On the evening of November 26, 2024, my phone in Berlin rang at around 7pm. On the other end of the line was the security officer from the German embassy in Beirut.
"Mr. Hanssen, do you still have any employees at the Institute?"
I replied, "Yes, the porter and possibly housekeeping.”
"Get them out of there, now!"
What had preceded this call for over eleven months?
We returned to Beirut at the beginning of January 2024 with cautious confidence that the Israeli war of retaliation against Palestinians of Gaza would come to an end three months after the Hamas massacre. Although there had been an Israeli attack on a Hamas cell in the southern suburbs of Beirut on January 2, we were hopeful that the ceasefire and prisoner exchange would happen soon.
But our hopes were dashed. At the end of March, Israel attacked targets in Aleppo, then the Iranian consulate in Damascus. It became increasingly clear that Hezbollah had lost deterrence capabilities while the Biden administration had no ability to de-escalate. As the year progressed, Lebanon became increasingly at the mercy of massive Israeli military attacks.
As a result, we had to organize events outside Lebanon to guarantee the safety of participating colleagues and to enable those who were restricted from traveling to Beirut due to the security situation to take part in events. We were able to hold events in our branch office in Cairo, and thanks to new academic partnerships, we also held events in Berlin, Kassel, Munich, Istanbul, Paris, Rome, Fez, Princeton, and Toronto. The OIB was also very active in the German-speaking media, particularly thanks to Dr. Sarah El-Bulbeisi’s tireless interventions in the press as well as our fellow-in-residence Jan Altaner who wrote numerous newspaper articles.
In the meantime, we also carried out repairs and renovations as well as expanded the IT and solar infrastructure at the Institute. The rear terrace in the garden now seats seventy people. To ensure the safety of our colleagues, we constructed an emergency exit from the shelter in the basement and offered a first aid training course. Additionally, the embassy held a safety training session to review evacuation scenarios and rehearse the "chain of command" regarding satellite-phone communication. We urged everyone to have an "emergency kit" with essential supplies while emergency accommodation was supported for colleagues whose buildings were damaged by the Israeli bombings.
During this uncertain time, our fellows-in-residence were only able to organize one of the popular "Open Garden" events, on June 27. One month later, what we increasingly feared happened. On July 27, a misguided Hezbollah rocket hit an athletics field in Majdal al-Shams in the annexed Golan region, killing twelve children and many more Druze residents. This action crossed all red lines for the Israeli government, prompting them to target Hezbollah's leadership wherever they operated—even if it meant exacting collateral damage. Israeli drones came to circle over our heads 24/7. Foreign organizations became more anxious.
On September 17, 2024, Israel launched the unprecedented pager attacks, which dramatically altered the course of events. On that day we were at Saydet al-Dukhul Church in Achrafieh with Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian friends and colleagues to bid our last farewell to a recently deceased friend, the Arab writer and intellectual Elias Khoury. On the way back from the church, we witnessed mass panic: ambulances rushing by, and people desperately trying to transport the injured—some lying across their laps—to hospitals on scooters. The city, the country, and its people were in shock. This was a new, unprecedented form of warfare.
Ten days after these attacks, around a dozen cluster bombs hit the underground command center of Hasan Nasrallah and the Hezbollah leadership in the southern suburbs. The whole city shook. The Institute trembled.
The OIB-Advisory Board and the Managing Director of the Max Weber Foundation, Mr. Rosenbach, participated in our weekly crisis meetings on several occasions to check on our well-being and offer assistance if needed. At the Institute, we were given permission to work from home and asked to be discreet.
Finally, the German Foreign Office raised the security level to 3a and called on all organizations to follow the embassy's example and withdraw all non-essential expatriates from Lebanon. At the OIB, we decided to ask all German employees to leave, some of them on air force planes provided by the Foreign Office, and one research associate and his family left by ship from Tripoli to Turkey. The Institute was closed to visitors from October 1, 2024. However, the OIB was never empty. Our local colleagues from the directorate, administration, and IT department regularly came to check on things. Our building caretaker was also always on site.
The Israeli rockets hit closer and closer. Then, on the night of October 3, 2024, a building in the Bashura district near the Institute was razed to the ground. At that time, we had just traveled to Cairo to explore alternative venues for certain cooperation projects with colleagues there. Helplessly, we watched the events in Lebanon. An article in the F.A.Z. of October 16, 2024 describes this quite vividly.
For two interminable months into December, many villages in southern Lebanon were destroyed; in Baalbek, the Temple of Jupiter narrowly escaped (by a few meters) an Israeli missile strike; and with each passing day, the devastation of the southern suburbs increased. Throughout the country, the Israeli air force targeted suspected Hezbollah members. All too often they hit innocent bystanders. Many attacks were announced on so-called "building hit lists" on an Israeli army social media channel. Sometimes the intended targets were hit, but usually others in the vicinity were destroyed; the "hit lists" always caused panic among residents. There was great fear in the city. Some residents went to the mountains, but even there nobody really felt safe. The future was uncertain. The city was full of displaced people who camped out in the streets and squares or were housed in schools, like the one next to the OIB where several hundred found temporary shelter. We needed to provide better protection for the Institute, as Hezbollah's refugee aid initially thought we were a school too, and because unknown persons tapped into our solar power supply; twice trespassers tried to get over the fence onto our premises.
