A few days ago, in a village in southern Lebanon emptied by months of war, Israeli soldiers came upon a note left behind by a family that had fled north. It did not curse them. It told them, in plain words, that the family was Christian, that they loved them, and that they asked only to be allowed one day to come home. I have not been able to stop thinking about that note. It is a small thing against the machinery of this war, and yet it says what the headlines so rarely manage to say: the war along Israel’s northern border is not, and has never been, a war between Israel and Lebanon.

It is a war between Israel and Hezbollah. That is not the same thing at all, and we must learn to hold the difference firmly—especially now, when the guns are loud and the easy temptation is to let the map do our thinking for us. To the eye that reads only the map, Lebanon is the land to the north from which the rockets come, and therefore Lebanon is the enemy. But Hezbollah is not Lebanon. It is a state grafted inside a state, an armed militia that answers not to Beirut but to Tehran, planted in the south and the Bekaa to serve as Iran’s forward army against the Jewish people. When Israeli forces this month uncovered a great tunnel network beneath the ruins of an ancient castle in the south—dug and paid for with Iranian money—they were not exposing the works of the Lebanese nation. They were exposing the burrow of a foreign occupier that has made Lebanon’s soil its trench and Lebanon’s people its shield.

This matters more than a point of vocabulary, because the truth of a war shapes the conscience of those who fight it and those who watch.........

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