On March 29, 1985, Elie Hallak, a fifty-eight-year-old physician and the vice president of Lebanon’s Jewish Communal Council (Conseil communal israélite libanais), was abducted from his home in West Beirut. His kidnappers belonged to a shadowy militant Shiite network, associated with the milieu from which Hezbollah was then emerging, which called itself the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth. During his captivity Hallak was held alongside the journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann and the sociologist Michel Seurat, who were abducted together on May 22 after arriving on the same flight from Paris, in a kidnapping claimed by Islamic Jihad. Seurat, a researcher at the social-sciences institute CERMOC (Centre d’études et de recherches sur le Moyen-Orient contemporain) who had lived in Lebanon for about a decade, was returning to Beirut; Kauffmann had arrived as a correspondent for L’Événement du jeudi. In a 1988 essay for that magazine, Kauffmann remembered that Hallak, unlike the other prisoners, was sometimes allowed to move without a blindfold; the guards referred to him simply as the hakim—the doctor.

According to Kauffmann’s later account, by December 1985 Seurat’s health began to deteriorate rapidly, and Hallak was brought to see him for brief visits each day. (In at least one case he remained by Seurat’s side as explosions shook the building.) Hallak asked that blood tests be performed and continued to treat Seurat even as the results came back incomplete or useless. Kauffmann compared him to Dr. Rieux in Camus’s The Plague: the physician who knows that he may be powerless against the disease before him and nevertheless continues to do his work.

Leading Christian and Muslim officials in Lebanon condemned the kidnapping, including Nabih Berri, then both the country’s justice minister and the leader of the Shiite Amal movement. When we spoke in August, Hallak’s son André told me that Imad Mughniyeh—then a rising figure in the militant networks later associated with Hezbollah—telephoned his mother, Rachel, to say that he wanted to secure her husband’s release because the hakim had once saved his own son from a serious illness. According to André, however, Hallak refused to be released alone. The following February the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth announced that it had executed Hallak, accusing him of spying for Israel. Rachel rejected that accusation.

Hallak was one of at least eleven Lebanese Jews—several of them members or officers of the Jewish Communal Council—abducted in the mid-1980s in operations attributed to the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth. Ten are believed to have died or been killed, with announcements of executions continuing into 1987. The fate of the eleventh, Salim Mourad Jammous, secretary-general of the Jewish Communal Council, remains unknown. The abductions began nine years into Lebanon’s civil war and two years after Israel’s invasion of the country, a major catalyst for Hezbollah’s emergence in the early 1980s.¹ The remains of at least six, including Hallak, have never been recovered.

These abductions were part of a much larger Lebanese tragedy. During the civil war, between 1975 and 1990, some 17,000 people of different nationalities, religions, and political affiliations vanished. Most of them were civilians. Scores of others disappeared after the war, in the period of Syria’s domination over Lebanon. Among them were Lebanese citizens and stateless Palestinians seized by Syrian intelligence, sometimes with the participation of Lebanese security forces, and transferred to Syrian prisons, where many were held incommunicado and some were tortured.

The Lebanese state never produced a comprehensive accounting of the missing, and for decades families were left without any official way of confirming their fate. In 2015 the International Committee of the Red Cross began collecting biological reference samples from relatives of the disappeared, but as of 2019 this program had reached families representing only about seven hundred missing people—a tiny fraction of the thousands who remained unaccounted for. According to André, he and his siblings were never approached to provide DNA samples that might help identify their father’s remains. For decades the disappearance of Lebanon’s Jewish communal leaders received little sustained public attention. That changed this year, when their fate and the location of their remains emerged as an issue in the US-mediated negotiations between Lebanon and Israel.

US-led diplomacy began after Israel and Hezbollah returned to all-out war in early March 2026. In April Israel and Lebanon entered direct US-sponsored negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and addressing a broader set of security and political issues. Those talks, which had proceeded through seven rounds by early August before a planned eighth round was postponed, came to encompass Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory, the deployment of the Lebanese army in the south, and the disarmament of Hezbollah. On June 26 the negotiations produced a framework agreement under which the Lebanese army would take control of designated “pilot zones,” non-state armed groups would be disarmed there, and Israeli forces would withdraw progressively as those arrangements were implemented. Hezbollah, which was not a party to the agreement, rejected the framework and refused to lay down its arms while Israeli forces remained in the country. Israel has meanwhile continued to bomb Lebanon, destroying villages, detaining combatants and civilians alike, and devastating lives, ecologies, and livelihoods, while consolidating an occupation zone across a substantial swath of the country’s south.

