This article originally appeared in AlRawiya on April 14, 2024 https://al-rawiya.com/the-dual-violence-against-lebanon-a-quiet-invasion-and-a-loud-aggression/
The Ailanthus tree, an invasive species, spreads quietly and persistently—colonizing the land, choking out native ecosystems, and disrupting biodiversity. “This is one of the most poisonous and harmful plants,” says Hadi Awada to his friend Raed Zeno in the opening scene of Zeno’s short film Tree of Hell, as he points to the tree growing in Raed’s small garden in Beirut. Later, Raed reflects that after learning about the Ailanthus, the main focus of his film, he began noticing it everywhere in Beirut. I had a similar experience—although I lived most of my life in Beirut, before watching the film, I had never paid attention to its presence either.
The film was one of eight produced during an artistic residency in Lebanon in December 2023, which brought together environmentalists and filmmakers. The works premiered in Lebanon in July 2024. A few friends and I recently hosted an informal screening of three of them: The Tree of Hell by Raed Zeno, A Grotto for Sale by Muriele Honein, and Mānthöûr Bayrūt by Farah F. Naboulsi. While each film explores distinct environmental and social issues—from the privatization of natural heritage to unchecked urban expansion and Israeli aggression and the spread of invasive species—they collectively reveal a dual violence that shapes our environment and our access and relationship to the land.
On one hand, Israel destroys ecosystems and kills and forcibly displaces people through direct military aggression. On the other, the pervasive global logic of neoliberalism embedded in our society perpetuates conditions of displacement, restricts access to land and nature, and erodes people’s connection to it. As Lebanese historian Fawwaz Traboulsi puts it: “It has been the fate of this part of the world to suffer from not one, but two relatively distinct yet closely interrelated forms of foreign domination: Zionist colonialism, on the one hand, and Western imperialism, in most of its possible varieties, on the other.” Neoliberalism, in this context, represents one of the many contemporary expressions of Western neo-imperialism—an extension of hegemonic global political and economic systems, reinforced by local oligarchs seeking capital accumulation.
In this text, I explore how these films expose the dual violence confronting Lebanon. I focus in particular on the second form—the insidious and quiet spread of neoliberalism—because, like the Israeli occupation, it has aggressively displaced us not only physically but also culturally. By severing our relationship to place and collective memory, it facilitates the very conditions that enable and sustain Israeli occupation, aggression, and broader forms of external domination. Unless we confront this hegemonic neoliberal logic, our ability to effectively resist the first form of violence—Israel’s occupation and aggression—remains deeply compromised.
A quiet invasion
Tree of Hell is set in the months following the outbreak of the genocide in Gaza, when Israel began targeting southern Lebanon with the incendiary and toxic white phosphorus munitions, burning acres of land, crops, and centennial olive trees. The film opens with footage of one such attack, sent to Zeno by his friend Hadi Awada, who lives in the village of Kafr Kila, bordering Israel. The video captures toxic, hazardous smoke billowing over the hills of South Lebanon before cutting to scenes of destroyed homes and shattered infrastructure.
Zeno told me he intended the Ailanthus tree, with its harmful and destructive effects, to symbolize Israel’s aggression and invasion. While the violence and destruction of Israeli attacks make the metaphor compelling, the tree’s quiet, invasive spread resonated with me more deeply—as a symbol of the insidious ways in which global market logics infiltrate our lands, cities, cultures, and consciousness.
In the film, Dr. Mohammad Abdalla, an expert on invasive species, explains that the Ailanthus kills the roots of surrounding plants, leaving behind a barren forest where only it can thrive. In much the same way, hegemonic market rationalities—through instilling models of development, knowledge, and language—do not merely spread; they homogenize, displace, and endanger what is locally rooted.
Throughout the film, the buzz of Israeli drones echoes persistently above Raed, occasionally pierced by the roar of warplanes—an audible assertion of Israel’s dominance and its capacity for unrestrained violence towards all forms of life. Yet, unlike this overt display of force, the ideological, political, and economic encroachment is more insidious: gradual, normalized, and quietly dismantling our collective resistance. As Lebanon is drawn deeper into global market systems and dominant logic of profits—anchored in a U.S.-led capitalist order that empowers and sustains Israel—our ability to resist, whether materially, culturally, or politically, continues to weaken.
Turning nature into property: One grotto, endless possibilities
“In Dennieh’s Zahlan Grotto, you have a restaurant, a hotel, and paid entry to the cave—that’s what should be done at Zod,” says a man attempting to sell the Zod cave in Muriele Honein’s Grotto for Sale.
The short film centers on Zod Grotto, a cave in Beqaa Safine in North Lebanon discovered in 1997 on private land during excavation for a water reservoir. In 2023, the landowners listed it for sale, advertising its “endless possibilities”—whether into a luxury home or a tourist attraction—so long as someone is willing to invest.
Local voices echo this logic—acknowledging the grotto as a natural treasure, yet supporting its transformation into a tourist site that generates jobs, even at the expense of the environment. As one resident puts it in the film, “Humans come first in nature—then animals and plants. What’s the harm in using nature to our benefit?” The film shows the consequences of exploiting nature for human benefit , zooming in on natural sites that have been transformed into artificial playgrounds—complete with jarring additions like a giant shark sculpture overlooking the valley.
