WHEN talking about “The Situation” in their country, many of my Lebanese friends turn to jokes and stories. “It’s how we cope,” my friend Salim explained to me, laughing.

“We can’t let The Situation get us down or we’ll never get up again.” He was sitting next to me at a seaside restaurant – a goodbye meal before I left the next day. Food and friends surrounded us, and laughter.

Conversations returned often to who was trying to get out of the country – the possibilities of scholarships, visas, jobs abroad.

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“You don’t want to leave, you think it’s beautiful,” Salim smiled at me. “And it is. But it’s also … like a trap. Like we are mice.”

Then he became briefly serious: “When a mouse is caught between a bear and an elephant, the mouse gets crushed.”

I first lived in Lebanon in 2001. Very rapidly, I learned that there were no simple stories here, no simple names or dates. Israel had not long pulled out of the south, which it had occupied since “the 1982 invasion” – an invasion, I was told, which catalysed the formation of Hezbollah and was distinct from “the 1978 invasion”.

Over months and years, as I lived in and left and returned to Lebanon, friends told me jokes and stories like tangled threads which went back centuries. By the time I was sitting with Salim in Tripoli, Israel’s brutal bombing campaign during “the 2006 war” had left civilian infrastructure in tatters.

Five years later, war in Syria saw more than 1.5 million Syrian people seek refuge in Lebanon, putting further pressure on a struggling Lebanese state. There are many more strands to The Situation – there are many bears and elephants.

I have been thinking about Salim since the latest Israeli campaign of blasts, bombing and deaths which has shaken Lebanon. Salim did get out in the end. So did many other friends. The Situation became too much. People felt trapped and left if they could, taking their family, hopes, talents and labour to other countries that were more safe and stable.

Living in the UK, one of those “other countries”, and seeing the shameful approach our government has held towards people seeking refuge here, I have also been thinking of mice – of my colleagues and friends in Gaza and Lebanon who can’t leave, who live among death, trapped.

And of how language helps us to cope with intolerable situations through jokes and stories but also helps us justify horrific cruelty by making other people less than human. By calling them “vermin” or “collateral damage” or “illegal swarms”.

Here in Scotland, I have watched colleagues and family and friends become increasingly exhausted by grief over the genocide in Gaza, by the struggle to make ends meet, by a sense that people in Scotland “can’t make a blind bit of difference anyway” because of key powers being reserved to Westminster, and anyway, “It’s the US that decides everything”.

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I see people become trapped in webs of powerlessness and despair. What can we do about any of it?

I, too, feel overwhelmed by The Situation.

As I try to contact friends again, to see if they are OK, I turn to words – because that is how I cope – and especially words written by Audre Lorde: “Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do.) Each of us must find our work and do it.”* I am reading these words on a train through the Highlands when I finally hear from Rana, one of the few Lebanese pals who have not got out.

She lives not far from Beirut, recovering from illness and caring for her mother. Rana sends me a voice message, interrupted by the crashing sound of sonic booms.

These are also known as “special visits” made by Israeli warplanes which regularly fly low over Lebanon. If a warplane goes as fast as, or faster than, the speed of sound, it makes a noise like thunder, like a crash that fills the sky, a huge booming terror that leaves a strange reverberation and a stunned silence which pieces itself back into sound slowly.

The first time I heard a sonic boom in Beirut, while I was sitting at a seafront café, I felt pinned down and frozen and struck dumb by terror. Rana laughed, ordered more coffee and taught me some excellent curses and swear words to wield against the fear.

Today, her voice still holds laughter but it is also very tired. She says, “I am a bit overwhelmed,” but adds that, “hopefully when things settle down I want you to come and visit – you’ll stay at my place of course – but definitely not any time soon”.

She carries on: “I’m not really very hopeful but then again I’m not gonna lose hope …” she pauses and the sound of an Israeli warplane plane’s “special visit” fills my phone, the sonic boom a horribly familiar sound, outrageous against the peace and beauty of the Highlands “so … I’m taking it day by day.”

Rana’s voice feels like a living echo of Audre Lorde’s writing. Their words reverberate in my head as I travel through Scotland’s beauty in a safe train back to my safe home.

Yes, The Situation is complex, but in the tangled web there are individual threads which we can each look out for, reach out for and interact with. That is the work.

We can reach out to each other, first of all. We can remind each other that what is happening in Lebanon is absolutely related to what has been happening in Gaza, and there is a wealth of active resources which we can access to protest and resist the ongoing violence.

From our safe, beautiful wee country we can: call for practical action and join in if we want; support arms embargoes; contact politicians. We can contribute to the Accountability Archive, an online resource logging all statements which dehumanise Lebanese and Palestinian people.

We can absolutely take it day by day. We can remind each other that there are plenty of things we can do to support just peace, and that we have to do them, however small.

Because if violence continues to spread from Gaza to Lebanon, we all will be directly affected, whether we want to engage with The Situation or not.

*Audre Lorde, Sister Outrider, 1984, p.141

Esa Aldegheri is a multilingual writer, educator and researcher with a PhD in community education and migration studies. She works at the University of Glasgow