I arrived in Beirut around ten in the evening. Rafik Hariri International Airport, small by international standards, was packed with travelers: Lebanese returning temporarily from the diaspora, families making their way home, tourists and visitors.
In the passport line, the voice of a child no older than seven rose above the crowd. He was staring at one of the foreign travelers with undisguised displeasure, as if asking: “What are you doing here? This is our land. This is our airport.” Beside him stood his mother – a woman in full black hijab, smiling with a pride that looked very much like approval.
Then I stepped outside. As soon as you leave the terminal, Lebanon begins to speak. The road to Beirut is not merely a passage for cars. It is a prologue to a country’s story.
On both sides of the road, a visual battle plays out without pause: Official Lebanese state banners confront Hezbollah flags and portraits of Iranian leaders, all hanging from the same lampposts. Every banner is a narrative, and every narrative contests the one beside it. In just a few kilometers, you can already read Lebanon’s internal conflict in full – political, social, existential – along both sides of the road. The entrance to the capital does not welcome you. It tells you who controls the public space – and who is still fighting over it.
Even in the hardest moments, the Lebanese find a way to make a joke.
I stayed in north Beirut. No trace of war there. The city moves through its nights at its familiar pace: restaurants, cafes, noise, laughter. Nothing here suggests a country that barely emerged from a war and has since entered a fragile truce.
On the second day, I went to the southern suburbs to visit my mother’s grave. That same day, Hezbollah was holding what it called a mourning ceremony for the late supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed in February in an Israeli strike on Tehran, and not buried until July, after his body had traveled between Tehran, Najaf, and Mashhad. In Islam, honoring the dead begins with burying them. Iran’s honoring of its supreme leader began by parading him. What Tehran did was not a religious ritual. It was a political performance. Standing at my mother’s grave, I found myself pondering that contrast.
The southern suburbs themselves were a contradiction of another kind: mechanics working in their garages, bakeries open, people drinking coffee beside the ruins of their buildings, others pointing their fingers at the sky. The sound of Israeli drones never disappears; it imposes itself as the permanent background to every conversation, every activity. The residents of the suburbs have given these drones a name: “Umm Kamel,” the Lebanese term for a meddlesome woman who leaves no one in peace and brings chaos wherever she goes. Even in the hardest moments, the Lebanese find a way to make a joke.
A day later, I had an appointment at the Grand Serail with Prime Minister Nawaf Salam.
We were received by Ambassador Farah Al-Khatib, director of his office. A calm and composed woman, she has been deeply involved in the policymaking process, including close collaboration with Tom Barrack, Trump’s lead advisor on the Middle East. She is a woman who helped make a piece of history whose name does not appear in the headlines.
She told us about the prime minister’s daily routine: how he wakes early and begins working from home, how he follows the work of ministers and ministries through direct contact with each minister, and how he arrives at his office and sits with his team over coffee. As she told us this, he suddenly appeared, in the process demonstrating his own humility. He was ten minutes late, so he came personally to her office to apologize, then walked us to his own.
The meeting with him was relaxed. That is not a given with a prime minister leading a country in a state of war. He is not, by his own nature, a man of many words – but he was engaged and present.
I asked him about the framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel, and about the Lebanese army’s entry into the recently agreed “pilot zone,” an area in the South where the Lebanese army will soon deploy in order to demonstrate that Beirut, and not Hezbollah, is in control. I asked him whether that required a cabinet decision. His answer was unambiguous: “No.” The Lebanese army must be everywhere and must reach anywhere in Lebanon, no additional procedure required. For him, the matter was that simple. I suggested that it would not be that simple on the ground, because there are parties capable of breaking the peace. He neither agreed nor disagreed. He returned to the same sentence: The Lebanese army must take responsibility in the south.
Enormous work and effort will still be needed to secure a better future for the people of the South and Lebanese citizens overall.
