Israel Attacks Hezbollah. The Lebanese Pay the Price.

Ms. Bakri is a journalist and essayist based in Cambridge, Mass.

I have been tending my house on a hill in Marjayoun in southern Lebanon by phone since fighting broke out between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, after Oct. 7, 2023. I call the caretaker of the house every week. Is the road passable? Is the water running? Is the house still standing? He tells me what he can see. I ask him to do what he can.

A cease-fire in 2024 quelled the fighting, although Israel continued with sporadic raids. This month, the area became a major front in the American-Israeli war with Iran. Israel ordered people to leave our neighborhood and sent its army and attack planes to fight Hezbollah. In two weeks, the Israeli military has killed more than 800 people and driven some 800,000 others from their homes there and elsewhere in Lebanon, with devastating strikes on Beirut, and turned schools, stadiums, sidewalks and other corners of ordinary life into places of shelter.

The orders came after Hezbollah fired on Israel, saying it was avenging the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and acting in defense of Lebanon. The Lebanese government answered by banning military activity by Hezbollah, declaring that only the state can make decisions about war and peace. President Joseph Aoun on Monday said Hezbollah showed “no regard for the interests of Lebanon or the lives of its people.”

For decades, Lebanon has been a place for other people’s wars and our own unfinished ones: Palestinians and Israelis, Syrians and Israelis, militias and the state. Old civil war battle lines never fully disappeared, and new wars keep finding the same ground. Even now, after all these years, Lebanon is still caught between a party that claims to defend it — Hezbollah — and a war whose consequences the country is left to absorb. My house is still standing. But like much of the country, it remains intact only at the whims of the armies surrounding it.

Lebanese politicians have been talking about ending Hezbollah’s enormous influence on Lebanon for at least 30 years. Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in 1996 during a previous Israeli occupation, spoke about plans to disarm Hezbollah and absorb it into the Lebanese political landscape once Israel withdrew from the south.

Mr. Hariri was not an idealist floating proposals from the margins. He was rebuilding Beirut, and understood that you do not dismantle a militia by confrontation but by making it unnecessary, by building a state functional enough that the argument for a parallel state becomes moot. Remove the occupation, he was saying. Remove the cause. Disarmament will follow. It was a specific, logical theory of how Lebanon works. But it was also a threat to the parallel state that Hezbollah was building.

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