The Economy of Survival: On the Labor Behind Lebanon's Wars

To live through war is a continuous effort to stay alive. In Lebanon, people carry the marks of this labor in their bodies, worn into them across repeated cycles of violence. Wars do not only destroy bodies; they also multiply the work required for peoples and societies to survive. Labor is required not only to wage war, but to sustain the lives of people living in the midst of it.

Entire institutions exist to count the rockets, the airstrikes, the arms manufacturing, the GDP losses; to make destruction legible and profitable. But there are no statistics or indices to measure the survival and grief of a country bombed across multiple generations, the hours spent in displacement, the mourning of lost land and lives, or the emotional labor of holding households together. All of this fall outside the existing frameworks for measuring war’s toll on human productivity. The formal economy depends on this labor while refusing to name it. This article insists on doing so.

The Labor of Displacement

Within the first two weeks of Israel's renewed aggression on Lebanon on March 2nd 2026, the scale of forced evacuation orders reached a level never before experienced in the country's history. Israel ordered the complete emptying of South Lebanon up to the Zahrani River, an area covering more than 1,470 square kilometers. It simultaneously issued another evacuation order for the entirety of Beirut's southern suburbs, the most densely populated zone in the Beirut metropolitan area. 
 

Within two weeks, more than one million people were displaced.

But these numbers say nothing about the labor imposed upon that population. Over a million people were forced to pack up their lives, drive or walk out of their neighborhoods carrying whatever they could, find somewhere to shelter, adapt to living in a school or a tent or out of a car, and rebuild some semblance of routine in conditions designed to strip people of their dignity. All while managing not only their own fear but that of everyone depending upon them.

The labor of displacement does not end with departure from one’s home. Once displaced, people must wash clothes, cook, and shower in places that are not designed to accommodate any of it. The work of a household persists even without the house, it just becomes harder and more time consuming. For some, that means returning on a short basis to neighborhoods under active bombardment to do laundry or take a shower. For others, it means studying while watching for evacuation orders on social media, or cooking a meal while remaining on alert to flee at a moment's notice. Survival under displacement is not a pause from ordinary life. It is ordinary life, made heavier.

The Labor of Grief

Since March 2^nd 2026, Israel has killed over 2,000 people and wounded thousands more in Lebanon. If we count back from October 2023 – when Israel began a “contained” campaign of destruction on southern Lebanon – the death toll rises to above 6,000. 

These are not abstract figures. They are people pulled by neighbors and family members from under the rubble of buildings that were standing an hour before. They were carried to overwhelmed hospitals, identified sometimes in corridors, and buried in the limited arrangement their family could manage. And all of it – the searching, the carrying, the identifying, the mourning – was done by people who had to finish and then go back to their daily routines.

The work of death in wartime falls on those who survive, and it is relentless. The war does not pause to allow grief to be processed. People mourn while trying to avoid threats, caring for others, and seeking out some sense of human normalcy. The energy this requires is immense but largely unrecognized.

The Labor of Staying Alert

Lebanon has no nationwide early warning system. What it has instead is a community of people constantly exchanging information: WhatsApp groups that never go quiet, neighbors firing guns into the air to signal incoming airstrikes, and individuals following local news and social media channels around the clock to make sure they are informed and can inform those around them of any anticipated threats. This is a collective but exhausting infrastructure of alertness built entirely of human attention and human bodies, and it is, by any honest measure, labor.

Bodies living in Lebanon are a sensory apparatus honed to the soundscape of war. People are so attuned to the noises of warplanes, drones, and various kinds of munitions that many can now distinguish an airstrike from a fighter jet breaking the sound barrier. Many can even estimate the proximity and direction of an attack from its sound. Not by choice, but because survival has demanded it.

People are not sleeping. They stay alert through the night, scanning the incessant onslaught of news updates for any sign of what might come next. And when a strike hits, they spend hours refreshing their news feeds to identify its location, determining whom among their loved ones might be there, trying to reach them, and waiting for the message that confirms they are still alive. This constant state of readiness is exhausting and carries a physical cost borne entirely by those sustaining it.

Who Pays for the War?

Not all labor is distributed equally, and not all of it is recognized. Feminist and leftist scholarship has long criticized the patriarchal capitalist system for its failure to see or acknowledge reproductive labor, even as it systematically extracts from it. In fact, its invisibility is crucial to sustaining that extraction. 

Already before the war, women in Lebanon performed three to ten times more unpaid domestic labor than men. During the war, this did not change. Women displaced into shelters continued to clean, manage households, follow up on children's education, and wash their families’ clothes. 

However, the extraction of labor expands under crisis. Women are still the default source of unpaid labor, a role long entrenched by patriarchal structures and norms, but when the scale of crisis exceeds what women alone can carry, the burden metastasizes. Men grieve and do not call it labor. Communities build warning systems and do not call it labor. Refugees who are already displaced are displaced again and do not call it labor. Children struggle against paralyzing fear to sustain the wonder and curiosity so fundamental to childhood and do not call it labor.

Capitalism has always depended on the extraction of unpaid reproductive labor to sustain economies. But when those economies contract under war, extraction does not stop. It reorganizes, leeching even more from those persisting in its margins, and celebrate their endurance as "resilience". "Resilient" is what you are called when a socioeconomic order has failed you so completely that surviving its failures has become your defining characteristic. In Lebanon, that label has been used after every war, every explosion, and every collapse. It functions as an alibi, defending capitalism from calls for accountability, just reparations, or any serious reckoning with the conditions that make such endurance necessary.

What Labor Day Means in these Conditions

Labor Day exists because workers refuse to be invisible. In Lebanon this year, the work of survival is everywhere, performed by everyone.

It is visible among those who left their homes with nothing and are trying to build a daily life elsewhere. Among those managing households in shelters or on the streets. Among neighbors who stay awake through the night to keep those around them alert to threats. Among parents who buried their children and are trying to move on. Among children learning to recognize the sounds of war without losing their childhood to it. Among people with disabilities navigating shelters that cannot accommodate them. Among migrant domestic workers abandoned by employers who still find ways to survive collectively. Among rescue and medical workers who risk their own lives to save others. Among those waiting for a message at 3 am confirming someone is still alive.

Labor Day, here in Lebanon, is a moment to name this work. To insist that the bodies holding this country together under bombardment are working bodies that are owed more than silence. But moreover, to refuse a system that drops millions of dollars in rockets on our heads while relying on unpaid human effort to absorb and deal with the fallout.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.