On a winter morning in 1982, in the months leading up to Israel’s second invasion of Lebanon, Abu Akram, a tobacco farmer from the village of Taybeh, set out for the market with his cousins. As they made their way through the olive groves, they stumbled upon a memoir by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, likely abandoned by Israeli soldiers or members of the Christian militia, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), who patrolled the border villages. As news of the book spread across the village, about twenty farmers gathered that evening to discuss how to destroy it. The option of burning it was quickly dismissed, fearing that any light would draw the attention of Israeli planes patrolling the night sky. Instead, they chose to gather around a dried-up well near the village center, where they each stomped on the book and spat on it before hurling it into the well and burying it under cow manure. In this double darkness of the soil and the night, farmers in Taybeh found themselves shedding the hollow morality disguised in the imperial struggle for light. And in recognizing the mounting conflict between light and life in southern Lebanon, Abu Akram and his companions aimed their spades at their oppressors and wielded darkness into their arsenal of life-making tools.