IV. THE SOUTH LEBANON ARMY AND THE CHRISTIANS WHO CHOSE WRONG
Most Americans know almost nothing about the South Lebanon Army and that ignorance is part of the story.
In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to push the PLO away from the border after years of attacks on northern Israeli civilian communities. Out of that operation emerged an alliance with Lebanese Christian militias in the south, predominantly Maronite Christians, who shared Israel’s interest in keeping the Iranian-backed organisations away from the border. Israel armed them, trained them, and funded them. They called themselves the South Lebanon Army. They patrolled a security zone in the south and provided a buffer between Israeli civilians and the Hezbollah forces that Iran was building to replace the PLO.
For 18 years this arrangement held, imperfectly, at cost. And then in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided to withdraw from southern Lebanon entirely. The decision was made quickly. When the Israeli pullback began, the South Lebanon Army collapsed almost immediately. Soldiers abandoned their posts. Officers and their families fled to Israel, where some 7,000 of them sought asylum in a matter of days. Hundreds surrendered to the Lebanese army. The security zone emptied. Hezbollah moved into the void.
The South Lebanon Army was built from people who had made a bet. They had concluded that cooperation with Israel was the path to protecting their homes and their families against the Islamist forces that were consuming Lebanon. They were mostly Christians who understood, more clearly than their countrymen in Beirut, what Hezbollah represented. They were not wrong about Hezbollah. They were wrong about the permanence of the alliance they were counting on.
The men who fled to Israel are still there, or their children are. The men who stayed and surrendered faced prison and in some cases execution under the Lebanese legal system that classified their service as collaboration. Their villages in the south were absorbed into Hezbollah’s domain. The organisation that had promised to liberate southern Lebanon from occupation made the south into the most militarised, most Iranian-controlled territory in the Levant.
Here is the part that almost no one discusses openly. A significant portion of the Lebanese Christian diaspora, concentrated now in cities like Montreal, Sydney, São Paulo, and Detroit, has processed the loss of southern Lebanon in a specific way. They acknowledge Hezbollah’s role intellectually. They know who did what. But when they speak to Western audiences, when they appear on panels, when they give interviews to journalists who are looking for Lebanese Christian voices to balance their coverage, many of them place the primary blame on Israeli actions. They cite Israeli airstrikes. They cite the 1982 invasion. They cite collateral damage from Israeli operations against Hezbollah.
This is understandable on a human level. Admitting that you lost your homeland because a Muslim terrorist organisation, funded by Iran and enabled by the political cowardice of the Lebanese state, methodically displaced your community over decades, requires sitting with a grief that has no political outlet, no international movement, no campus protest demanding your right of return. The alternative, placing the blame on Israel, at least gives the grief a familiar grammar. The Western progressive world understands that grammar. It rewards it with sympathy.
But it is not true. The Maronite Christians of southern Lebanon, those who left and those who stayed, lost their communities to Hezbollah. Not to Israel. And the few remaining Christians in Lebanon who still blink rapidly when asked about it, nodding carefully in the direction of whoever holds the gun nearest their head, know exactly what happened. They just cannot say it safely.
In 1960, about 52 per cent of Lebanon’s population was Christian. Today that number has fallen to about 30 per cent. Lebanese Christians who can leave take the first plane to Montreal or Sydney. What was once called the Paris of the Middle East, with its Swiss banks, its French universities, its cosmopolitan beaches, its wine competing with Bordeaux, has been systematically consumed by an Iranian proxy organisation while the world that lectures Israel about proportionality looked away.
Christians in Lebanon deserve a protected homeland. Instead they have a military that gave their land over to foreign funded terrorists whose continual targeting of civilians in Israel from within their villages has brought decades of death and despair.
V. WHAT TARGETING CIVILIANS HAS ACTUALLY PRODUCED
Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis. These organisations share a strategy. They target civilians. They have targeted Israeli civilians continuously, with varying levels of capability, since their founding. And the strategy has produced, for the Palestinian people specifically, the worst outcomes imaginable.
Gaza before October 7, 2023, was not a prosperous place. But it was better than Gaza on October 8, 2023. The people of Gaza did not authorise October 7. They could not have stopped it. They paid for it with everything they had.
The argument made constantly in Western progressive discourse is that resistance, meaning terrorism against civilian targets, is the natural and inevitable response to oppression, and that the oppression is the root cause of the suffering. This argument requires ignoring the specific choices made by the organisations claiming to represent Palestinian interests.
Hamas chose to build tunnels instead of schools. Hamas chose to fire rockets instead of building an economy. Hamas chose October 7 knowing what the response would be. Hamas chose to site its military infrastructure under hospitals, guaranteeing that Israeli military responses would produce civilian casualties that could be photographed and distributed through the networks that the KGB built and Qatar now maintains.
Every photograph of a destroyed Gaza building serves Hamas’s strategic objectives. Not Israel’s. Hamas’s. Hamas needs those photographs. Hamas’s political survival, its international fundraising, its relevance to the donor nations that sustain it, depends on the suffering of the people it claims to represent. A prosperous Gaza with functioning infrastructure and economic opportunity and children in schools instead of tunnels is the end of Hamas. Hamas knows this. This is why Hamas destroyed the greenhouses in 2005. This is why Hamas diverts humanitarian aid. This is why Hamas builds rockets while destroying civilian infrastructure.
The people stuck in Gaza are not stupid. They know what Hamas is. Many of them despise it. They cannot say so safely. They live in a giant welfare state built on grievance, maintained by UNRWA, which has employed Hamas members and allowed its facilities to be used for weapons storage, funded by donor nations whose own progressive academics need the Palestinian cause to be pure and simple, governed by an organisation whose founding document calls for the destruction of a neighbouring state and whose strategy has produced, across 80 years of conflict, not one square meter of additional sovereignty for the people it claims to represent.
This is the lie that keeps killing. Not the lie that there are no legitimate Palestinian grievances. There are. Not the lie that Israeli policy has been blameless and perfect. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make. The lie is that the organisations claiming to speak for Palestinian people have ever been interested in Palestinian flourishing. They have not. They have been interested in Palestinian suffering, because Palestinian suffering is the fuel the cause runs on.
They want the complete destruction of Israel. If Palestine laid down their arms, they would have a country recognised and nurtured by the world and able to build something real. If Israel laid down its arms, it would be slaughtered wholesale and the cowards in America wearing kaffiyeh in solidarity would look away from murdered children and raped women as they did after October 7.
The Soviet propagandists who designed this architecture in the 1960s built it to last. It has lasted. It is running today. And it will keep killing until enough people are willing to say plainly what it is.