One of the major questions in the talks has been the release of detainees and the recovery of missing persons and remains. At one of those talks in Rome in August, according to reporting by the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, the Lebanese delegation submitted an updated list of thirty-four Lebanese detainees whose release it was seeking from Israel; by September 22 the Lebanese Association of Prisoners and Liberated Detainees said that it had confirmed thirty-nine Lebanese detainees in Israeli custody, while acknowledging that the actual number remained unknown. Three of those on the earlier list dated from previous periods of conflict—1978, 1981, and 2005—while the others had largely been detained since October 2024, including during the renewed fighting of March 2026.

Israel has not provided Lebanon with a comprehensive list of the prisoners it holds, and according to the Beirut daily An-Nahar it has refused either to let the International Committee of the Red Cross visit the Lebanese detainees or to provide ICRC officials with their names. (The ICRC has in fact been denied access to detainees held in Israeli detention facilities generally since October 2023.) It has, meanwhile, gone to extreme lengths to recover its own missing dead. In March 2026 Israeli special forces entered Nabi Chit in the Bekaa Valley under heavy air cover and desecrated the Al-Chokr family cemetery while searching for the remains of Ron Arad, the Israeli Air Force navigator who disappeared after ejecting from his damaged aircraft over Lebanon in 1986. Lebanese reports said the commandos excavated and opened a family grave; Israel subsequently said that no evidence relating to Arad had been found.²

It was hardly unexpected, then, that in recent rounds of negotiations Israel linked progress on the release of Lebanese detainees to information about Arad and possibly the recovery of his remains. And yet it also, more unexpectedly, tied movement on the detainee issue to Lebanese efforts to locate the remains of Lebanese Jewish communal figures and others abducted and killed during the civil war. In early September, through US mediation, Israel released five civilian detainees, three Lebanese and two Syrians—none of whom appeared on the list of detainees previously circulated by the Lebanese Association of Prisoners and Liberated Detainees. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that the release followed “significant activity” by both Lebanon and Israel to locate the remains of Lebanese Jewish communal figures abducted and murdered in the 1980s, including unspecified “operations on the ground.” Israeli and Lebanese reports have since referred to maps, photographs, and the location of possible burial sites supplied to Lebanese authorities, although neither government has publicly identified who conducted the searches or precisely where they took place. The US State Department described the arrangement more plainly: “Israel is releasing detainees and Lebanon is helping Israel recover the lost remains of Lebanese Jews.”

All this has forced the issue of Lebanon’s disappeared Jews back onto the agenda of a state that has largely ignored it for decades. A September 5 report in the Beirut daily Ad-Diyar suggested just how much relevant material may have remained scattered within Lebanese institutions. Citing diplomatic sources, Ad-Diyar reported that officials had begun assembling a dossier of intelligence records and testimony from the period, and had provided American officials with documents and photographs as well as information about possible burial sites. The report does not prove that Lebanese authorities knew where the missing were buried, still less that they deliberately concealed that knowledge. It does, however, raise uncomfortable questions: How much information had been left languishing in the archives of a state that showed little urgency in accounting for its missing citizens, and why did that information acquire political value only when another state made those citizens’ remains part of a negotiation?

That choice by Israel exposed the Lebanese state’s failure toward these victims and their families, but it was far from a neutral humanitarian gesture. By conditioning the release of Lebanese detainees on Lebanon’s cooperation in locating these remains, Israel assumed a political standing in relation to the civil war’s Lebanese Jewish victims that resembled the standing it exercises on behalf of its own missing citizens. When the Associated Press correspondent Bassem Mroue recently asked Doron Spielman, a spokesperson for Netanyahu, to clarify why the recovery of Lebanese Jewish remains had become an Israeli negotiating interest, he answered that “Israel, as the nation-state of the Jewish people, has a profound and enduring responsibility to Jews throughout the world.” That responsibility, Spielman continued, “does not end at Israel’s borders, nor does it end with death.” 

