When I looked up from my phone screen, I saw that most of the office mates had already returned to work.
It sounded like a bang. A thunderous explosion. Shocked faces in my office in Beirut. I saw people walking to the window to look out, an understandable and risky reflex. I myself sat and waited, not knowing exactly why.
To give away the ending: no bomb had gone off. On social media, I saw shaky footage of two Israeli warplanes flying into Lebanese airspace, over the rooftops of the capital. The din we had heard was the sound of the sound barrier breaking. When I looked up from my phone screen, I saw that most of the office mates had already returned to work. Only the buzz was a little louder.
There were plenty of reasons to shrug: the neighbors to the south, with whom Lebanon is formally at war, come into neighborhoods more often. Researchers who The Guardian said, calculated that Israel had entered Lebanese airspace 22 thousand times in the last 15 years. On average, that’s four times a day.
Most flights only circle over the south, where the Shiite Hezbollah movement is in control. Generations of children have grown up with the noise. Lebanon reports the incidents to the United Nations, but nothing happens. According to the Israelis, the flights are necessary to monitor the activities of Hezbollah (a terrorist organization, according to Israel and the European Union).
In news reports I read that this time it was preceded by a cat-and-mouse game. Hezbollah proudly announced that afternoon that a drone had been flown over Israel. Forty minutes long! The thing had returned unscathed. The drone was christened ‘Hassan’ after the charismatic party leader Hassan Nasrallah. Now I understood the Israeli planes. They came to deliver a message: you should not try that again.
My lover would later tell me that at home she instinctively pressed herself against the thickest wall of the living room. At embassies and companies, people had been hiding under desks. Some had cried. The explosion in the harbor two years ago was fresh in my mind.
Night fell outside, and on the roof terrace of my office everyone seemed more preoccupied with the upcoming weekend than with the incident a few hours earlier. A young Lebanese (his name was Rami) twinkled out an Arabian lute and began strumming songs by Fairouz, the uncrowned queen of Lebanon. I grabbed my phone and gestured to Rami if it was okay if I made a video. His smile reassured me. Rami had the laughs on his hand. He dropped silences in the songs, filling them with variations on the word ‘Hezbollah’. There was clapping, singing, cheering and cheering.
The completely premature statement formed in my head that this was the way Lebanese tried to forget the misery of everyday life. I emptied my glass and left the terrace to go home. Rami came after me in a hurry. “Do you want to delete that video?” I looked at him bewildered. ‘Really, you have to delete.’ Silence. I showed him how to delete it from my phone. “And now from your deleted files.”
Friends would later tell me that the name Rami is especially common among Shiites in the south. His jokes about Hezbollah could have nasty consequences outside this room. I did what he asked. I no longer have the video. It was as if it had never happened.
Jenne Jan Holtland is a Volkskrant correspondent in the Middle East, based in Beirut.