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A cloud of smoke erupts following an Israeli airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on October 19, 2024. Israel’s recent invasion of Lebanon may have come after months of trading fire with its longtime Lebanese enemy Hezbollah, but the conflict between the two countries goes back decades — before Hezbollah even existed. At the center of the hostilities between the two countries is the issue of Palestine. Israel’s friction with Lebanon began when the latter absorbed more than 100,000 Palestinian refugees in the wake of Israel’s founding in 1948. That friction has only intensified in the decades since, as those refugees, their descendants, and the Lebanese groups they inspired agitated for various forms of self-determination.  Israel launched the current invasion into southern Lebanon on October 1, to push Hezbollah, an Iran-aligned Shia militant and political group, back from its positions in southern Lebanon. Israel hoped to send tens of thousands of its citizens back to their homes in the country’s north, a year after they were forced to leave due to Hezbollah rocket fire.  Throughout the war, Hezbollah has said that it will not cease attacks on Israel until there is a ceasefire in Gaza, though the group’s leadership recently endorsed ceasefire talks that didn’t hinge on a Gaza truce. More than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year by the Israeli military’s ongoing operations.  The costs of the invasion are quickly rising. Israel has displaced the inhabitants of dozens of villages in southern Lebanon — more than 1 million people, in a population of 6 million — and repeatedly bombed the capitol, Beirut, and its southern suburbs. More than 2,000 Lebanese have been killed in the past year, most in the past month. Over the past year, 28 Israeli civilians and 43 Israeli soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah attacks and in recent ground operations. Though Israel initially promised a “limited” operation in Lebanon, US officials have warned the Israelis about “mission creep” there as the fighting stretches on. And Israel’s decision to invade has also renewed fears of a wider war, especially given the escalation between Israel and Iran. That said, to fully understand what’s happening in Lebanon right now, we’ll need to go back decades. Here’s a timeline of the fraught Israel-Lebanon relationship that can help explain how we arrived at the current situation. 1948 — the Nakba and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon Before there was the state of Israel, there was the Zionist settler colonial project, started in the 19th century by European Jews hoping to create a homeland and escape the pogroms and persecution they faced for centuries in European countries. (Arab Jewish communities had lived for centuries throughout the Middle East, often in cooperation with neighbors of other religions, but with their own distinct culture.) European Jews began settling in Palestine in the late 19th century. At that time, Lebanon was overseen by France, and Palestine by Britain. As more European Jews began settling in Palestine in the face of rising fascism and antisemitic violence on the continent, Zionists appealed to European powers for a Jewish state in Palestine.  In 1947, the United Nations granted that appeal, calling for a partitioned state of Palestine. By that time tensions between Jewish communities and the Muslim countries they lived in were rising, as leaders of Arab countries associated those communities to Zionism; that led to the expulsion of many Jewish communities across the region. Jewish militias had also ethnically cleansed many Palestinian villages and towns; in response to this violence and in defiance of another European colonial project, a full-scale war, known as the Arab-Israeli War, broke out in 1948.  Lebanon was one of the group of allied nations fighting the newly formed Israel and was a safe harbor for some of the 750,000 to 1 million Palestinians forced to flee their homes during the war, an event referred to as the Nakba.  Lebanon mostly welcomed the Palestinian refugees, understanding their status to be temporary. But Lebanon’s political system divides power among the nation’s religious groups, and the influx of mostly Sunni Muslim Palestinians threatened to upset the country’s fragile sectarian power-sharing dynamic. The Lebanese government operates on a confessional system, meaning political power is accorded to different religious groups based on population. That gave the Maronites — a Catholic sect exclusive to Lebanon — significant political power.  Since then, Muslim Palestinians have been relegated to second-class status in Lebanon while Christians were able to gain citizenship. This dynamic would, over the decades, resonate with disenfranchised Lebanese from other religious groups, feeding both internal conflict and conflict with Israel. The Arab-Israeli War also upended the economic stability of southern Lebanon, in a way the area never really recovered from. Prior to 1948, many people in southern towns and border villages relied on access to Palestinian cities for their livelihoods. They lost that access once the state of Israel was formed, and movement was further restricted after the war — Israel captured and incorporated a number of southern Lebanese villages.  