The implications of this logic are troubling. It detaches Lebanese Jews, living and dead, from Lebanon’s own history and turns Jewishness itself from a diasporic identity rooted in many languages, places, and communities into a presumptive basis for political belonging to Israel. There is an unsettling historical symmetry here. The militants who abducted Lebanon’s Jewish leaders in the 1980s also treated their Jewishness as evidence of a political relationship to Israel, tying their fate to the demand that Israel withdraw from Lebanon and release Lebanese prisoners. Hallak and the other victims were Lebanese civilians who had remained in the country through the civil war, yet to their captors they were proxies for a state of which they were not citizens. In February 1986 the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth claimed that it had killed Hallak in retaliation for Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon; later that year it likewise said that three other Lebanese Jewish hostages had been executed in response to Israeli attacks.

Israel now appears to be making a similar conflation from the opposite direction. In this sense the current negotiations reach beyond the fate of the missing themselves, to the tension between Israeli ethnonationalism and diasporic Judaism, and by implication to the challenge posed by the Lebanese model itself: the possibility, however fraught and imperfect, that religious difference need not mean territorial separation and monoethnic national identities.

Beirut has a longstanding place in the Jewish history of Roman Phoenicia. By late antiquity it was home to an established Jewish community, with a synagogue that stood there until it was destroyed in the earthquake of 502 CE.³ In the twelfth century Benjamin of Tudela wrote about his encounters with Jewish communities in Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre, where Jews included Talmudic scholars, shipowners, merchants, and glassmakers whose wares circulated far beyond the city.

The first recorded burial in Beirut’s current Jewish cemetery, in Ras al-Nabaa, was that of Rabbi Moise Yedid Levy in 1829. Beirut’s Jewish community expanded rapidly over the nineteenth century, becoming part of the city’s commercial and civic life. In 1824 the Jewish traveler David d’Beth Hillel found some fifteen Jewish merchant families in Beirut, “natives of the country” who spoke Arabic and maintained a small synagogue; by 1856 another visitor counted about five hundred Sephardi Jews, many working as merchants and porters. After World War I the Maghen Abraham synagogue became the religious and institutional heart of a flourishing Beirut Jewish community. Most of the city’s Jews were middle-class and engaged in commerce; as Beirut expanded they increasingly lived beyond Wadi Abu Jamil, although the old Jewish quarter remained the symbolic and communal center of Jewish life.⁴

The Jewish cemetery in Sidon is even older than the one in Beirut. It lies on an ancient dune, in the fine sand that fed Sidon’s celebrated glassmaking tradition. (The Homeric epics already associate Sidon with exceptional craftsmanship.) Some of its tombstones are fashioned from fragments of ancient Greek and Roman columns, though many of the inscriptions are now illegible, as I learned when I worked on the cemetery’s restoration.

Jews historically lived not only in Beirut and Sidon but also in Tripoli, the Chouf, Aley, Deir al-Qamar, and elsewhere in the country. Aley and Bhamdoun, once popular summer resorts for Beirut’s Jewish community, still have historic synagogues that sit abandoned among mosques and churches. By the twentieth century Lebanon’s Jews sustained a dense network of institutions: Talmud Torah and Alliance schools, charitable associations, synagogues, batei midrash, businesses, and other social organizations. Tomer Levi has described this as the emergence of a distinctly “Levantine” Jewish community, formed through migration, commerce, and the plural social world of the late Ottoman port city.⁵

When Lebanon gained independence in 1943, its Jewish citizens remained part of the country’s constitutional and confessional order. Judaism was a legally recognized religion, its adherents protected by constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience and communal rights in matters of family and personal status. The National Pact of 1943—the country’s unwritten political compact between President Bechara al-Khouri and Prime Minister Riad al-Solh—privileged the larger Christian and Muslim communities in the distribution of political office, but it did not render Lebanese Jews foreign to the state.

Even before independence, Alfred Naccache, Lebanon’s president under the French Mandate from 1941 to 1943, had publicly affirmed the place of Jews within Lebanese national life. During a visit to Beirut’s Maghen Abraham Synagogue, he praised their contribution to Lebanon and, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said that Jewish citizens would be given “a full share in the responsibilities of government.” The modern Lebanese state continues formally to recognize Judaism, even though the community today is numerically tiny.

