Lebanon is exhausted. On March 1, Hezbollah yet again initiated a completely unjustifiable war with Israel by launching missile and drone strikes supposedly in revenge for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. And for most of the country, it was the last straw. And it could well prove to be an inflection point, if Israel doesn’t overplay its hand. But Israel may indeed be doing that by creating a new occupation of the lower fifth of the country south of the Litani River, and vowing that hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians displaced from there cannot return until Hezbollah is disarmed to Israel’s satisfaction.Lebanese were disgusted at Israel’s completely disproportionate and brutal response to the ineffective and virtually symbolic Hezbollah attack. Over 700,000 Lebanese were displaced in a matter of two or three days, with another 300,000 following soon after. In a country of fewer than six million people, that’s an extraordinary dislocation, especially in so rapid a time. In Beirut, where I was while this was unfolding, I suddenly saw refugees everywhere, sleeping on the streets, in their cars, in tents provided by the government, and anywhere they could lay their heads. Over 1,000 Lebanese have been killed in the past few weeks, and Israel vows that this war will likely continue even if the conflict with Iran is concluded. So, there is obvious rage and disgust with Israel. But that’s familiar, and most Lebanese expect nothing else from the Israelis. Israel has launched major invasions of Lebanon countless times in recent decades, including in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2006, and 2023–2024. For many Lebanese, this is just what Israel does: invade and occupy their country.What’s new, and unprecedented, is the overwhelming and near-total consensus of rage against Hezbollah. The militia group was seen by many Lebanese as heroic as long as it was fighting against a large and long-standing Israeli occupation that lasted from 1982, when Hezbollah was founded under Iranian guidance, until 2000, when Israel was driven out. Even after that, when Hezbollah insisted it needed to continue to be the only militia group that retained a private arsenal of heavy weapons, quite a few Lebanese (including many who did not otherwise like or trust Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons) viewed it as a necessary evil to combat Israel’s ongoing occupation of small areas in the south and offset the potential for another invasion.This perspective began to shift in the aftermath of the 2006 war, which originated with a Hezbollah attack on Israeli soldiers in the border region. As the conflict subsided, many Lebanese began to ask themselves, and Hezbollah, why this conflict was necessary and why this organization had decided to inflict it on the country without consulting anybody else. The backlash was so severe that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah felt it necessary to apologize, saying that if he had only known the extent of Israel’s retaliation, he would never have authorized the initial attack. But everyone in Lebanon was well acquainted with Israel’s doctrine of disproportionate response to Arab adversaries. Nasrallah was, in effect, pleading incompetence and stupidity as indemnification against recklessness and preferring a foreign master to his own country’s government. That’s a good barometer of how serious the backlash had become.A similar dynamic played out in 2023–2024, when anger against Hezbollah was stronger than ever. But that was of secondary concern to the organization, which was primarily focused on the intense losses Israel inflicted on it in a matter of weeks after the pager explosions that blew up all over Lebanon in September 2024. In less than a month following, Hezbollah’s arsenal, military command and control and battlefield officers, political leadership, and other organizational structures were decimated and lay in ruins. Unpopularity at home was, at that point, the least of its worries.Many Lebanese were absolutely outraged that Hezbollah would drag the country into war over Gaza and Hamas and on behalf of Iran. Yet again, no aspect of Lebanese national interests—or even Hezbollah’s interests—was served by joining the conflict initiated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Worse, Hezbollah tried to have it both ways, initiating what it hoped would be a limited conflict with Israel that would maintain its “revolutionary” bona fides without risking the destruction of a full-scale war with the Israelis. Israel was not interested in playing that game and instead sought to inflict a major strategic defeat on Iran and its core allies (Hamas is in a loose marriage of convenience with Tehran and its Arab proxies) by attacking and decimating Hezbollah. When the pagers exploded and Israel unleashed a flurry of full-scale attacks on Hezbollah, the cost of holding back almost all its most powerful potential blows against Israel became clear.