History of Loss
How a Lebanese family’s past was swallowed up by the wars of the present

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The smell came first. Markouk flatbread on the griddle, made every other day in my grandfather’s house in Bint Jbeil. After that, I see long stone stairs, a spacious hall, rooms opening onto it. My siblings and I climbed those stairs knowing what waited at the top: bread, still warm, and a life that felt, for those visits, entirely unhurried.

We built a swing inside that house once. Hung it from the old beams and played “Superman” – the comic book version, not the political one. Nobody was asking children to be anything other than children.

That house is gone now. The stairs, the hall, the beams. All gone.

The first time I lost access to it, I was a child. It was 1978. Israel launched Operation Litani to displace the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), who had turned South Lebanon into a launchpad for cross-border raids. My father was in the Lebanese Army and could not follow us.

I saw southerners throwing rice at Israeli tanks – not in welcome of Israel, but out of relief at the end of “Fatahland,” the PLO’s autonomous canton carved out of Lebanese land. The relief was real.

My mother was in the hospital. A shrapnel fragment from a rocket had struck her in the head during the fighting between Palestinian factions and Lebanese Christian militias that had been tearing Beirut apart since 1975. It destroyed 25 percent of her skull. She survived – but she couldn’t walk, couldn’t move her hands, and could barely speak. So my siblings and I went to live with my uncle in Bint Jbeil – inside the occupied zone, under Israel and the South Lebanon Army.

I remember two things about that period. The first is the village: the fig and olive fields, the open society, the weekly Thursday souk where we dressed in our best just to walk through it. Christians, Muslims, families from across the district. Bint Jbeil was the district capital and I was young enough to feel pride in that. My village was the biggest, and everyone came to it.

The second thing I remember is the South Lebanon Army, formed by a group of soldiers who broke away from the national army in 1976, forming a local force to protect themselves and surrounding communities from Palestinian faction attacks. After Israel’s 1978 invasion, it began arming and funding this group, which expanded by recruiting local civilians. It eventually became the controlling force of what Israel called the “security zone” – a border strip in southern Lebanon run by the Israelis. They controlled who could enter or leave through checkpoints that became notorious for arbitrary detentions and coercive control over civilian movement. That abuse was visible even to a child.

My mother eventually joined us, fully paralyzed, carried back to us by the war. Somehow, inside that occupation and that sorrow, we built a life. When Israel invaded Beirut in 1982 and the PLO was expelled, we came back north. I saw southerners throwing rice at Israeli tanks – not in welcome of Israel, but out of relief at the end of “Fatahland,” the PLO’s autonomous canton carved out of Lebanese land. The relief was real.

A Militia Seizes Control of Future and Past

Back in Beirut, we began hearing the word “resistance.” It was not, at first, a religious word. It was a nationalist one. Before Hezbollah existed, the resistance in the south was a mix of Palestinian fighters and Lebanese leftist and nationalist groups – secular, plural, motivated by land and sovereignty rather than faith. But by 1982, while Israeli soldiers remained in the south, something different was being built.

Hezbollah was founded that year, with Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps instructors arriving to train its first cadres. Unlike the Amal movement, built from Shia marginalization and socialist grievance, Hezbollah did not frame its goals within Lebanon. It called for the expulsion of Western influence, the destruction of Israel, and an Islamic government modeled on Iran’s model of clerical rule. The Resistance was no longer about Lebanon. Lebanon was where the Resistance happened to be located.

[Hezbollah] converted a national Lebanese euphoria into the founding myth of a military structure that had its own agenda, its own patrons, and its own idea of what the south was for

In May 2000, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation. And for one moment – one real, unscripted, unowned moment – Lebanon exhaled.

Not just the south. The whole country. Christians, Sunnis, Druze, Shia – Lebanese watched that withdrawal together and felt something they had almost forgotten how to feel. That the land could come back. That something had been won.

That moment belonged to the people of the south. To the families who stayed. To the ones who left and came back. The liberation was theirs. Ours.

And then it was taken away.

Hezbollah called it a divine victory – and in calling it that, they claimed it. Branded it. Converted a national Lebanese euphoria into the founding myth of a military structure that had its own agenda, its own patrons, and its own idea of what the south was for.

The people of the south found themselves relocated. They were transformed from subjects of the liberation to extras in someone else’s victory. It was a moment that separated the liberation from the people it was supposed to liberate.

