A Landscape of War: On the Nature of Conflict in South Lebanon Munira Khayyat Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Munira Khayyat All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT A Landscape of War: On the Nature of Conflict in South Lebanon Munira Khayyat This dissertation is an inquiry into the naturalization of war. It examines forms of life in a rural borderland that is also a battlefield through an ethnographic exploration of the intertwining of war and everyday living on Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. Life in these parts, for the most part, revolves around tobacco farming, olive cropping, goat herding and other forms of agricultural practice generating subsistence and income and underpinning an ongoing presence in place. The southern borderland is also entangled in an ongoing war condition that cyclically erupts, disrupts, destructs, (re)constructs, and has done for generations now. War in South Lebanon has come to be inhabited as “natural”; it is by now a part of southern life, or better yet, insistently generative of a kind of life that continues – in whichever ways and outside of moral judgments – to be viable here. My inquiry unfolds as a journey through landscape as a place of simultaneous dwelling and warring and concerns itself with what constitutes ordinary living in a rural borderland that is also a battlefield. In what follows I explore how the tobacco-farming village communities of South Lebanon inhabit a long-term and ongoing condition of war in its ordinary, everyday and also violent guises. How do the pathways and rhythms of living in a rural-agricultural margin mesh with the materials and space-times of war? How are military conflicts past, recent and expected recognized, resisted, claimed, encountered, nurtured, inhabited as tabi’i natural and ‘adi, habitual, normal? I conceive of this work as an attempt to place war in life; that is to think of war as a condition as generative and constructive (of life) as it is also destructive. What follows then is an ethnographic attempt to give breathing space to the life that goes on in a place of enduring war. Table of Contents List of Figures ii Acknowledgements vi Prelude: The Hidden Life of War xii I. Introduction 1 II. Research at the Edge of the Earth 47 III. Once Upon a Wartime in South Lebanon: Genealogy of a War Formation 78 IV. Farming the Frontlines: Cultivating Life in a Place of War 139 V. The Resisting Earth: On the Nature and Culture of War in South Lebanon 183 VI. Inhabiting the Gray Zone: Life at the Borders of the Possible 228 VII. Reprise: A Landscape of War 275 Coda 317 Bibliography 322 ! i! List of Figures Figure 1 Broken door. Beirut. Figure 2. Holiday Inn. Kantari. Figure 3. Four Windows. Beirut. Figure 4. Car Kitty. Beirut. Figure 5. Pink Bullets. Beirut. Figure 6. Wild meadow with spring flowers and barbed wire along the border in South Lebanon. Figure 7. Deadly dance: olive grove and minefield. Dhaira, South Lebanon. Figure 8. Tobacco seedling greenhouse nurseries in spring in foreground and Israeli military outpost on the border in background. R., South Lebanon Figure 9. Denuded tobacco fields on border. Figure 10. Israeli outpost on border. Figure 11. Post-2006 destruction in Bint Jbeil. Figure 12. Ribbon of road in South Lebanon. Figure 13. UN APC drives past tractor laden with hay in South Lebanon. Figure 14. Map of Israeli-occupied South Lebanon. Figure 15. UN map showing “events” in South Lebanon in the closing days of the 2006 war. Figure 16. Tractor with pilfered “Danger Mines” sign in R., South Lebanon. Figure 17. Partially harvested tobacco plants along the Lebanese-Israeli border, South Lebanon. Figure 18. Homestead in South Lebanon with laundry and tobacco hung out to dry. ! ii! Figure 19. Israeli outpost on border to the left, cypresses to the right. Tobacco field in foreground. Fig. 20. The khabeer stabs the tobacco bale with the ma’liqa to inspect its contents. Figure 21. Abu Fawzi uses a ma’liqa to inspect a tobacco bale before pricing while farmers look nervously on. Fig. 22. Bales of tobacco piled high to the ceiling of the warehouse contain 14 months of toil. Figure 23. Tobacco hung to dry from green to gold in the saqqali in R. South Lebanon. Figure 24. Tobacco kboosh hung from the rafters of a home in South Lebanon. Figure 25. The hands of Fatima are stained black by tar bleeding from the green tobacco leaves she is threading. Figure 26. Temporary pond in marj of R. near border. Fig. 27 The ordinary objects of war. Captured Israeli Army rations on display in Mleeta. Figure 28. The “Sayyid Abbas Barricade” in Mleeta. Figure 29. Display of bunker larder in Mleeta ‘Tunnel’. Poster reads: “My weapons and my soul are twins”. Figure 30. Katyushas among the bushes. Mleeta, South Lebanon. Figure 