Points of Entry

Mary Turfah writes on Lebanon and broken glass in an online release from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 44, “Pressure.”

By Mary TurfahFebruary 9, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• LARB Lit

• Politics

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 44: Pressure. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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MY PARENTS’ HOUSE, in the south, was struck three times. We hadn’t built the house ourselves—it came with a piece of land my family had purchased for its banana trees. When my grandfather, then 10 years old, fled to Lebanon from Palestine in 1948, he had no shoes. His mother, he said, hadn’t gone to school; he had to supplement her earnings as a seamstress, and to support his sisters. He worked as a laborer for years, tilling the lands of a man who treated him and the other workers without dignity, a small man who needed to make others feel that they needed him. The man threw the workers’ wages at them as he might have thrown food at hungry dogs. My grandfather, still a boy, was not as fast as the other men, and gathered less than his fair share. On his rare days off, he slept, his body so sore that he struggled to move at all. On the other days, my grandfather worked against his body, saving enough money that, a decade and some change later, he could start renting orange orchards in ‘Adloun and, by the time my father was a teenager, buying them. Then, watermelon fields. Then, thick rows of banana trees that stretched for kilometers—so far that, by the time I was a child and we stayed with him in the summer, all I could see around me, from the roof of the house he built on some of the first land he purchased, were banana leaves.

It did not rain in the summer. My father prayed outside, on my grandfather’s roof. I tried it once at sunset. The roof’s concrete had been left unfinished, and it scraped my knees through my pants.

There is a nighttime prayer called al-Ghufayla, from the Arabic gha-fa-la, which means “fell asleep.” Ghufayla translates to “a small neglect,” the “ay” modifying toward the diminutive, and meaning, literally, something like “a small sleep,” a nodding off. Among the verses recited during this prayer is one that reads,

And He holds the keys to the Unknown which none knows except Him, and He knows what is in/of the land and in/of the ocean, and not a leaf falls except that He knows it, and not a seed in the depths of earth and not a ripened nor rotten thing except that it is recorded in a book, lucid/clear (mubeen).

Imagine reciting this surrounded by banana trees that stopped only where the Mediterranean Sea started, as the sun set into the sea beneath a sky many colors more than blue. I remember the feeling, the goosebumps, and still get them when I think about the leaves that blurred into deep green all around me. There was an accounting, somewhere, for the vibrations of leaves whose borders I couldn’t perceive—for everything. A feeling of wide-eyed smallness surged in me, pressed me into my feet. I did not know but something did, and I was, in that moment, enveloped by it.

I didn’t tell you my parents’ house was on the sea. A little over a decade ago, my parents bought a piece of land contiguous to the land that belonged to my grandfather. The house, which seemed to have been abandoned a long time ago, came with it. One of my father’s brothers helped us renovate. Running power lines through its walls, a contractor he’d hired noted the walls’ thickness. A family friend who knew Yasser Arafat said that his men had built the house—that Arafat himself had lived there during the Palestine Liberation Organization’s time in the south of Lebanon. The house was bombed three times by the Israelis last October because it was built to resist collapse, and because it did not collapse after their first or second strike.

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The news that our house had been bombed—the first time—arrived via WhatsApp. My father forwarded a photo. I was roughly 24 hours into a hospital shift in the United States and had just come out of the operating room. I took my phone off Do Not Disturb, clicked on the photo my father had shared, and zoomed in with my fingers, searching for something I’d recognize. Our basketball hoop—which my parents spent hours, one summer, driving through Sur looking for—lay sideways on the ground, its metal pole unbent.

Immediately after the ceasefire on November 27, 2024, I went to Lebanon for three-and-a-half days. I went with my mother, who’d never particularly cared for this house. We arrived in Beirut in the evening. The next afternoon, we drove just over an hour south to ‘Adloun. My aunt had lost her daughter—a twin—and her grandchild, her daughter’s son. By “lost,” I mean Israeli soldiers killed them with bombs supplied by the United States.

In the south, a stranger I met in Lebanon said to me, Israel did not leave a single family without tears in its eyes. Another woman—a doctor, my parents’ friend with whom we spent much of the trip—later said, with her standard matter-of-factness, that this was what the West had decided should be the price of resisting humanity’s annihilation.

