forced from their homes in the south of the country or south of Beirut, in what is known as the Dahiye. Das ist der Süden von allem, as a friend writes in her play about toy cars booby-trapped by the Israeli army for Lebanese children to find, pick up, and die by. On March 4, and again on March 7, the Israeli army issued displacement orders for the entire area south of the Litani River, over 50 towns, as well as to the South of Beirut. On March 12, they expanded these orders to the Zahrani River in the South, so that the orders now encompass 14% of Lebanon’s land area.
These orders are cynically called “evacuation notices,” as if they were a humanitarian kindness by a regime that rains down bombs. They come via social media — because the population of a war zone is expected to stay up all night checking the enemy’s X feed — or via leaflets dropped over targeted areas. These leaflets were dropped again over Beirut, with messages aimed at sowing sectarian division in a country deeply rattled by the sectarian system that locks political power into gridlock.
The leaflets feature in my play, dropped over the audience halfway through. Fundamentally, as I tried to explain to a curious dramaturg, they mean: You are not safe here. Leave before we do worse.
What does safe mean when a hospital, a media office, a children’s school, a residential building have all become targets?
Israel committed at least 15,400 violations after the beginning of the “ceasefire” in November 2024. Over 300 Lebanese killed, countless others injured, thousands permanently displaced and barred from returning, five villages occupied by Israel, hundreds of houses destroyed, land poisoned, journalists shot at.
I’m scared to message my friends. How do you ask someone how they are doing? If they are safe? What does safe mean when a hospital, a media office, a children’s school, a residential building have all become targets?
In late September 2024, I left Lebanon for a seminar in Rome, thinking I could return after the week was over. But mere minutes after my flight departed, Israel launched a full-scale bombing campaign that left 558 people dead in just one day, 558 people whom a German television presenter allowed to be called “so-called humans” by an Israeli army spokesman with no rebuttal.
In Germany, I am an artist worthy of inviting to the stage. In Lebanon, I would be a so-called human.
Are we damned to forever repeat the cycle, ground into dust by the unfathomable violence that those in power have decided will be normal? My friends reassure me they will be fine, they have always been fine. Lebanese men joke about them being the bombshell Israel was targeting, after the pager attacks, some started posting memes of them strapping dialing phones to their belts instead. But a seemingly unending capacity for dark humor and a deep well of resilience can never replace a life in dignity, without the threat of warplanes overhead.
Next week, my play will be performed in German theaters, in front of audiences content with the news of another ceasefire, oblivious to the fact that during this “ceasefire” Israel has continued to demolish, annex, bomb, and kill with impunity.
The play ends as it begins — the lovers in bed, tiny giants in a world that threatens to swallow them. It doesn’t offer answers, because I don’t think that is the job of art. That is still the purview of people.