This was the precarious situation when I received a call from the embassy on the eve of the Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire. Why this urgency? Was the Institute on one of the hit lists?
And indeed, the embassy’s security officer was on the phone, and he had received credible information that the OIB could take a direct hit. We quickly instructed those still present to leave the premises immediately or to take refuge in our newly built shelter. It was a long and tense night for everyone. In the end, the Institute was spared, apart from six battered solar cells on the roof.
We had barely recovered from this horror when events in Syria suddenly came thick and fast. Within a few days, HTS militiamen overran Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus. Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow in a cloak-and-dagger operation on December 8, 2024. We could hardly believe it. The Assad regime, designed to last forever, had collapsed like a house of cards. The images from Saydnaya and other prisons, the reunion scenes of families who had been separated from each other for years and decades and didn't know whether their relatives had survived, got under the skin of many of us. The possibility that we would be able to travel to Syria again, conduct research there, and establish academic partnerships gave us a sense of optimism again in the final days of 2024.
In Lebanon, the military collapse of Hezbollah at the turn of the year broke the parliamentary deadlock that had lasted for over two years. The election of Joseph Aoun as Lebanese President on January 9, 2025, and the appointment of Dr. Nawaf Salam as the new Prime Minister could pave the way to national convalescence and political reform—in a stable world. Alas, specters of genocide and sectarianism in the region, the rise of fascism and racism in Europe and the US, and the looming threats of economic and ecological collapse do not bode well for the planet.
Nevertheless, at the OIB we are proud of what we have achieved together amidst such adversity. I would particularly like to highlight the large number of critical events that we have held in Beirut despite everything. We held another LAWHA conference at the OIB; an international panel discussion with our partners from the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and the Finnish Institute in the Middle East; two evening lectures with the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies in Beirut; twelve international research colloquia in Cairo and twelve theory & methods seminars for our ten fellows-in-residence, fifteen visiting scholars, and four Hans-Robert Roemer Fellows. Dr. Zeina G. Halabi, who joined our team as research associate in January 2024, oversees the mentorship of our new cohorts of fellows and developed an excellent program to offer advice on professionalization to our early career researchers.
At the end of 2024, three colleagues left our academic Advisory Board after eight turbulent years of service. I would like to thank Claudia Derichs (Chair of the Advisory Board), Christian Lange (Deputy Chair of the Advisory Board), and Beatrice Gründler for their dedication to the Institute. At the same time, I would like to welcome five new Advisory Board members: Nadia Bagdadi from the Central European University in Vienna, Sebastian Günther from the University of Göttingen, Isabel Toral from the Free University of Berlin, Dietrich Jung from the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, and Maher Jarrar from the American University of Beirut.
Let me conclude with some more good news from the Institute, for we are delighted that three of our current employees have been offered new positions: Dr. Hans-Peter Pökel will be leaving us for Bonn, where he will become a librarian for the Commission for the Archaeology of Non-European Cultures at the German Archaeological Institute; Dr. Sarah El-Bulbeisi will take up an academic position at the LMU in Munich on April 1, 2025; And Dr. Sami Khatib has been appointed to the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. He will be Professor of Art Studies and Media Philosophy there starting April 1, 2025.
Finally, I am pleased to inform the readers of this annual report that we established an association for OIB alumni and friends in Berlin on December 16, 2024. There was a very lively attendance with twenty-two face-to-face participants and sixteen online participants. After a long and positive meeting, we were able to toast the association's statutes and the newly elected board at the Catholic Academy in Berlin. I would like to thank everyone from the bottom of my heart for their participation in this first general meeting.
I would like to warmly congratulate our new board members Dr. Yvonne Albers, academic coordinator of the FU Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities" and author of the recent monograph Beirut and the Journal Mawaqif: An Arab Intellectual History, 1968-1994; Dr. Torsten Wollina, acquisitions editor for Islamic Studies at de Gruyter; Dr. Carsten Walbiner, director of the DAAD office in Cairo until the beginning of December; and Dr. Sara Binay, advisor to the president of the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Köthen. If you would like to become a member, please write to Sara via email at sara.binay@dont-want-spam.web.de.
Finally, I would like to thank all current OIB employees for their outstanding work and our camaraderie this year. We have all demonstrated a great sense of community and a wonderful team spirit again this past year and shown what we can achieve even in the most difficult of times. I would like to take this opportunity to give a special thank you to my wife Andrea Kazzer. Without her, I would not have been able to overcome the crises of the past year.
I hope that the OIB will always remain a beacon of academic freedom and critical debate on historical and current issues.