Israel Is Not My Enemy

I remember my first row with my family about Israel as if it were yesterday. I come from a family from southern Lebanon. And in that family, of course, for a very long time, we believed that all the world's problems came from the enemy, came from Israel.

How could it have been otherwise?

My grandmother was killed by the Israeli army. And I've lost count of the members of my family who died, unfortunate victims under the bombs. My mum has had her house destroyed four times by the Israeli army.

Four times.

The last time, after October 7 and the tragic events in Israel, the Israeli army attacked Lebanon, and that destruction was one too many. It was the destruction that made my mother lose all hope of ever being able to return to Lebanon.

That's where I'm speaking from. Not a television studio, not a lecture hall, not a keffiyeh bought on Instagram. From a Shiite family in the South that has paid, and is still paying.

And that's precisely why I can write what follows.

We are blessed by the gods. My mother is safe, I managed to get her out of Lebanon in time, I was able to get dozens of people out of Lebanon and, with complete discretion, I helped every person who wanted to leave that country to do so. I gave financial help to members of my family, strangers, and all the people who make this diaspora such an extraordinary force.

Because Lebanon is not a country like any other. Lebanon is a country made up of many religions that have a very hard time living with one another. Historically, each of these religions has always been manipulated by a foreign power, an occupying power, and Hezbollah is simply part of a long Lebanese tradition of being influenced from outside, because the country doesn't have the means to be financially independent.

Yet what I see is that in the Emirates and abroad, there are no longer Shiites, Maronites, Christians, Protestants, Sunnis, Druze, or whatever else. There are Lebanese people, and there is a certain shared culture. A love of a good party, a certain zest for the good life, a resilience that makes you dream. I'm extremely proud to carry those roots and those values within me.

Southern Lebanon is a complicated region that, for a very long time, was poor, majority Shiite, and rejected by the rest of Lebanon. They found liberators in Hezbollah, not just militarily but economically too. Hezbollah is something we know fairly little about in France. It's an organization whose reach is also economic; it isn't just military, it's a kind of parallel state within the state.

At the height of the crisis, when Lebanon didn't even have a functioning bank anymore, Hezbollah could provide 100-dollar bills, could provide loans, could provide support, and enabled an entire region to live. I'm not naive, I know perfectly well that Iran colonized southern Lebanon, not by force, but through ideological affinity and the purchase of goods and services that made life easier for many people in that poor region.

But what is the reality? The reality is that this support, this resistance, came at a price for the Lebanese people. That price is the price of blood, war, destruction.

The model we're importing from Iran is incompatible with Lebanon. Lebanon has only ever lived off its openness, its trade, its ability to hold together communities that massacre one another elsewhere. Importing a monocultural Islamist model into that country means breaking the engine that kept the machine running.

I didn't decide to create the State of Israel. No member of my family decided to create the State of Israel. I have no idea whether it was a good decision or a bad one. I wasn't in the room in 1948, and what I see is that the Israeli state is here, and it's here to stay.

The Arab countries tried to wage war on Israel, and they lost. I know that's very difficult to hear, but wars are won and lost, and in the balance of power, there are the strong and there are the weak. Today, in the region, the strong one is Israel. That makes people hysterical, it makes them sad. Some people are happy, some aren't; some people are pro-Israel, others aren't, Zionist, not Zionist. None of that interests me. The only thing I see is that the Israeli people, for legitimate reasons or otherwise, are settled in Judea and intend to stay there.

So we, the other Semitic peoples of the region, have two choices: either accept their existence and reach a peace agreement with them, or wage war on them until one of the two sides dies. Israel has demonstrated a commitment, a discipline, an ability to defend itself that no country in the region has demonstrated. Perhaps if the countries in the region were less corrupt, less incapable of using all the money they're given to develop their countries, perhaps they would have managed to build an esprit de corps, perhaps they would have managed to develop the means to defend themselves.

There's no point in rewriting history. The situation today is very clear: Israel is a strong state, it wants to exist, and if that means recognizing it, I'm the first to want to recognize Israel's right to exist, because Lebanon has no business in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and no Lebanese person should die for Iran's imperialist ambitions.

It's still crazy that a country whose language we don't speak, whose culture we don't share, can dictate its will to every member of society on the grounds that a minority in the country shares a religion with it. And at the same time, let's be clear-eyed. If Iran was able to establish itself in southern Lebanon as it did, it's because no Lebanese force was able to occupy that space. You don't complain about what fills a vacuum you failed to close yourself.

Yes, I know, I was born Shiite, I have Shiite family members. And that's precisely why I can say it without beating around the bush: my community bet on the Iranian alliance and on the state within a state as a political model. That bet failed. And the Shiites of the South are the first to pay the bill, in blood.

I can't stand this coalition that has formed around opposition to Israel anymore, bringing together left-wing activists opposed to every war except the ones that suit them, Trump haters unable to admit that a peace agreement could come from someone they despise, Western academics who impose a decolonial framework on a region they don't know, influencers who have built a career around the keffiyeh, Islamists who see Israel as a metaphysical enemy rather than a state with an army and interests, European diplomats who have built their careers on prolonging the conflict, and Western celebrities who sign opinion pieces between film shoots.

All these people have one thing in common: they don't live in the region, they haven't lost anyone there, they'll never have to live with the concrete outcome of their positions. Their opinions cost them nothing. They cost us.

Israel is not my enemy. Israel is a people I want to have ties with. Israel is a cultural area extremely close to a Lebanese person, genetically, socially, intellectually. When you see a Lebanese person and an Israeli person and no one tells you who's who, it's hard to tell the difference.

Why? Because we share a destiny and a common culture.

It's time to write a shared chapter and a shared history that isn't imposed from abroad, but truly comes from the will of a large part of the Lebanese people.

I never would have believed I'd see what I saw today.

Over breakfast I read the announcement of the meeting, and I saw the flags flying together, and my eyes filled with tears. Of joy.

I never would have believed I'd see all those people in the street applauding a ceasefire.

The wind has changed, and I could really feel that even deep in southern Lebanon, people are truly fed up with misery and war. The price in blood has been paid for too long, and it's time to move on.

When I was a child, Nelson Mandela made a deep impression on me with two simple words: forget and forgive. I don't know whether we're capable of that today. But I hope that one day this region can take inspiration from them.

Dear Lebanon, منرجع منبني

Let's try to make peace, and perhaps much more besides.