Dana El-Kurd

Lebanon is one of the smallest countries in the world.

And South Lebanon is one of the only regions in the country that you might call like a breadbasket in terms of agriculture.

So yeah, 20% of the population has already been displaced, and those are those that could be registered.

You can imagine numbers being higher than that.

And as I said, a lot of those people have already been displaced a number of times before, even in 2024, when there was the initial escalation.

But many of them even going back to 2006, when there was the war, and in some cases even further back in the 80s and 90s, when the Israelis occupied southern Lebanon.

And I guess this is really important to note because obviously what's happening today is connected to the war on Iran.

Of course, it's directly connected.

But if one only knows this, I think we miss what I would describe as a bit of an Israeli obsession with Lebanon specifically for a long time.

There's like historical roots to all of this.

It even goes back to the Israelis having ties with the local Christian far right in the 60s, especially as the 70s and 80s.

During the civil war in Lebanon.

And a bit of this almost ideological thing of like, we will focus on the non-Muslims and hope that they're on our side, that sort of thing, which is a policy that the Israelis have done within Israel-Palestine and in Syria.

You know, this is an ongoing thing as well, and so on and so forth.

I really want to emphasize this because I have had the experience when I read a lot of the coverage and listen to podcasts, what have you, that even among people who don't support the state of Israel, who are very critical of it, that tends to be understandably because Lebanon is less powerful than Iran, not as influential on the global scene or whatnot.

But there's usually a tendency to link what happens in Lebanon directly to what's happening in Iran.

And this has been true in the past three weeks.

And as I said, this is, of course, partly the case.

It's not like completely irrelevant.

Hezbollah did even state that the reason why they launched those rockets was to avenge the assassination of the Ayatollah.