My mother and I needed to offer our condolences, and to see my father’s family. We stopped first at what was left of our house. Shards of glass littered the ground. Where was the house? There wasn’t more rubble than might make up a bathroom. Objects scattered by the blast—appliances, the fabric and insides of a couch—had since been gathered into piles. My mother pointed out the metal of the washing machine, the dryer. The wooden door of a closet. I found a fake rose and rolled its stem under my foot. I pulled out my phone to take a picture, my screen mediating a distance that felt familiar. For a moment I was at home, scrolling through, seeing what others witnessed with their bodies. And then, back in my own body in ‘Adloun, I heard myself say plastic flowers never die, a line I resented (and the only one I’d retained) from an ethnography I had been made to read in college. A chunk of the rose was missing, like it had been scooped out. My mother bent down to recover a pocketbook of prayers from one of the piles, dusty, its spine intact.

Almost two decades earlier, my father boarded the first Middle East Airlines flight to land in Beirut after the last ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, in 2006. He drove through Beirut’s southern suburbs, the Dahieh, and through the south. In the Dahieh, he pulled a Qur’an out from a hill of rubble, plastered open to what one has to imagine were the last things a stranger’s eyes knew before the missile struck. Dripped onto the pages were specks of dried blood.

My father placed this Qur’an in a plastic bag and brought it home to the US to show us. I still remember him kneeling before his suitcase, pulling out the book slowly so as not to damage it. I was 11 at the time and had neither the language nor the proper frame to articulate what felt wrong. I asked whether this was considered stealing. It was not the blood on its own that I wished not to see; it was the sight of death in a place—on an object—I felt it didn’t belong. Someone had sought comfort, protection, I thought, and their seeking hadn’t materialized how they’d hoped. None of us wants to die, only to live in a different world.

The book my mother picked up from what remained of our house was not a Qur’an but something adjacent, dua’a: words written not by God but by people who’d spent their lives aligning with God’s resonance, and who had asked God to bring them closer, closer. In Islam there is no original sin; human nature is definitively good, a person’s potential perfection, every act of harm a choice people make.

My mother’s pockets were too small; she blew dust off the book’s cover and carried it at her side, satisfied, registering what she considered a small miracle, an aya, a sign. Here were bombs, she’d said when she first heard the news that our house was gone, that at least hadn’t killed a person. We had the means to rebuild—here was a chance, she’d said, to offer something up against the worst people in the world.

Dyssynchronous calls to sunset prayer rose from the hills behind us, and, from what seemed to be nowhere, the revving of an engine. One of my uncles appeared on his motorcycle. He asked—his smile revealing more wrinkles on his face than I remembered—if we were looking for something. He asked if I wanted to see what their bombs had done to our banana trees. I said yes and he said yalla, let’s go then, edging forward in his seat and nodding back toward the space he’d cleared for me.

We stopped at a crater whose exact size was hard to make out in the dusk, but it was many trees deep, too big to capture in a photo. At the very edges of the hole, trees’ leaves were scorched, their exposed roots outlining a circumference through the dirt. Most of them appeared okay, although who knows which carcinogens they’d been exposed to. The Israelis regularly used shells containing white phosphorus, setting olive trees and tobacco fields ablaze—poisoning what was left, trying to make our earth uninhabitable, moved by a logic belonging to those who can neither love nor know the land. If we can’t have it, no one can.

My uncle and I rode back to an area my mother and I had passed in our car on the way in, 10 meters from what was left of our house. They’d moved the concrete, he said; it would get in the way of rebuilding. Already, I thought. I stared at the rubble, at the bulldozer resting on top of it. I stared at the walls that had reassured Arafat, a full meter thick. I took a picture.

Later, I learned that people around the country weren’t sure what to do with the tons and tons of rubble Israel left behind. Environmental agencies had announced that it was biohazardous and couldn’t be dumped into the water. They had yet to offer anywhere else to put it.

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People in Lebanon and elsewhere—people who mostly experienced the south through The New York Times, who had not been displaced, who had not lost a person—spoke of “Pyrrhic victories,” condemning sacrifices that were not their own. Sacrifices they didn’t understand. A friend, the doctor, asked a group chat of medical colleagues who had mocked people’s celebrations whether they understood what it meant that she could return to her home. One colleague responded with something along the lines of you’re entitled to your feelings. The others said nothing.

