A few days ago, a short reel began circulating online. It showed Lebanese people dining, laughing, clinking glasses in restaurants and clubs in the Naccache area, a few kilometers north of Beirut. The video was clearly meant to convey a familiar (and to many, by now nauseating) Lebanese message: resilience. Life goes on. We refuse to surrender joy, even when the sky above us threatens otherwise.
Within minutes, the comments section turned into a battlefield.
People condemned the video as insensitive, indecent, even inhumane. How could anyone celebrate while other Lebanese were sleeping on the streets, displaced by bombardments in the South or the suburbs of Beirut? How could music play while families searched for shelter?
The criticism quickly acquired another tone. The video had been filmed in a predominantly Christian area. For many commenters, this was no longer simply about nightlife. It became evidence — real or imagined — of a deeper fissure: The old accusation that some Lebanese get to live “normally” while others pay the price of war.
Suddenly the reel stopped being an uplifting example of the Lebanese talent for coping and morphed into something heavier: a brutal allegory of Lebanon itself, a nation that has forgotten, willingly or not, how to see itself as one body.
Behind the outrage lies a question we rarely ask honestly: What exactly are people supposed to do when war erupts in only one part of a fractured country? Lebanon has lived inside this moral dilemma for decades. Our wars are rarely total. They arrive unevenly, selective both geographically, politically and religiously. One neighborhood burns while another remains intact. One family flees while another continues dinner. The country oscillates between two accusations: insensitivity on one side, moral policing on the other. Both reactions come from real pain.
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Those who are displaced, or whose relatives live under the drones, understandably experience scenes of carefree life and fun as betrayal. Not because they envy the joy of others, but because suffering isolates. It produces the humiliating feeling that your pain belongs to you alone, that it doesn’t matter enough to generate empathy.
At the same time, the people sitting in those restaurants are not necessarily celebrating anyone else’s misery. Many of them are themselves exhausted by years of collapse, financial disaster, and the endless anticipation of catastrophe. They cling to normal life the way a drowning person clings to air.
This is not justification. It is simply an observation. In Lebanon, resilience and denial often wear the same face.
But it was comments beneath the video, rather than the reel itself, that were the most revealing. Scrolling through them felt like watching a country shatter sentence by sentence. Individuals and communities accusing one another. Old sectarian resentments resurfacing with frightening speed. Compassion evaporating under the pressure of anger. Extremes colliding without any ability to place oneself in the other’s shoes. It’s hard to imagine how you can bridge the discourse of a mother declaring, “May all my sons die in this holy fight!” with the blunt cry: “Let’s make peace with Israel already!”
Each war seems to prove the same fact: that we Lebanese are not truly one people, merely neighbors trapped in the same exhausted geography.
The reel mentioned above is not an isolated case. Follow almost any social media thread these days and you will witness the same spectacle: Lebanon arguing with itself. For some, Hezbollah is not simply a party or a militia. It is a shield. Imperfect, controversial perhaps, but a shield nonetheless. Many of those who think this way come from the South, or Dahieh (the predominantly Shiite suburb of Beirut), or have family there. They know the sound of drones the way other people know the sound of rain. They remember wars not as geopolitical episodes, but as destroyed houses, hurried funerals, children who learned too early the geography of shelters.
Last week, I spoke to Abed, a friend from. His family home has been damaged three times, in three different wars. “When people tell Hezbollah to disarm,” he said quietly, “I want to ask them: who will protect us then?” Yet when I ask him: “But if your house has been destroyed three times, how has Hezbollah actually protected you?”, he struggles for an answer. For him, the party is not an ideology. It is, despite everything and against all logic, “insurance” — perhaps the only insurance that exists for him in a state that has repeatedly failed to defend him and people like him. Even the current government of Prime Minister Nawaf Abdallah Salim Salam, which has given hope to many Lebanese, has so far failed to turn the Lebanese Army into what it should have been long ago: the country’s sole legitimate protector.
But not all Southerners or Dahieh inhabitants share this sentiment.
