Thousands of displaced Lebanese return home: ‘Victory? Is everything that has happened to us a victory?’

Bilal Muneimana has just returned home to Dahieh, the southern suburb of Beirut that he left two months ago when an Israeli missile fell so close that he felt his life was in danger, and he does not mince his words. He is extremely irritated by the frenetic sounds of horns, the yellow Hezbollah flags, and the triumphal signs that he sees and hears from the window. “Victory? Is everything that has happened to us a victory?” he asks. He has experienced the two and a half months of open war between the party-militia and Israel as a “personal humiliation”: sleeping with his wife and three children in a school that was used as a shelter, with a small piece of hanging cloth to provide some privacy from the other displaced people with whom he shared a classroom; grabbing his belongings at night so that no one would steal them, going to work in the cold and with back pain… “I am going to sell my house here and another one that I have in the south. I am leaving this country. I’m not prepared to live through a war every 10 years,” he says, clenching his fists without realizing it.

Tonight, he still won’t be able to sleep in his own bed; even during the day, it’s too cold. Like the rest of Dahieh, he still has no electricity. He has to wait for the owner of the private generator that powers the building (the bankrupt state power company only provides a few hours a day nationwide) to restart the service. His youngest daughter is also afraid to return. “She was too traumatized by the Nasrallah explosion [in which Israel killed the Hezbollah leader]. My hearing hasn’t been the same since that day, and the scar on my wife’s chest has split open,” Muneimana says, his tone somewhere between sad and angry.

His case shows the contrast between the public celebrations that have marked the ceasefire and what takes place within some of the four walls of Dahieh itself. It is Hezbollah’s stronghold, where there is not a single block without a building in ruins, and where Israel has been attacking for weeks to eliminate almost the entire leadership of the party-militia. Some buildings are still smoking from Tuesday’s intense attack, the final Israeli display before the truce. Except for a few bakeries that sell packaged bread, all the shops remain closed. For the moment, there is no electricity for more business activity.

A bridge dominates the heart of the district. The road towards Beirut is empty. The other, towards Dahieh and further south, is jammed by the cars and motorbikes of the thousands of people returning, some with mattresses on the roof. A man points a gun out of the window and fires in celebration. The sound of gunfire, usually from rifles, is constant. A young woman wearing a yellow Hezbollah scarf appears and hands out sweets to the occupants of the vehicles, while giving them a smile and making the V for victory sign with her fingers.

Below, on the street, one color dominates the flags: the yellow of Hezbollah, mixed with the green and black of the praises of Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed venerated in Shia Islam. Winding around on motorbikes or standing on the rubble of bombed buildings, they shout “Hezbollah!” or “We will answer your call, oh Hezbollah!” The same young people of the party — or “of the resistance,” as they call themselves here — who tend to distrust any stranger, are today debating whether to pose for celebratory photos or continue concealing their identity, because, after all, everyone knows that what is coming is a truce, but not peace.

They seem ecstatic, as if the ceasefire that came into effect hours earlier was a resounding “victory” and a “surrender” by Israel (two of the words used most often), rather than a sort of tactical withdrawal awaiting better days. This is summed up by one of their members, Ali, proud that his brother fell as a “martyr” stopping the advance of Israeli troops in the south, and that Hezbollah continued until the last moment “firing missiles at Tel Aviv,” despite the overwhelming technological and military superiority of an enemy that “the whole world supports.” “We fight alone and on the ground; they fight from the air. They are cowards.” The militia, he says, did not want him to join the hand-to-hand combat in order to avoid the same family losing two sons. “Now, life is returning to normal, but things will happen in the future. And the next time we talk will be in Palestine,” he says, suggesting that by then the State of Israel will have disappeared.

This is precisely what bothers not only Muneimana, but also Raghida. She is 70 years old and returned to her apartment at 10 a.m., with a maid who empties and cleans the refrigerator with bleach because everything inside has rotted. When she left, she says, there was still electricity and she thought it would be for “two or three days.” In the end it was two months, sleeping at her daughter’s house in the much safer mountains of the interior.

So the first thing she does is apologize for breaking the rules of Arab hospitality and not offering coffee to visitors: there is no electricity or gas to make it. Then she attacks the young people who shoot in the air. “What victory are these people celebrating? Everyone knows that Hezbollah has been weakened. They act as if it were [the war between Israel and Hezbollah] in 2006. That was a victory. This is not,” she says. Raghida, with her children scattered across three continents, remembers that she forbade one of them from joining the youth movement. “It is one thing to defend your home. I would be the first to pick up the rifle if they come to my door. But to die far away? Why? If they want to, go ahead. My son, no.”

Judur Muallem, 61, and his wife, Imam, 49, are the complete opposite of Raghida. They smile with relief at the sight of their house still standing (they weren’t sure about that) amid destruction that is hardly an Israeli victory. “They have everything. Tanks, planes and the help of intelligence services from all over the world. We have only small rockets and our people. Still, we have managed to get them to surrender,” Imam says, cleaning the floor.

Since they left, a portrait of Nasrallah, the revered leader of Hezbollah for decades who was killed in an Israeli strike in September just a few blocks from here, has remained under a tapestry with the word “God” written on it. “It is the only thing that breaks our feeling of victory. Still, for me it is as if he is still alive. I know he is dead, I know that. But his figure is still present,” Imam says.

Muallem explains why he did not mind spending seven weeks at a friend’s house away from Dahieh, and why he believes Hezbollah has once again emerged victorious from the onslaught. “You’re European, right?” he begins. “Didn’t Hitler destroy Europe, but did he win World War II? That’s part of the fight. You can’t claim victory if your home is intact. If any army in the world were attacked as they did with the pagers, and had its first and second lines of command taken out, it would disappear. Hezbollah managed to regroup and continue fighting and firing missiles.”

He is not worried about the future. In 2006, he recalls, Israel also promised to impose its law across the border if Hezbollah regrouped, which it eventually did. “Now, they say they will. Well, they say one thing and we say another,” he adds with a smile: “Hezbollah is not a foreign entity, like an army, to be driven out of a place. It is the people who live here. It is their land. And here we do not have a state, an army to defend us from Israel. That is why there needs to be resistance [Hezbollah]. Otherwise, we would have already disappeared.”

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