1967 — the Six-Day War Following the Nakba, Lebanon’s government sought to avoid the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, given its weak military and the economic support it was enjoying from the US. However, a war in 1967 — known as the Six-Day War — thrust Lebanon back into the conflict.  The war’s precipitating events began in 1965, when Palestinian groups based in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria began launching attacks on Israel, against which the Israeli military retaliated with immense force. Those tit-for-tat strikes continued for two years, until Egypt entered the fray. In response to false reports that Israel was scaling up forces on the Syrian border, Egypt mobilized troops, kicked out UN peacekeepers, and closed a key strait, effectively blockading Israel. Syria, Jordan, and Iraq allied themselves with Egypt. Israel then launched a preemptive strike that destroyed most of the Egyptian Air Force, and quickly defeated Egypt and its allies, capturing and claiming new territory: the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and Jerusalem from Jordan.  All of this has two things to do with Lebanon.  One, the defeat of these allied Arab national armies dealt a death blow to the pan-Arab movement, which was supposed to liberate Palestine. In the immediate term, that meant the Palestinians displaced in the Nakba — including all those living in Lebanon — weren’t going back to their homes any time soon. Two, that reality meant Palestinian militant groups understood they had to fight for their own national liberation.  Those groups — and their message — proliferated in the years following the war. Many, most notably the Palestine Liberation Organization, the national liberation and militia group headed by Yasser Arafat, made Beirut their headquarters.  From Lebanon, those groups would continue to stage attacks targeting Israel.  1975–1990 — the Lebanese Civil War and Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon Before Palestinian militias in Lebanon became models for groups like Hezbollah, they were the inspiration for — and later, partner to — various left-wing armed Lebanese groups disenfranchised by the country’s political structure.  Again, Lebanon’s government is run under what is called a confessional system, in which political representation is based on religion. The president has always been a member of Lebanon’s Maronite Christian group, and the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, with lesser positions and representation for the country’s other religions like the Druze, Shia Muslims, and other Christian sects. Though presidential powers and parliamentary representation have changed, the system remains largely intact. It also reflects significant class divides.  Palestinians arriving in Lebanon during the Nakba were largely Muslims (though some belonged to the Greek Orthodox faith). That influx of Muslims into tiny Lebanon upset the sectarian balance of power — something that would have long-term consequences.  “As a result of Palestinian presence in Lebanon, you have a situation where old sectarian divides within Lebanon resurface, and also old political divides,” Abdel Razzaq Takriti, a professor of history at Rice University who studies Arab radical movements, told Vox. These tensions exploded in April 1975, when Christian nationalist militants attacked a bus carrying Palestinian fighters and their Lebanese comrades through a Christian Beirut suburb, killing 22 people. And they were exacerbated by Israel, which meddled in the fighting in the hopes of pushing the PLO out of Lebanon and ensuring a friendly Maronite Christian government was in power. Israel directly supported the largest Maronite militia, the Phalange, providing arms, training, and funding, sometimes in coordination with the CIA. Israel also openly supported the leader of the Phalange movement for president, in the hopes that he would enter into a peace treaty. Israel took a more direct role three years into the war: In March 1978, it invaded Lebanon in response to an attack by a Palestinian group that killed 34 Israelis. By the time Israeli forces withdrew later that month, as many as 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians had been killed, 200,000 displaced, and dozens of villages in the south damaged. It also helped turn the tide of the war. Before the invasion, combined left-wing Lebanese and Palestinian forces had made important gains. Israel’s attack, however, strengthened its relationship with the Maronite forces, which would continue through a second Israeli invasion in 1982. The Lebanese Civil War was a deeply complex and devastating conflict; over the course of 15 years, around 100,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed, although some reports put that number as high as 150,000. The war finally ended in 1990, following the Taif agreement, which altered the balance of power within Lebanon’s government. But that resolution failed to address the war’s root causes, perpetuating the sectarian dynamics that still plague Lebanese society. Israel was not the only outside country to become involved in Lebanon’s civil war; Syria, the US, and other Arab and European nations all contributed to the chaos. The civil war was happening in the context of the Cold War, and the US in particular was involved because it wanted to eliminate the possibility of communism (and Arab nationalism, which it saw as a corollary) from taking hold in the Middle East.  