The threat of war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is reviving painful memories for former Lebanese soldiers and their families who fled to their former ally Israel 20 years ago.
The South Lebanon Army (SLA) is a largely Christian militia recruited by Israel during its occupation of southern Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Zadalnikim, former members of the SLA, known in Israel by the group’s Hebrew acronym, sought refuge south of the border after Israel’s abrupt withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, fearing reprisals from Hezbollah, with whom they had fought for years. Brutal and uncompromising conflict.
Iran-backed Hezbollah – a Hamas ally with a large arsenal of rockets and missiles – has exchanged fire with Israeli forces daily since Hamas triggered the war in Gaza on October 7 after an attack on Israel.
In response, Israel launched raids deeper and deeper into Lebanese territory, targeting several Hezbollah commanders.
It has become a strip several kilometers wide on either side of the border In fact A war zone, emptied of its tens of thousands of civilian inhabitants.
“They told us to prepare for two weeks in a hotel in Tiberias” in northern Israel, said Claude Ibrahim, one of Israel’s more prominent Lebanese collaborators.
“It’s already been six months. I don’t think it will last 24 years,” he said, referring to his exile from Lebanon.
A former right-hand man of the late SLA commander Antoine Lahad, Mr. Ibrahim was evacuated from Kiryat Shmona, a northern Israeli town near the Lebanese border, when the entire city was evacuated in October.
‘History Repeats’
“It’s like history repeating itself… generation to generation,” he said, referring to how the Zadalnikim were forced to flee their homeland after years of moving from village to village during the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s and 1980s.
About 3,500 of the 6,000 to 7,000 Lebanese who fled to Israel in May 2000 still live in Israel, officials said. He registered with the Ministry of Interior as a “Lebanese of Israel” and was granted citizenship in 2004.
Shortly after their arrival in Israel – the authorities partly took over their responsibility – many moved to Sweden, Germany or Canada. Others returned to Lebanon, where they were tried for collaboration with Israel.
All former SLA members in Israel have relatives in Lebanon, mostly in southern villages, a few kilometers from the Israeli border. Few agreed to be interviewed out of fear of reprisals against their families in Lebanon, which is why they remain in contact through third parties.
Maryam Younes, 28, a communications student at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, was five years old when she came to Israel with her parents. When her father, a former SLA officer, died a decade ago, she was able to bury him in her ancestral village of Debel, roughly 10 kilometers from the northern Israeli town of Malot-Tarshiha, where she had moved. The rest of his family was in Lebanon, in Debal and in the capital, Beirut.
As fears grew that the daily skirmishes across the border could escalate into full-scale war, Ms Younes worried about her relatives.
“I care a lot for my family, for my village (in Lebanon),” Ms. Younes said, he sees himself as “half Lebanese, half Israeli.”
“I think there is a way to protect them”, she said, if there is an all-out war with Hezbollah.
Despite promising that the new conflict with Israel would “finish off” its old enemy Hezbollah, Mr. Ibrahim was equally worried.
‘hard lesson’
“The only solution is a major strike on Hezbollah so that it understands that there is no way forward through peace,” he said.
Mr Ibrahim said there was no reason why Israel and Lebanon should not be at peace.
But Asher Kaufman, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana who specializes in Lebanon and broader West Asia, said attitudes in Israel and cooperation between Lebanese Christian militias and the Israeli military have changed significantly in the decades since the civil war.
“The vision of an alliance between Lebanese Christians and Israelis that was at the root of the 1982 invasion (of Lebanon by Israel) has completely collapsed,” he said.
Israel has stopped seeing Lebanon as the “Switzerland of Western Asia,” a peaceful and prosperous country, and now sees it as a “violent slough,” he said.