Lebanon, a land of hope, a land of despair. A country where the modern meets the medieval in a Mediterranean melange. How did the home of the ancient Phoenicians come under the primitive control of the jihadi group Hezbollah and its Iranian puppet master? In a colorful 21st-century twist right out of a James Bond film, how and why did Israeli intelligence plant and activate explosives in the pagers and walkie-talkies carried by Hezbollah operatives, incapacitating thousands — and then successfully assassinate its fabled leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a pinpoint strike? You must understand the story of this place to see what the future holds. “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon,” says Psalm 92:12. When I was young, the verse seemed to fit as well as the biblical cedar on the Lebanese flag: Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East, home to the prestigious American University of Beirut and a cosmopolitan population. But Lebanon had problems too, and the most visible of them as the 1980s dawned was the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization which, led by the mastermind terrorist Yasser Arafat, engineered control of what was called a “state-within-a-state” in Southern Lebanon and engaged in cross-border attacks on Israel. In 1982, Israel and its allies in Lebanon were able to defeat the PLO and its Syrian ally, under the family rule of the current President Bashar Assad’s father. For a time, it appeared that the region would be revolutionized as the new Lebanese President Amine Gemayel signed a May 1983 peace treaty with Israel. But Western support wavered as the war lengthened, and Syria forced Gemayel to renege on the agreement in March 1984. Meanwhile, Iran had spawned the creation of a Shi’ite jihadi militia called Hezbollah. Hezbollah introduced modern suicide bombing to the Islamic world, notably with the suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks that killed 241 U.S. service members. Since 2000, when Israel and its ally, the South Lebanon Army, withdrew, Hezbollah has been in complete control of the territory north of Israel’s border. A long night fell in Lebanon until 2005, when a popular uprising called the Cedar Revolution gave the Lebanese people a new lease on hope. Outrage after the assassination by Hezbollah of popular former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri led to the withdrawal of the Syrian army from its occupation of Lebanon. However, once again, the new openness longed for by the Lebanese people never arrived, as Hezbollah strongarmed the weak Lebanese state into submission and, by 2006, had launched a hellish new war on Israel, with many Israelis spending a summer reminiscent of the London Blitz largely in bomb shelters. Hezbollah’s dark star continued to rise, as the terror organization interfered in the Syrian Civil War on behalf of the brutal dictator Bashar Assad, who has massacred more than half a million of his own people in his bid to cling to power. Hezbollah even has developed its Radwan Forces, operatives specially trained to infiltrate Israel and commit atrocities. A day after Hamas launched its despicable war on Israel on Oct. 7, murdering 1,200 innocents and kidnapping 251 more, Hezbollah began its own shelling of northern Israel, forcing the evacuation of about 60,000 Israelis from their homes. One such rocket attack on the village of Majdal Shams was searing, with one man heard screaming “They are all children!” after the deaths of a dozen Druze children. “The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon,” says Psalm 29:5. On Sept. 17, Israel activated explosive devices that it had planted in thousands of Hezbollah pagers and the next day blew up their hand-held radios. Israel then proceeded to systematically kill Hezbollah’s leadership and destroy its arsenal, estimated at more than 100,000 rockets that threatened Israeli cities. And yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu called on the people of Lebanon to free themselves from Hezbollah. It’s important to understand that Lebanon is not Hezbollah any more than it was the PLO or the Syrian army. Like those prior occupiers, Hezbollah and its patron, Iran, have assumed effective military power of a nation most of whose citizens — the multiconfessional, Francophone potpourri who are the Lebanese — find their values of “holy war” and the oppression of women abhorrent. This is the Lebanon that yearns to breathe free again, the instant that the ugly edifice of Hezbollah dominance begins to crumble. These are the Lebanese who are urgently paging a new Cedar Revolution. Yousef is the author of “From Hamas to America: My Story of Defying Terror, Facing the Unimaginable, and Finding Redemption in the Land of Opportunity.”