What came next was not announced. It did not arrive with guns or decrees. The changes were architectural and social – and they were permanent. Schools that had always been mixed-gender, at the elementary and intermediate levels, began to split into separate facilities for girls and boys. Gyms, youth camps, and social gatherings followed. Posters, murals, and flags appeared on streets that had once carried no religious markings. Hezbollah’s Al-Mahdi schools replaced or supplemented the public system, moving children through a curriculum shaped in Tehran.

The economic logic was just as deliberate. Jihad al-Bina – Hezbollah’s construction arm, designated by the U.S. Treasury as a terrorist entity – became the village’s primary rebuilder and employer after every Israeli airstrike. The Martyrs Foundation provided income and healthcare to the families of fighters, which meant that a son’s decision to join was also, for a struggling household, a financial calculation. In a country where the state provided nothing and Hezbollah provided everything – jobs, clinics, schools, reconstruction – membership was not only ideology. It was survival.

This is how you rewrite a village from the inside. Not with a gun. You do it with a school, a clinic, a paycheck, and a construction crew with Iranian money and a Hezbollah flag. Surveys in 1970 and 1971 showed Shia youth in the south favoring socialism, not theocracy. Bint Jbeil was reprogrammed, deliberately and patiently, over decades.

A Hezbollah Leader’s Confession

What is rarely said plainly: Lebanon did not start that war… The Lebanese people paid for a decision they did not make, were not consulted on, and could not stop.

Then came July 12, 2006. Hezbollah crossed into Israeli territory, ambushed a border patrol, killed three soldiers and captured two, demanding a prisoner exchange. Israel’s response reached far beyond the south. Strikes hit Beirut’s international airport and port, shutting down the country’s entry and exit points. Power plants, including a station south of Beirut, were targeted, cutting electricity across the country. Major highways and bridges were destroyed, severing the arteries that moved people, goods, and fuel. Dense civilian neighborhoods in Beirut’s southern suburbs were flattened. This was not a campaign against a militia’s front lines. It was the systematic dismantling of a functioning country. The 34-day war killed more than 1,191 Lebanese, displaced one million, and cost Lebanon over $15 billion.

What is rarely said plainly: Lebanon did not start that war. The Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said publicly that it had no knowledge of the Hezbollah raid and did not condone it. The Lebanese people paid for a decision they did not make, were not consulted on, and could not stop.

When the guns finally went quiet, Nasrallah sat for an interview on Lebanese television. What he said has never left me. “We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war of this magnitude. Would I do it? I say no, absolutely not…” The leader of the Resistance, the man whose fighters had just fought Israel to a standstill in Bint Jbeil’s streets, looked into the camera and told Lebanon: I didn’t know it would cost you this much.

It was the most honest thing he ever said. It was also, for the families of 1,191 dead, entirely beside the point.

The 2006 war hit Bint Jbeil with particular intensity. The IDF sent thousands of troops into the town. The fighting was close, brutal, and costly. More than 40 percent of the city was destroyed – including the souk. And my grandfather’s house.

The rebuild came. We were grateful for the walls, for the roof. But gratitude and memory are not the same thing. I could not stand in the rebuilt souk and say: Here is where I stood with my uncle’s wife. I could not point to a beam and say, “Here is where the swing was.” The village was reconstructed, not restored.

What happened next in Lebanon is a fact that tends to get buried under the rubble of the next catastrophe: The Lebanese Ministry of Finance stated that the Lebanese economy grew at an average of 9.1 percent between 2007 and 2010. The country rebuilt. Beirut filled again with tourists. Members of the Lebanese diaspora began returning every summer, with the particular stubborn energy of a people who have learned, too many times, to rebuild. By the summer of 2023, tourism had surged to the highest numbers seen since before the 2019 financial crisis. There were glimmers – fragile, uneven, but real.

Then came October 7, 2023. Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza. Hezbollah – without a vote, without a mandate, without consulting the Lebanese state or the Lebanese people – opened a second front in solidarity. Framing it as the same axis, the same resistance, the same divine obligation.

Lebanon had not been asked.

The economic cost was immediate. Hotel occupancy rates, which had reached 25 to 50 percent nationally, fell off a cliff. Tourists cancelled. Investors paused. Airlines rerouted.

A country that had survived a financial collapse, a port explosion, a pandemic, and a political vacuum was handed one more war it did not choose. By an organization that had long ago decided it did not need Lebanon’s permission.

This is the pattern. Every time Lebanon finds its footing, someone else’s war finds it first. In 1982 it was the PLO, Palestinian fighters operating from Lebanese soil under the Cairo Agreement, pursuing their own national liberation at Lebanon’s expense, with no Lebanese mandate to do so. From 2000 onward it was Hezbollah, armed, funded, and strategically directed by Iran, fighting wars in Lebanon’s name for goals set in Tehran. Different actors, different ideologies, different patrons. The same Lebanese civilians paying the price. The Resistance’s wars have always been fought on Lebanese soil.

