The last time I saw Fawaz Najim alive was in Galilee, not far from St. Paul’s parents’ hometown. The first time I saw him was outside his apartment building in Israel’s northernmost city of Metula which abuts the Lebanese border. Fawaz was waiting outside in a t-shirt and orange Crocs, leisurely smoking a cigarette by the curb when we pulled up. Passersby might have figured him for a mechanic, but I knew better.

Fawaz tossed his cigarette aside and embraced me as I got out of the car. “Thank you for coming,” he said in English with a big smile. He was short, stocky, and dark, over 60 but as strong as an ox. Leading me inside, he sat me on a couch and pulled up a chair so close that our knees touched. Our mutual friend Shadi Khalloul sat beside me. Fawaz soon exhausted his stockpile of English phrases and switched to Hebrew. His wife Mariana brought coffee and sweets.

Shadi had told me a lot about Fawaz, a Lebanese Christian born and raised in Qlayaa, a small village over the border now visible through his living room window. Fawaz, like Shadi, was a member of the Syriac Maronite Church, a Rome-affiliated rite founded by Aramaic-speaking Christians in the Lebanese mountains. The Maronites have always been a proud people—proud of their faith, proud of their heritage, proud of their freedom. Thanks to the patronage of the French, they dominated Lebanon for much of the 20^th century and still hold some of the country’s top political offices by law.

The big thing I knew about Fawaz—the thing that had interested me enough to ask for a meeting—was that he had spent his life as a Christian soldier in Lebanon, much of it fighting in the trenches side-by-side with Israelis. I had read about this little-known episode in the Arab-Israeli conflict—the armed Judeo-Christian alliance in Lebanon—but had never encountered it firsthand. Examining Fawaz’s weather-beaten face, his salt-and-pepper hair, and his unkempt beard, I could see it now with clear eyes.

“Shadi told me a lot about you,” I said. “I want to hear everything.” 

Fawaz smiled. It was the invitation he had been waiting for.

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It all started in 1970, Fawaz said, when Yasser Arafat moved the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization to Lebanon after King Hussein threw him out of Jordan. Back then Beirut was still known as the Paris of the Middle East, a Europeanized corner of the Arab world where Christians made up a third of the population and French was almost as ubiquitous as Arabic.

But Arafat quickly rebuilt in Lebanon what he’d lost in Jordan—a Palestinian state-within-a-state, complete with checkpoints and armed fedayeen—and commenced a new wave of assaults against Israel. It wasn’t long before the PLO controlled most of the south and large parts of Beirut, taking over neighborhoods at gunpoint, terrorizing the populace, and triggering Israeli reprisals with each cross-border raid. It wasn’t long before Lebanon’s sectarian balance was thrown into chaos. Sunnis, Druze, and Marxists from all camps, including many Christians, swarmed to Arafat’s side, demanding the end of the Maronite-dominated regime. The Maronites, with the rest of the Christians, took up arms to defend it. And so began a 15-year civil war that in many ways still goes on today.

For Fawaz, the turning point came at age 17 when some of his relatives were killed by fedayeen and tossed into a ditch, forcing him to do what many young men were doing in the early 1970s: pick up a rifle and join a militia, in his case the Lebanese Tigers. For more than two hours, Fawaz recounted his experiences on the front lines of the civil war: the massacres and counter-massacres; the Syrian occupation that started in 1976; the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982; the PLO’s expulsion to Tunis; and the Taif Accord, which ostensibly ended the war but planted the seeds for new conflict. 

I was especially intrigued by Fawaz’s affiliation with the Free Lebanon Army—later called the South Lebanon Army, or SLA—which started when a rogue unit of the Lebanese Armed Forces broke away under Major Saad Haddad, a Greek Catholic from nearby Marjayoun, and established an autonomous security zone in the south with backing from the IDF. This idiosyncratic Israeli-Maronite condominium, which Haddad declared in 1979 the “State of Free Lebanon,” stretched along the Lebanon-Israel border from Mount Hermon to the sea, enduring in one form or another until Israel pulled out in 2000.

Fawaz served for years alongside Shiites and Druze in this Christian-dominated paramilitary force. Because the SLA had its training camps and headquarters in Israel, Fawaz was soon visiting the Jewish state, befriending Israeli soldiers, and learning colloquial Hebrew. He fought with the Israelis, first against the Palestinians then against Hezbollah, a new Iranian-backed paramilitary force that had radicalized Lebanese Shiites—historically, an impoverished population ignored by Christians and Sunnis alike—with a new political theology and promises of protection.

