Lebanon Is a Hostage, Not a Foe

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. If Israel were warring against Lebanon, the friend of Israel would have to wrestle with the justice of it. But Israel is not, and her own leaders have said so plainly: in recent days the Prime Minister and the President of Israel addressed themselves directly to the Lebanese people, telling them that Israel seeks peace with Lebanon and that her fight is with Hezbollah alone. That is not a slogan of convenience. It is a description of the actual war, in which the men who fire on Galilee and the men who long to go home are not the same men.

Consider who truly suffers under Hezbollah’s rule, and you will see a hostage where you had been told to look for a foe. It is the Lebanese themselves—Christian and Muslim alike—who have watched their country hollowed out by a militia that has dragged a small and once-beautiful nation into a war it never chose, for the sake of an Iranian quarrel that was never its own. Tens of thousands have fled the south. Lebanese voices, when they dare to be heard, cry out that they have had enough of this war. Even Lebanon’s own president, by seeking talks with Israel and saying aloud that Iran has used his country as a bargaining chip, found himself branded a traitor by Hezbollah for the crime of wanting peace. When wanting peace makes a man a traitor, you may be certain it is not the nation that is the enemy, but the thing that has seized it by the throat.

There is an older Lebanon than the one in the news, and the Christian who reads his Bible knows it well. Lebanon is not a stranger to the story of Israel; it is woven into it. When Solomon built the house of the Lord in Jerusalem, the cedars came down from the mountains of Lebanon, floated along the coast by Hiram king of Tyre, who called Solomon his brother and sent the timber for the Temple. The most glorious work the people of God ever raised was framed of Lebanese wood, given in friendship. The Psalmist, reaching for an image of the man who flourishes in the courts of God, found it in that same country: The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. In Scripture the cedar of Lebanon stands not as a symbol of menace but of strength, dignity, and the slow grandeur of a thing that is meant to endure. That is the Lebanon beneath the rubble, and it has not ceased to exist because Iran has occupied it.

None of this is to gild the war or to pretend that the innocent do not die when armies clash. They do, on both sides of the line, and the friend of Israel gains nothing by denying it. A war fought against an enemy who hides his rockets in bedrooms and his tunnels beneath villages will bring grief to the very people one would most wish to spare; honesty requires that we say so and grieve it. But honesty requires also that we name the author of that grief correctly. It is Hezbollah, and behind Hezbollah the regime in Tehran, that chose to make a battlefield of southern Lebanon; it is Hezbollah that fires across the border and then shelters behind the civilians it has endangered. To lay the suffering of the Lebanese at Israel’s door is to absolve the very power that has authored it.

There is a deeper enmity at work here, and it is well to see it clearly. The hatred that drives Hezbollah is not the ordinary friction of neighboring peoples; it is ideological, and beneath that, spiritual. It is the same revolutionary Islamism, exported from Tehran, that has sworn for more than forty years to wipe the Jewish state from the earth. That hatred has no real quarrel with Lebanon as such—it merely uses Lebanon, as it uses Gaza and Yemen and Syria, as one more front in its war against the covenant people. The enemy of Israel, rightly understood, is not a nation to the north but a doctrine that says the name of Israel must be blotted out; and that doctrine holds the Lebanese captive every bit as much as it threatens the Galilee.

And so the right response of the Christian who stands with Israel is not to add Lebanon to the list of enemies, but to see her people as what they are: hostages of the same serpent, longing for the same peace. We ought to pray for the day when the cedars again grow toward heaven over a land set free from Iran’s grip; when the family that left its note in an empty house may come home in safety; when Lebanon, delivered from the militia that devours it, may take its old place as a neighbor and not a battlefield. Seek peace, and pursue it, the Psalmist commands, and the pursuit of it begins with telling the truth about who the enemy is.

Israel has no quarrel with Lebanon. She has a quarrel with the power that has stolen Lebanon. Until that power is broken the rockets will fall and the soldiers will answer them; but the friend of Israel must never let the guns persuade him that the people behind the rockets and the people who left that note are one and the same. They are not. One is the captor. The other is the captive—and the captive, too, is only waiting to come home.