In waiting for the clouds to clear from the American-Iranian understanding and its terse provisions, and to see whether what is announced will differ from what has been kept secret; in waiting to identify the “relative victor” and the “relative loser,” and for the contours of a new strategic equation to emerge—one that holds that losing a battle does not necessarily mean losing the war, and that winning a war does not necessarily mean winning politically; amid all these assumptions built upon the nature of Iran’s political character and the temperament of the American president, Donald Trump... there is one reality visible to the naked eye: Jabal Amel has become a vanishing trace.
Jabal Amel, thrust into the battle of vengeance for the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was transformed into a sacrificial offering laid upon the altar of negotiations; negotiations conducted through fire, in which Tel Aviv employed the full extent of its destructive capabilities, reducing the region to ruins.
The Israeli mindset, since the founding of the state, has generally suffered an aversion to anything that bears witness to a historical trace or inherited legacy in this region attesting to its original inhabitants. Its project was founded upon the formula of “a land without a people for a people without a land,” and from its inception it has sought to entrench its historical and mythological claims. When it failed to erase the facts, it turned instead to removing what disproved its narrative. This, to a great extent, is what happened in Jabal Amel.
We, the inhabitants of this East, know our enemy and the danger it poses. We need no one to teach us that, nor to lecture us on how to defend ourselves. Throughout history, the people of Jabal Amel have known its ravines best, understood its geography most intimately, and been the most capable of defending its land.
Yet those very ravines were shattered in the battle of vengeance until they too became a vanishing trace. This ranks among the most devastating losses suffered by southern Lebanon, after the great hemorrhage of lives and after the loss of generations of its youth in a series of support battles that began in Syria, then Yemen, then Gaza, and ended politically at the gates of Tehran.
Stranger still in this equation is that some emerge to thank Tehran for what they regard as a ceasefire. Stranger yet are those who speak—in their gatherings, in universities and research centers, or through the media—about the South and its reconstruction, as though this region had possessed neither stature nor history before it was politically hijacked and bound to the Iranian project.
More dangerous than that are those leftists and secularists who do not even believe in Iran’s theocratic system, yet aspire to its approval or symbolic presence. They speak of reconstruction as though the matter amounted to no more than a wall demolished here or a road cut off there... as though they inhabit a land without a people, without heritage, and without history; or as though they reduce the South to calculations of concrete and material considerations. They have failed to grasp that the ruins of Jabal Amel are more than rubble; they are witnesses to a painful rupture between past and present, and to a wound inflicted upon the identity of the place as much as upon its physical fabric.
The traditional houses of Jabal Amel have fallen like torn pages from the book of southern memory. It was not the buildings alone that were destroyed; with them collapsed the places that preserved people’s names, voices, rituals, and the memory of centuries of life on this land. The heritage house, the old square, and the historic quarter are not merely silent stones; they are vessels of shared memory that preserve the collective narrative and the image people hold of themselves.
When such heritage is lost, it is not only stone that is destroyed; the collective memory itself is wounded, and society’s sense of continuity and belonging is weakened. Future generations may inherit the names of villages and their stories, but they lose the tangible landmarks that once made history part of everyday lived experience.
For this reason, it seems difficult for such people to understand that what Jabal Amel has lost cannot be compensated for at any price. Houses can be rebuilt, and roads can be laid anew, but the memory of place, the cultural identity, and the accumulation of centuries of history engraved in both stone and people—once broken—require far more than money and reconstruction to restore. Their repair demands a long passage of time and a deep awareness of the magnitude of what has been lost.
