Nothing is more brutal than being denied the right to grieve. And I do not mean grief over loss and death alone, but also over losses that encompass home, land, memory, the past, the present, and the future. 

Yes, Hezbollah is imposing on us, its partners in this land, this country, this family, and this shared memory, a new kind of ban, one no dictatorship has previously imposed on its subjects: the right to grieve and to feel pain. What we mean here is not an inference derived from a somewhat more general idea, the ban on grief is a direct practice, documented through incidents and orders issued by the party. Your sorrow over your losses is treated as “a weakening of the nation’s resolve.” The ban now has its own audience, enforcement tools, policing, mechanisms, and language. Most critically, people have begun to fear expressing their grief openly. 

An overwhelming readiness to confront any attempt to express pain and grief. Electronic armies, mouthpieces, and influencers; a “victory police” dispersed across social media, in displacement centers, and on television screens. What journalists hear on camera is entirely different from what they hear once the cameras are turned off. 

What Raad said is nothing more than a political reflection of practices any journalist can attest to, especially those who have tried to access areas of displacement, shelters, schools, and the facilities where people have taken refuge. At the entrance of every site, party-affiliated activists stand guard, preventing journalists from approaching people on their own or speaking to them freely, to avoid any expression that might “weaken the nation’s resolve” through words of grief or regret over the losses inflicted by the war.

The party has also imposed a strict hierarchy of language on media outlets: calling the dead a “victim” is considered a betrayal; referring to them as a “martyr” is acceptable, provided it is preceded by the phrase “has ascended” rather than “has fallen.” Yet what the party ultimately seeks is for the word “martyr” to be preceded by “the happy.”

Hezbollah senses that grief carries a political function that does not align with the image of victory it declares every day. But to forbid us, mothers of the boys, from releasing what remains of our breath and pain, this is something never imposed on anyone before.

We, the people of the South, indeed, the Shiites, are children of grief. We have never hidden our mourning for our first forefather. And now, descendants disavow this inheritance because it does not fit a victory we have long renounced, one we have never sought since Ashura. We have always claimed our right to weep, turning away from the “victories” recorded by the perpetrators of that first massacre.

Weeping is the foremost ritual of Shiites, carried even to the extremes of lamentation and self-flagellation. Since that first tragedy, they did not seek power or a state. Yet their new offspring has led them astray in pursuit of both, offering up their renewed grief in a battle to defend a guardianship of the jurist that they never granted.

What Hezbollah asks of us is difficult. Truly difficult. The scene in the South cannot bear a ban on grief, and pain is stronger than any effort to conceal it. How can someone from Bint Jbeil or Qantara not be consumed by pain? And yet, the machinery of prohibition is operating at a dangerous intensity. Any attempt to cry is met with armies of the “victorious,” armed with a language that has suddenly emerged, furnished with a vocabulary designed to suppress grief.

Victims have gone beyond being called martyrs; they are now “the blessed.” Our dead have not “fallen,” they have “ascended.” Expressions of condolence are discouraged, replaced instead with congratulations.

Yes. Do you know that the family of the deceased no longer dares to receive condolences, and that we, the mourners, are forced to replace them with congratulations? 

Anyone among us who cannot bring themselves to offer congratulations for death is better off avoiding the duty of condolence altogether.

Can the party succeed in banning grief? It may succeed in concealing it, as long as there are those waiting to turn it into a political instrument against the community. But the tragedy is too immense to end in anything but pain. So what are we to do?

Can we live with two consciences, one for ourselves and another for others?

We are expected to appear before cameras with smiling, victorious faces, only to retreat to our beds at night and begin mourning the loss of everything. What kind of awareness, or unawareness, does this fracture produce, this schizophrenia of the “victorious victim”?

The losses are immense, immense. The future is open to even more. The party may win, who knows. But what about us? What about the people of Qantara, which was once a hill and is now a valley? What about the homes destroyed for the third time, built over decades, only to be leveled again by the occupation? Grief and pain are stronger than the party’s will to suppress them. The people of the South groan and stagger beneath the rubble of their homes and in places of displacement… “victory” is a small detail in the face of such catastrophe.

The loss runs deeper than the defeat or the victory of a party, deeper even than the transformation of a village or a city’s present landscape. What has been uprooted is the life of an entire community. And life is not only what a town was in the moment before it was blown apart, but the generations, stories, dialects, heritage, and ownership that accumulated within it.

Yes, we are facing a force that has already practiced uprooting our neighbors in the Galilee, who were driven from their villages into camps. So Safad became a neighborhood in Ain al-Hilweh, alongside another for the people of Safsaf. But we are also facing a triumphalist impulse that was never imposed on our Palestinian refugee neighbors. They practice their grief openly; they claim it. In fact, what little their cause has achieved rests on their recognition as victims. What unites us with them is catastrophe and loss, and perhaps, soon, a prolonged existence outside our own country.