Israel took the infrastructure and the physical memory – the stairs, the souk, the house, the beams where a swing once hung. Hezbollah took the identity – the secular, open, proudly plural district capital that raised children who played Superman and knew every family in the Thursday market.

The last time I was in Bint Jbeil was October 2025. My father had died, and in his will he asked – as Lebanese fathers, tethered to the land even in death, tend to do – to be buried near his own father. We brought him home.

At the funeral, men I did not know and had no relationship to took the microphone and delivered political speeches. They praised the Resistance. They chanted “Death to Israel, death to America.” My father was lying there. We were mourning him. I remember thinking: who are you people? How do you walk into a family’s grief and turn it into a rally? But I already knew the answer. They were not intruding. They had been inside the village for 40 years. The village was theirs now, in ways that had nothing to do with birth or belonging.

After the ceremony, my siblings and I took a photograph inside my brother’s house. The way you do when you understand, without saying so, that you may not be together in this place again.

I had left for Washington years before. I wasn’t fleeing bombs, but doing something slower and more deliberate. I did not want my children raised inside the gravitational pull of an ideology that had already swallowed one generation. I had watched it happen to the place in which I grew up. I was not willing to watch it happen again. That is a sentence I would not have imagined writing when I was a child climbing those stairs with the smell of markouk ahead of me.

In March 2026, Hezbollah launched another support operation, this one in the wake of Khamenei’s death. Israel’s response followed its time-worn strategy of deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure to pressure populations and reshape political geography.

I was in Washington when my brother called. He had been displaced and was sharing a Google satellite map on WhatsApp, trying to identify what had once been his house, my father’s house, and my younger brother’s house. The resolution was not clear enough to be certain. Two days later, the IDF released its own footage showing the full destruction of Bint Jbeil. What local and international media had already begun documenting was no longer in question: Bint Jbeil was not just damaged. It was being erased.

Israel took the infrastructure and the physical memory – the stairs, the souk, the house, the beams where a swing once hung. Hezbollah took the identity – the secular, open, proudly plural district capital that raised children who played Superman and knew every family in the Thursday market.

Neither asked permission. Neither will answer for it.

A Country’s Hijacked Destiny

Nasrallah is dead now, killed by an Israeli airstrike in Beirut in September 2024. He cannot be asked whether the open front for Hamas, the open front after Khamenei, were worth this – worth the souk, worth the stairs, worth the house where two boys once played Superman. Worth more than 6,600 Lebanese killed since October 2023. Worth 1.2 million displaced. Worth $25 billion in destruction and 90 percent of Bint Jbeil’s urban footprint demolished, building by building.

But we already know his answer. He gave it to us once, in 2006, on camera. These are the costs of decisions made without a Lebanese vote, by a man who admitted, when it was already too late, that he would not have made them. The question now belongs to whoever comes after him. And to a village that was never given the choice.

The walls of Bint Jbeil will go back up. They always do. The question is whether the next reconstruction will again be handed to the same hands that made the destruction possible.

I am from Lebanon. I have covered this region for decades. I have sat across from ambassadors, generals, and ministers. What Lebanon wants is not complicated. Not resistance. Not victory. Not divine promise. It wants a deal – specifically, a security agreement, guaranteed by the United States, that includes full border demarcation and Israeli withdrawal. Lebanon wants a non-aggression agreement, Hezbollah disarmed, and an international force with real authority deployed across the south. Not what UNIFIL has been – a peacekeeping presence operating under Chapter Six of the UN Charter, which requires the consent of all parties and carries no enforcement power.

Hezbollah exploited that limitation for decades, rearming and expanding its presence on the ground while blue helmets watched and filed reports. What Lebanon needs is a force operating under Chapter Seven, the UN’s binding enforcement authority, that does not require Hezbollah’s cooperation and cannot be vetoed by a militia. An international presence that can actually hold the line, not merely observe it being crossed.

Lebanon did not ask for ideology or a patron. It asked for a border, a guarantee, and to be left alone on its own land. In most of the world, that is called a minimum.

The walls of Bint Jbeil will go back up. They always do. The question is whether the next reconstruction will again be handed to the same hands that made the destruction possible.

The stairs to my grandfather’s house are rubble. The swing is long gone. And Lebanon is still waiting for someone – anyone – to understand before it is too late.