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This chapter explains the history of the Islamic milieu, and describes its changing relationship to Dahiya and a new generation of pious Shi'i Muslims. This history will provide an understanding of how political contingency, urbanization, economic mobility, and generational shifts have combined to produce an environment ripe for the development of leisure. It also considers transnational influences on leisure, and a general sense of the infitah, or “opening up,” of Hizbullah and Dahiya as conditions for these new leisure desires and sites. The most visible of these changes is of course Hizbullah's popularity along with its incorporation into the social and spatial fabric of Dahiya and Lebanon.

Prior to 2000, Dahiya had a few pizza places scattered along some of its commercial streets that functioned like the local man'oushe and fast-food stands. With the introduction of the Internet in Lebanon, businesses providing access appeared across Beirut, including in Dahiya. Initially, Internet access was incorporated into the “amusement centers” where young men played pool and computer games. Eventually, some of these gaming centers became small cybercafés, providing Wi-Fi along with wired desktop computers, food, and drinks. Over time, they attracted an increasingly mixed clientele of youths. This chapter provides a geographic analysis of these new leisure sites, mapping them onto Dahiya's streets and neighborhoods, and comparing their architectural design and aesthetic features.

This chapter considers the ways in which pious Shi'i Muslims navigate and inhabit moral leisure places in different parts of the city. It argues that new moral leisure geographies are changing pious people's spatial experiences both within Dahiya and between Dahiya and Beirut. It begins with those who feel more comfortable remaining within their neighborhoods, and how this preference confines and territorially limits their spatial and leisure experiences. It then examines the urban experiences of those who prefer to venture outside the familiar to inhabit other city spaces that share their moral norms. Next, it shows how moral leisure facilitates new urban experiences in Dahiya and Beirut by promoting street life as well as public interactions. It concludes with reflections about how the city is being reshaped by the spatial practices of youths living moral leisure.

The preceding chapters showed how ideas about morality, space, and place come together to create specific forms of leisure for more or less pious Shi'i Muslim residents of south Beirut. Choices about leisure activities and places are informed by different moral rubrics, as people negotiate social norms, religious tenets, and political loyalties. Pastimes and their settings are assessed according to ideas about where they are located and how their patrons behave—ideas built on assumptions about the relationship between morality and geography in the city. Yet how and where a person hangs out is also an expression of personal taste. This chapter brings taste into the picture and discusses how Dahiya's new leisure sites and practices are valued along with how judgments about class, morality, geography, and politics work together to produce ideas about taste and social hierarchy. It concludes by thinking through the question of whether changing leisure practices and spaces can lead to broader social, political, and urban change.

This chapter discusses how Palestinians are being killed, wounded, maimed, and oppressed by Israeli governmental forces with little or no international pressure to limit, stop, or prosecute systematic attacks on Palestinian civilians. With its immense, deliberate destructiveness, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza have systematically attacked and eliminated people as well as predefined physical targets, all based on an Israeli military-political paradigm known as the Dahiya Doctrine. The aim of these Israeli attacks has been to “send Gaza decades into the past” while at the same time attaining “the maximum number of enemy casualties and keeping IDF casualties at a minimum.” Palestinian leaders have called on the Palestinian Authority to abolish the Oslo Accords since Israel has refused to commit to its obligations and instead has continued land grabs and settlement expansion in the West Bank and brutal attacks on civilian society in Gaza. Negotiations toward a final peace agreement have failed simply because Israel does not want peace.

This chapter engages with contemporary counterterrorist practices and discusses cases in which state actors either deal with “terrorists” according to the prescriptions inherent in the symbolic and metaphoric systems used to frame them in the first place, or impersonate the monster prototype (entirely or in some of its components) in their counterterrorist strategies. It first presents the so-called Dahiya Doctrine as an example of how the framing of an enemy as the paradigmatic, cosmic adversary of a people could help a state (Israel) justify violations of the law of war. The following paragraphs discuss the performative construction of the War on Terror as the war of monsters against monsters, focusing first on the impersonation of monstrosity as part of the condoning of unconventional interrogation and detention methods, and then on the move toward de-humanized, (allegedly) surgically effective, and automatized weapon platforms and surveillance systems.