Almost two months separate two important moments in the Lebanese town of Qlayaa, just four kilometers from Israel and where “100%” of the around 2,900 inhabitants have the same religion (Maronite), the same patron saint (Saint George) and the same church, the only one called, obviously, Saint George. His priest, Pierre Al Rahi, participated in both. The first took place on October 4. Israel had just turned 11 months of low-intensity war with Hezbollah into open war and was issuing evacuation orders in southern Lebanon, where mosques and churches dot the mountainous landscape. The Israeli military spokesman then included Qlayaa, a town with a far from secret past of collaboration with Israel during the 18 years of occupation (1982-2000) and where the word enemy usually refers to Hezbollah. Father Al Rahi summoned the remaining residents (half had escaped the bombings in the area), contacted the blue helmet mission that monitors the area and launched a rallying cry: “We are not leaving!” “If we did,” he explains today, “Hezbollah would occupy our empty houses, launch rockets from there, and Israel would end up responding and damaging them. It’s about protecting our people. Even though we don’t have weapons, like others.” He convinced the Israeli army, which, a few hours later, annulled the order.
On Tuesday, a ceasefire put an end to two and a half months of exhausting conflict in which the town was left as a kind of island without being attacked between Shiite towns that are now devastated and still have the presence of Israeli troops. There were seven weeks without bombings inside, but without access to a hospital, drawing on food and fuel reserves to power the electric generator that they had prepared. Also family stores, in an agricultural area full of olive groves and fruit trees. Today, Qlayaa is part of the strip of a map to which the Israeli army prohibits access and on which it imposes a curfew from afternoon to dawn. Some young people watch, with little concealment, that no stranger enters. That is, no one from Hezbollah or, rather, no suspicious-looking Shiites.
The ceasefire agreement establishes that Israeli troops in southern Lebanon (where they penetrated a few kilometers, until they were near Qlayaa) will gradually withdraw over the next two months. Their place will be taken by some 10,000 Lebanese soldiers, in a reinforced deployment with a complicated task: ensuring that Hezbollah does not have militiamen, nor weapons, nor workshops to build them, nor does it regroup in the area.
Where they remain, the Israelis have not yet taken a position. But they have begun to be deployed in the rest of the areas. Transfer of armored vehicles and all-terrain vehicles, trucks transporting soldiers, checkpoints at the entrance to Shiite towns with metal barriers… Their presence, previously almost anecdotal, is noticeable as soon as you cross the Litani River, where Hezbollah has been exercising authority over an absent and impotent State. That is why this Friday, in his first speech since the end of the truce, Naim Qasem, the new leader of Hezbollah after the assassination of Hasan Nasrallah, has made an effort to promise “high-level coordination between the resistance and the Lebanese army to implement the terms of the agreement” and in asking that “no one bet on problems or a conflict” between the two.
On the first day of the truce, on Wednesday, several Lebanese army armored vehicles crossed Qlayaa on their way to the base of nearby Marjayun. It was then that the second image occurred, the other side of the same coin as the refusal to leave the town a month and a half earlier. The neighbors came out to celebrate the deployment of the soldiers, throwing rice and flower petals at them and chanting slogans such as: “We don’t want to see anything but the Lebanese army.” The soldiers saluted in surprise.
It is the part of Lebanon that feels that the formerly called “Switzerland of the Middle East” is no longer that because there is always some group launching attacks against Israel from the area. From the seventies, with the fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization), until now, with Hezbollah, which is accused of caring only about its patron, Iran, not the national good. In their songs they usually say: “A single army for a single State.” Or, in the words of the priest Al Rahi: “What cannot be is that there is an army and, furthermore, a party with weapons on its own.”
It is exactly the opposite narrative to that of Hezbollah, in which its supporters (and others who are not) see the only guarantee of survival for Lebanon, because the Israeli neighbor would use any excuse to invade it (as it has done several times in half a century). ) and the Western powers have ensured that it has an army incapable of confronting it, without even an air force. One of their songs is “State, army, resistance.” And, in the background, of course, the historical oblivion and humiliation of the Shiites compared to the Christians, privileged by the French colonial administration.
The nearby town of Marjayún, also with a Christian majority, is marked by the proximity of the Miguel de Cervantes base, part of the UN mission sector (Unifil) led by Spain. It is present in the number of people who speak Spanish or in the names of shops in the same language, in the road where Unifil soldiers usually pass and, in better times, get off and chat with the locals. In this war, Marjayun has paid a higher price than Qlayaa. Four of their neighbors have been killed by Israeli bombings, which everyone here blames on a Hezbollah member sneaking into an empty house.
It is part of what the Shiite war displaced people have suffered in recent months, often treated outside their areas as if they were plagued (denying them rent upon hearing their name, which usually denotes religion, or directly expelling them), for fear that the building ended up becoming an Israeli target. In conversations without names or surnames in Shiite areas, it emerges that Christians will one day pay for having treated them like dogs in a time of need. Among the Christians, they are happy, on the other hand, that Israel has done the dirty work of weakening the military Hezbollah, so that the political one also loses internal power.
If on the long road that crosses Marjayún they did not receive the Lebanese army tanks with rice or flower petals, it is, in part, because they had not stopped passing. But today there are many more, to the joy of their neighbors, like Tony. “It calms us to see them, it gives us confidence,” he says in front of one of the few open businesses, which seem empty between entire rows of closed blinds. “I have great hope that the Armed Forces can fulfill their mission and we will get out of this dark situation. Until now, they were there, but they were not watching. In any country, the one who protects is the army.”
Tony (he prefers not to give his last name) is one of the few who remained throughout the conflict in Marjayún, so he is not too worried about the regular health that the ceasefire is showing in its first days, with around twenty attacks (some can be heard suddenly in the background during the conversation) from Israel, which has promised a tough line against any attempt by Hezbollah to regroup in the south. “This is not our war,” he summarizes. “It is not a Lebanese war. “It is a war between Iran and Israel.”
