Protesters hold a Lebanese flag during the fifth commemoration of the Beirut port explosion on Aug. 4, 2025, in Beirut. (Credit: Matthieu Karam/L'Orient Today)
Dalal Mawad is a Lebanese journalist based in Paris, author of "All She Lost. The Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women Who Survive" (Bloomsbury, 2023).Blanket amnesty and forced amnesia should not remain our destiny.Six years ago, our lives changed forever. Yet six years on, nothing has truly shifted. Instead of finding out what happened — instead of justice — we survived two more wars... And now, Aug. 4 is quietly slipping into oblivion.But we cannot outrun our past by ignoring it.As Lebanese, we share a collective trauma, yet we have been denied a collective healing. Our lives have been defined by a relentless succession of crises, each one merely bandaged rather than resolved. Lurching from one to the next, we have been forced into a perpetual state of survival. But one cannot heal while fighting just...
Dalal Mawad is a Lebanese journalist based in Paris, author of "All She Lost. The Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women Who Survive" (Bloomsbury, 2023).Blanket amnesty and forced amnesia should not remain our destiny.Six years ago, our lives changed forever. Yet six years on, nothing has truly shifted. Instead of finding out what happened — instead of justice — we survived two more wars... And now, Aug. 4 is quietly slipping into oblivion.But we cannot outrun our past by ignoring it.As Lebanese, we share a collective trauma, yet we have been denied a collective healing. Our lives have been defined by a relentless succession of crises, each one merely bandaged rather than resolved. Lurching from one to the next, we have been forced into a perpetual state of survival. But one cannot heal while fighting...
