Letter to the South

Dear South,

I am writing to you from a city that has often used you as a symbol and rarely treated you as a citizen.

You have been called frontier, resistance, burden, voting bloc, shield, problem, sacrifice, red line, and bargaining chip. You have been asked to absorb invasions on behalf of a state that did not build shelters for you, did not build an army able to defend you, did not build an economy capable of rebuilding you without a donor conference.

Now men who do not know your villages speak of zones, buffers, lines, withdrawals, sequencing, implementation. They use language that makes land sound procedural. A village becomes a file. A family becomes a displacement number. A grove becomes a security requirement.

No.

Not one square kilometre can be signed away by people who did not inherit the soil, bury the dead there, prune the trees, repair the roof, or memorize the bend in the road. No banker, minister, envoy, militia commander, analyst, or foreign official owns the right to make your absence normal.

This does not require anyone to sanctify Hezbollah. A party is not a people. A militia is not a village. The south is older than the organization that claims to defend it, and it will have to be defended one day by institutions better than any faction. But until that day exists in fact, no Lebanese has the right to confuse criticism of Hezbollah with indifference to occupation.

You are not collateral in an internal Lebanese argument. You are Lebanon.

With steadiness, Karim