What the war feels like north of the border

My mother-in-law is in her late seventies and has dementia now. When the bombs come she cries. Not because she doesn’t understand what’s happening. I think it’s because she understands too well. She was frightened as a child during war. She was frightened as a young wife during war. Then one day her husband, a Lebanese Army soldier, was killed by an Israeli sniper while out hunting in a field near the village. She was left with six children and no income and she did what she had to do. She crossed into Israel and worked in a bakery there to finish raising her family.

Nobody in this family hates Israel because of what happened to him. I want you to sit with that for a moment.

I came to South Lebanon through marriage. I’m American, I chose this place and these people, and I have been watching what it costs them for years now. My husband’s family has lived through more cycles of war than I can count. They fought off the Palestinians when they tried to occupy the south. They have buried people. They have rebuilt. They have buried people again. Some of them don’t trust Israel because of the way the 1990s ended, the sudden withdrawal that left people who had worked alongside Israeli forces exposed, vulnerable, some of them jailed. That distrust is earned and it is complicated and it lives alongside everything else in the same family, at the same dinner table.

In 2006 I was living in Qatar, surrounded by the Lebanese diaspora, removed from the village but not from the conversation. I lost a friend over that war. She was a pharmacist, a passionate Hezbollah supporter, and when I asked her why Hezbollah was firing rockets from the vicinity of Qana, from a place where women and children were living, putting them directly in the path of whatever response would come, she never spoke to me again. I wasn’t asking why Israel struck. I was asking why Hezbollah chose that location in the first place. That question cost me a friendship. I have been asking versions of it ever since.

My children are thirteen now. They have grown up through Covid and through what feels like endless war and I keep asking myself what it is doing to them even as I watch them absorb it with a resilience that breaks my heart a little. They should not have to be this resilient. Resilience is what you build when you have no other choice.

My husband lost his restaurant. The village is dying slowly, choked by an economy that doesn’t work and an occupation that isn’t called one. Hezbollah buys from its own. The Christian villages in the south have been quietly squeezed for years, little by little, until the life that was here is diminished almost beyond recognition.

And yet we stay. And there are things you don’t admit in polite company. When the airstrikes hit a Hezbollah depot, sometimes we go outside and watch the smoke rise and we feel something close to relief. One less weapons cache. One less tunnel. One less reason for the next war. You learn to read the sky differently when you live here long enough.

This last ceasefire broke me in a way the wars themselves didn’t. For a few weeks there was real talk about disarmament, about a security zone, about something that might actually hold. I let myself feel something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Hope, I think, is the word. The possibility that I might one day be able to drive across a border and visit people I know and love on the other side.

And then it collapsed. Decided unilaterally, from far away, by someone with no particular stake in whether this village survives or what happens to the people in it.

My mother-in-law cries when the bombs come. She has been doing it her whole life. My children are thirteen and they brace for explosions the way other kids brace for thunderstorms.

For what, exactly. That’s all I keep asking. For what.

Sophia Rizk is an American writer who came to South Lebanon through marriage and has called it home ever since.