This is Democracy – Episode 281: Lebanon Wars

This is Democracy. A podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship. About engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues. And how to have a voice in what happens next.

[00:00:24] Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy.

Today we are going to discuss the emerging war in Lebanon and the history of conflict in and around Lebanon. We are fortunate to be joined by a longtime friend and the person who I know is writing the most interesting work, at least in English, on the last 50 years of conflict in Lebanon. And politics around Lebanon and the region.

Uh, this is Emily Whalen, who has been with us before on this podcast, but it’s been, it’s been a little while, Emily, since we’ve had you on, isn’t that so?

[00:01:03] Emily Whalen: Yeah, it’s been, I think a couple of years.

[00:01:05] Jeremi: Wow. Well, that’s extraordinary. The time goes fast, doesn’t

[00:01:08] Emily Whalen: it? It sure does. Yeah. Um, and as a historian, I’m not always used to my work being quite so relevant to contemporary news.

[00:01:16] Jeremi: And I was going to say, also, even though two years have passed, it’s probably not that different, right?

[00:01:20] Emily Whalen: Unfortunately, yeah.

[00:01:23] Jeremi: Uh, for those of you who don’t know Emily Whelan, and I hope all of our listeners do know Emily Whelan, uh, she is a non resident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.

C. Her first book, Which I’m proud to say is the dissertation she wrote at the University of Texas at Austin, a fantastic dissertation and now first book examines the history of U. S. interventions in the Lebanese Civil War, and that book will be out in 2025 and will be selling like hot cakes, I’m sure. Um, it’s funny we use that phrase.

I never really know what hot cakes are. I guess they’re pancakes of one kind or another. Emily, as I referred to, earned her Ph. D. at the University of Texas at Austin, her undergraduate degree.

And she’s very active and engaged in both the world of historical analysis and, uh, policy, uh, advising as well. So we’re very fortunate to have Emily with us, and there’s really no one better to talk about what’s going on in Lebanon right now. Uh, before we get to our conversation with Emily, uh, we have, of course, Mr.

Zachary’s scene setting poem. Uh, Zachary, what’s the title of your poem today?

[00:02:33] Zachary: A Prophecy. A Prophecy.

[00:02:35] Jeremi: A prophecy. All right, let’s hear it.

[00:02:38] Zachary: There is an old promise, a prophecy that remains to be fulfilled. A dream whose spark seems almost to be killed. There is an old saying, a phrase that we have whispered through the years.

It is written, it is sung, and it is shouted through our fears. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war anymore. The other night I was walking with a friend and we were singing this. And I asked, what does it mean not to learn war? And he said, it meant we would have forgotten how to fight.

And I asked, could this ever be? And he said, Who knows?

[00:03:21] Jeremi: Very thought provoking, Zachary. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, Emily, I’ll let you react to that.

[00:03:27] Emily Whalen: Yeah, it’s just, it’s, um, it’s very evocative and, um, you’re a very talented writer, um, Zach, but I’ve known that for a long time and it evokes for me also, you know, um, one of Lebanon’s most famous, um, Citizens is Khalil Gibran, who is a, um, a poet and, um, who wrote, um, a book, I believe, called The Prophet, if I’m not mistaken.

[00:03:49] Jeremi: Yes, that’s correct, I think.

[00:03:50] Emily Whalen: Yeah. Um, so, thank you for sharing that.

[00:03:54] Jeremi: Uh, Emily, what, what is it like for you, if you’re willing to share with us, to, Visit and study and develop affection for a country, which I know you’ve developed for Lebanon, and many people have. I mean, it seems it’s a place that really draws people in, and then to watch recurring moments of just, just what Zachary’s talking about, about people not unlearning war but actually fighting war time and time again.

[00:04:21] Emily Whalen: That’s um, thank you for the question. And also thank you very much for having me on. It’s um, it’s always a pleasure to chat with both of you and, um, to reflect and discuss. And, um, I always, I find I learn more in our conversations than I do, um, on my own. So I appreciate the chance. I think Lebanon is. It’s such a complicated place.

And I remember when I was first starting out on this project, um, which was my dissertation, I remember I had conversations with you and I had conversations with a couple other people on my committee. And there were, there was some sort of reservation about Lebanon because it is such a complicated, uh, place.

