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In the NYR Online this week, Loubna El Amine, who teaches classical Chinese political theory in London, writes about the impact of Israel’s pager bombings on her family and community in southern Lebanon, where, the morning we published her essay, Israeli airstrikes killed nearly five hundred people. “That we cannot tally Hezbollah constituents neatly,” El Amine argues,

is not simply due to the party’s concern with secrecy. It is also because its pager-carrying members are ensconced in networks of family relations, local ties, and political solidarities. Their relatives, the people who live in the same villages and neighborhoods, and those whose lives intersect with theirs support them without agreeing with all their decisions, policies, or ideas. A pager that explodes in a quotidian setting, severing limbs and blinding eyes, never inflicts neatly bounded damage, both because it invariably harms civilians and because it hits its target squarely amid his social world. It spreads fear, but it also reinforces communal solidarities—or at least the conviction that Israel is the enemy. We have been here before. The war of July 2006 was said to sow doubt about Hezbollah among its supporters, but it was also a reminder that Israel had the capacity and will to do indiscriminate harm in Lebanon.

Below, alongside El Amine’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing from the Review’s archives about Lebanon’s recent history.

Loubna El Amine
Lebanon: Memories of War

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon are striking not just individual Hezbollah members but my family’s entire social world.

Charles Glass
Letter from Mount Lebanon

“The demise of ancient antagonisms should be a reason for hope in this hopeless land, but it isn’t. Ehden’s tranquility does not hide the fact that peace is precarious here.”

—December 10, 2023

Seth Anziska
‘Let Us Not Hurry to Our Doom’

The first Lebanon War helped lay the groundwork for Israel’s escalations of violence in Gaza. Who will heed its warnings?

—November 9, 2023

Zena el Khalil
After the Occupation

“When the decision to pull out of Lebanon was announced, twenty-two years of Israeli occupation was dismantled in a matter of forty-eight hours. I guessed that the soldiers occupying our house were just about to sit down for lunch when they got the call. It was such a strange sight. Even the glasses were still filled with water. They didn’t even get the chance to have a sip.”

—October 18, 2012

Adam Shatz
In Search of Hezbollah I

The movement first emerged during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, in which between twelve and nineteen thousand Lebanese died, most of them civilians and many of them Shiites. Militant followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Hezbollah’s original cadres were organized and trained by a 1,500-member contingent of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards…. For Iran, whose efforts to spread the Islamic revolution to the Arab world had been stymied by its war with Iraq, Hezbollah provided a means of gaining a foothold in Middle East politics.

—April 29, 2004

Adam Shatz
In Search of Hezbollah II

“Hezbollahland” is more than a shrine to Shiite martyrdom. It is also central to the party’s efforts to increase its following through civic activities, the promotion of Islam, and charitable work. Jihad al-Bina, the party’s Iranian-subsidized construction company, has repaired thousands of houses destroyed by Israeli raids in southern Lebanon. And though the region remains poor, its economy is slowly improving, thanks to support from Iran and donations from well-to-do Shiites. The arid hills are now dotted by white mansions, built by Shiites who made their fortunes in Africa and the Gulf states and who have returned home, many of them pouring money into Hezbollah’s large welfare system.

—May 13, 2004

Charles Glass
Why Lebanon?

Lebanon traces its woes, indeed its existence as a state, back to the dismemberment by the British and French of the Arab part of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. A series of agreements between the two countries prevented the creation of a united Arab state and denied homelands to the Armenians, the Kurds, and the Palestinian Arabs; but the French gave political power to Lebanon’s Maronite Catholics, and the British assurances of a homeland to Palestine’s immigrant Jews. This imperial map drawing, which established such historical anomalies as the kingdom of Transjordan, superimposed a façade of modern statelets on a structure of centuries-old Ottoman power sharing.

—September 29, 1983

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