The L word
TWO nights ago, I logged on to our evening meeting the way I have done twice a day, five days a week for nearly six weeks. On my screen: half a dozen faces I have come to think of as family, based in Beirut.
News was coming in of an impending Israeli bombing. They were scrambling — checking phones, calling relatives, trying to locate family members — and simultaneously, they were working. Editing, producing, filming. Because the news goes on.
I sat in Islamabad, safe, watching them hold themselves together from across a screen. The friction was unbearable. A war brews in my backyard too, and yet there I was, untouched, while they split themselves in two — one half terrified, one half professional — because that is what survival looks like when the bombs have been falling, on and off, your entire life.
I thought of the last time I was in Lebanon in 2009. My friend Shaan and I travelled the length and breadth of the country for two weeks, lost half the time, pre-Google Maps, finding our way through broken Arabic, French, English, and the extraordinary generosity of strangers.
We walked into a Hezbollah stall, a kind of travelling museum of resistance, and, upon hearing we were from Pakistan, were treated like long-lost friends. These young men walked us through posters and literature about Israel’s war crimes in Lebanon and we left with a clearer perspective than we had arrived with.
That clarity is what enrages me most about the language coming out of Washington and Tel Aviv. Liberation. They use this word as if it is a gift they are delivering, wrapped in the rubble of apartment buildings, hospitals, schools. As if the people of Lebanon, of Gaza, of Iraq, of Vietnam etc. needed to be freed from something other than the bombs themselves.
There was no doubt who the aggressor was then. There’s no doubt now.
Who, exactly, have they liberated?
Ask Vietnam. After years of carpet bombing — more tonnage than was used in all of World War II — the United States left behind craters, Agent Orange, and a generation of children born with deformities. Vietnam rebuilt itself and became one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia. No thanks to its liberators. In Ho Chi Minh City, the War Remnants Museum stands as a document of what liberation looked like on the ground. Every American I took there told me they had not been given the full picture about their country’s role. The museum gave it to them.
Ask Iraq, where liberation arrived in 2003 and has not yet finished its work, two decades later, in a country dismembered by sectarian violence that did not exist at that scale before the liberators came.
Ask the people of Gaza — not awaiting liberation, but living under occupation, stripped of basic rights, stateless in the land they have always inhabited. In 2023, the former head of Israel’s Mossad, said it plainly: “There is an apartheid state here. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”
And now ask Iran. ‘Someone’ struck a girls’ elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, apparently three times. Between 150 and 168 people were killed, most of them girls between seven and 12. America says it wouldn’t ‘deliberately’ strike a school yet here we are.
The word ‘liberation’ has been so disfigured by its use that it now means its opposite. In the language of the powerful, it means the freedom to destroy without consequence.
Watching us in Islamabad and my Beirut family on screen, I thought of that word ‘resilient’ which the Western press loves to apply to people who have no choice but to survive. It is not a compliment. It is an observation made from a safe distance by people who will never have to be it. ‘Resilient’ is what you are called when no one comes to help you.
The men at the Hezbollah stall told us about Pakistan with more warmth and political precision than most international commentators manage about us.
They talked about our corrupt politicians, our establishment, our client-state relationship with the very empires now bombing their neighbours. No mention of religion. No apocalyptic register. Just the logic of people who have learned that no one else is coming.
There was no doubt who the aggressor was then. There is no doubt now.
The demonstrations across the world are not complicated. They are people stating the obvious: you cannot bomb a civilian population into freedom. You cannot starve children into democracy. You cannot call it liberation when the liberated are not alive to receive it.
We will log on again tomorrow morning. And somewhere in Washington, someone will talk about Israel’s right to defend itself, and the word ‘liberation’ will hang in the air, waiting for the next country to be freed.
The writer is a former journalism instructor.
X: LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, March 8th, 2026