And, uh, I am, You know, I’m a sucker for punishment. I got a PhD in history. So I thought I’d lean right into something that seemed really complicated and try to write a story that I wasn’t sure I could tell. I am not Lebanese. I, my family is not Lebanese. As far as I know, not from the Middle East. Um, I, neither, I am neither Jewish nor Muslim nor Christian, really.

Um, and, uh, I came into the story, into the, into learning about the Middle East with a strong sense of being an outsider. And I still have a sense of, I’m an observer of a lot of this and not, I don’t feel, I don’t have the same kind of emotional connection to the work that a lot of people have had whose heritages are rooted in the region, but I do have an emotional connection to Lebanon because I spent time there doing research.

I was very happy when I was living in Beirut, and it is It’s just a, a really intoxicating place, I think, if you’re a certain kind of person. It’s neither Eastern or Western. Everything’s kind of complicated. You’re always speaking three languages at once, English, French, and Arabic, and you’re always running through, you know, calculations in your mind of doing conversions between dollars and Lebanese lira and euros.

And it’s fun. It’s just, it’s a, it was a, it, it is, and I hope it will be again, a fun place. It’s rivetingly beautiful. part of my research. Recently, when I was finishing up the manuscript, I, um, was going back and looking at the travel writing about Beirut and about Lebanon over the course of the last several hundred years.

And, you know, you have people who are arriving in Lebanon, uh, for the first time in, like, the year, uh, 2000. 500 C. E. After it had this horrible earthquake, and they’re talking about it as this kind of hub of devastation. And then about 1000 years later, you have poets coming from, um, Europe to Lebanon, and they’re talking about how it It has acquired the epithet of fortunate because it is so beautiful and because of the advantages of its situation.

So it has this long history of lucklessness and fortune, um, and there’s something very compelling about that. So I’ve waxed a little bit, um, poetic there, but I think to, to be blunt, it’s been a very difficult, emotional, um, last couple of weeks. I recognize Again, recognizing that what I’m going through as an observer is nothing compared to what’s going on on the ground, but, um, to, to sort of feel like a place where you are happy is now a place that you can’t really ever go back again, I think is, um, It’s been hard.

Yeah, it’s been really hard.

[00:07:43] Jeremi: Emily, thank you for sharing that. I know it’s, it’s a difficult and very personal topic for you. Thank you. Zachary?

[00:07:52] Zachary: What is it like as a historian looking at what’s playing out in Lebanon and in the region as a whole right now? Does it feel like deja vu or does this feel like a very different moment?

[00:08:03] Emily Whalen: Yeah, that’s something that I grapple with, Zach, because there is Part of me that feels like tearing out my hair and saying I like this. This has happened before. Um, and so much about what’s going on in Lebanon. Um, right now is it evokes and it’s very seductive. Um, to say this is exactly what has happened before, because there are the similarities are, um, profound the.

In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, in 1982, the Prime Minister at the time, uh, Menachem Begin, said similar things to what, or, um, excuse me, similar things to what Benjamin Netanyahu is saying now, saying things like, it’s going to be a limited invasion of Lebanon, we’re simply targeting Israel. You know, this extremist group that is killing Israeli citizens.

And, um, and we’re just going to go in kind of wipe out their capacities and come back out. And that was exactly what Israel proposed in 1982. And the end result was an occupation of southern parts of Lebanon that lasted until the year 2000. And it and so there’s You know, that is a very strong similarity.

Um, there are a lot of differences though, and I think it’s important to remember those because you can kind of fall into a trap of historical determinism if you don’t. So Israel is much more as. a much more capacious intelligence and military, um, military power than it was even in 1982. So in 1982, Israel was very, had a lot of military, um, might and was much stronger than the extremist organization.

They went into Lebanon to eradicate, which was the Palestinian liberation organization. Um, the. Difference in capacity between hezbollah and the and israel is orders of magnitude greater I would suggest I would venture to guess now. Um, we also have a different diplomatic Arrangement in the region something that like the abraham accords which were signed in I think 2020 correct me if i’m wrong between israel and gulf countries arab gulf countries That would not have been something that could have happened in 1982 at all.

