As the war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group of Hezbollah intensified last September, Abed Al Kadiri was sitting for television in art studio, where he worked in Kuwait.
Mr. Al Kadiri watched the Beirut, the Lebanese capital and the city of his childhood, ravaged Israeli bombing. He was upset about what members of his family, including his mother and a 13-year-old son, together with his friends, endured there. He started having nightmares and panic attacks and failed to sleep.
Determined to support his family and help his country renew, Mr. Al Kadiri decided to book a ticket house.
“Lebanon entered the apocalyptic phase,” said Mr. Al Kadiri, 40, in the recent morning on the periphery of Beirut. “Return was the only best option.”
Large and influential diaspora in Lebanon – estimated at almost three times more than 5.7 million inhabitants in the country – hoping, hoping to provide physical and financial support to the country with a relaxed one of the bloodiest wars in the Mediterranean Nations for decades.
The challenges are huge. Returnees are returning to a broken country whose economy has been It plagues sectasing tensionPolitical argument and foreign nuisance. Lebanon’s path remains deeply uncertain After a conflict that is likely to transfer the balance of power inside the earth and through the Middle East.
But many of the returnees say they felt they had no choice, even as an agreement on the interruption of fire between Israel and Hezbollah signed in November remains sensitive.
“I felt like our country called us, that our physical presence is important,” said Zeina Kays, 48, a communication adviser who left Lebanon for Doha in Katar in 2004, where she has lived and worked ever since. She returned to Lebanon in October.
In Doha, she said, she watched on television as families scattered from Beirut arrived in other cities and cities across Lebanon with what’s left of their belongings. As death and destruction escalated, she had a “emotional urge” to come back and help, she said.
Mrs. Kays, 48, is now coming back, she says, in the Koura area, about 30 miles north of Beirut, where she and her husband own a home. There, with the help of friends and family, she led a campaign for stock insurance – blankets, medicine, food, accessories and clothing – for dozens of displaced families in her hometown and nearby villages.
“This war has shown patriotism, solidarity and unity that exists among all the Lebanese, regardless of their region or religion,” she said in an interview in Batron, a coastal city that is also home to home The village of the Lebanese diasporaA cultural and tourism project aimed at connecting foreign Lebanon with their homeland.
“Lebanon deserves a brighter vision and a better future,” Mrs. Kays said.
The war came to Lebanon again after October 7, 2023, an attack guided by Hamas on Israel. Hezbollah began to target Israel with Hamas in solidarity, setting up a series of Tit-Za-Tat attacks across the Israeli-Libanian border. Conflict, which escalated at the end of September, Killed and injured thousands of people and displaced about 1.3 millionaccording to Lebanese officials and united nations.
Whole villages and neighbors, especially in the south, were smoked As Israel led Intense air attacks. Hezbollah, the dominant political and military force supported by Iran, is hardly weakened as Top leaders were killed and his ally in neighboring Syria, Bashar al-Assad, He was overthrown.
The war has worsened the increasing problems that Lebanon is already facing.
AND Economic messStarting in 2019, and worsened by pandemic lock, the World Bank ranked as well as as Among the worst national financial crises Since the mid -19th century. Anger due to corruption led to Huge antigornic protests. Then, an Explosion in the port of Beirut 2020 destroyed parts of the capital and killed hundreds. Two years Lebanon had a government guardian ia The new president and prime minister They were selected only in January.
“These last few years in Lebanon have been really like a rollerfish,” said Mr. Al Kadiri, an artist, who left Beirut a second time after the explosion of the port of 2020.
He first left Lebanon to Kuwait during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. But he returned in 2014, establishing a studio and reconnecting with the city. Decided to leave again when Luke exploded destroyed the gallery where he exposed his work. After Initiating the initiative Entitled “Today I would like to be a tree” in Beirut to help renovate homes broken with an explosion, he went to Paris, hoping he would find a job there in art to support his family.
He just arrived in Kuwait from Paris to show the show when the last war escalated.
Now he returned to Beirut again. “The future can be dark, in terms of scary, but we are here,” he said. “Even if we leave, we’re still coming back.”
The Lebanese began leaving their homeland in the waves, beginning in the late 19th century, when it was under the Ottoman Empire, and continued to emigrate during the French rule and after independence in the forties. They escaped sectsal divisions, economic crises, hunger during the First World War, politically motivated by murder ia civil war From 1975 to 1990.
In countries like Australia, Brazil, Nigeria and the United States, they and their descendants have established new lives. Among their number are an international lawyer Amal Clooney and merchant-philosopher Nazim Nicholas Taleb.
Many also held a close relationship with Home: 2023. The diaspora sent about $ 6 billion in remittances or about 27.5 percent of the gross domestic product of Lebanon, According to the World Bank.
As the war took place last year, the Lebanese diaspora mobilized to raise money and ambulance.
Many say that they are watching that the new government plans to renew the economy, to carry out a sensitive truce between Israel and Hezbollah and stabilize the nation before deciding whether to return.
Another consideration, said Konrad Kanan, a 31-year-old lawyer based in France, who has recently visited Beirut, is Moving geopolitics of the region And how they could influence the future of Lebanon.
At a recent dinner at Mr. Canaan’s brother’s house in Achrafieh’s neighborhood in Beirut, an animated conversation about Syria and Gazi followed. One family member quoted the Israeli Prime Minister twice, Benjamin Netanyahu, and said she was eager to understand what his vision would look like for the “new Middle East”. Others spoke of the agony and emotional outraction, which were cultivated by a repeating wars.
Everyone admitted that none of them had a clear idea of the future.
“I think resistance is not something very positive,” Mr. Kanan said about the attribute cited by many Lebanese. “He exhausts.”
Many Lebanonians also wonder what will happen to Hezbollah, how the group’s relationship with Iran will develop and whether the militants will withdraw from South Lebanon that it has been agreed with Israel. While anger with Israel is high among Lebanese, many openly criticized Hezbollah for attacking Israel by Iran.
“We love our homeland, but the Iranians took it,” said Rabie Kanan, a 35-year-old business programmer from Australia, who was visiting the family in Beirut (and not in connection with Mr. Canaan’s lawyer). Rabie Canaan is originally from Tnenin, a city in southern Lebanon, who withdrew Israeli air attacks during the war. His family’s home was in the ruins, he said, and now he is unable to bring his 8-year-old daughter to visit Banant Hills where he grew up.
“He always asks,” Dad, why are they always fighting in our country? “He said. He tried to counteract that notion, he added, telling her,” As ordinary people, we just target peace. “
Sarah Chaayto contributed to the reporting from Beirut.