But Israel’s support of the Maronite sect — and particularly the bloodthirsty militia — only entrenched the unworkable status quo and showed disregard for the country’s sovereignty, fueling Lebanese and Palestinian distrust in Israel. 1982 — Israel’s second invasion of Lebanon, the establishment of Hezbollah, the occupation of southern Lebanon, and the Sabra and Shatila massacre Israel invaded Lebanon again in 1982 to finally oust the Palestine Liberation Organization from the country following an offshoot organization’s assassination attempt on an Israeli politician. This time Israeli forces made it all the way to Beirut. At this point, Israel was still financially and materially supporting the Christian Phalangist militia. In September, the Phalangist militia, with Israeli assistance, carried out a massacre on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in west Beirut, despite the fact that the PLO had already left Lebanon. As many as 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed, and the incident provoked worldwide outrage. Under pressure from the US and UN (in the form of a Security Council ceasefire resolution), Israeli forces moved back to the south following the massacre, ending up south of Lebanon’s Litani River. But Israel would continue to occupy southern Lebanon until 2000, both with ground troops and via its proxy militia there, the South Lebanon Army.  Southern Lebanon was — and still is — largely Shia, one of Lebanon’s historically disenfranchised religious sects. It is also mostly rural, economically disadvantaged, and physically removed from the center of power in Beirut. The southern Shia population had no protection from repeated Israeli invasions, since the Lebanese military presence there was an Israeli proxy force. In the face of this, Hezbollah formed in southern Lebanon in 1982, offering southern Shia communities protection from Israel, stronger political representation in Beirut, and access to resources like health clinics and community centers. It grew into a well-equipped guerilla fighting force supported by Israel’s arch-foe, Iran — which means Israel sees Hezbollah as an existential threat along its northern border. Hezbollah’s early vow to destroy Israel only fueled this understanding.  Israel would launch two military operations against them — one in 1993 and one in 1999, before withdrawing from Lebanon in 2000.  2000-present — war with Hezbollah In the new millennium, there came a shift in Israeli-Lebanese relations. With the PLO leaving Beirut in 1982, renouncing armed resistance as part of the Oslo Accords, and shifting to an administrative role in the Palestinian struggle, Israel’s focus has been on Hezbollah. And the scale of the conflict has shrunk, with most operations taking place on either side of the Israeli-Lebanese border.  The first significant attack of this new phase came in July 2006, when a Hezbollah unit crossed into Israeli territory, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing eight while also firing a rocket barrage into northern Israel. That touched off a month of brutal, intense conflict including aerial bombardment on Lebanese territory. That conflict ended in a UN-backed ceasefire on August 14, 2006. Since then, Hezbollah and Israel have often traded rocket fire over Lebanon’s southern border. In recent months, those attacks have intensified; following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Hezbollah has launched thousands of rockets into Israeli territory.  Israel has long had plans to take out Hezbollah, according to Natan Sachs, director of the Middle East program at the Brookings Institution. But it only began to act on those plans in recent weeks. Now, assassinations — particularly of military leader Fuad Shukr and of former Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah — have taken out significant portions of Hezbollah’s top- and mid-tier leadership. “Israel has been preparing for this for 18 years,” Sachs said. Israel has managed to seriously damage Hezbollah by killing its leadership and destroying weapons supplies — but it’s unlikely the group will be permanently destroyed or impaired, something Israel has tacitly acknowledged. What’s more, this present invasion, coupled with the destruction and death Israel has wrought against Palestinians, has only served to fuel fresh outrage in Lebanon — and the world — over Israel’s actions. Over the decades, Israel has tried, whether through military or political action, to shape Lebanon according to its interests. It’s repeatedly failed, with its actions sometimes helping to create new foes, as was the case with Hezbollah. Today Israel’s willingness to try to influence internal Lebanese politics seems to be no different: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to destroy the country unless it pushes Hezbollah out.  Thus far, however, this invasion, like military actions in the past, may only foment even more animosity toward Israel, and further destabilize Lebanon.