Um, You And so there’s a different sort of relational architecture between the countries of the region, and there’s the staggering difference, which is that in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to incapacitate the Palestinian liberation organization, which was a Palestinian organization. It had been in Lebanon in a meaningful way for quite some time, but it was still a organization that was a foreign organization.

And Hezbollah is, despite its, um, copious funding from, and support from Iran and, and from Syria, once upon a time is still a Lebanese organization. And so there is a, there’s a different, um, It’s you can’t look at what happened with the PLO and say that the way that it shook out with them is the way that it’s going to shake out with Hezbollah.

In my opinion, the things that are different about this situation make it more likely that you’re still going to get a very protracted, messy conflict that will last much longer and will create more problems. But, you know, I think you also have to be humble and recognize that We can never really know the future, you know,

[00:11:29] Jeremi: right, of course, but we can know the past where we can at least try to know the past Emily and maybe if it’s possible, give us a, at least some sense of why did this country that in some ways was prosperous and peaceful.

Why did it explode into civil war in the mid 1970s? This is where your book begins, of course.

[00:11:51] Emily Whalen: Yes. Um, boy, I I should really, Jeremy, have a tighter answer for this. Um, so I’m going to try to keep myself You know, uh, limited to, to not to sort of just sort of read out the first chapter of my book. But, um, Lebanon, um, the thing I always say about Lebanon is that it is, um, people like to think of Lebanon as an exception.

You know, it’s a Arab Middle Eastern country that has a large Christian population. It’s this blend of East and West. It’s, um, like I said, doesn’t really fit into any particular category. It’s very different from most other, um, Arab countries. And what I say, instead of it being an exception, is that it’s a, it’s a, It’s the far point, um, on a long continuum of States.

Lebanon became in its years, first decades of independence, which was started in 1943 after the French mandate ended. It was a very entrepreneurial state. So it became like the financial hub basically for, um, for the Middle East. And it became the gateway between East and West for, um, for businesses and for culture.

And, um, What that did was it, it was a very open economy. There were not a lot of regulations and this sort of drew in kind of all kinds. You could find whatever you wanted to in Beirut. Um, and that’s part of the reason why it exploded because you’re inviting dynamics from the globe and from the burgeoning international system and from what we would call international society into an environment that Um, where the government itself is not, does not have the same kind of capacities in terms of tempering, um, the intersection of those global dynamics and the domestic dynamics.

So, Lebanon had never had, um, a really strong industrialization. It went pretty much from an agricultural society to an almost entirely externally focused services based society. So you have a great deal of economic inequality. Its government is, um, does something called confessionalism, which is a colonial sort of legacy of the Ottoman Empire and of the French Empire, in which citizens have their, um, their political, political, voice is tied to what’s their sect or their confession, um, basically whatever religion they’re born into.

To this day in Lebanon, there is no institution of civil marriage. So what that does is in some senses you could understand how that might be seen as accommodating, um, between like for a very diverse population, but what that also does is it really, um, makes those boundaries between people and between sects, um, and confessions very rigid.

So you have what basically a very brittle system that doesn’t have a lot of capacity, and it’s then it’s exposed to these vagaries of international affairs. And you have, you know, the foundation of the state of Israel, the rise of Palestinian terrorism and, um, Um, Lebanon becomes a convenient place for these tensions and dynamics to play out in a violent way and once war breaks out and when war broke out in 1975, it was between a um palestinian group and a a right wing lebanese christian group what that does is it kind of fragments and crystallizes and splinters the society.

So then you get people breaking off into various groupings based sometimes on their religious confession, sometimes on their political ideologies, sometimes on their national ideologies, and it becomes very hard to Lebanon was already in need of reform. And, um, when the war breaks out, essentially what happens is that the Lebanese elite become focused on rebuilding a system that was already failing and already in need of reform.

And once that happens, it just becomes really hard to, um, to ever put it back together again. That was a long winded answer. I apologize for that.

[00:16:05] Jeremi: I think that actually gave us a lot about the sort of crossroads society, the various influences, and the extraordinary mix. But that mix that made this place so cosmopolitan also made it so vulnerable at the same time.

[00:16:21] Emily Whalen: Yes. Yeah. Vulnerable is a very good word, I think.