The local support for such projects reflects how capital-centric and neoliberal logic has permeated our thinking, limiting our choices and narrowing our ability to imagine alternatives beyond profit-driven development. Crucially, it has reshaped our relationship with nature—reducing its ecological and cultural value to mere economic potential, and altering what we expect from the land itself. As Honein points out, both the drive toward commercialization and the reality of neglect stem from the same root cause: communities feel disconnected from their environment, stripped of agency, and increasingly view nature as the private property of landowners rather than a shared collective responsibility.
Activists and academics in Lebanon, particularly during the October 2019 protests, criticized large-scale environmental projects, such as the Bisri Dam planned in a valley in Mount Lebanon, for advancing the interests of political elites and foreign investors at the expense of public goods, social equity, and local communities. The World Bank, a key funder and promoter of large-scale investment projects, was seen as advancing a global development model that masks environmental harm and social exclusion as economic progress. Critics argued that addressing the environmental crisis in Lebanon required moving away from neoliberal approaches and embracing development models that are just, community-driven, and ecologically sustainable.
Honein offers one such alternative through ecotourism—an approach that links environmental protection with local livelihoods and equitable access to land. By actively involving communities in showcasing their natural heritage, this model could secure livelihoods without the need for large-scale construction or harmful development.
The sea is getting further away: Privatization and the disappearance of Beirut
“What’s the point of all these expansionary projects?” asks a young woman in Farah Naboulsi ‘s Mānthöûr Bayrūt, as she walks beside the swimming pool of a private beach in Beirut. The concrete structures surrounding her make the sea feel even more distant—physically and symbolically. Reflecting on the effects of urban encroachment and the literal burial of the sea, she says: “I lived by a sea that represents absence—absence of accessibility, absence of ability, absence of coexistence […] the sea is getting further away from the people in the area because they’re burying the sea over and over.” In Lebanon, 80% of the coastline is privatized. While the World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 9 square meters of green space per capita, Beirut offers just 0.8 square meters.
Naboulsi weaves the reflection on Beirut’s shrinking green spaces and increasingly privatized coastline around the Manthour, a rare flower that grows in the cracks of coastal boulders. Much of the film is shot in Dalieh, a once-public coastal area of Beirut now under threat of privatization. A young man in the film recalls discovering the flower while documenting the area’s biodiversity during the 2013–2014 campaign to protect Dalieh—and the nearby public beach, Ramlet el Bayda—from resort development.
In contrast to the expanding urban jungle, the Manthour flower feels like an act of quiet resistance. Naboulsi told me she was drawn to it because of its stubborn presence on the chaotic fringes of Beirut—where the coastline is being buried under concrete and smog. For her, the Manthour flower deepened her connection to the land she comes from—a land, she noted, now barely visible beneath layers of asphalt and profit-driven development. The flower—immortalized in Fairuz’s song Baadak ‘Ala Bali, where she sings: “Baadak ‘ala bali, ya helo ya maghrour, ya habak w manthour ‘ala el-sateh el-‘ali” (“You’re still on my mind, you beautiful and proud one, the basil and manthour on the high rooftop”)—now faces the threat of erasure amid the privatization and profit-driven urbanization overtaking Beirut.
Capital, war, and the collapse of social nature
The quiet encroachment of capital on Lebanon has transformed our lands and cities, —pushing us further away from them, and severing our connection to them and our culture. While there has been resistance in Lebanon to overt extractive projects—such as the campaigns against the privatization of Dalieh and the Bisri Dam—many smaller, incremental interventions accumulate quietly, often met with limited resistance. Over time, they displace us from our environment and culture without us fully realizing it.
Today, we live in a society shaped by transnational capital, violence, and occupation, marked by unequal access to land, nature, and basic rights—and perhaps, by the gradual erosion of our shared humanity. The two forms of violence at the heart of this condition—Israeli aggression on one hand, and neoliberal market logic on the other—are deeply intertwined, both enabled and sustained by global capitalist powers, particularly the United States. As Fawwaz Traboulsi argues, the financialization of Lebanon’s economy—driven by neoliberalism and facilitated by the country’s oligarchs—has entrenched a system of dependency that ties Lebanon to the global imperialist order.
One striking example of this dual violence in Lebanon unfolded during Israel’s assault last year, when over 250 people—many already displaced multiple times by Israeli aggression—sought shelter in Hamra’s long-abandoned Star Hotel. They cleaned and restored the space themselves, only to be evicted by a court order obtained by the owners. In a system driven by privatization and capital, it has become normalized for buildings to sit empty while victims of Israeli violence sleep on the streets. “Humanity should come first,” one of the displaced told me. “How can anyone speak of rights and freedom when there’s no humanity to begin with?”
As we become increasingly absorbed into the neoliberal order, enabling the second form of violence to spread, our collective capacity to resist the first form of violence – Israeli aggression- is weakened. Just as critically, our capacity to protect our environment and reclaim our lands is further eroded.
The interplay of modern capitalism, war, and environmental destruction is what Ali Kadri describes as the “systemic accumulation of waste.” In his keynote lecture “De-development and the Accumulation of Waste Through Wars” (Development Days 2025), he explains that this waste is not only physical, but also includes the premature destruction of human and natural life—driven by exploitative social and economic systems. Kadri refers to this as the destruction of “social nature,” encompassing both people and ecosystems.
How do we resist the destruction of “social nature”? In The Tree of Hell, Raed cuts down the invasive Ailanthus tree in his garden in an attempt to stop its silent, harmful spread. Perhaps we, too, need a similar act of resistance: dismantling hegemonic systems and dominant development logics, and cultivating alternatives rooted in life, collaboration, and justice. With global systems already on edge—exacerbated by Trump’s escalating trade policies—there may be no better time to imagine and act on new possibilities.