When one hears the word “occupation” mentioned in the context of the Middle East, what first comes to mind is usually Israel’s control over areas it gained in the Six-Day War, and when the word is mentioned in connection with Lebanon, what comes to mind is the buffer zone controlled by the Jerusalem-backed South Lebanese Army until 2000. But for most Lebanese, the real occupation was the Syrian military’s pervasive presence throughout their country from 1976 to 2005. Faysal Itani—through a tragicomic personal tale of an automotive accident two decades ago—explores this oft-forgotten piece of Levantine history, and its lingering effects:

In 1976, Hafez al-Assad invaded Lebanon to crush Palestinian-led Muslim militias fighting Christian ones in what would become a fifteen-year civil war. But the Christians, who had sought Syrian support against their Lebanese enemies, grew tired of Assad’s heavy hand. And so began years of fighting between the Syrian regime and Lebanon’s Christians, culminating in Assad’s destruction and invasion of Christian areas, ending the war in 1990 and solidifying Syria’s occupation of Lebanon.

The Syrian regime’s relationship with Lebanon’s Sunnis was even more complicated. The Sunnis supported the Palestinian cause against Israel. In theory so did Assad, but he only tolerated anti-Israel groups he could control, and Lebanon’s Sunnis never forgot his control over them and their Palestinian allies. Throughout the 1980s, Assad fought a long war against Lebanese Sunni militias, crushing them even as he slaughtered Sunni insurgents at home. This became the root of Sunni bitterness toward Assad, whose forces killed or “disappeared” thousands of their young men.

Lebanon’s civil war ended in 1990, but I was too young to care. My Lebanon experience was defined by multiple wars with Israel, but even more so by the Syrian occupation. This decade and a half until Syria withdrew in 2005 had an enormous impact on Lebanon and its ongoing descent into a moral travesty of a state.

There is very little literature about this chapter in Lebanese-Syrian history, not least because the press was muzzled and social media did not exist. It was the occupation’s banal pettiness that weighed heavily on the Lebanese. My friends and I experienced it constantly, mostly from members or allies of Syrian intelligence services: shutting down my university after a student cursed another connected to the regime; beating a friend with a rifle for flipping off a convoy carrying Hafez al-Assad’s nephew; torturing a fellow student activist to death; ramming my car at an intersection then driving away; forcing bribes at checkpoints manned by agents wearing their trademark Hawaiian shirts; and other things I cannot recall or should keep to myself.

The Assads, father and son, also played a role—as Itani explains—in securing Hizballah’s current domination of the country, which is the source of so many of its present woes, and poses such a danger to Israel’s security.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.