31. Dummies of fighters among the trees. Mleeta, South Lebanon. Figure 32. S., South Lebanon at sunset. Looking southwest in direction of Israel. Figure 33. “Inhabited” oak. S., South Lebanon. Figure 34. Smashed mosque walls framing scenes of surrounding landscape. Figure 35. S. looking south toward shrine visible as clump atop hilltop in distance. Late summer denuded tobacco fields among a sparse grove of olives in foreground. ! iii! Fig. 36 Fruitful fig tree and ruin of home of dead couple in S. Figure 37. Israeli settlement of Metulla as seen through the border fence at Kfar Kila, South Lebanon. Figure 38. Lebanese-Israeli borderline as viewed from Maroun al Ras. Abandoned dry fields on the Lebanese side up until the Israeli border. Figure 39. Rose Valley/khallet wardeh the exact location of the kidnapping that sparked the 2006 war. Figure 40. UN-distributed poster warning farmers from handling cluster bombs encountered in their orchards. Outside Rmeish municipality, South Lebanon. It reads: “To help UNIFIL clean your lands of unexploded ordinance, do not pick the wrong fruit. Cluster bombs kill”. Figure 41. Foxhole in the wa’r. Azzieh, South Lebanon. Figure 42. Abu Bilal poses next to cluster-bomb. Oleander in background. Figure 43. Goats and goatherd trace a meshwork of paths along the Lebanese-Israeli border. Technical fence, minefields and border road in background. Figure 44. Abu Nimr wipes away his tears as he remembers his son Ali surrounded by his grandchildren and the morning tobacco harvest. The woman in black threading tobacco behind him is the widow of his dead son. The litte girl in the foreground threading tobacco is his dead son’s youngest daughter. Figure 45. J. Abandoned Bedu village on Israeli side of border as viewed from Im Khaled’s garden on Lebanese side of border. Figure 46. Im Alaa remembers how she lost her limb as we sit in her garden. Figure 47. View of border road and adjacent minefield from Im Khaled’s garden. ! iv! Figure 48. Billboard overlooking khallet wardeh. Figure 49. “White ground”. Fig. 50. Marj with view of Israeli military outpost on hill in the middle of the frame. Figure 51. R. viewed through the thorns. Figure 52. Tobacco fields and olives in khallet al hamra. Figure 53. Kifri ancient olives in R. Figure 54. “Blinderness”. Figure 55. Poster of assassinated Hizbullah mastermind Imad Mughnieh with minefield and Israeli border road in background. Figure 56. Fields, minefields, and Israeli border road. Figure 57. Palestine as viewed from Blat, South Lebanon. Figure 58. The blessed and the profane. Olive tree in tobacco field. Figure 59 Valley Figure 60. S. Ruins, goat enclosures and shrine on top of hill in distance. ! v! Acknowledgements Long have I dreamt of this very moment: when I begin to write the acknowledgements for this work. And yet now that here I am finally, I am curiously silenced by the difficulty of the task. So many people to thank, so much to be grateful for at the end of this long, long journey that has taken up a substantial segment of my life thus far. Those of you named here please accept my humble gratitude, those of you inadvertently left out, forgive me, for the road has indeed been long – in time as well as space. In Chicago, at the University of Chicago, where it all began, I remain in awe of the brilliance of Michel-Rolph Trouillot with whom I was lucky enough to have studied before he left us too soon. Rolph you were the best teacher I ever had and the notes I took in your classroom are carefully bound and accompany me everywhere: I will never forget you. “Systems” would have never been the same without the “non-aligned” comradeship of Nitzan Shoshan and Mariana Cavalcanti: I thank the stroke of fate that brought us together! Vyjayanthi Rao and Satya Pemmaraju right at the beginning you took me under your wing and there I remain: thanks for all the jazz! I would also like to thank Jean Comaroff for her infectious inspiration and encouragement, Elizabeth Povinelli and Saba Mahmood. And to Tala Nasr, who drove in the depth of winter all the way to Chicago from Atlanta, where she was completing her medical residency in neonatology, to watch me moan about writing a paper and to make me laugh: you truly are my best best friend. In New York, at Columbia University, I would like to first and foremost thank the members of my committee, who inspired and argued, encouraged and admonished in ! vi! equal measure to see me safely through. Brinkley Messick, I am so grateful for your constant encouragement and guidance, your inspiration and your calming presence; Michael Taussig, thank you for illumination surreal and profane, your vibrant curiosity and tireless intellectual energy; Nadia Abu el Haj and Lila Abu Lughod, you are both role models and critical interlocutors and for that I am grateful.