I Went to Lebanon and Found Something Strangely Hopeful

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

49% : It's with this settler-colonial, aggressive, expansionist Israel.
47% : Israel's maximum force doctrine has, paradoxically, produced more resistance.
45% : "Hezbollah had a role, a major role, in driving the Israelis out of the south," he told me, referring to Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 after nearly two decades of occupation.
45% : Instead, he said, its resolution will inevitably involve not just Iran and Israel but also other major players in the region.
45% : If Israel's high-tech army, backed by the United States, cannot defeat Hezbollah, how would the Lebanese Army be able to achieve it?
44% : Peace talks are underway between the Lebanese and Israeli governments, even though Lebanon is not fighting Israel.
44% : Her focus, instead, was on Israel.
44% : Two medics and a member of the administrative staff were killed in the strike, he said, three of more than 116 people killed by Israeli strikes on health-care facilities since March, according to the World Health Organization.
43% : " Hezbollah's popularity certainly waned, even among Shiites, since the group decided to join Hamas in targeting Israel after Oct. 7, and again after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei earlier this year.
43% : Back in Beirut, I met with a man named Nawaf Moussawi, a longtime Hezbollah politician who was a close ally of Hassan Nasrallah, the group's charismatic leader, who was assassinated by Israel in 2024.
42% : His house had been destroyed in the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2024, along with his small farm.
42% : The notion that this feeble force could completely disarm Hezbollah -- as Israel and America demand -- strikes many Lebanese as laughable.
41% : "Lebanon cannot be extracted from the conflict with Israel, unless there is a regional peace achieved.
41% : Israel's right to self-defense cannot come at the expense of Lebanese civilian lives, she argued, and killing a handful of Hezbollah fighters cannot justify the occupation and destruction of vast tracts of a foreign country.
40% : Israel's inability to force regime change in Iran could lead it to lash out even more ferociously at its neighbors; or it could find itself exhausted and isolated, hemmed in by a loss of unstinting American support.
39% : Last week, Israel widened its ground assault and pushed deeper into Lebanon.
39% : Jarade, an eye surgeon, was horrified by the gruesome injuries he saw in civilian patients and disgusted by Israel's celebratory response to the attack, which injured thousands.
39% : For Jarade, the atrocity put Hezbollah and Israel side by side as terrorizers of innocent civilians. Tarek Mitri, an Orthodox Christian politician who serves as the deputy prime minister, also seemed keen to move past old divisions.
39% : "From there on, Israeli incursions into Lebanese territory or Hezbollah operations into Israel have given each other pretext to interfere."
39% : "Arrangements dictated by the occupier will never work," he declared, referring to Israel.
38% : Israel regularly bombs residential areas it claims harbor Hezbollah militants, and Hezbollah attacks Israeli troops, who occupy an ever-expanding swath of Lebanese territory.
38% : Unlike Sheikh Naim Qassem, the current secretary general of Hezbollah, Moussawi did not predict the demise of the state of Israel.
37% : " I asked him if he worried about Israel becoming a hegemonic power in the Middle East or the plight of the Palestinian people, including Palestinian Christians.
36% : Partly this is a result of Lebanon's own shambolic economic situation, but it is also a product of American policy that seeks to keep regional armies weaker than Israel's.
36% : Despite the relentless Israeli assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon, he argued that the aftermath of the Iran war has left Israel weak and isolated, as well as revealing powerful truths about the limits of American military power.
34% : Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia group, has been in conflict with Israel, on and off, for decades.
32% : "Israel tells us that it is going to transform Lebanon to Gaza, it's going to occupy our land, destroy our land," she said, referring to the approach laid out by officials including Israel's defense minister.
30% : She has long been critical of Hezbollah but, like the deputy prime minister, rejects attempts to paint it as an alien force bent on destroying Israel.
30% : It would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and so, some might say, it is merely a more politely phrased version of the Iranian chant of "Death to Israel."
29% : But Israel's maximum-war doctrine in the aftermath of Oct. 7 has eroded its standing across the globe, making Moussawi's position -- that Israel should be a single pluralistic, democratic state with equal rights for Palestinians -- something closer to an emerging global consensus.
25% : After it fired rockets into Israel in March as vengeance for the killing of Iran's supreme leader, Israel launched a brutal counterattack, killing almost 3,500 people and wounding more than 10,000, according to Lebanon's health ministry.
25% : If he might once have been sympathetic to Israel's fight against Hezbollah, that changed after Israel used booby-trapped pagers to attack Hezbollah leaders two years ago.

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