"That is [a] kind of a conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean."
Ghassan Kanafani, 1970
Nearly a decade ago, my grandparents drove me to the garden of Maroun el Rass. Decorated with flowers, fountains and rusted playground equipment, the garden sat at the fringe of perhaps one of the most volatile frontiers in the world. That day, I swung down monkey bars, climbed up slides and shared laughs with my cousins.
In all my childhood ignorance, I didn’t bother to notice the uniform towers that spanned in the seemingly infinite distance on either side of me, didn’t notice the peacekeepers standing beside fat guns. I didn’t notice the long statue of a military man pointing to the shrunken horizon with a disdain thick in his eyes.
The Blue Line is not a border, but rather a “line of withdrawal,” a dirt road flanked by electric barbed fencing that stretches 120 kilometers. The earth around it remains in a constant state of limbo, barren yet green-bushed, dead yet alive. It carries the tears of children, the memories of great fires and phosphorus gas bombs. Ratified by the United Nations in the year 2000, the line stands as a glass solution to the fragile stability between Israel and Lebanon, one that has shattered too many times since.
The garden of Maroun el Rass is now destroyed. With that, a barrage of bombs have wrought devastation on the village in which it sat, as has been the case with most villages in South Lebanon, including my mother’s hometown of Baraachit.
The price of war is astounding. Since October 7th, tens of thousands of people have lost their lives across Palestine, Israel and Lebanon. In my mother’s home country, people force teary smiles at the funerals of their loved ones, assured that the martyred are rewarded with a place in Jannah (heaven). Across the border, the families of Israeli hostages chain themselves across a bridge, touting a banner that reads “Abandoned to their deaths.” Last year, a member of the US Air Force set himself aflame outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC in an effort to erase his complicity in his nation’s crimes. In Gaza, the displaced lay their sajadat (prayer mats) beside the ruins of a mosque and raise their hands, making the first Friday prayers of Ramadan.
Here at Cornell, we hold vigils, standing in solemnity with dropped heads, as if we carry the consequences, the shame of the decisions made by leaders thousands of miles across the globe. We host town hall meetings, segregate ourselves on either side of the Memorial Room. Students shoot glares and steal photos of one another in silent acts of malice. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that we have all been taught morality, but morality loses significance to some in times of great suffering and distress. Still, I have been to the community dinners, spoken to others who were willing to set aside their biases and open up their hearts, who long for peace just as much as I do.
I am lucky to have made a friend before the conflict, who I might have otherwise been opposed to, given the nature of our differences. What was so jarring to me was how easy it was for us to comfort one another, knowing that if our parents had not fled to America, we could have been experiencing the war in real time. In our combined suffering, we seemed to have found a sort of understanding. In the end, we are just students. There is no way that we can grasp the magnitude of demolition that has ruptured across Gaza, nor could we feel one another’s pain. But we can try to.
By viewing a conversation with the “other” side as that between sword and neck, we are setting ourselves up for decades of more conflict, to which civilians are most affected.
With everything and nothing in our power, we have a responsibility as Cornell students to set an example for the rest of the world. The future is in our hands, and we cannot tear away the barbed wire fencing, cannot take down the statues and paint over symbols of hatred, cannot bring back what was lost unless we push aside our differences and face one another with kindness and empathy.
We have no right to run the risk of another humanitarian catastrophe.
In the words of Mahmoud Darwish:
The war will end. The leaders will shake hands. The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son. That girl will wait for her beloved husband. And those children will wait for their heroic father.
I don’t know who sold our homeland. But I saw who paid the price.
Leah Badawi is a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences and Co-Editor in Chief of Rainy Day Literary Magazine. Her fortnightly column “Leah Down The Law” reflects on politics, history, and broader culture in an attempt to tell stories are often left between the lines. She can be reached at lbadawi@cornellsun.com.
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Leah Badawi is a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences and Co-Editor in Chief of Rainy Day Literary Magazine. Her fortnightly column “Leah Down The Law” reflects on politics, history, and broader culture in an attempt to tell stories are often left between the lines. She can be reached at lbadawi@cornellsun.com.
