Fear has deepened on the faces of southerners since Hezbollah’s open letter to Lebanon’s three presidents, a message in which the party declared that the government’s trajectory toward disarmament was a “sin,” affirming its continued commitment to resistance and its refusal to give up its weapons.
Speaking of fear as seen on southern faces is not an act of guesswork. One could read it plainly: those faces exposed it in the very moment they realized that the letter might hasten the arrival of war.
From within an educational institution, the writer of these lines observed the thickening of fear on the faces of teachers and students alike. The letter’s impact began to take hold among a broad civilian segment, one that, in all likelihood, provides a measure for the public’s overall fear of war, and exposes the fragility of many of the prevailing narratives about how southerners perceive it.
Hezbollah’s open letter, which shed its usual ambiguity regarding negotiations and the question of exclusive arms possession, also became, paradoxically, a key for southerners themselves, a way of recognizing and naming the fear long buried within them. It revealed the illusions that are daily circulated about a community said to face war with “zero fear.”
Whatever ambiguity the party’s letter may have left about this sense of fear was quickly dispelled, just hours later, by the threats of the Israeli army’s spokesperson.
Avichay Adraee began by deliberately posting warnings of upcoming strikes on villages in South Lebanon, a malicious attempt to cast all southerners into a state of fear. And indeed, he succeeded. The subsequent, more specific warnings about targeted areas may have somewhat reduced the widespread panic, but they did not erase it; people still lived in tense anticipation of new alerts.
While it is difficult to make a definitive claim about the general state of fear, my own observation in my village, Shaqra — where I live — and in its surroundings, suggests that such generalization is well-founded. It often manifests in the rush to gas stations and the packing of bags, both clear indicators of an anticipated displacement.
Taybeh, Tair Debba, Zawtar al-Sharqiyyeh, Kfardounine, Aita al-Jabal, southern villages directly threatened by Adraee’s warnings, have already witnessed mass displacement toward neighboring villages, or, at best, displacements of a lesser distance, depending on how far people now instinctively measure themselves from Adraee’s words, distances they know by heart.
The “five hundred meters” that the Israeli army’s spokesperson “grants” the residents of the threatened villages have produced two distinct approaches to dealing with danger. The first is expressed through widespread displacement, often exceeding Israel’s so-called “safety radius.” The second belongs more to the political realm than the public one; it aligns proportionally with Adraee’s “meters,” serving as a performative backdrop through which Hezbollah projects its own narrative of a fearless society.
War never leaves the southerners’ tongues. It is their constant obsession, their perpetual conversation, their enduring fear. Politics is no longer the occupation of its “practitioners” and theoreticians alone. The constant speculation about whether war will erupt has turned politics, for the inhabitants of southern villages, into a compulsory “trade” that everyone must practice, even my father, who has always despised politics, has become a “politician.” My ninety-year-old father now stands on the edge of a war he loathes.
I, too, hate war — openly, not implicitly. I confess it without hesitation or disguise. I despise the forced silence of those who claim neutrality about it, or about its causes. Their silence is interpreted by Hezbollah in ways they never intend, folded conveniently into the party’s narrative, a narrative now embodied in its open letter to presidents who, like me, may hate war but, unlike me, do nothing to prevent it.
I hate war, and I know that escaping its evil is not a matter of choice. I know, too, that avoiding its ugliness — whether through death or displacement — will not be made possible by Hezbollah’s weapons, nor by Joseph Aoun’s riddles, nor by Nabih Berri’s “poetic” rhetoric.
What remains possible now is only to flee the curse of this homeland, to escape a “Lebaneseness” that was once merely a citizenship, but has been turned by politics and weapons into an occupation.
The war will likely happen. May it not. But even if, by some chance, southerners were spared its eruption, what escape could they ever have from its traumas — the psychological and social scars left by the many wars that have already exhausted them?
To be Lebanese, and southern in particular, means to live a fractured present, split between what you love and what you fear. Between humming a song in solitude and hearing the hum of drones join in your melody. Between sitting with friends to talk about love, sex, and joy, only to have the shadow of war intrude and overwhelm the moment. Between reaching for a poem and finding that poetry itself has been confined to verses praising Sheikh Naim Qassem or the “state” of Nabih Berri.
Such is life in the South today, a daily existence consumed by fear, lived on the edge of war.