[00:16:24] Jeremi: Yeah. Zachary?

[00:16:27] Zachary: Relationship between the United States and Lebanon. Being the United States has, uh, as I’m sure many of our listeners know, intervened in Lebanon, uh, a number of times to say the least. What has the American sort of strategy in the region, uh, used Lebanon for?

[00:16:42] Emily Whalen: Boy, Zach, have I got a book for you. Um, something I often say about Lebanon is that the reason it makes such an interesting case. For me, for looking at the way that the United States functions in the world is because it is not important to the United States, really, um, the United States intervened in Lebanon in 1958.

They also intervened in Lebanon in 1982. And part of what my book does is traces. Actually, I kind of expand the concept of intervention beyond military intervention and say, actually, if we’re going to include diplomatic interventions and special envoys and stuff like that, the United States has kind of been, I would say, like, Very low key involved for a long time in Lebanon, but it’s not usually something that percolates up to the level of national strategy.

It’s not usually something that the United States, um, the National Security Council or various presidents really perceives as vital or or important to U. S. Interests. And there’s some degree of merit in that. But it. Then you kind of get this push this sort of like cycle of we’ll ignore lebanon For the most part until a crisis happens and then when a crisis happens with lebanon, there’s a rush to um, Devote resources and attention to it But because there isn’t that sort of long institutional history like memory of it of our relationship with lebanon our understanding of lebanon Um, you get a lot of strategic mistakes and those strategic mistakes Because lebanon is not particularly vital to U.

S. interests, um, we then can pull out without a lot of political backlash or any kind of consequences. And then you get sort of trapped in this cycle of over involvement and then under involvement. And with this, the sort of engine of that cycle is crisis in Lebanon. So you have, um, a structural problem there.

[00:18:38] Jeremi: It’s a fascinating point you make, Emily, and I want to just, um, help elucidate it because I think it’s, I think it’s really actually quite, quite helpful. Of course, in the late 1950s and 1958, Eisenhower sends a small force into Lebanon and then pulls them out. But the case where your dynamic really seems to take hold is in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan sends a force, and I think this is relevant because it’s also in this period, as I learned from your work, that we begin to see the rise of Hezbollah.

And any other organizations that are now sort of standard players in the region one way or another. And of course, deeply relevant for the current moment. So what happens in the early 1980s in US policy to elucidate the dynamic that you’ve described?

[00:19:23] Emily Whalen: Yeah. So in the 1980s, so Lebanon, um, the war breaks out in 1975 and it continues more or less, you know, there are sort of a long series of periods that are more intense and more violent, and then you’ll have kind of a lull, but it continues more or less, um, through.

So, but in 1982, Lebanon has been at war for about seven years. Um, And the precipitating event for us involvement is this israeli invasion That happens in june and it happens very quickly and there’s a lot of conversation around and it’s not particularly clear I have my own opinions about it but whether or not the united states or certain members of the reagan administration had kind of advanced knowledge that israel was gonna invade lebanon, but what happens is that You know, Ariel Sharon, who’s the minister of defense invades Lebanon pushes forward within six days, you have Israeli troops outside of Beirut.

And all of a sudden we’re on the verge of an international crisis. And, um, this is what, when the national security council and the Reagan administration really snapped to and say, okay, we’ve got to do something about this. Um, they had been involved for about a year with the, uh, Um, to try to negotiate ceasefires between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Israelis, because there had been exchanges of fire, similar to what we’re seeing actually with Hezbollah, but, uh, obviously those, those, um, missions were unsuccessful.

So, in the summer of 1982, the Reagan administration sends Phil Habib back, um, to Israel. To Beirut to start negotiating, and it’s a difficult negotiation because Beirut is under siege, uh, functionally, and Philip Habib, who is a, you know, veteran U. S. diplomat, um, did not get along very well with, uh, Ariel Sharon, and then you have the kind of cross currents that, a complicating cross currents of the U.

S. of the Civil War still going on, which at this point, um, has evolved mostly into a fight between right wing, almost exclusively Christian organizations, and then a really heterogeneous, largely Muslim, but many different kinds of, um, denominations, and a little bit more Yeah, I don’t even want to say left wing, but it’s not.