As the historian Kirsten Schulze shows in The Jews of Lebanon: Between Coexistence and Conflict, Lebanese Jewish life did not end with the establishment of Israel in 1948.⁶ While most of Sidon’s Jews temporarily fled the city amid the arrival of Palestinian refugees and the movement of Lebanese troops toward the border, she writes, the Lebanese government “protected their property and restored it to the Jews upon their return.” In Beirut, too, the state deployed security forces to protect the Jewish quarter during periods of regional conflict. Lebanon thus differed markedly from Iraq and Egypt, where the 1950s brought denaturalization, expulsions, sequestration, and large-scale dispossession of Jews.

In fact, Lebanon was the only Arab country whose Jewish population increased after 1948. Part of that growth came from Syrian and Iraqi Jewish refugees who settled in Beirut. By 1951, Schulze estimates, some nine thousand Jews were living in Lebanon, nearly seven thousand of them Lebanese citizens. They generally, she observes, did not take the so-called Arab-Israeli war “to directly affect them,” because “they saw themselves clearly as Lebanese nationals—so much so that there were Jewish soldiers in the Lebanese army fighting in the war of 1948.” Their relations with Zionism were particularly revealing. The community was marked by “ardent Lebanese nationalism” and, among the majority, considerable “apathy towards the Zionist project,” Schulze writes, even as a small number of leaders and activists maintained close ties with the Yishuv. Schulze paraphrases Joseph Attie, the president of the council, who summed up the prevailing position in 1952: while some may have been sympathetic toward Israel, “their first loyalty was to Lebanon.”

The unraveling began after the 1967 Six-Day War, which Lebanon largely sat out, and accelerated with the growth of the Palestinian armed presence in Lebanon and the start of the civil war. Notably, in 1967 the Lebanese state still moved to protect the Jewish quarter during demonstrations. By the 1970s, however, insecurity had deepened; a bomb exploded at the Selim Tarrab Talmud Torah school, and the community’s numbers fell sharply as Jews, like many other Lebanese, began to leave the country. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 marked a still more dangerous turn. Israel opened its border to Lebanese Jews and even offered them citizenship, but according to Schulze none were reported to have taken up the offer; many still described Lebanon as home. Yet from 1982 onward some Islamist militias increasingly associated Lebanon’s Jews with Israel; after the Israeli withdrawal from Beirut, that identification became deadly.

Such suspicions were not unique to Lebanon’s Jews. Lebanese political life had long been shaped by the external affiliations of its confessional communities—Maronites with France, Sunnis with Saudi Arabia, and Shiites with Iran. What distinguished the Jewish case was the ease with which religion could be made to stand in for nationality: to be Jewish was increasingly to risk being treated as politically Israeli. The consequences were not confined to the later kidnappings. During the civil war Jewish homes and institutions in Wadi Abu Jamil were damaged or abandoned; ironically, the Maghen Abraham synagogue itself was struck by Israeli shelling in 1982, forcing elderly Jewish residents to flee the quarter. By 1978 estimates of the remaining Jewish population ranged from about 450 to 1,000, down from roughly five to six thousand only a few years earlier; by 1980, according to estimates Schulze cites, only two or three hundred Jews remained in the country.

The point of narrating this history is not to romanticize Lebanon, or to deny the harassment and insecurity that made Jews there increasingly vulnerable. The civil war—profoundly shaped by the Palestinian Nakba and exodus, and later the armed Palestinian presence and its Lebanese alliances—shattered the country in which that life had been possible.⁷ Yet for many Lebanese Jews, departure did not represent a belated discovery of where they had truly belonged all along. The testimonies collected by the journalist Nada Abdelsamad in Wadi Abu Jamil, her 2009 book about the neighborhood, are striking in this respect: her interviewees consistently describe departure not as a homecoming but as an exile.⁸

Some went to Israel, but many settled in Europe, the United States, Canada, Latin America, and elsewhere, as did Lebanese of other creeds. For these exiles Lebanon was not merely the place they had escaped but a lost homeland to which they continued to return—in memory, in ritual, in friendship, and sometimes in person. Many Lebanese Jews in the diaspora have maintained a powerful attachment to the country, preserving a distinctly Lebanese identity through language, food, music, friendship, family memory, and religious practices.

