Beirut, January 2017. My photo.

“Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. … The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.” Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Michael W Jennings (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 391.