On This Land

5 April 2026

My patient and I, both presently in the US, are originally from neighboring villages in south Lebanon. She, Shia from a predominately Shia village; I, Orthodox Christian from a mixed village. I can see her village from the veranda of my three-hundred-year-old ancestral home. It's a view that I know and love well.

I weep while FaceTiming with my cousin who is unable to sleep during intense shelling. I attempt to comfort him, to witness and bear his despair. He asks if I can hear the explosions that rock and destroy, he does not know what. Won't know what has been broken until dawn itself breaks. I feel I fail him when I tell him the truth: I cannot hear what terrorizes him. My cousin, seventy years old, refuses to abandon our home and village. He remains alone in his home.

My patient's village has been nearly destroyed by Israeli bombs. Only a handful of people remain, mostly very old women and men who refuse dislocation. We share a deep love and connection to our respective villages and ancestral homes. We both have dreamt of returning, she to open a school, I to retire and raise goats. Once, she returned from a visit home and brought me an olive branch from my village, in a period of intense bombardments when I did not know if I would ever be able to return. I wept with pain and gratitude for this priceless gift and our wordless understanding of its meaning.

Things are unfathomably more hopeless now. Israel's defense minister, Israel Katz, and finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, are planning to re-occupy Lebanon up to the Litani River. They vow to drive out residents and destroy every home. This beloved river, thirty kilometers from our southern border, welcomes the Lebanese to the south. Since 2023, Israel has escalated its use of white phosphorus in south Lebanon, a notorious and unlawful scorched-earth tactic to clear the land of vegetation and other life forms. The people of the south resist and refuse submission.

During the Ottoman Empire, when Chris