Hezbollah’s message welcoming Pope Leo XIV to Lebanon was another barrage of accusations against Israel while presenting Lebanon as a bridge between what it called “the two Abrahamic faiths, Christianity and Islam.” Judaism, the original covenantal faith rooted in Avraham Avinu, was erased—mirroring a pattern seen before in regional interfaith events where Jewish presence should have been central but was instead pushed aside.
Hezbollah’s declaration claimed Lebanon “represents a civilizational link” between Christianity and Islam, while ignoring the country’s near-vanished Jewish community—now estimated at only around one hundred people who practice discreetly in Beirut. This quiet disappearance did not happen in a vacuum. Decades of intimidation, Hezbollah’s rise, and the targeting of religious minorities drove the Jews of Lebanon into silence or exile.
The same statement that celebrated interfaith harmony also accused Israel of destabilizing Lebanon and committing “genocide” in Gaza, even as Hezbollah admitted that it used the Gaza war as justification to fire rockets into Israeli civilian communities beginning on October 8, 2023. The document condemned the world’s supposed disrespect for religious diversity only months after the IDF showed Hezbollah operatives to be responsible for the assassination of Christian politician Elias Hasrouni in 2023 and the kidnapping and killing of Pascal Sleiman in 2024. These were not abstract tensions. These were targeted killings carried out by the same organization now speaking about coexistence.
The group’s message to the pope presented the usual list of accusations: Israel supposedly covets Lebanon’s water and gas resources; Israel disrupts Lebanese stability; Israel is the sole source of regional conflict. In this narrative, Hezbollah positions itself as Lebanon’s guardian, even as its attacks have dragged Lebanon deeper into economic collapse and military confrontation.
The pope’s own visit preceding his arrival in Lebanon underscored another layer of discord. At Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, Pope Leo entered respectfully but did not pray, surprising both the Turkish hosts and the Vatican’s own communications team, which scrambled to clarify the situation. The visit highlighted the complexity of Christian-Muslim encounters in the region, yet in Lebanon, Hezbollah seeks to turn the pontiff’s arrival into a vehicle for its political goals.
This framing echoed Pope Francis’ 2021 “sons of Abraham” event at Ur in Iraq, where Christianity and Islam stood together without any Jewish representation, despite the site’s biblical significance. That event was promoted as a shared spiritual moment, yet the people for whom the Abrahamic covenant is an ancestral reality were absent. Hezbollah’s statement revived that same formula: a narrative about Abraham stripped of the Jews who have carried his name for millennia.
The pattern is clear. When Judaism is removed from the list of Abrahamic faiths, the Jewish connection to the land of Israel becomes easier for Israel’s enemies to deny. It becomes possible to present Israel as a foreign presence rather than the people whose covenantal bond to the land is older than Islam and Christianity by more than a thousand years.