A note to our readers
As part of changes to our organization, Élie Fayad, who has served as co-editor-in-chief of L’Orient-Le Jour for several years, will take up a new role as special adviser to senior management. Drawing on his expertise, he will help diversify our activities, including by developing our archive, expanding services for readers in the diaspora, and organizing debates and conferences. He will also help mediate and maintain dialogue with our subscribers, while continuing to write regularly for L’Orient-Le Jour.
Living almost permanently in Lebanon or abroad does not determine how people see the world, but it can influence their outlook, particularly on political issues, and more specifically their views of the ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah.
Any generalization would be misleading, of course, and it is important to bear in mind that many people who live physically in Lebanon are, in a sense, living abroad, influenced by the trends and ways of thinking prevalent there. The reverse is also true: there are Lebanese people living in Europe, the U.S., or elsewhere who seem as if they have never left Lebanon.
However, for a significant share of those concerned, particularly younger people, the difference is stark and meaningful. It reflects the diversity of their perspectives, much like when two people look at the same landscape through windows from different places and can see very different views.
Without claiming to have conducted a serious survey, it is reasonable to suggest that most non-Shiite Lebanese living in major cities, to varying degrees of course, consider Hezbollah and its Iranian patron as primarily responsible for the war and the suffering Lebanon is currently enduring. At one end there are the moderates who condemn Israel for the disproportionate nature of its war, both in Lebanon and Gaza, but at the same time believe the Shiite militia should stop bringing the pain of Israeli retaliation upon the country. At the other end, there are those who embrace a more hard line position, such as Saleh Mashnouk, who point out that Lebanon is the only country in the world where a “resistance” movement has led to a foreign occupation, rather than the other way around.
This perspective, however, isn’t necessarily the right one in the eyes of many expats, making dialogue with those living in Lebanon increasingly difficult. Shaped by the debates and disputes that have unfolded since Oct. 7, particularly in the West, between supporters and opponents of Israel, and more specifically between supporters and critics of Benjamin Netanyahu, these expatriates view the issue through a distinctly Israeli lens. In other words, they see Israel, and the Jewish question, as the starting point and ultimate focus of the entire conflict. This applies both to Israel’s supporters and to its detractors.
In other words, from a Western perspective, there are not, strictly speaking, those who are pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian or pro-Hezbollah. There are simply those who support Israel and those who oppose it, and both pay very little attention to the specific circumstances of the other actors in the region. It is as though they had joined forces to drown out the Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, and other dimensions of the conflict.
“My problem isn’t Hezbollah. It’s Israel,” a woman in her thirties told me some time ago. She had lived abroad until recently, but has since returned to Lebanon (there is hope!). Yes, Hezbollah may not be the issue, because ultimately, outside a specifically Lebanese context, no one really cares about it. Netanyahu, on the other hand, matters to the whole world.
A reader of L’Orient-Le Jour, a European man married to a Lebanese woman, recently complained that our newspaper’s editorial line amounted to “looking for domestic reasons within the country to explain or justify” Israel’s war against Lebanon. We replied by pointing to the indifference, even contempt, that his words showed towards these “domestic reasons:” the aspirations for sovereignty, peace, and prosperity shared by the vast majority of Lebanese people who have no ties to Hezbollah.
Around the same time, another European reader, also married to a Lebanese woman, accused us of sometimes being antisemitic. We gave him a detailed and comprehensive explanation of why the accusation was entirely unfounded, while also making clear that L’Orient-Le Jour journalists could be angry with Israel and its government over the disproportionate war it is waging against Lebanon without that making them antisemitic.
In any event, the criticisms levelled at us by these two readers, leaving aside the fact that their criticism is shaped by ideological or deeply rooted beliefs, show how central Israel is to the divide, and how little else matters, including Lebanon’s “domestic reasons,” whichever side of the divide one looks at.
This editorial originally appeared in French on L'Orient-Le Jour and was translated by Joelle El Khoury.
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