One must admire, in a purely aesthetic and detached sense, the punctuality of it all. As the sun dips below the Mediterranean horizon, casting a golden hue over a landscape already shimmering with the heat of previous detonations, the orchestration begins anew. In Southern Lebanon, the transition from daytime ‘exchanges’ to nighttime ‘bombardments’ is handled with the kind of logistical rigor one usually associates with German train schedules or the change of guard at a dying monarchy’s palace. The Israeli military, having spent the daylight hours engaged in what is charitably described as a 'series of attacks,' saw no reason to let the evening air go unpunished. It is the Levant’s version of a double-feature, though the audience is trapped in the theater and the exits have been welded shut by decades of geopolitical incompetence.

To call this an escalation is to admit one hasn’t been paying attention for the last half-century. It is, instead, a rehearsal of a play that has been in continuous production since the mid-twentieth century, performed with a fervor that suggests the actors have long since forgotten their lines and are now merely improvising with heavy ordnance. The Israeli strikes, we are told, are aimed at neutralizing threats—a delightfully clinical euphemism that suggests a biological procedure rather than the systematic pulverization of the landscape. On the other side of the blue line, the responses are framed as resistance, another word that has been stripped of its marrow through decades of over-utilization. It is a linguistic desert to match the physical one being created one payload at a time.

The sheer redundancy of the cycle is what truly grates on the nerves of any sentient observer. We are treated to the same headlines, the same grainy thermal footage of things exploding in the dark, and the same breathless reports from journalists who seem shocked that a region defined by its volatility is, once again, volatile. The absurdity lies in the predictability. The daytime attacks set the tempo, a staccato of aggression that builds to the evening’s crescendos. It is a predictable rhythm that allows the international community to schedule its ‘deep concerns’ between lunch and cocktails. The bureaucratic machinery of the UN and the various ministries of foreign affairs operate with the same weary efficiency as the bombers; they have their templates ready, their adjectives polished, and their total lack of influence pre-packaged for public consumption.

Lebanon, a country that has been a ‘sovereign state’ in the same way that a sinking ship is a ‘vessel,’ finds itself once again serving as the unfortunate parquet for someone else’s dance of death. One almost feels for the Lebanese bureaucracy, if one were inclined to feel anything for bureaucracies. They are the ultimate middle-men in a transaction where they own none of the currency and all of the debt. The sovereignty they claim is a polite fiction, a diplomatic ghost that haunts the halls of Beirut while the real decisions are made in bunkers and war rooms far beyond their control. They are the stagehands in a tragedy where the lead actors refuse to leave the spotlight, even as the scenery collapses around them.

There is a particular irony in the ‘surgical’ nature of these strikes. The modern military establishment loves the word ‘surgical,’ as if they are performing a life-saving bypass rather than dropping several tons of high explosives onto a hillside. It is the language of the technocrat, the attempt to wrap the chaotic, bloody reality of war in the sterile white coat of science. If these strikes are surgical, then the patient has been on the operating table for seventy years, and the surgeons are primarily interested in seeing how many incisions the body can withstand before it ceases to be a body. It is a macabre experiment in endurance, conducted with the cold indifference of a laboratory assistant.

We are told this is a response to ‘threats,’ a word so broad it can encompass everything from an armed militia to a particularly stern look across a fence. In the theater of the absurd that is the Middle East, the threat is the existence of the other, and the solution is the periodic application of fire. It is a primitive logic dressed up in the finery of twenty-first-century technology. We use satellites and AI to determine exactly where to drop a bomb that serves a purpose as ancient as the hills it destroys. The intellectual bankruptcy of the entire endeavor is staggering, yet we are expected to analyze it with a straight face, to weigh the ‘strategic objectives’ as if they weren’t just the latest spasm in a chronic condition.

As the strikes continue to pound the south, the world watches with a familiar, jaded eye. We have seen this film before. We know the ending, which is to say, we know there is no ending—only a brief intermission before the next daytime attack leads into the next nighttime bombardment. The tragedy isn’t just the loss of life or the destruction of infrastructure; it’s the crushing boredom of a cycle that refuses to evolve. It is a symphony of explosive redundancy, and we are all, quite frankly, exhausted by the performance.