As the Jewish population of Lebanon grew smaller, its physical infrastructure was left increasingly vulnerable. Under Lebanon’s confessional system, recognized religious communities have considerable autonomy over their communal institutions and property, including places of worship and cemeteries; for the dwindling Jewish community, maintaining that infrastructure became increasingly difficult. But some sites have been maintained or restored through initiatives involving Lebanese Jews at home and in the diaspora. The Jewish cemetery in Sidon underwent rehabilitation funded by a Lebanese Jewish expatriate, while the Maghen Abraham synagogue was extensively restored beginning in 2009 with support from the Lebanese Jewish community, diaspora donors, and Solidere, the private real-estate company created to oversee Beirut’s postwar reconstruction. The Sidon synagogue served for decades as a makeshift home for displaced families—first Palestinian and later Syrian—some of whom earned a little money by showing around curious visitors (myself included). According to Bassem El-Hout, the lawyer representing Lebanon’s Jewish community, the building has recently been vacated and restored to the community’s possession.

Does the State of Israel possess a special political claim over the Jews who worshipped there simply by virtue of their being Jews—wherever they lived, whatever citizenship they possessed, and whatever attachments they chose in life? The philosopher Michel Feher has considered this question in his latest book, Redevenir juif (“Becoming Jewish Again”), in which he seeks to reclaim a diasporic Jewish political identity against the presumption that Jewishness necessarily entails allegiance to the Israeli state.⁹ Feher is hardly the first to notice the affinity between one of antisemitism’s oldest fixations—the idea that Jews do not truly belong where they live—and the Zionist proposition that their authentic political home lies elsewhere. Theodor Herzl himself famously wrote in his diary in 1895 that “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies,” imagining opponents of Jewish presence in Europe as potential partners in Jewish emigration. Feher’s argument, however, goes further: Zionism does not merely find common cause with antisemites; it can reproduce something of the same logic by treating diaspora as a deficient or provisional condition and Jewish political belonging as properly located elsewhere. It is in this sense that he provocatively, but not illogically, describes Israel as “the least Jewish country in the world.”

The historian Avi Shlaim and the cultural theorist Ella Shohat have made related arguments about the experience of Arab Jewry. Shlaim recovers what it meant, historically, for people like him and his Iraqi family to inhabit the hyphenated category of the “Arab-Jew.” Shohat asks how that conjunction came to appear contradictory in the first place, tracing how Zionist discourse produced a rupture between Arabness and Jewishness and recast Jews from Arab countries within the Israeli category of Mizrahim.¹⁰ In different registers, both show how forms of Arab-Jewish belonging that had once been ordinary came to appear anomalous or destined to disappear into Israel.

The transformation was not merely semantic. In Israel, Arabic—the language of many Jews from the Levant and North Africa—was increasingly stigmatized, while modern Hebrew became the dominant language of public and national life and immigrants from Arab societies were incorporated into Ashkenazi-dominated institutions. Shohat has described this as a process of “de-Arabization,” in which Jews from Arab countries were recast as diasporic populations returning to their proper homeland.¹¹ Shlaim recounts the same rupture from within: his family left Baghdad as Iraqi Jews and arrived in Israel to discover that their language and culture marked them as socially and culturally inferior.¹² The treatment of Lebanese Jewish remains in the current Lebanese-Israeli negotiations is a strange twenty-first-century echo of this history.

Once accepted, the presumption that Israel has a particular claim even over Jews in the diaspora does not necessarily stop at the recovery of the missing; it can extend as well to the dead whose place of burial was never in doubt. After the August negotiations, the Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported that Israel had proposed linking the release of Lebanese civilian detainees not only to the recovery of missing Jewish remains but also to the transfer to Israel of the remains buried in established Jewish cemeteries in Beirut and Sidon—a proposal that would, as the paper noted, call into question the very legitimacy of a historic Jewish presence in Lebanon. There was a certain irony in seeing this argument appear in a pro-Hezbollah paper, given the history of Shiite militant groups in the 1980s treating Lebanese Jews as proxies for Israel. The political logic behind the article was unclear, beyond its effect of weakening the legitimacy of a negotiation in which, the paper argued, Lebanon faced asymmetrical Israeli demands and little reciprocal movement.