As soon as the ceasefire went into effect at 0400 on November 27, people—some of whom had been displaced for two months—started to make their way south through hours of traffic. Those who returned to villages and towns Israel intended to occupy post-ceasefire were shot at, some killed, by soldiers who believed that God looked like them.

That day, the doctor stood at the outer limit of her hometown, Bazouriye, and cried. The feeling, she said, was ‘iz: something like a sudden, visceral awareness of human worth, of your worth; of your head held high, lifted by others, many of whom gave themselves to show you what a person can be. She took in the immensity of the sacrifice, without once wondering whether that sacrifice was worth it. The thought, she said, turns the blame inward. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what Israel is after—a misunderstanding that comes easily to people who live for themselves; people who can’t accept that others are not like them, that there exist people who insist on believing in a world that values human life, in spite of (and thanks to) what they witness. People who work toward this world knowing they probably won’t live to see it.

The doctor and those around her, she said, knew with certainty—as if there had ever been a doubt—that this enemy would not calibrate for itself a moral floor, didn’t exist on a plane that factored morality into its calculus at all. On our way back to Beirut one evening, my mother shared news of a family that had, in coordination with the Israelis, received permission from the Lebanese army and UNIFIL to bury a woman Israel had killed during the war. She was taken by ambulance to the cemetery whose earth carried her ancestors. As the family neared the cemetery, Israeli tanks approached them, ushered in by the sound of metal tracks. Those who’d come to bury her fled, abandoning the woman’s body in the ambulance. The family again contacted the Lebanese army and UNIFIL, who in turn contacted the Israelis. The family was informed that they had 30 minutes to bury the woman and get out. As they neared the ambulance, Israeli soldiers fired at them. The woman’s son was shot in his arm and taken to the hospital. At the time he gave his testimony to reporters, his mother’s body still lay in the ambulance the Israelis would not let them reach.

The doctor and those around her knew that any limit against Israel’s expansion would have to be imposed—and that they would give everything they had to impose it. As the doctor walked through Bazouriye, the area around and including her parents’ house had been so thoroughly destroyed that she couldn’t orient herself. The power lines and fixtures that had once signaled it was time to turn right, to turn left, were gone. She heard herself asking aloud for help finding the rubble that belonged to her family.

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Standing before it on that first day, on our first trip to the south, I didn’t feel particularly moved. In part because the sky was gray, the air thick, salty. And because I’d already mourned the loss, seen the picture my father had sent. And because the rubble was not where the house had been.

We left the rubble and bulldozer to see my aunt. She was dressed in black. She told me that before she and her family fled, she had opened all the windows in her house. Israel hadn’t given people a warning. It was determined to maximize its civilian kill count, to achieve its objectives—to force submission. Yet attempts to do so, against a people who are not waiting on the colonizer to perceive their humanity, will always have the opposite effect. And this the colonial mind is unable to grasp, because to understand it would be to unravel. Instead, goes Israel’s logic, if a certain amount of terrorizing force doesn’t work, the answer is more. My aunt’s daughter and grandchild and hundreds of others were killed on the same day I checked my phone after leaving the operating room. The bloodiest day the south remembered.

People fled north all at once. My aunts and uncles and their children waited in traffic for nine hours, 11. Maybe you saw the photo online: two arms extended through the windows of parallel cars, traffic stilled around them, one pouring water from a plastic bottle into the plastic bottle held by the other. The gesture, the photo itself, is very Lebanese. I didn’t find it particularly surprising; it’s the least I know to expect from a people who, every day, remind me of the bare minimum we owe each other.

Had she not left her windows open, my aunt said, the sonic pressure from Israel’s bombs and shock waves created by intentional breaks in the sound barrier would have shattered the glass. Either way, she knew, debris would gather in her home. In the week since returning, she had cleaned her house three times—the bathrooms many more—to get rid of the smell.

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The doctor insisted we stop by her apartment in Beirut as soon as we arrived, straight from the airport. My mother entered first. She and the doctor held each other for what felt like a long time. First, hamdillah ‘assaleimah. Thank God for your safety. And then, ‘athamallah ajrik. May God recognize the significance of what you’ve given. The doctor’s nephew, a dentist, had been killed by Israel.