It’s essentially just sort of the Lebanese opposition, which is deeply penetrated by Syria. So it’s a it’s a messy situation, I guess, is what I’m trying to say. At the end of the summer, the United States, France and Italy send in a multinational force to oversee the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut.

This is successful. The belief is that with the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut, the Israelis will pull out. This does not happen. What happens is that Lebanon is plunged further into violence. And so that dynamic has, um, means that the United States has troops in Lebanon through to the beginning of 1984.

Part of why a lot of folks know about this period is that this is all coinciding, all of these crazy dynamics, as you mentioned and indicated, with the rise of Hezbollah and Hezbollah adjacent organizations. So the Israelis are occupying most of South Lebanon at the time. There is a robust Lebanese resistance to This occupation and part of what begins to emerge is a strain of Muslim extremism and Islamism in this opposition.

Lebanon for all of its, you know, religious diversity. You don’t see the rise of this kind of religious extremism, Christian or Muslim, um, until the war. There’s not the kind of same dogmatism that you see. So, The Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and the presence of the multinational force at the same time, the US troops, is part of the environment when you get extremist Muslim organizations like Hezbollah founding, and they’re very nebulous.

They’re non hierarchical, and they are really shadowy for the first few years, but we see them start to become more powerful, and, um, better funded from Iran and, and Syria. At the time, Syria was actually the predominant funder, I think, of a lot of these organizations. In 1983, with the bombing of the U. S.

Embassy and the bombing of the U. S. Marine barracks. And those two events, which happened in April and October of 1983, were horrific. terrorist attacks. Many, many people died. And, um, it was, I think the barracks bombing was the single deadliest day for the U. S. Marines since the Vietnam War. Um, and what happens with the Reagan administration, and it’s, I want to be careful how I phrase this because it is, you know, it’s complicated and there are a lot of other factors going on.

And this is also, you know, right when we’re having what’s known as, you In some circles as the mini cold war where the cold war is ramping up again. Um, but essentially the Reagan administration cuts its losses in Lebanon and, and pulls out again, um, in early 1984. And there was a lot of frustration and anger about that within the Reagan administration.

There’s a lot of frustration and anger about that within the American, um, military and diplomatic communities who had been involved in Lebanon. But it was essentially a fait accompli. Does that answer what you wanted to hear about? Yeah.

[00:24:54] Jeremi: Well, you, you’re doing an excellent job, Emily, as you do in your, in your book and in many settings of taking, you know, an, an, a, a very complicated multi headed Hydra, making it, making it something we can at least understand the shape of, because there are so many players and so many things going on from Iran to Syria, to Israel, to the United States, and then various factions of Of course, within Lebanon.

Yeah. I guess the question I wanted to follow on your excellent description with is, is a very simple one. Um, sticking to the history now, um, this history seems to indicate, as you tell it, that both Israeli and American military intervention in Lebanon. Neither brought stability to Lebanon, nor reduced the terrorist threat.

In fact, it seems it did the opposite of both of those things. Is that correct?

[00:25:50] Emily Whalen: Yes, I would say that is very correct. And that is something, by the way, sticking with the history, that was observed at the time. You know, um, Itzhak Rabin, I had made a comment, Once about how the 1982 invasion of Lebanon created a greater terrorist threat than it eliminated.

And this was something that IDF generals, this was something that members of the U. S. National Security Council and certainly U. S. generals and, um, reading some of the memoirs of the Marine commanders has been really interesting. They, they understood what was happening. They saw the rise of these terrorist organizations, and they saw the way that, um, living under occupation pushed particularly disenfranchised, young disenfranchised Lebanese men toward organizations that were funded by extremists.

This was something that was known at the time. It just never, for whatever reason, seemed to percolate up to the level of policy. Yeah, and I think, I think we see something similar happening today.

[00:26:49] Jeremi: So, so that was, yeah, that was my not so subtle bridge to the present. Um,

[00:26:53] Emily Whalen: Yeah.

[00:26:53] Jeremi: So, you know, a lot of what’s happening now is hard to keep track of and, and at least I don’t have, you know, inside intelligence.

