The gnarled, monumental olive trees leading to Nabil Nahas’s studio in the mountains north of Beirut, portrayed by the renowned Lebanese-American artist in semi-abstract paintings, are silent witnesses to more than a thousand years of history. ‘They date from the Roman period,’ and come from lands mentioned in the bible, Nahas told me at his studio in the Lebanese village of Ain Aar in February. ‘What’s fascinating is that they’re still alive.’

A few weeks later, after the US-Israeli war on Iran spread to Lebanon, he added, ‘When I got them 20 years ago, I felt guilty at transplanting them from southern Lebanon to my mountain garden. Now I feel I’ve saved a few trees.’

Collected around the time of Israel’s 2006 invasion of south Lebanon, the massive sentinels with their ancient beauty are little consolation for what the artist sees as today’s renewed ‘tragedy of human loss and destruction, with the displacement of more than a million people from their land, probably never to return’. In addition to almost 2,300 people killed (including 177 children) and some 7,500 injured in seven weeks’ bombardment before a tentative ceasefire on 16 April, more than a fifth of Lebanon’s population were driven from their homes – some camping on the streets of downtown Beirut. In the south, where Israel has its self-declared ‘security zone’, lands subjected to scorched-earth warfare have, Nahas said, been ‘completely annihilated with white phosphorus, creating unliveable conditions for years to come’.

When the latest Israeli assault began, in response to Tehran’s Hizbullah militia allies retaliating for the attack on Iran by firing rockets into Israel from Lebanese soil, Nahas had only just completed the magnum opus that will (…)

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