The doctor had prepared sandwiches and yogurt in case we were hungry. Had her home been damaged? my mother asked. Her home was okay, the doctor replied. Her family had been lucky; they had fixed the broken glass quickly. Since the ceasefire, the doctor added, the price of glass had doubled or tripled in some places.

The doctor’s parents’ apartment in Beirut had been damaged, the glass on their balcony shattered and part of the wall blown off, exposing the storage area that kept her late father’s papers. The doctor’s father was from the same collection of villages in northernmost Palestine as my grandfather; he had also fled Palestine at the start of the Nakba. As word of the massacre in my grandfather’s village, Salha, spread to neighboring villages—what Zionist documents call, deploying a euphemism for psychological terrorism, “whispering operations”—the other villages, too, were “depopulated.”

Before he fled, the doctor’s father had time to gather some of the family’s belongings. He had preserved these until his passing—and now, the doctor said, the documents her father had kept were among the papers soaked from the rain. Or, they had been: she found them in the storage area of her parents’ damaged apartment and brought them back to hers, where she spent hours separating one page from another—slowly, so as to keep the pages from tearing—and laid them out on her living room floor to dry. She would buy laminated binders soon, she said, to prevent anything like this from happening again. In the bedroom of her own children (who’d years ago moved out), where the dried papers had been organized into piles, she showed me letters dating back to the mid-1800s, Ottoman times, correspondences with Mandate authorities, her father’s accounting of which parcels of land in Palestine belonged to whom, pages and pages of his poetry. She read a few stanzas, and I recognized immediately the gravity of what was almost lost, what she had labored to keep.

In the final hours before a ceasefire goes into effect, the Lebanese say the Israelis “byiflato,” are set loose, act without restraint—whatever restraints existed for them in the first place. In 2006, Israel dropped millions of cluster bombs on the south of Lebanon, 90 percent of these in the final 72 hours of their sadistic military campaign, so that people, especially the children, would continue to explode on their land in the months and years to come. So that the specter of Zionism would hang over a land the Israelis could not keep. So that the people of the land, especially the children, would remember.

This time, the doctor’s neighborhood in Beirut stayed safe for most of the war. Hours before the ceasefire, two buildings down her street were bombed. My mother and I passed one on our way to check into our hotel. The upper stories were destroyed; the blast had skeletonized much of what remained. Even in the dark, I could tell there was no glass inside the window frames.

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The second time we drove south, the doctor came with us. We visited a friend who had stayed in her town for each of the 66 days Israel pummeled the houses and trees and cemeteries and roads around her. She was fiftysomething and had cancer. She had been displaced once before, in 2006. She found the experience humiliating. This time, she said, if God decided to take her, she wanted to go with her house.

Her children, adults, decided to stay with their mother. One night, she heard an explosion so close that she initially thought she had died. After she realized she was still in her body, she panicked—she was certain the bomb had landed on the house. Maybe it had landed on her daughter’s room. She called out. No answer. She called out again. The friend’s son answered, reassuring his mother that he and his sister were okay. They gathered downstairs as a family. It was dark. They had lost power. They made Nescafé and told stories into the night, talking about life and, of course, death, to get to the life that came after. They discussed the nature of the enemy we were up against. They told jokes. They laughed.

Remembering, the friend smiled in spite of herself. She’d just returned from a collective funeral. Ninety people in her town had been killed, including an entire family bearing my mother’s last name, Charara—Arabic for “spark.” Had we looked into her house that night, she said, we’d have thought she and her children had gone mad from the way they laughed. How alive they felt.

Inkasar li’zeiz? asked the doctor. Did the glass break? I heard some version of this question at every reunion since the war, so frequently that I learned to anticipate it. It was preceded only by concerns about a person’s loved ones: tamneeni, keefun ahlik; reassure me, how’s your family? The glass offered an unimposing point of entry, a window into what in many ways had nothing to do with glass and everything to do with people.

The force of the blast had shattered all the glass in her home, the woman responded. By the time we visited, most of it had been replaced by people in her town who would not charge her a lira more than what it cost them to repair it.

