The Tunnel and the Tent

They have precision missiles, but they have no blankets for the children. This is not an oversight or a logistical failure — it is a choice. Cement was not used to build shelters to protect families; it was used to dig tunnels to protect rockets. In this logic, a warhead holds strategic value, while a civilian is considered replaceable. You simply produce more. Demography becomes, in this way, a form of arsenal.

And the suffering of those civilians is not a failure for those who run this system. On the contrary, it becomes a tool. A mother weeping in a school before the cameras of the entire world produces a powerful message that spreads on its own: look at what they are doing to us. What one rarely says is that the enemy did not destroy the shelters. There simply never were any.

To prevent people from asking too many questions, misery was eventually transformed into doctrine. The explanation goes: suffering is a form of resistance, poverty is proof of dignity, and living in destitution is almost a badge of honor. In this system, whoever dares to complain becomes suspect, as though betraying the memory of the martyrs.

Meanwhile, the leaders run the cause from air-conditioned bunkers and fortified offices, while ordinary militants sometimes sleep on asphalt and are proclaimed glorious. Speeches cost nothing, whereas mattresses cost money.

For decades, everything was done to ensure the Lebanese state remained too weak, too divided, and too corrupt to offer any real alternative to the population. The result is simple: people stay where they are — not out of love for the system, but because they have the impression that no other way out exists.

The true genius of this system lies neither in its missiles nor in its parallel financial networks. Its genius consists in transforming entire populations into hostages who end up thanking those who hold them prisoner, simply because they no longer have the strength to imagine anything else.

The tunnels protect the weapons. The tents, for their part, serve to display the suffering.

And for those whom misery alone is not enough to convince, there is always the great promise of paradise. It is, in a sense, the deferred wage of the poor. In this world, there is not always a pension, not always healthcare, not always a decent school for the children — but a perfect reward is promised after death, with terms and conditions that no one has ever been able to read.

The contract is ideal for those who propose it, because the beneficiary never comes back to demand an accounting.

In this system, dying becomes almost a promotion, and sending others to their deaths can be presented as an act of generosity. It is a form of martyrdom accounting in which the workforce pays itself with its own faith. There are no social charges, no unions, no strikes. There are only mothers who weep and posters on the walls.

Those posters are essential, because the martyr does not truly disappear. He becomes an image. On the poster, before his name, they write "The Happy Martyr," and after his name they add: "On the road to Jerusalem." But the poster never says what he left behind. It does not show the family without a father, the children who grow up without him, nor the immense void that opens in a house when someone does not come home again. That void is simply filled by the next volunteer.

And so a simple question eventually poses itself: who decided he was happy? The dead do not speak, and that is precisely what makes the system so efficient. You can put any words in his mouth. You can claim he is fulfilled, that he is happy in paradise, and no one will ever be able to verify it.

Telling a mother that her son is happy is almost tantamount to forbidding her to grieve. Her sorrow becomes suspect, as though it were a form of ingratitude.

And so many mothers fall silent. They look at the posters on the walls and they say nothing. But somewhere deep within them, a question keeps haunting them. If their son is truly happy, why is the pain so great?

Meanwhile, the promise of divine victory goes on. It is always near, always imminent, but it seems to recede each time one believes one is drawing close to it. It is announced for soon, for ten years from now, for the next generation, for the next war.

And while this promise keeps shifting through time, the architects of this victory live rather well. They have bodyguards, protected villas, and children who study in Europe. They speak of sacrifice from armored podiums and weep for the martyrs with great eloquence, but they themselves almost never become martyrs.

This coincidence has lasted for decades, and by lasting so long it has ended up resembling less a coincidence than a very well-organized system.

In this system, the tunnels descend ever deeper to protect the weapons, while on the surface, the tents await the wind, the rain, and the cameras of the entire world.

And the system continues to turn. It has been turning for decades because the dead never come back to tell their version of the story, and because the living are exhausted. Exhausted from fighting, exhausted from losing, exhausted from hoping. And so they end up voting for those who keep them in this machinery.

They rarely vote out of conviction and almost never out of love. They vote out of fear, out of the absence of alternatives, and above all out of exhaustion. And sometimes too out of a certain very human cynicism, the reasoning that if one must remain a prisoner, one might as well let one's jailer win.

The system knows this exhaustion very well, and it feeds on it. And it will continue to function as long as no one dares to ask the simplest question — the one that everyone avoids out of habit, out of fear, or out of politeness.

Who decided he was happy?

And above all, across all these years, how many of those martyrs have truly made it all the way to Jerusalem?