War and the Bitter Knowledge of Geography

In ordinary life, we inhabit what anthropologists call a milieu: a space infused with memory and human relationships, made up of the home, the village square, the neighborhood shop, the mosque or the church, and the road to school. In wartime, place is transformed into space. It becomes an object of measurement and management: range, field of vision, supply line. The shift is from meaning to function, from dwelling to calculation and enumeration. It is as though the land were stripped of its story and rewritten in the language of war.

War fractures our sense of belonging. Belonging is ordinarily built through stability and the quiet repetition of daily life: the same road, the same faces, the same habits. Once a place becomes threatened, belonging gives way to a state of anxiety. One remains attached to a place that may have to be abandoned at any moment. What emerges is a form of “provisional belonging”: you love the place, yet no longer trust that you will be able to remain there. This paradox leaves a lasting fracture within.

The body, too, is transformed. In times of peace, it moves through familiar places almost without conscious thought. In war, it learns to bend, to enter the world of calculation: to hide, estimate distances, decipher sounds, scan its surroundings before every movement. The senses become an early warning system. The land is now understood through danger: Where can you hide? Which way can you pass? Which route offers the least exposure? At what moment? This is a form of “embodied knowledge” that reshapes our relationship with the world at an unconscious level.

It is not only place that changes. Time changes as well. In war, time becomes compressed. Brief moments carry decisions of life or death. Human beings are pulled away from extended time, the continuity that links past, present, and future, into an overwhelming present. This compression weakens the capacity to plan and strengthens the instinct to react. The land is no longer the stage upon which a life is built, but the setting in which fleeting moments must be managed.

Wars turn human beings into numbers. Philosophically, this is part of the rationalization of war: reducing people to units that can be counted.

Here, a double alienation takes hold: alienation from the self, because I am not merely a number; and alienation from the land, which no longer recognizes my story, only my location. All of this threatens the very idea of human dignity, rooted in one’s name, one’s history, and one’s life.

After war, the land is never neutral again. Every hill, every bridge bears an imprint: loss, fear, survival. Memory attaches itself to places and continually recreates them. Returning after war therefore never means returning to the “same” place, but to a place whose meaning has been reshaped. This also explains why people may feel like strangers even in their own villages.

The land itself is now read through different eyes, having been treated as a defensive position, an observation post, an unsafe home, or an escape route.

War creates overlapping geographies instead of a single geography. This multiplicity generates a struggle not only over control but also over meaning. Who owns the land? Not merely the one who controls it, but the one who succeeds in imposing its interpretation.

This war has revealed to us a geography of Lebanon that we never truly knew. Villages have become military positions. Roads have turned into escape corridors leading away from the inferno of war. Rivers have become natural barriers. Bridges are destroyed to sever lines of communication, while the high ground becomes observation posts from which the enemy can be monitored. Fierce battles are fought to seize these elevations in order to dominate the terrain and maintain surveillance.

Human beings have been reduced to numbers: the dead, the missing, the displaced, or those driven to beg for survival. Cars have become homes, while homes have been reduced to rubble. We have discovered villages, roads, hills, valleys, ravines, and rugged terrain whose existence we scarcely knew, landscapes capable either of slowing an advance or facilitating it.

We did not know our country in this form. We are no longer people with a history, memories, and professions. We have become targets for aircraft, missiles, and drones, a theater of war where an enemy sees nothing extraordinary in invading and attacking us in order to fight the soldiers of an occupying state, whether directly through its own officers or through its party, which openly defines itself as an Iranian soldier. Iran exploits us in pursuit of its dream of reaching the Mediterranean, an ambition it has cherished since the time of Cyrus, only to see it frustrated time and again.

All of this leaves me astonished. I find myself standing before this bitter and deeply paradoxical knowledge, this somber, painful understanding that war forces upon us.

Wars do not merely transform politics. They also redraw geography in the minds of those who live through them. The places themselves remain, yet their meaning is overturned. The village that once embodied life and human relationships becomes a military position. The road that once connected people becomes a possible route to survival. The bridge that once shortened distances becomes a target.

This is not simply “new knowledge.” It is a distortion of the human relationship with place. In times of peace, geography is lived. In times of war, it is measured: firing range, field of vision, supply line, or escape route. Even language changes. Instead of saying “home,” we say “position.” Instead of “valley,” we say “corridor.” Instead of “hill,” we say “strongpoint.”

Most devastating of all, the human being is reduced as well. Not merely to a number, but to a category: dead, missing, displaced, or waiting for assistance. This is a brutal process of dehumanization, yet it lies at the heart of the logic of war, which sustains itself through counting, classification, and simplification.

It is precisely here that the deepest pain begins: the moment a person feels they have lost their irreducible individuality and have become nothing more than another “case.”