Christian villages were neutral in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. That didn’t save them
LA TimesFor much of the last year, as Hezbollah and Israel traded blows in an escalating tit-for-tat, the predominantly Christian village of Ain Ebel remained mostly out of the crossfire: Hezbollah cadres didn’t use the village as staging ground for attacks, and Israeli warplanes and artillery avoided striking it. We’ve never seen any movement from Hezbollah in these areas.” An Israeli mobile artillery unit fires a shell from northern Israel toward Lebanon on Wednesday. What if I leave my village tonight and it’s no longer accessible to me in the morning?’ ” Diab acknowledged that she, like others from Ain Ebel and areas uninvolved with Hezbollah, had a “complicated relationship” with the group and its entry into a war without the Lebanese people’s consent. But, she said, the anger is “more towards Israel as an occupier.” Similar fears of history repeating itself are growing in Marjayoun, a Christian town about five miles from the Israeli border and once the headquarters of the now defunct South Lebanon Army, a militia Israel funded to help its troops police occupied parts of southern Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s.
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