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Whenever jeans trends evolve, people tend to freak out. Vox reader Stephanie asks: I will grant you that at 43, I am old. However, I am scratching my head about why fashion that I have seen already in my lifetime is recycling itself? Mom jeans were bad the first time — why are we doing it again when they look good on literally no one? The ’90s are bad but worse this time? Have we lost creativity in fashion? This didn’t seem to happen before, but then again, maybe I’m wrong … It’s a truth universally acknowledged that kids rediscovering the fashions of your youth will always be bizarre and inexplicably kind of annoying.  My personal nightmare manifested around 2018 in the form of ’90s-style tiny sunglasses (and later, eyeglasses), after what felt like a solid two decades of the wayfarers and oversized frames that suited my very round face. But guess what kind of sunglasses I wear now? So you’re not wrong that it’s weird — but new, it is not. Conventional wisdom holds that trends tend to be recycled every 20 years, because that’s how long it takes for a new generation to come of age and rediscover the aesthetics and style that were popular when they were too young to enjoy them.  To truly understand why mom jeans have returned, however, you’ve got to grasp a fundamental truth about fashion that has existed for nearly a century, as well as some context about the way the industry — and our own modes of attention — work now.   Are trends moving at hyperspeed?  There’s been a lot of internet discourse in recent years that the trend cycle is speeding up because of the way social media regurgitates trends in ever-shortening time spans: At the beginning of the pandemic, for instance, kids on the internet were expressing their nostalgia for the year 2014, a mere six years before.  Sign up for the Explain It to Me newsletter The newsletter is part of Vox’s Explain It to Me. Each week, we tackle a question from our audience and deliver a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Have a question you want us to answer? Ask us here. Part of why it feels this way is because everything is trendy online now, and therefore nothing is. You could choose a random fashion item from any point in the last 50 years and you’ll find a community of people on the internet who still love it. An incomplete list of things I was certain would never return but somehow have: mullets, kitten heels, thongs sticking out of jeans, ’80s blush.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by I AM GIA (@iamgia) But we’re also seeing the 20-year cycle play out right on schedule in the form of relentless Y2K-inspired trends in fashion, beauty, and music, as well as those very ’90s mom jeans you’re referring to. Those actually started gaining steam around 2016, reaching their peak Google search interest in 2021.  Does that mean that fashion is undergoing a crisis of creativity? Maybe — but I think there’s also something more interesting going on.  As has been the pattern in countless other industries, corporate consolidation and cost cutting are driving fashion brands to produce cheaply (read: unethically) made clothing that caters to algorithms and sales data. Your clothes are, in fact, worse now.  At the same time, consumers are pushing back on poor quality and unimaginative fast fashion by thrifting, which has never been more popular. In addition to being a really fun way to spend an afternoon, scouring racks of vintage allows shoppers to think more sustainably about where their stuff comes from, while also injecting a bit of that much-needed individuality into fashion. Right now, one of the biggest fashion trends on TikTok is all about finding your personal style, which reflects a widespread interest in opting out of the viral fad hamster wheel.  One piece of fashion writing that I think might help you understand is the sociologist Angela McRobbie’s 1989 work on how the rise of the secondhand market after World War II completely changed the way cool young people have dressed ever since.  Basically, in the ’50s and ’60s, kids began flocking to “ragmarkets” and fleas, repurposing items everybody else thought were outdated: army coats, old-fashioned furs, petticoats, items made of higher-quality fabrics than the ones being sold at department stores of the time (the more things change!). Thrifting created the hippie look, with its peasant-style blouses and bohemian draping, borrowed from items from the 1940s but styled them in a way that evoked the present. Why do “ugly” clothes have such enduring appeal? Not only have kids been repurposing past fashions for generations — they’re also specifically drawn to items that mainstream tastes find ugly or unflattering.  McRobbie references two women in the 1970s who popularized arty, androgynous dressing but in very different ways: Patti Smith, who appeared malnourished and unkempt in leather jackets and T-shirts, and Diane Keaton as the “frumpy” Annie Hall. Both wore clothing typically associated with men, but neither, she argues, “conferred true androgyny.” In both cases, part of the purpose of the masculine silhouette was to accentuate just how much of an unmistakably female form lied underneath.  The same can be said for mom jeans, which, of course, only read as matronly if the wearer possesses what is considered to be a “mom bod.” Because beneath all fashion trends is a deeply unsatisfying truth: When young, hot people start wearing something, it makes the rest of us believe that the item itself is magic.  But really, that’s just the magic of being hot.  Bella Hadid, for instance, can wear jorts and a tank top and people will call her a fashion icon because even regular clothes look extremely sexy on her. When enough people try to recreate that look in the hopes it’ll confer hotness, it just becomes what everyone’s wearing.  Which means that if I had to guess, at some point in the next few years, you might find yourself buying what your current self would consider to be mom jeans. But by that point, of course, they’ll just read as “jeans” to you.  That’s kind of lovely, I think! It shows us that fashion, and by extension culture, is constantly challenging our notions of what’s acceptable, and the things we find beautiful and pleasurable are entirely subjective.  You don’t have to like mom jeans, just as all of us are free to ignore what all the cool young people are doing and dress however we want. But just because you’re “old” (you’re not!) doesn’t mean your style preferences have to remain the same for the rest of your life. Sometimes, rediscovering the clothing items you never thought you’d see again is exactly the novelty a wardrobe needs.  This story was featured in the Explain It to Me newsletter. Sign up here. For more from Explain It to Me, check out the podcast. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

After LeBron James finally lived his dream of sharing the NBA court with his son Bronny, he called it a "moment I'm never going to forget."

