When putting together the line-up for this issue on the Night, Mohamad Nahleh was an obvious pick. Continuing his work that reflects on nighttime in the southern part of Lebanon that is deprived of its relation with neighboring Palestine by the Israeli occupation, he offers us a powerful text built on his conversations with Taybeh locals Abu Akram and Umm Akram. Having started before the most recent murderous Israeli bombings and invasion of South Lebanon, he finished his essay in the midst of yet another evidence that “the Empire is an empire.”
On a winter morning in 1982, in the months leading up to Israel’s second invasion of Lebanon, Abu Akram, a tobacco farmer from the village of Taybeh, set out for the market with his cousins. As they made their way through the olive groves, they stumbled upon a memoir by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, likely abandoned by Israeli soldiers or members of the Christian militia, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), who patrolled the border villages. As news of the book spread across the village, about twenty farmers gathered that evening to discuss how to destroy it. The option of burning it was quickly dismissed, fearing that any light would draw the attention of Israeli planes patrolling the night sky. Instead, they chose to gather around a dried-up well near the village center, where they each stomped on the book and spat on it before hurling it into the well and burying it under cow manure. In this double darkness of the soil and the night, farmers in Taybeh found themselves shedding the hollow morality disguised in the imperial struggle for light.
And in recognizing the mounting conflict between light and life in southern Lebanon, Abu Akram and his companions aimed their spades at their oppressors and wielded darkness into their arsenal of life-making tools.