It was an unusual chapter in the history of the Near East—a time when Jews and Christians fought alongside Muslims against common enemies. Recounted in 2019, the whole thing seemed unreal enough to be a fairy tale. But the story of the SLA, like so many others in Lebanon (and like so many fairy tales), ended in tragedy. And men like Fawaz suffered the most.

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When the civil war ended, Hezbollah refused to disarm—it really all came down to that. Claiming resistance against the Israelis, its leaders launched a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and commando raids that turned south Lebanon of the 1990s into Israel’s Vietnam. It was a terrorist campaign that helped inspire America’s enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq a decade later.

Eventually, the Israelis grew tired of occupation. Southern Lebanon was never considered part of the historical Jewish homeland, which meant little emotional attachment to its coniferous hills and valleys. When two troop helicopters collided in 1997, killing 73 IDF soldiers, the Israeli anti-war camp took on new energy and demanded that first-term Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leave Lebanon immediately. When left-wing opposition leader Ehud Barak put that demand at the center of his peace-forward political campaign, Israelis put him in office. On May 25, 2000, Barak made good on his promise and evacuated from Lebanon for good.

As soon as Israel moved out, Hezbollah moved in. The SLA collapsed immediately, many of its fighters rounded up and tried for treason. But thousands escaped to Israel with their families, some moving on to other countries but others remaining as citizens of the Jewish state. Cut off from their homeland with minimal financial assistance, these newly-minted “Lebanese-Israelis” had to restart their lives from zero. Some like Fawaz became Israeli patriots. Others became bitter. Back in Lebanon, Hezbollah became more powerful than ever.

Politically, Fawaz was to the right of Netanyahu. He hated peaceniks like Ehud Barak who handed Lebanon to Hezbollah and brought Arafat back to Ramallah, paving the way for the Second Intifada. Few could explain the importance of a Jewish state as well as he could. But the more Fawaz talked, the more I realized how Lebanese he still was. My gaze kept shifting over his shoulder to his native Qlayaa in Lebanon, still hovering in the window like an apparition—close enough to touch, but like the Promised Land before Moses, forever beyond his reach. I noticed that the contents of his living room, like the contents of his heart, were all oriented towards that window and the world beyond.

There was something heroic about Fawaz, but something sad too. “If it wasn’t for the Israelis, there would be no Lebanon today,” he told me through cloudy eyes. “The Jews saved the Christians. They saved the whole country.” But few Jews in Israel remembered his war, let alone realized an old Lebanese gunfighter was living among them. So there he sat, watching Arabic TV and smoking cigarettes in his Crocs while casting furtive glances out his window at a lost world. 

All he had now was his story—a tale of Jews and Christians fighting alongside Druze and Muslims to hold back the forces of chaos that would soon tear the world apart. He wanted to tell that story, and believed that if he could tell it, the dream of a free Lebanon might be resurrected. Israelis and Lebanese might remember their shared past and rediscover the path to peace. He talked about writing a memoir, maybe even producing a documentary if he could find money. He had high hopes.

Instead, Fawaz developed lung cancer and died in 2021, his story preserved only by Mariana, their children, and close friends. It was the end of an era. But his spirit lives on.

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I was thinking of Fawaz as I watched Israel’s war with Hezbollah unfold last fall. I wondered what he’d say about “Operation Grim Beeper,” the death of Hassan Nasrallah, and the election of a new Maronite president. I had a feeling he’d be pleased, but also knew that any victory without Qlayaa would disappoint him.

The future of Lebanon in this new chapter is uncertain. There are good signs and bad. The idea of peace between Lebanon and Israel, like the legacy of Israel’s cooperation with the Maronites, remains controversial to say the least. In Lebanon, the mere suggestion of peace can land you in jail or worse. But with the 25^th anniversary of Israel’s pullout approaching, the story of the SLA and its fighters deserves closer attention. So, too, does the dream of a free Lebanon, which Israel’s victory over Hezbollah makes possible again. Thousands of men like Fawaz—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Druze—gave their best years in service of that dream. Many gave their lives. It’s high time we remember them