Major Israeli news outlets quickly picked up the story, from Yedioth Ahronoth and the public broadcaster KAN to English-language outlets like The Jerusalem Post. None reported that they had independently corroborated the claim by Al-Akhbar, a newspaper many Lebanese readers treat with skepticism, and no subsequent developments have yet confirmed it. The idea itself, meanwhile, had already entered Israeli public discussion. A few weeks before the Rome negotiations, Walla, part of the Jerusalem Post media group, interviewed a Beirut-born Jewish man living in Haifa who called on the Israeli government, if it reached an agreement with Lebanon, to include a provision for transferring Jews buried there—including his sister—to cemeteries in Israel. “It’s not just me,” he said; Lebanese Jewish families still had parents and grandparents buried in the country.

But there is an obvious difference, of course, between a family asking to move the remains of a relative and a state incorporating such transfers into negotiations over detainees. The former is an act of private mourning; the latter risks converting Jewish ancestry into a basis for national jurisdiction over the dead. Lebanon’s Jews were not Israelis-in-waiting, estranged from their proper national home. They were Lebanese Jews, and Lebanon’s failure to protect them does not erase that history or amount to a transfer of their citizenship after death.

Lebanon’s constitution rests on a premise antithetical to Israel’s. For all its failures, the country’s political order is nevertheless based on an idea worth defending: that different religious communities can coexist without ceasing to be themselves. A Jew need not be Israeli any more than a Maronite need be French, a Sunni Saudi, a Shiite Iranian, or a Druze the citizen of a Druze state.

Israel’s appropriation of Judaism, by contrast, retains something of the fin-de-siècle imperial imagination: the idea that separate religious communities are also peoples destined for territorial political expression. That principle is not merely implicit in Zionist history. It has been repeatedly inscribed into Israeli state doctrine, most explicitly in the 2018 Basic Law concerning Israel as “the Nation State of the Jewish People,” which declares that the right of national self-determination in Israel is “exclusive to the Jewish people” and commits the state to Jewish immigration and the “ingathering of exiles.”

This vision of a Middle East composed of increasingly purified ethnoreligious territories cuts precisely against how the region was made. Its cities were built by communities whose affiliations overlapped rather than aligned: Arabic-speaking Jews in Beirut, Baghdad, Aleppo, and Alexandria; Armenians dispersed across Anatolia, Syria, and Lebanon; Greek Orthodox Christians tied simultaneously to local cities, ecclesiastical networks, and the wider Mediterranean; merchants, pilgrims, refugees, and laborers moving continually between ports such as Beirut, Sidon, Haifa, Alexandria, and Izmir. The region’s social worlds were never innocent of hierarchy or violence, but neither were they reducible to territorially bounded, homogeneous peoples.

The Lebanese Jewish dead belong to that history. Lebanon has an obligation to investigate the fate of the members of its Jewish community who disappeared during the civil war, just as it has an obligation toward the families of the thousands of other missing persons who have waited for decades to learn what became of them. When the civil war ended in 1990, the country’s leaders chose amnesty over reckoning. The following year, Parliament passed a sweeping law that pardoned most crimes committed during the conflict, allowing many of the militia leaders who had prosecuted the war to reenter public life as ministers, parliamentarians, and party chiefs. The settlement helped bring the fighting to an end, but it also institutionalized silence: there would be no comprehensive accounting of wartime crimes, no serious process for establishing responsibility, and little official effort to determine what happened to those who went missing.

But closure without truth is difficult, and reconciliation without accountability harder still. While Lebanon cannot restore the dead or undo the disappearances, it can establish what happened where evidence survives, identify remains and those responsible where possible, and acknowledge the failures that allowed thousands to vanish without account. The creation of the National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared in 2018 was an important recognition of that obligation, but without sustained investigation even this risks becoming another form of postponement. A state that asks its citizens to forget what it has never seriously investigated cannot plausibly claim to have left its violence behind.

The disappearance of the country’s Jews stands as one of the starkest indictments of the state’s failure to protect its citizens and to account for the missing. Yet we should, at the same time, be wary of treating that failure as evidence that Lebanon’s Jewish community belonged somewhere else all along. They were Lebanese citizens who disappeared in Lebanon, and their disappearance belongs first of all to that country’s own unfinished history of violence and impunity. Their Jewishness should neither remove them from this national reckoning nor make their fate a matter for another state to claim.