In what diplomats are calling a ‘fragile truce with a hair trigger’ and what everyone else is calling Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes have once again turned southern Lebanon into a smouldering ashtray of geopolitics. The death toll stands at seventeen, a number that sounds too neat to be an accident but too messy to be a press release.
The strikes hit a cluster of villages where the main exports are olives, resentment and the occasional Hezbollah fighter. It’s the oldest recipe in the Levantine cookbook: drop bombs, call it self-defence, wait for rockets, blame the other side, hold a UN emergency session where everyone speaks in pluperfect clauses about ‘unacceptable escalations’ while doing absolutely nothing.
The ceasefire, which was signed with the usual pomp and immediately began leaking like a rusty sieve, now hangs by a thread that was always made of diplomatic dental floss. ‘We are committed to de-escalation,’ said an Israeli spokesperson, moments before the bombs took off from F-16s. In Gaza, the same speech is given with different accents and slightly more rubble.
The dead include three children, two women and twelve men who were probably just trying to get a loaf of bread without stepping on a landmine. The international community has responded with the traditional combination of sternly worded statements and the quiet shuffling of arms deals. The US has already vetoed any hint of a UN resolution that might inconvenience Israel’s right to bomb things at inconvenient hours.
This is the part of the news cycle where I’m supposed to offer hope. I’ll do you one better: I’ll offer gin. Because the only thing more absurd than the situation is the idea that next week there will be another ‘breakthrough,’ another cease-fire, another round of violence named after a fruit or a season. The peace process is a zombie: it keeps lurching forward even though it should have been buried decades ago.
Seventeen dead. That’s a dinner party in a posh London suburb or a full-scale massacre in the Middle East. Perspective is everything, especially when you’re the one with the high-altitude camera and the smart bombs. The thread holding the ceasefire is not a thread: it’s a noose, and both sides are pulling.
As I write this, my gin has gone warm, which is as good a metaphor as any for the state of affairs. The only question left is whether the next headline will read ‘New Dawn for Peace’ or ‘Body Count Rises.’ I’m not a betting man, but I know which side of the ledger the casinos are on.
In the meantime, raise a glass to the seventeen. They won’t be reading this, but their names will be footnotes in tomorrow’s dry diplomatic cables. And that, dear reader, is the real tragedy: not just the dying, but the tedious repetition of it all. If you’re looking for a silver lining, you’ll need a better lens than mine. I’m out of gin and out of patience.
Reporting from the bar of the Hotel Inferno, where the only ice is cold comfort.