Upon arriving, we’d gathered around a table outside, the sun directly on us. The friend’s house overlooked the hills and valleys of the south. It made sense, I thought then, why the Zionists dreamed of this land. And, hearing this woman speak, why they will never have it.

The sun’s intensity gave the doctor a migraine. She asked if we could step inside for lunch. The glass framing the back door was cracked—part of it had broken off, leaving sharp edges—and had not yet been replaced. Tinted mint, textured in some places—it would take more time to fix, I figured. I asked the doctor if the lines in the glass, reaching outward from a disappeared center, had been part of the door’s original design. They were evenly spaced and straight, like the ruler-traced rays of a cartoon sun. The doctor, who had grown up under the Israeli occupation of Beirut and south Lebanon, was in medical school during the country’s so-called civil war; she had no choice but to learn the physics of bombs. Due to the force of the blast, she explained, the glass had cracked from the center outward.

Back in Beirut that night, I typed “how glass cracks” into Google. The search results were nonspecific. I added the word “bomb” and found a summary in Nature of an article titled, with healthy alliteration, “Window Breakage by Bomb-Blast.” It had been published in 1940, which explained the relevance for a Western audience. Bombs, the summary claimed, affected glass in two phases:

[D]uring the compression period the centre of the glass is forced inwards as a diaphragm, and ring and radial cracks develop. In the second stage, before the pieces have time to separate, the “suction” half of the wave comes into effect and the pieces fall towards the bomb.

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Glass is not suited for war. Zionism is incompatible with life. According to a complaint submitted by Lebanon to the United Nations Security Council on December 24, 2024, Israel violated the ceasefire agreement 816 times between November 27 and December 22. In their coverage of the complaint’s submission, The New York Times opted for the headline “A Month on, a Tenuous Cease-fire Holds in Lebanon.” By December 28, Israel’s violations had exceeded 1,100.

On December 27, a 75-year-old woman—who had, since the start of the war, refused to leave her home in Yaroun—was declared a martyr by her people. Lebanese Red Cross and UNIFIL workers found her stilled body in her house almost a month after the ceasefire, once the Israelis had finally withdrawn. They assumed, initially, that she had died of a heart attack. An ambulance and first responders were called, and a medical examiner later discovered gunshot wounds and multiple fractured bones. It’s not hard to imagine what the Israelis did to her. A week earlier, three weeks into the ceasefire, the woman—who had for so many become a symbol of steadfastness, of resistance—was still alive. Attempts to reach her were prevented by Israeli gunfire.

Every day since the so-called ceasefire goes something like this: on December 11, for instance, an explosion heard near Al-Jebbayn Tayr Harfa triangle was thought to be the sound of the Israeli military detonating people’s homes. That day, Israeli occupation forces prevented the Lebanese Army from entering the northern part of Khiam. The Israelis raided a house in Borj al-Muluk, interrogated its inhabitants, and ordered them to abandon their home until further notice. That day too, an Israeli air strike targeted the area around Ainata cemetery, where people had gathered to bury their dead, killing one person and injuring another. On December 11, three people were killed in an Israeli drone strike on a car in Bint Jbeil, the hometown of my mother’s father. Another was killed in Aitaroun. Another was killed in an air strike in Beit Leif, returning from his cattle farm in his van.

Every day, for 60 days. The ceasefire stipulated Israel’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon by January 26. In the days leading up to the deadline, Israel announced that it needed more time, affirming the people of the land’s suspicion that Israel had no intention of leaving Lebanon at all. The people of the land responded that they would return to their villages together, on the morning of January 26, whether Israel was ready or not. A spokesperson for the Israeli military issued a warning: anyone who tried to enter the so-called buffer zone—their home—would be putting their lives in danger. At 0400 that morning, people flooded south, unarmed, unimpeded by fear. Dozens were killed and injured. Mothers and fathers were shot in front of their children, children in front of their parents. A woman in a black abaya faced down a tank, the wind blowing her dress back. Another marched toward a group of soldiers, her arms out, telling the soldier shooting at her, in Arabic, to go back to his family, that this is my land. A young man gave a tank the finger—a gesture intended for the soldiers inside to understand. The Israelis retreated from upwards of 30 towns and villages in just one day. And like that, the people liberated their land, knowing, as they already knew, that the price would always be paid in blood.

