Israel's old Lebanese allies grapple with new Hezbollah threat

The looming threat of a war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is reviving painful memories for former Lebanese militiamen and their families who fled to Israel, their erstwhile ally, more than 20 years ago.

The South Lebanon Army was a mostly Christian militia recruited by Israel when it occupied south Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Zadalnikim, as the SLA's former members are known in Israel from the group's Hebrew acronym, sought shelter south of the border in the aftermath of Israel's sudden withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, fearing reprisals from Hezbollah, whom they had fought for years in a brutal and uncompromising conflict.

Iran-backed Hezbollah -- a Hamas ally with a large arsenal of rockets and missiles -- has exchanged fire with Israeli forces almost daily since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 triggering war in Gaza.

In response, Israel has carried out strikes deeper and deeper into Lebanese territory, targeting several Hezbollah commanders.

A strip several kilometres (miles) wide on either side of the border has become a de facto war zone, emptied of its tens of thousands of civilian residents.

"They told us to prepare for two weeks in a hotel in Tiberias" in northern Israel, said Claude Ibrahim, one of Israel's more prominent Lebanese collaborators.

"It's already been six months. I hope it won't last 24 years," he told AFP, referring to his exile from Lebanon.

- 'History repeating itself' -

Ibrahim, a former right-hand man of the late SLA commander Antoine Lahad, was evacuated from the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona, near the Lebanese border, in October when the entire city was emptied.

"It's as if history repeated itself... generation after generation," he said, referring to how the Zadalnikim had to flee their homeland after years spent moving from village to village during the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s and 1980s.

Of the 6,000 to 7,000 Lebanese who fled to Israel in May 2000, around 3,500 still live in Israel, according to the authorities. They are registered with the interior ministry as "Lebanese of Israel" and were granted citizenship in 2004.

Shortly after their arrival in Israel -- where authorities only partly took responsibility for them -- many moved on to Sweden, Germany or Canada. Others returned to Lebanon, where they were tried for collaboration with Israel.

All former SLA members in Israel have relatives in Lebanon, mostly in villages in the south, a few kilometres (miles) from the Israeli border.

Few agreed to be interviewed out of fear of reprisals against their families in Lebanon, whom they stay in touch with via third parties for the same reason.

Maryam Younnes, a 28-year-old communications student at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, was five when she arrived in Israel with her parents.

- 'Finish Hezbollah' -

When her father, a former SLA officer, died a decade ago, they were able to bury him in their ancestral village of Debel, roughly 10 kilometres (six miles) as the crow flies from Ma'alot-Tarshiha, the northern Israeli town they moved to.

The rest of their family remained in Lebanon, in Debel and the capital Beirut.

With fears growing that the near-daily exchanges of fire across the border might escalate into a full-scale war, Younnes was worried about her relatives.

"I'm very concerned for my family, for my village (in Lebanon)," said Younnes, who sees herself as "half Lebanese, half Israeli".

"I hope that there will be a way to protect them", she said, if there is an all-out war with Hezbollah.

Ibrahim was equally worried, although he voiced hope that a new conflict with Israel would "finish off" his old enemy Hezbollah.

"The only solution is a big strike on Hezbollah so that it understands that there is no way forward but through peace," he said.

Ibrahim said there was no reason Israel and Lebanon should not be at peace.

But Asher Kaufman, a history professor at Notre Dame University in Indiana who specialises in Lebanon and the wider Middle East, said attitudes in Israel had shifted significantly in the decades since the civil war and the cooperation between Lebanese Christian militias and the Israeli military.

The vision of an alliance between "Lebanese Christians and the Israelis, which was at the root of the 1982 invasion (of Lebanon by Israel) has completely collapsed."

Israel has stopped "viewing Lebanon as the Switzerland of the Middle East", a peaceful and prosperous country, and now sees it as "a violent quagmire it wants nothing to do with".