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What Next | Daily News and Analysis

Getting Out Of Lebanon

What Next | Daily News and Analysis

Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Daily News

4.32.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How the State Department is evacuating Americans from Beirut—and how the war is influencing Lebanese-American voters living in a swing state.


Guest:

Amy Fallas, PhD candidate studying history in Beirut for the last year.


Alabas Farhat, Michigan State Representative. 



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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

0:04.0

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0:15.3

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0:21.2

Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. For the last year, Amy Fias has been asking herself this question.

0:39.0

How do you know when it's time to leave a war zone.

0:48.0

Amy's been asking herself this while living in Beirut. Amy's American.

0:49.0

She'd move to Lebanon for love and for her dissertation. Her partners from there, she's

0:54.8

earning a PhD in Middle Eastern history. Ever since October 7th, things in

1:00.4

Beirut felt shaky.

1:07.0

I think for me in terms of feeling unsafe, I think that really escalated over the summer.

1:09.1

The Israeli aircrafts had started to break the sound barrier over Beirut and so everyone could hear it across the city and it felt like a bomb had just dropped in your backyard.

1:22.9

And so I started to get ready, had like a go bag of things

1:28.4

that I might need, should I need to leave immediately?

1:33.1

To be clear, Amy didn't want to leave.

1:36.2

But back in September, she was driving through the city

1:38.7

when she started to reconsider.

1:40.8

So it was in the afternoon, like late afternoon I would say and I was actually I was having a birthday party that day and I was picking up last minute things with a friend so we were literally driving across Bay

1:53.6

routes and all of a sudden we started to hear these ambulances and then we

1:58.5

started to see men in motorcycles with like blood on their clothes making way trying to get the cars out of the way in

2:06.4

traffic for the ambulances. And it was at that moment that my partner, who's Lebanese, he texted me saying the beepers have been attacked

2:18.0

or the pages have been attacked and it sounded like something out of you know a James Bond movie like I was

...

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