Official Lebanon, in Nawaf Salam’s office, looks calm, confident, and composed. But an unspoken question lingered: Is that enough?
On June 26, Lebanon and Israel signed, under American auspices, a framework agreement charting a path toward “comprehensive peace and security,” including the exclusive and gradual deployment of the Lebanese army into southern areas. The agreement that Salam spoke of with confidence and affirmed its importance was rejected by Hezbollah. Its Secretary-General Naim Qassem described it as a “grave mistake” and “null and void.” The party’s parliamentary deputy Hassan Fadlallah warned of civil war should the authorities insist on implementing it. This is precisely what I told the prime minister in his office. He neither disagreed nor agreed. Hezbollah had already given its answer.
Underlying this complex picture are numbers that leave no room for interpretation: more than 4,230 killed and 12,179 wounded since last March. And by the end of 2026, the long-running United Nations peacekeeping mission will end, leaving the South without any international presence, however symbolic. The calm and confidence in Nawaf Salam’s office are real. But what awaits him outside that office far exceeds the quiet conversation. Enormous work and effort will still be needed to secure a better future for the people of the South and Lebanese citizens overall.
Before the visit ended, I went with my husband to a restaurant on the shore in north Lebanon: fresh fried fish and a sea that walks with you to the table. When we asked what kind of fish would be served, the woman who runs the place said simply: “I’ll bring you a little of each.” When the fish arrived, the table looked like a statement of what most defines this country and its people: diversity.
At the table beside us sat a Lebanese couple in their forties, speaking with American guests, trying to explain some facets of what is happening in the country. They mapped out the eighteen sects and the system that distributes power among them: the president a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. Then they moved on to the people: the Christian villages beside the Sunni villages beside the Shia villages, and the sectarian and denominational diversity within many of them.
I sat listening, old conversations with colleagues running through my mind. The Lebanese describe their country as a mosaic of sects – but the map looks far less mixed than the narrative suggests. Each community has, to a large degree, its own geographic domain, while the political system remains hostage to balances drawn more than 80 years ago. The last official census was conducted in 1932, and no update has followed – because any new count would reopen Lebanon’s most sensitive question: Who represents the majority, and who holds power?
The most recent estimates put the Shia at roughly 32 percent of the population, Sunnis at 31 percent, Christians (across their various denominations) at around 32 percent, and the Druze at 5.5 percent. These numbers tell on their own the story of a country whose political system has not kept pace with the demographic shifts of decades.
Only there do you grasp that this country does not live its contradictions on the margins of life – it has made them part of daily life itself.
This mosaic of communities, combined with what is happening in Lebanon – above all Hezbollah’s dragging of the country into a war most Lebanese believe is not theirs – has brought the conversation about federalism back to the surface with a new intensity. The idea at its core is simple: each community governs its own territory, has its own institutions and its own decisions, and will not be dragged into wars in the name of a national unity that never protected it. The idea is not new, but it is being raised this time with urgency and conviction by a wide range of political figures and sectarian and denominational communities.
Everywhere I went on this visit, I heard English and French. The Lebanese dialect itself has become a mixture: Arabic sentences threaded through with foreign words, as though the mother tongue no longer suffices on its own. The Americans I encountered were not Lebanese diaspora; they were visitors who came despite their government’s travel warnings. They came looking for Lebanon, but found something more complicated. They found a country that does not resemble the image carried by news bulletins. They did not find a broken people or a city that had surrendered to war. They found a society pressing on with stubborn insistence: drinking coffee among the rubble, raising eyes toward the drone in the sky, then returning to conversation as though life is still louder than the noise.
Lebanon is not understood from a distance. No report captures it, no official statement contains it. It is understood on the airport road, in the southern suburbs, in the prime minister’s office, and at a restaurant table overlooking the sea. Only there do you grasp that this country does not live its contradictions on the margins of life – it has made them part of daily life itself. And perhaps that is why no visitor leaves with more answers. They leave with more questions.
