Richard Miniter

One night I stayed at an Israeli farm literally on the Lebanese border.

And I said, well, your farm workers come in the morning.

Can I talk to them without you around?

And I just want to hear what they have to say because all the farm workers came from the Lebanese side of the border.

And the workers that had sorted themselves into two groups, Christians and Muslims.

And by the way, this farm is now evacuated because of the rocket attacks and the fields are overgrown and it'll take a long time for them to build it back.

But anyway, so the Christian workers, they said, well, didn't you see our village at night?

It's lit up.

We have no problem with the Israelis.

They are culturally like us.

We can do business with them.

And then the Muslim group of workers, whose villages were not lit up at night, there are very few generators there, and Hezbollah did not supply them any power, said, yes, we work for the Israelis because it's the only people who pay us.

But someday soon, this land will be ours, and we will be the masters of it, and we will prosper from it.

And these are two groups of workers working for the same farmer on the same land, living in villages half a mile apart.

And so, but none of these people were Sunni.

These were all Shia.

So my last question to them was, where did your father and mother come from?

And the answer was always Syria or Iraq.

They weren't in Lebanon for more than a generation or two.

When people see the exit of Hezbollah from Lebanon, what they're talking about is the exit of this entire immigration of people who share different values and different outlook and are much more ideological than the people who were native there before.