Lebanon, half a century later: the wound that won't heal

BeirutFifty years later, the green line still lives on. Invisible, but lethal, this imaginary border divided Beirut in two during fifteen years of civil war: in the west, the Muslim and Palestinian neighborhoods; in the east, the Christians. A range of death that not only divided the city, but the soul of an entire country.

The mirage of the Switzerland of the Middle East evaporated on April 13, 1975, when an explosion shook Lebanon to its foundations. That Sunday, the attack on a Palestinian bus in Ain al-Rammaneh left 27 dead. Hours earlier, outside a nearby church, gunmen had opened fire. Civil war was now a reality.

For fifteen years, the country was caught in a tangle of shifting loyalties, warlords, and alliances that mutated with the rhythm of interests. Muslims, Christians, and Druze clashed with each other, while foreign powers turned Lebanese territory into a chessboard. In 1982, Israel invaded Beirut to oust Yasser Arafat and the PLO. The Palestinian resistance was replaced by a new force: Hezbollah, founded with Iranian support that same year to combat the Israeli occupationSyria also intervened, and its troops—like Israel's—remained on Lebanese soil well into the new millennium.

The formal end of the conflict came in 1990 with the Taif Agreement, facilitated by Saudi Arabia. The pact established a new distribution of power among religious sects, but its cost had been devastating: 150,000 dead, tens of thousands missing, and a capital still riddled with bullets. A general amnesty left the victims without justice and the country immersed in a voluntary amnesia in order to move forward.

The war, still latent, now reappears in the form of cracks. Many fear its return. Tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, rekindled after the last conflict between October 2023 and November 2024, are causing the specter of war to haunt Beirut once again.. "Today, conditions are even more conducive to a new civil war than in 1975," says Hussein, 25, a resident of Beirut's Muslim neighborhood of Shiyyah. "We saw it in Tayouné and we saw it again during this war," he says.

He is referring to October 14, 2021, when clashes broke out in Tayouné: supporters of Amal and Hezbollah protested outside the Palace of Justice against the investigation into the 2020 port explosion. The demonstration escalated into a pitched battle with residents. Seven dead and nearly thirty injured confirmed the obvious: the fracture remains.

An omnipresent memory

For Hasan, 35, from southern Lebanon, the civil war has only one face: Israel. His parents married under the bombing, and that memory became the starting point for the family's memory. Abdallah, a Sunni from the Hamra neighborhood, grew up hearing about the Syrian occupation, not sectarian conflicts. "If you come from a family close to Rafik Hariri [former Lebanese prime minister], you are rarely raised in a sectarian language," he says.

In the Christian neighborhoods of Ashrafiyeh, the story takes on a different tone. Jonny, 30, celebrated the entry of Syrian Islamists into Damascus on December 8 with champagne. For him, the fall of the Assad regime is the beginning of a new chapter in Lebanon's history. Like so many others of his generation, born after the Taif Agreement, he did not experience the war, but he carries its memory: in family stories, in the pockmarked streets, in the inherited silences.

The wounds are not limited to memories. The urban landscape bears witness to the war. Forced internal migration transformed entire neighborhoods. Shiite communities fleeing the south colonized Beirut's southern suburbs; Christians regrouped in homogeneous areas. Every corner of the country has a memory capsule, a vestige of former fronts.

Today, the issue polarizing the country is the disarmament of Hezbollah. After refusing to hand over its weapons at the end of the civil war, the group consolidated itself as a state within a state. The recent war with Israel has severely weakened it: thousands of fighters killed, leaders assassinated, and much of its arsenal destroyed. The debate over the militia's disarmament has gained momentum and is dividing the Lebanese authorities.

But beyond weapons and borders, what truly threatens Lebanon is the impossibility of reconciling with itself. Without a shared memory, without justice or reparation, the country walks the tightrope of stability. Half a century later, the green line hasn't disappeared: it's simply mutated. It's in the gazes, in the conflicting narratives, in the streets that still separate more than they unite. And on this invisible border, Lebanon continues to struggle between memory and oblivion.