Exodus: the desperate rush to get out of Lebanon

Refugee crises are nothing new in the Middle East, wrote Nicholas R. Micinski and Kelsey Norman on The Conversation (Melbourne). The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 brought about "the world's longest-standing refugee situation": six million Palestinians spread across the Levant. The first Gulf War and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq left millions displaced, as did Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah, and subsequent conflicts in Syria, Libya and Yemen. But the current exodus from Lebanon has plunged the region into an unprecedented crisis. In the weeks since Israel launched its full-scale invasion and bombardment, 1.2 million people (a fifth of Lebanon's population) have been displaced – adding to the two million Gazans displaced since last October.

Lebanon was already on its knees before this conflict escalated, said Vivian Yee in The New York Times. It had endured years of unstable government, largely owing to the insidious role played in its politics by Hezbollah, the Shia militia that doubles as a political party. It hasn't had a president for two years – it's now run by a weak caretaker regime – and the crippling economic crisis that took hold in 2019 has left millions impoverished. And after Israel's onslaught began last month, those same people are doing all they can just to survive, said The National (Abu Dhabi). Many have holed up in schools, hotels and nightclubs designated as shelters by the Lebanese government. But huge numbers are fleeing the country. A fortunate minority have stumped up $1,800 for one-way tickets on charter yachts to Cyprus; about 6,000 have taken the bold step of fleeing to Iraq.

What makes this exodus especially tragic, said Tasnim Chaaban in L'Orient-Le Jour (Beirut), is that it includes vast numbers of people who'd found, in Lebanon, a refuge from other war zones. Even before this crisis, Lebanon was home to more refugees per head than any other country on Earth, among them 250,000 Palestinians and 1.5 million Syrians – refugees from their own 13-year civil war. Most of the 400,000 people who've fled into Syria since September have been people who not long ago had fled from Syria into Lebanon.

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To understand the reasons for the sheer scale of this onslaught, said Daniel Byman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (Washington), you have to go back to the 2006 war with Hezbollah, when Israel poured troops into Lebanon expecting to sweep the militia's fighters aside. Israel's failure to do so shattered its reputation for military invincibility, while the defiance displayed by Hezbollah forces "electrified Arab audiences".

After that achievement, the group, backed by Iran, steadily increased its power: it vastly expanded its missile arsenals – locating many of the weapons in civilian areas – and extended its huge network of underground tunnels. But over that same period Israel, too, has been making preparations for another war with Hezbollah, and this time committing itself to pursue a far more destructive doctrine regarding the use of force – namely, to obliterate every village from which Israel is fired on. That massive retaliation is what we're now witnessing, said Mat Nashed in Al Jazeera (Dubai), and the devastation it has caused has severely damaged Hezbollah's reputation and its popularity. Lebanon's Christian and Sunni Muslim factions, long resentful of the way Hezbollah has "hijacked" the state through its military strength, are hoping this could be the moment to banish Hezbollah to the political sidelines for ever.

The EU is now offering financial assistance to Lebanon, said Rym Momtaz of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Washington), but it needs to do a lot more: it should use its diplomatic and military weight in the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) to push for "a sequenced de-escalation". For, in truth, Europe has a pressing reason to fix this mess – if it doesn't, the fresh influx of migrants pouring into the continent via Cyprus could completely destabilise European politics. Crises in Lebanon have a way of spilling far beyond the nation's borders; and unless checked, this one will prove no different.