Uh, and so it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on. And that’s part of the problem in trying to follow this, right, as an informed observer. Um, and the last thing we want to do on the podcast is, is contribute to more myths, more misinformation. We’re trying to do the opposite. Um, I think what you bring to the table so well is this historical background that few others have.

And I think that offers some framework for at least understanding what’s happening at a surface level. How does this background then lead you to think about the current Israeli incursions into Lebanon? I mean, that’s sort of the opening I want to give you to, to, to, to sort of apply this as you feel comfortable to thinking about today.

[00:27:47] Emily Whalen: Yeah. I mean, this is. I had a dinner party last night and we were having this exact conversation because a friend of mine was wanting to, wanting to, to encourage me to, to say specifically, you know, what specific policy decisions should be made tomorrow, essentially to ameliorate the situation. And, um, I was getting frustrated with myself because, um, I struggle with that.

You know, there’s French historian Fernand Braudel, who, you know, I have a very soft spot for and he divides time into three sections. Um, one is sort of the, the event history, what he calls sort of the seafoam history of individual lives and moments. One is the conjoncture, the cyclical history, um, longer trends, longer sort of history over centuries.

And then he has the longue durée, which is of course history over millennia. And I am always, More comfortable in that cyclical or long do I history? And when I think about Lebanon now, I think the thing that I think about is the history of the international system and of the state, because I think what we’re seeing is the eruption of attention in the international system and in the state as a as a political form of organization that has been embedded in our international system since it’s, you know, evolution, which I would, you know, Put at around 1919 to 1922, which is this question of and and this is where I say You don’t, you don’t have to know exactly what’s going on in Lebanon.

You have to be, you know, a thoughtful person and you, and it’s good to learn some more information, but it’s impossible to keep track of all of the threads and it’s impossible to prioritize, you know, all of this information, especially with our, the way that our information landscape is structured, you just get an onslaught of details and it’s hard to know what’s relevant and what’s not.

So I find a lot of comfort in looking at the long, uh, sort of the long delay. And to me, the question at the heart of this is, do you have to be. In a majority religious, ethnic. Racial, whatever, to have. Right. Because historically, the answer is yes. Historically, minorities and, um, marginalized groups within states have been oppressed and persecuted, massacred, and, and, and subject to all sorts of atrocities.

And this is the logic around which our current international system is based. We’re trying to create majorities. Lebanon’s a curious case, because you can’t really do that in Lebanon. And I think, for me, the question is, is that the world that we’re going to live in in the future, too? And if it is, we will see more wars like this.

[00:30:43] Jeremi: For me, Emily, to push you a little bit off of that point and beyond, because I think it’s a great starting point about the sorting of different religious groups, which, of course, has been going on for a long time. Obviously, you see that getting worse. The Israelis are claiming whether, One agrees with their reason for an incursion into Lebanon or not.

That’s not what we’re debating right now. They’re arguing that they will be able to make this a short, short police action of one kind or another to eradicate. As they’ve done with assassinating very effectively, the leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas, that they’re going to continue to interdict the bad guys and then leave you.

You I sense are very skeptical of this based on this history. Uh, yes. Is that fair?

[00:31:29] Emily Whalen: It is fair. And yes, absolutely. I’m incredibly skeptical of it. And perhaps this is idealistic of me, but I don’t think that you can bomb your way to peace, even if you bomb very effectively or precisely. This is where the, the question of information becomes really difficult.

You know, you see reports that Israel bombed a Hezbollah sponsored hospital or something like that. But in Lebanon, the lines between government and Pesbala and parties and individual donors, like those are, those are not easy to parse out. And so perhaps call me idealistic, but I don’t think it’s ever justified to bomb the hospital.

People will remember that more than anything else. And I think key to this for me is that I don’t think this is going to make Israeli citizens safer either. Um, and why not Emily? Because there will be retaliation. In the moment, right? We’re already seeing this with Iran’s has demonstrated a willingness to retaliate.

I think that in the short term, you also are looking at, although Hamas’s leaders, for example, have been very effectively incapacitated, there will be other leaders and there will be other people, um, Um, Who will take their place, unfortunately. And I, and I, I really mean that. Unfortunately, I don’t, it makes me upset to see organizations like Hamas have power and exercise their terrorism in the region.

