In Lebanon, war doesn’t just kill you, it rearranges the living

This week, I cancelled a flight. It wasn’t a particularly dramatic act in itself – people cancel flights all the time. A bit gutting, one of those things… With just a few clicks of my smartphone, it was done.

It wasn’t for money reasons, or for work. I cancelled it because the world, once again, has decided I should.

I had meant to be going to Lebanon to surprise my grandfather for his 99th birthday – a number that should come with celebration. A number so improbable, it feels almost defiant.

His is a life that has stretched across empires, the birth of a nation, independence, construction, destruction and reconstruction. Invasions. Wars. A life that, at this point, deserves only one thing: peace.

I am acutely aware of the absurdity of sitting in London and writing about a cancelled trip while people are dying and families are being erased. What I feel today is miniscule in comparison.

But this is also what war does. It doesn’t just kill – it rearranges the living. It corrodes the ordinary. It takes something as simple, as fundamental, as visiting your family and renders it risky, irresponsible or impossible. By any reasonable measure, I have had a privileged existence. The son of an immigrant mother who left war-torn Beirut with my British father, I was raised in exceptional circumstances in the United Kingdom. My life exists purely because my parents and grandparents endured theirs.

Summer holidays in Lebanon along with my brother and sister feel almost mythical now: manakish for breakfast, days spent splashing in the Mediterranean, minibus trips across the border to Syria to see even more family – cousins, uncles, aunties. Music, parties, dancing. These are not romantic inventions, they are real memories.

But then came the interruptions. Again and again, something always happens in Lebanon.

Armed conflicts – trips cancelled. Attempted invasions – reunions abandoned. Political assassinations – plans up in the air. Always a problem. Always a question mark. A grim, predictable cycle in which ordinary Lebanese life builds itself back up, only to be flattened again by forces that insist on calling themselves necessary.

Last month, Donald Trump laughed as he wondered how people could still live in Lebanon. As if the act of staying in one’s home is irrational – or that everyone has a foreign passport tucked conveniently away in a drawer.

For my Teta (grandmother) and Jeddo (grandfather), their lives must feel as though they have moved in reverse. They raised their children in luxury and comfort, only for that to give way to bomb shelters in basements, armed checkpoints, car bombs and tanks on the streets. They are now financially weaker than they have ever been, with less family around them than ever before.

They go to sleep to the sound of gunfire, drones, missiles and explosions. They are in their nineties. They should be going to sleep to the sound of nothing at all.

And then on Wednesday, Beirut came under its heaviest assault in years. More than 200 people killed in a matter of hours. The same city that once held my summer memories now feels unpredictable, haphazard – as though anywhere, at any moment, can become the centre of violent chaos.

The balcony I remember from summer holidays – looking out over Beirut and the Mediterranean – has become something else entirely. Now it is a vantage point. A place to watch the smoke rising, the sirens, the screams. The quiet counting of time between explosions. A front row seat to the destruction of my family’s city.

I was told yesterday that “today is good” – not because anything has improved, but because it was quiet. Quiet now meaning fewer than a hundred airstrikes in 10 minutes. That is what passes for relief.

People here reach out, but kind, well-meaning messages are impossible to answer properly. “Are your family OK?” You stare at it for a while, because what does “OK” even mean in this context? They are not dead. They have not been displaced. So you say “Yes”. Or you say “They’re fine for now”, which is closer to the truth, but still feels like a lie.

I wanted to see them. To sit with them. To hug them. To hear the same stories I have heard a hundred times before and will never hear enough. To mark, however briefly, the fact that a human life has reached 99 years.

Instead, I’m left to tackle a more difficult truth – will I ever see them again?

Of course, none of this is accidental. All of the missed visits, the cancelled flights, the quiet severing of ordinary life are not unfortunate by-products of what is going on in the world. They are entirely predictable consequences of decisions made by people who will never have to live with them.

You watch matters unfold and wonder which is worse: that two giddy men in the Oval Office – one of them is reckless, the other calculating – knew exactly what would happen in the wider region when they attacked Iran on 28 February; or that they didn’t care enough to think it through. That the newly announced ceasefire didn’t initially bother getting to the detail of how much, or even if, it included whatever is even going on in Lebanon. The result is always the same: normal lives will always be reduced to collateral.

Every building has a family inside it. Every explosion has a scream attached to it. These are obvious things, but they are easy to forget when you are watching from a distance.

I am angry at the predictability of it. Angry at the language that sanitises it. Security. Stability. Necessary action. Angry at the way things continue, decade after decade, as though this is simply how things are meant to be.

Angry that, in order to see my family, I must first consult the Foreign Office website, my travel insurance policy schedule and make a risk assessment. I must work out to what extent I trust the prime minister of Israel’s definitions of the words “ceasefire” and “peace talks”.

It is not a complicated request. It is, in fact, the most basic one there is.

Angry, too, at my own position in all of this. At the fact that I have been able to opt out, however reluctantly.

That I can just cancel a flight on my smartphone and remain safe. That I can sit here and write about it.