Another Reading of Lebanon's ‘Liberation Day'

Asharq Al-Awsat

29-05-2025

Were the Lebanese really liberated on the 25th of May twenty-five years ago?
The official answer has not changed: yes. The commemoration of this occasion and its elevation into a national holiday, 'Resistance and Liberation Day' was born of this answer. The residents of the region that had been occupied returned to their towns and villages after the Israeli army's withdrawal, and the state and its institutions reestablished a nominal presence there.
However, looking at our current state of affairs, one would be baffled to learn that we had been liberated 25 years ago only to find ourselves today in this miserable situation, confronted by another occupation and destruction that has driven people from the same homes they had returned to.
Furthermore, holidays are supposed to reflect a degree of stability and sustainability that stem from natural factors, a collective story, a historical event, or a long-standing tradition...
Even more astonishingly, however, the same party credited with our 'liberation' in 2000, Hezbollah, has summoned occupation again. Not only are five points along the border controlled by the Israeli army; severe constraints and burdens have also been imposed on Lebanese sovereignty and decision-making - burdens that could continue to weigh us down for years to come.
There is, then, some duplicity involved in applying the term 'liberation' in our case. It belongs to the same genre of deception that the party has spoon-fed the Lebanese over the years, like 'the era of defeats is over' and 'Israel is weaker than a spider's web.'
And now that we are in a situation that allows for scrutinizing assumptions that had once been off limits, acts of forgery must be exposed in all of their forms. Given the immense suffering that the 'support war' has caused in Lebanon, there is an urgent need to question the largely adulterated mainstream historical narrative of resistance and liberation. Thus, correcting this account of the past has become a necessary requisite for leading sensible, honest lives in the present, and by extension, for correcting what reality means.
Before confronting the overarching lie, however, we must first contend with three falsehoods that have branched out of it:
First: Israel's initial occupation of Lebanon - in 1978 and 1982, before Hezbollah's emergence - came out of nowhere, born of the enemy's essentially evil nature and nothing else. As for the notion that it may have been a reaction to the actions of an armed resistance movement (Palestinian at the time), it should be muted or swept under the rug.
Second: Hezbollah's resistance was developed from scratch. Mind you, other factions (both communists and non-communists) had preceded it and were eventually liquidated by it.
Third: liberation, like resistance, was deliberately prevented from being a unifying national project. In 2005, for instance, some of Hezbollah's opponents proposed a compromise that recognized both liberations: from Israel in 2000 and from Syria that year. The idea was to build a shared national narrative that all Lebanese could embrace, but the suggestion was met with nothing but rejection and suspicion, to saying nothing of thanking 'Assad's Syria.'
As for what happened in the year 2000 specifically, the real story is, once again, far more complex than the narrative that has prevailed. Under the Labor government headed by Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Israel announced as soon as 1999 its intention to withdraw unilaterally. In response to this statement, Lebanese media outlets affiliated with Damascus and Hezbollah began speaking of a 'withdrawal conspiracy' - terminology echoed by Lebanese politicians aligned with the Syrian-Iranian axis.
When Israel actually withdrew a year later, the issue of retrieving the Shebaa Farms - territory Israel had occupied from Syria in 1967 - was suddenly brought back to the fore, becoming a pretext to justify Hezbollah's maintenance of its arms. To strengthen the credibility of this defense, Damascus conveniently ignored the fact that Shebaa was Syrian territory, albeit without ever formally recognizing the territorial claims of the Lebanese. And, in tandem with keeping the conflict alive through the Shebaa Farms, the resistance's role in leading us to liberation was inflated; it was presented not as a mere means to an end but an existential need.
Without, in any way, belittling the sacrifices of the party nor the hardship that its community was made to suffer, the fact remains that its resistance was not crucial to liberation. In fact, its most consequential achievement was giving the Israeli peace camp an additional argument to underpin its advocacy of withdrawal from all occupied territories. Over the span of 18 years (1982–2000), Israel suffered 800 casualties as a result of resistance operations in total - fewer than 45 deaths a year. At the time, many pointed out that more Israelis were dying in road traffic accidents annually.
The fact is that the party's version of history is neither revisionist nor negationist. The reason is simple: there had been no prior narrative of occupation, liberation, and resistance that the party was compelled to 'correct.' The party and its orbit were the only authors of this narrative that begins with them alone. They thereby consolidated a warped history and an adulterated consciousness. Both aimed to further local and regional agendas, and that was before this distortion and manipulation morphed into a 'historical horizon' that was written with water.