And I think you have the West bank as well, that people are going to continue to live in these places and will carry on the, the historical legacy of, of the experience of being bombed. Um, Yeah. Does that, I, yeah, that

[00:33:05] Jeremi: makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Zachary, I want to turn to, to you, I know, uh, from your poem that you’ve been talking about this, obviously with friends and others.

Yeah. I know you’ve been talking about it with me. Um, and of course, uh, I think quite, quite appropriately, Zachary, you feel a very strong connection to Israel and, Mm-Hmm. to the Jewish people in the region. So how, how do you think about this, Zachary?

[00:33:27] Zachary: It’s a very hard question. Um, I think that. The scariest part about watching, uh, how the last year has unfolded has been the sort of sense that things are getting worse and there’s very little space to see things get better.

And I think the incursion into Lebanon and continued fighting across the region shows that even a year later, there doesn’t really seem to be much hope for de escalation. Um, and it seems like obviously there has to be, Uh, response to violence from groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.

[00:34:03] Emily Whalen: Yes. Um,

[00:34:04] Zachary: but it seems like at the moment, uh, there, there’s really no, you know, effort or ability to contain the war because it seems to implicate such a wide array of actors and to be in almost everybody’s interest to continue the war, at least in the short term, except for the people themselves.

[00:34:23] Jeremi: Do you agree with that, Emily?

[00:34:24] Emily Whalen: Yeah, I, I very much agree with that. And I think that is. To me, one of The things that we can do as observers of the situation is sit in that tension and that difficulty because I, I couldn’t agree with you more exactly. We can’t let organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah act with impunity.

And, um, and, and, and indeed, I can’t, I’m not as familiar with, um, the Palestinian territories, but in the years leading up to this, Hezbollah, um, had been declining in popularity in Lebanon because the Lebanese were getting increasingly tired of their mismanagement and corruption and, um, and their radicalizing influence on politics in Lebanon.

So. I think that this is hard is really kind of like my unsatisfying answer. But I think that the best thing that we can do is dwell in that hardness and to accept that there are not clean answers to this and it will surprise Neither of you probably that I, as somebody who loves poetry and loves reading, I’ve been going back over Rainer Maria Rilke lately, because he’s such a wonderful, um, writer of feelings of grief and loss, and he has this line in his book, Letters to a Young Poet, that you have to just, you have to live your way into the answers, and I think that, um, while this is not an actionable policy recommendation here, right, but I think if you dwell in the complex, the complexity of it, feel the tension, um, of the, of how many things are right and many things are wrong, uh, in this knot of difficult issues.

The longer you dwell on that tension and the longer you avoid the, um, the desire to, to slide into, um, oversimplification, you can perhaps, if we’re very lucky, we can live our way into those answers sort of collectively as a society. But it does mean. Yeah, it means that we’re going to be living in a very uncomfortable, um, couple of decades, probably, before we get there.

[00:36:32] Jeremi: Unsatisfying, but compelling. Well, that’s the whole point of literature, right? We as historians often look for neat conclusions. And literature reminds us, as you’ve said so many times so well on this podcast and in other places, right? Literature reminds us of the messiness and the unfinished. Just. Nature of things.

Um, Zachary, we did this when we were talking about the Ukraine war early on, uh, more than a year ago. I think we should do it now. Would you be willing to read your poem one more time at the end?

[00:37:06] Zachary: Sure. A prophecy. There is an old promise, a prophecy, that remains to be fulfilled. A dream whose spark seems almost to be killed.

There is an old saying, a phrase that we have whispered through the years. It is written, it is sung, and it is shouted through our fears. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. The other night I was walking with a friend, and we were singing this, and I asked, what does it mean not to learn war?

And he said, it meant we would have forgotten how to fight. And I asked, could this ever be? And he said, who knows.

[00:37:47] Jeremi: Well, and, uh, Zachary, uh, thank you for, uh, contributing to, uh, a discussion that, that leaves us all. Uh, really thinking more deeply about what we know and what we don’t know and what we should know.

And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us, uh, for this episode and for our sub stack and, uh, for our various efforts to talk about democracy in a civil and learned way. Thank you for joining us for this episode of this is democracy.

[00:38:20] Outro: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Kudima. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

See you next time!