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On my third day, the doctor and I visited the Dahieh. We parked near a mosque in which she and I had each prayed hundreds of times. Israel hadn’t bombed the mosque directly; instead, they struck a building facing it, less than 10 meters away. Despite the marble being power-washed, the mosque’s outer walls were still stained with smoke. From the outside, its infrastructure appeared mostly intact. Inside was a different story. Some of the chandeliers that hung from its high ceilings—which I’d sometimes stared up at as a child, distracted during prayer—had fallen, metal and crystal and glass breaking and shattering onto carpets. Chairs had crashed into walls, bookshelves.

Near the mosque was a hospital, also significantly damaged from the blast. It’s a pattern we saw in Gaza: rather than target the hospitals right away, the Israelis dropped bombs near them, narrowing the distance of their strikes daily as they gauged what they could and could not do without consequences. In the south of Lebanon, Israel regularly targeted ambulances and medical clinics. They killed over 40 medics in one day. In Beirut, they hesitated, wary of the response—though, assuming sustained Western support, this could change in the next war.

In south Lebanon, Israeli soldiers destroyed mosques. They destroyed churches. They destroyed archaeological sites, some of which were thousands of years old. After the ceasefire went into effect, they reached lands they hadn’t been able to during the fighting. Vindictive, they detonated people’s homes—entire streets—with a single click. As in Palestine, they posted videos of themselves doing it, smiling for hungry audiences back home. None of this should surprise us. To paraphrase Mahmoud Darwish, those who kill people will have no issue destroying paintings, books, buildings.

Before we got out of the car, the doctor opened the median console and pulled out two surgical masks. She handed me one and put the other on herself. Who knew what toxins the Israelis were experimenting with? Part of the unforgivable harm Israel has done, I said to the doctor as we stood before the mosque, is to reshape what we know how to accommodate. I was staring at an empty space where there was once a multistory building, a place where people lived. Now, it was gone. And because I had spent the last year looking at what Israel has done to Gaza, what appeared before me then in the Dahieh felt not only plausible but also not so bad, comparatively. A sight that, just over a year ago, would have been unthinkable. At least they hadn’t bombed the mosque directly.

The doctor and I walked past a series of stores whose inventory had been put away, as their windows now covered the ground with pieces of glass made not for war but for living. I heard them crack under my sneakers. I watched my feet. It had rained that morning. I avoided the puddles.

The doctor pointed out the apartment building where a friend of hers lived. It had been bombed in 2006, and she was surprised to see it standing now. We moved toward it to find the surrounding tile spotless, the garbage collected. The absence of debris gave us the pause that a leveled building should.

Another friend of the doctor’s had left her apartment in October for a house she rented some kilometers north, in the mountains. We visited her that night, our last in Beirut. The doctor asked about the apartment: Had the glass broken? Yes, but they’d repaired it already.

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Since returning from Lebanon, I haven’t stopped thinking about glass. Glass in places glass shouldn’t be—like the flies in Jean Genet’s “Four Hours in Shatila,” an essay written in the immediate aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut. Genet finds bodies scattered across the earth of the refugee camp; as he relates “stepp[ing] over the bodies as one crosses chasms,” he draws the reader’s attention again and again to what, he says, a photograph won’t show you: the “thick white smell of death” and the flies, everywhere, covering faces, wounds, mouths “black with flies.” He attempts to capture a fuller sensorium of witness. It is emptying to look at the bodies directly; he finds a way to attend to the loss, obliquely.

Shards of glass: under olive trees, across carpets, in puddles, stuck to the soles of my sneakers, in the trash, in the sea. Glass missing from places glass should have been, a barrier between inside and out that the war burst open. Sheets of glass on the backs of pickup trucks parked on side streets. Overpriced glass, fairly priced glass, transparent glass, tinted glass, and smoked glass—i’zeiz, glass, its buzzing consonants puncturing their way into conversation.

Inkasar li’zeiz? Did the glass break? The question had nothing to do with glass and everything to do with people. A people who refuse to break, asking: Tell me, what happened to you that I cannot see?

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Images courtesy of Mary Turfah.