A growing number feel simply that they have had enough. Even those who once feared, or hesitated, to say so publicly in previous wars have begun to speak more openly. Many Shiites who were once staunch supporters of Hezbollah have taken to social media to voice anger, disappointment, and frustration. It is as if the old fear of retaliation, which once kept criticism locked inside the community, inside the house even, barely murmured, has begun to erode. People used to speak of “before the sahsouh and after the sahsouh”— i.e., before the beating and after the beating — as a shorthand for the unspoken red lines that once silenced criticisms of Hezbollah. Today some of those same voices seem less willing to remain silent, as though the weight of repeated wars and losses has finally begun to outweigh the fear that once kept them in check.
“Why are we always the battlefield?,” Mariam, a young Shiite woman screamed online, her face fully visible, undeterred by the backlash of her community, and even family, against her. “Why must we pay for wars that are not ours? Who said I want to die for Khamenei?” She lives in Dahieh. She runs a small business there that barely survived the financial collapse and the 2024 war. For her, every escalation means, at best, fewer customers, more fear, another nail in the coffin of a country already struggling to breathe. When she hears that Hezbollah might open another front or deepen its involvement, she no longer thinks of resistance or dignity. She thinks of displacement. Of humiliation. Of bankruptcy. Of another summer destroyed. Of another generation forced to leave. Her anger is far from isolated. Many Lebanese across different communities recognize themselves in it.
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Between those who insist that Hezbollah is their only protector and those who have simply had enough, between Abed and Mariam, lies a chasm that feels impossible to fill. The anger is real on both sides. The exhaustion too.
A friend told me she had to stop reading the comments under news posts because they were making her physically ill. “It’s not even political disagreement anymore,” she said. “It’s hatred. Pure hatred.” Indeed, the comments read less like debate than like rehearsals for a new civil war. Words such as traitor, coward, collaborator, fanatic fly back and forth with terrifying ease. People speak as if they were enemies rather than neighbors and citizens of the same country. In such moments, Lebanon begins to resemble a house whose inhabitants have stopped recognizing one another.
Yet beneath the online shouting lie fears that are often strangely similar.
Those who support Hezbollah fear abandonment, vulnerability, the possibility that without armed resistance they will lose everything, their homes, their lands, their identities, unable to accept that much has already been lost. Those who oppose Hezbollah fear something equally existential: that Lebanon will remain permanently hostage to regional wars and ideological battles it never chose.
Two fears. Two narratives. Both rooted in real experience. What has almost disappeared is the conversation between them.
Social media, which once promised connection, now amplifies the worst instincts of a fractured society. Nuance evaporates. Empathy collapses. Anger spreads with crude straightforwardness. Read enough comments and a cold thought begins to creep in: perhaps the deepest tragedy is not the war alone, but the way it reveals how fragile the very idea of a shared Lebanese identity has become.
A country cannot survive forever as a collection of parallel realities.
And yet, occasionally, another Lebanon appears: An Uber driver from the South who told me he is tired of being told his fears are illegitimate, but also tired of wars, of beginning over and over again. An Achrafieh shop owner who opposes Hezbollah yet sends blankets and food to displaced families. A group of students arguing fiercely about politics, then sitting down together for coffee.
These moments are small. Fragile. Almost invisible beneath the noise and the animosity. Yet they matter. They remind us that beyond the slogans and accusations are human beings trying, in their flawed and frightened ways, to protect what they love. Perhaps Lebanon’s tragedy is this: everyone claims to defend the country, yet no one agrees on how to save it.
And so, the arguments continue, scrolling endlessly across our screens, a nation speaking loudly, furiously, desperately to itself, still searching for a language in which it might one day speak as one people.
What this moment calls for is something simple, yet infinitely rare: the ability to hold two truths at once. To recognize that joy in one place does not erase suffering in another, but that suffering anywhere in this country should awaken solidarity everywhere.
Not condemnation. Not traitor-baiting. Not competition over who is hurting more or is paying a higher price. But solidarity.
Because the real obscenity is not that some Lebanese were having fun in Naccache while others slept on the street.
The real obscenity would be for us to lose the ability to feel that both realities belong to the same country.
Joumana Haddad
Joumana Haddad is a Lebanese author, journalist, and activist.
