Beirut, the once-fabled “Paris of the Middle East”, has been down on its luck in recent years. The lack of attention to Lebanon’s decline is now translating into complacency about the combustible situation on the country’s southern border, which it shares with Israel.

On July 27, a Hezbollah rocket flew across the border and killed 12 children on the Golan Heights, the most civilians lost in one day since the massacre of October 7. In retaliation, an Israeli air strike eliminated Hezbollah’s top military commander on July 30. The group’s response is likely to determine whether Lebanon plunges into a war as devastating as the one in Gaza.

Now is the time for journalists and their audiences to develop a clear understanding of how Hezbollah’s misrule and belligerence have brought Lebanon to the brink of a devastating conflict. Regrettably, much of the press corps has decamped from Beirut to more stable hubs such Dubai, Istanbul, and Cairo as the capital sank into misery while Hezbollah consolidated its ascendancy in Lebanese politics.

Epic graft led to Lebanon’s economic implosion in 2019, ushering in a five-year recession that ended the quarter-century of relative prosperity that followed the country’s civil war. The poverty rate has tripled while the middle-class has fled. The country has had no president for almost two years because its ethnic power-sharing arrangements have become paralyzing.

The greatest share of responsibility for this mess belongs to Hezbollah, which wields the most power in Beirut while professing loyalty to the Supreme Leader in Tehran. The group is a terrorist organization, political party, ethnic militia, welfare agency, and narco-crime syndicate rolled into one.

If you’ve not been hearing much about Lebanon’s immiseration or Hezbollah’s role, it is partly because foreign correspondents are now covering their beloved Levant from afar. But there is no substitute for on-site journalism.

The first thing these journalists need to understand, preferably before Hezbollah’s war with Israel begins, is that Hezbollah unilaterally initiated the war of attrition that has now claimed the lives of those 12 Israeli children. The border enjoyed 17 years of relative calm after a brief war in the summer of 2006.

But on October 8, the day after the massacre in southern Israel, Hezbollah began lobbing rockets and suicide drones at Israeli communities. This was a pure expression of support for Hamas, not a response to any Israeli provocation, real or imagined.

Which may also explain why you’ve not been hearing much about the second and far more combustible front to the Gaza war: the Lebanon-Israel border, across which Hezbollah has been lobbing rockets and suicide drones at civilian communities since Oct. 8, just one day after the Hamas atrocities that set the region on edge.

Western diplomats, mainly from Washington and Paris, have shuttled back and forth, urging restraint and offering flimsy solutions that do not address the main cause of conflict: Hezbollah’s determination, with support from its sponsors in Tehran, to tie down Israeli forces in the north to tilt the Gaza war in Hamas’s favor. This is precisely the reason the Islamic Republic in Iran has ringed the Jewish state with proxy forces, so they can work together to destroy it.

If and when an all-out war begins, there will be an ingathering of the Fourth Estate in Beirut, as if by magic. Their bandwidth will expand like a mighty wind filling a sail. They will focus on the innocents who inevitably pay the price for terrorists’ belligerence. And, inevitably, their breathless chronicling of the tragedy will skip past basic causality.

Their focus on the asymmetry of conventional military power will blind them to the asymmetric motives of the combatants: one, a sub-state actor bent on the destruction of a neighbor, the other a democratic nation that merely wants to be left in peace.

We’ve been here before — in 1982, and 2006, and an unending parade of smaller border skirmishes in-between. We must not indulge in this media myopia again.

On American campuses, there will be new encampments where teach-ins portray the conflict as the war of a Western capitalist juggernaut against downtrodden anti-imperialists. They never see that Tehran is the actual fountainhead of imperialism in the Middle East, bringing the capitals of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen under its thumb. But the capital it covets most is Jerusalem, and it is employing the war in Gaza as a weapon of mass distraction, turning attention away from its aggressive moves to reach the nuclear weapons threshold.

Once the war begins, the dispatches filed from Beirut are unlikely to remind readers that Hezbollah helped immiserate Lebanon, and then plunged it into war. Yet a quick Google search will serve to establish who was attacked first, who appealed time and again for quiet, and who issued warnings about a war it sought to avoid: the Israelis. Having established that, you should not indulge in reporting that skimps on basic recent history in favor of partisan messaging.