Liberation Day in Lebanon

Last Saturday, 25 May, was Resistance and Liberation Day in Lebanon. It commemorates the date when the south of the country was freed from Israeli occupation in 2000. The Israeli army had entered Lebanon in June 1982 in pursuit of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, reaching as far north as Beirut, and had retreated to the south by 1985, where it remained for fifteen years until it was forced out by Hizbullah fighters.

There was no celebration this year. The strip of formerly occupied villages has been heavily bombed since October. Most of the residents have left. Lebanon’s cabinet (in a caretaking capacity since May 2022) has been calling for the enforcement of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which put an end to the conflict between Israel and Hizbullah in August 2006 and established a demilitarised zone between the UN-demarcated Blue Line and the Litani River in the south of Lebanon.

Last week, the education minister said that schools and universities ought to use the first classroom session on the day before the holiday to ‘explain the importance of this national occasion’.

I still have an e-mail my first boyfriend sent me on 25 May 2000: ‘The south is free at last, let’s hope we’ll know how to use this freedom … I’m happy.’ That summer, television screens played and replayed footage of overjoyed older women throwing rice on the streets and at tanks that flew the yellow flags of Hizbullah. Like many others, my family drove through the liberated territory. We stopped at the Fatima Gate, a border crossing that had just been closed, and threw stones through the barbed wire towards the concrete Israeli guard towers in the distance. In the village of Khiam, we visited the detention centre and its notorious torture chambers. Grainy footage of a pair of hands pushing through the tight slot of a red metal prison door, to be held by those of a rescuer, became a symbol of the liberation.

Khiam was run by Israel’s collaborators, the South Lebanon Army, a Christian militia founded in the late 1970s, and colloquially referred to as the Lahd Army after its second leader, Antoine Lahd. Souha Bechara, a member of the Lebanese Communist Party who had tried to assassinate Lahd in 1988, spent ten years in the prison. In videos filmed after her release she looks gaunt and speaks softly. When the Israelis pulled out, many members of the SLA followed them to Israel. There have been occasional debates in the Lebanese parliament over whether to grant amnesty to those who remained and those who wanted to come back.

Lebanese law does not recognise the state of Israel and prohibits any contact between Lebanese citizens and Israelis. The charge of collusion has been laid in recent years against a number of public figures. In April, the premiere of Wajdi Mouawad’s latest play was cancelled by a theatre in Beirut after a complaint was lodged against him at the Military Prosecutor’s Office that he received funding from Israeli sources and spread the idea of normalisation. Mouawad left Lebanon at the age of eight, a year into the civil war. His previous work includes Incendies (2003), which draws on Bechara’s experiences.

In a rebuke to the education minister’s call for teaching about 25 May, Samir Geagea, the leader of the Lebanese Forces, a Christian political party, wrote on X that if the withdrawal of Israeli forces is to be celebrated, then the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon in April 2005 should also be viewed as a liberation and commemorated as a public holiday to be taught in public schools. Official Lebanese history textbooks end in 1943.

I was born and raised in Beirut but my family is from a village in the south that lay just outside the line of Israeli occupation and has been spared the recent attacks. My parents built a house there after the south was liberated. Before that, we only visited occasionally to see my grandparents. Israeli guard towers were visible across the hill. At night, the sounds of bombing and artillery fire reverberated in the surrounding valley. The village appears as my hometown on my identity card, following my father’s, because his father was born and grew up there.

I vote in my grandfather’s village even for municipal elections. The local ballots originally slated for 2022 have been postponed for a third time this year, first because of the economic crisis and now because of the security situation in the south. If they had been held this month they would almost certainly have been won by Hizbullah, who are still widely seen as the party of resistance and liberation.