The exiled in Israel: Between Identity Trauma and the Absence of Transitional Justice
The file of Lebanese citizens exiled to Israel is among the most complex and sensitive in the Lebanese context, because it stands at the intersection of three deeply intertwined dimensions: the consequences of the Syrian and Israeli occupations, the legacy of the civil war, and the profound divisions surrounding the very concepts of the State, sovereignty, and justice.
The State was absent from South Lebanon for decades, leaving the population at the mercy of the tensions between occupation forces and militia arms. When it returned after liberation, it came with a strict security and judicial logic, devoid of any genuine spirit of comprehensive national reconciliation. This is why the file has remained an open wound: Lebanon never underwent a true transitional justice process commensurate with the post-war era and the multiple occupations that had scarred it.
On the human level, the tragedy endured by thousands of people and their families cannot be ignored. It manifests in:
· Forcible uprooting from their natural environment.
· A devastating separation from their families and villages.
· A crisis of identity and belonging, and a life suspended between two countries.
As for the children born or raised there, they experience a compound crisis: they never fully integrated into that society, while some in Lebanon, their own country, regard them with suspicion and hostility. Here the fundamental moral question arises: is it legitimate to extend legal and political responsibility to wives, children, and grandchildren? Entire families are paying today for choices that overwhelming circumstances imposed on some of their members, even though the vast majority among them never bore arms nor engaged in any security-related activity.
To clarify the picture further, several established truths must be affirmed.
1. Authenticity of identity : These are genuine Lebanese citizens, not strangers or newcomers to this land.
2. The choice to live : They did not go to Israel by choice, but through forced exile. They were placed before two equally bitter alternatives — either face threats of physical elimination issued by their adversaries at the time (Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: "we will slaughter you in your beds"), or endure a harsh exile far from their homeland and loved ones. They chose to stay alive.
3. The absence of the State : They did not conspire against the State; it was the State that abandoned them, leaving them as easy prey to the occupations and foreign tutelages.
4. The peaceful record : They were not implicated in the assassination of prime ministers, nor in the elimination of sovereigntist deputies, and they neither bombed mosques nor destroyed public infrastructure.
Between Justice and Revenge
The essential distinction lies in separating justice grounded in individual accountability from collective revenge and permanent ostracism. Justice demands that individual responsibilities be established with precision, that trials be conducted fairly, and that the principle of inheriting guilt across generations be firmly rejected.
Political and Humanitarian Conclusion
This file cannot be resolved through denunciatory sloganeering; it demands the approach of a "genuine State," one founded on recognition of the specificity of the occupation period and the oppressive circumstances that accompanied it, on a clear distinction between those who committed actual crimes and those who were victims of circumstances, on respect for an independent Lebanese judiciary and the rule of law, and on treating the humanitarian dimension of families and children outside any logic of vengeance and hatred.
The file of those expelled to Israel cannot, and must not, be conflated with any other file, because the true adversary in this case is the Lebanese state itself, and not any other party. National and moral responsibility therefore falls first and foremost on the President of the Republic, in his capacity as head of State and the primary custodian of the country's security and integrity, as well as of the fate of all its citizens without exception. Those who once chose to confront Israel in defence of dignity and sovereignty cannot today prove incapable of finding a way to bring their children back from forced exile and restore them to their homeland under the aegis of law, justice, and national reconciliation.
In the end, Lebanon's fundamental challenge remains the same: to accomplish the transition from the memory of war and division toward the space of a State capable of articulating justice and reconciliation, without ever sacrificing either sovereignty or the human dignity of its citizens.