World News

I was at work last Saturday when I heard the blast. Since that moment, the world has been turned on its head. The school called asking me to come and pick up my child. I rushed to the metro and headed north in a carriage filled with anxious people calling their loved ones to ensure their safety, melancholy etched on their faces, uncertainty metastasising from one to another as they checked the latest news on their mobiles.

This is the second time within a year that Israel has decided to go for a war of choice with Iran, but I suppose that is the new normal. Israel has long enjoyed a unique position of near-total impunity when it comes to harassing Palestinians, and now the green light to aggression seems to extend to its unending wars and spreading of terror across the region. And it feels different this time. The pretence that there is some level of precision in the strikes is gone. Instead, the attacks appear indiscriminate, with targets ranging from schools to hospitals, from police stations to urban amenities – all hit with a level of might that seems aimed at demolition, total destruction, the flattening of the city.

“Beirutification” should become a word if it is not already. By that, I mean the slow normalisation of periodic attacks on a city by a capricious and violent state, until blasts and death become woven into the fabric of urban life. It is urban death by a thousand knives. It is the suffocation of imagination and the thwarting of any civil attempt at a better life, and the gradual dilapidation of a nation to the point where it can no longer stand again, condemned instead to rot in exhausted silence. That is what years of war have done to Beirut. Now something similar is unfolding in Tehran.

Anonymous has really stepped up their writing game.