President Biden echoed one of former President Trump's famous phrases by calling to politically "lock him up," a statement that quickly went viral across social media.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk onstage as he joins former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a campaign rally at the site of his first assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on October 5, 2024. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images I write a newsletter called On The Right, which covers the often-complicated and compelling political ideas driving the modern conservative movement. This week, I thought it’d be important to cover Elon Musk — a man who is single-handedly bankrolling much of Trump’s ground game. What are the ideas that drive an engineering titan to make such a sharp turn into politics? But reporting on Musk’s worldview led me to a perhaps surprising conclusion: His politics are boring.  His social politics are taken straight from the X replies he frequents — a specific type of edgelord bigotry that drifts frequently into debunked conspiracy theories. His economic views are even less interesting — the same tired hostility toward taxation and regulation that you hear from most people of his economic strata. For someone who has done such innovative work on cars and rocket ships, his politics could scarcely be more conventional. Yet for all their boringness, I realized Musk’s ideas were worth writing about anyway. This is true, in part, because of his sheer financial investment — one that Trump himself estimates at roughly $500 million in total. The eye-popping sum together with stunts like the possibly illegal million-dollar-a-day raffle for registered swing state voters demand some scrutiny of the man behind it all. While Musk may not successfully buy the election, he has succeeded in purchasing our collective attention.  Perhaps more importantly, the unoriginality of Musk’s politics is revealing in itself. In Musk, we see Trumpism as it truly is: not a war between populists and small-government types, but a marriage of them. In the conventional picture of the modern GOP, the Trumpian culture warriors are described as “populists” comfortable with big government who are being held back by their super-rich allies. The super-rich, in turn, are described as cultural libertines who put up with the race-baiting and xenophobia to get their tax cuts. Yet this picture is misleading, capturing only part of the dynamic. And no one shows why more clearly than Elon Musk. He is a gullible conspiracy theorist chummy with white nationalists, true; but he is also a plutocrat who believes that the greatest kind of freedom is letting big corporations do whatever they want. In this, he exposes the flaw in the popular analysis that the new GOP is beset by a fundamental contradiction between populists and elites when, in fact, the priorities of the culture warriors and the wealthy are often one and the same. Elon Musk, conventional thinker Elon Musk’s town hall in Pittsburgh this Sunday — which began with about 30 minutes of Musk free-associating on politics followed by an hour and a half of questions — provided one of the most unvarnished looks yet into his political worldview. In front of a friendly audience, with all the time in the world, Musk was free to say whatever he wanted. He sounded exactly like the person he is on X. When warning about the risks of a Harris presidency, for example, Musk dismisses the vice president as an irrelevancy. “There’s almost no point in attacking Kamala personally because she’s just a puppet of the Dem machine,” he says. Many of his fears about this machine’s agenda — like “wide-open borders” and “freedom of speech taken away” — are classic Trump-right themes. But his crowning fear, the one that he says pushed him into investing so heavily in the Trump campaign, is that the Democrats are importing “illegals” to replace native-born American voters. “There’s a massive increase in the number of illegals being put in swing states,” Musk said. “The goal will then be, over the next four years, to legalize all of those illegals. … Every swing state will be blue. America will be a one-party state forever, just like California. And that will be a nightmare — democracy gone. That’s what I think will happen with a Kamala presidency.” This, as my colleague Li Zhou explains, is top-to-bottom nonsense.  Musk’s claim that the undocumented population in swing states is surging, sourced to unspecified “government data,” appears false: Data from both Homeland Security and the Pew Research Center debunks Musk’s claim of a Biden-era surge in undocumented immigrants to swing states. (In a few swing states, undocumented populations have shrunk, whereas in others, they’ve increased slightly or been stagnant.) Migrants aren’t being “put” in those states by anyone, let alone Democrats; that’s not how undocumented migration works. Nor is there any evidence that Harris has a viable plan to grant them all citizenship in four years or proof that they’d all vote for Democrats forever once given the franchise. Really, what Musk is doing is taking a hoary old white nationalist trope — the “Great Replacement” mainstreamed by X’s most prominent talk show host, Tucker Carlson — and reiterating it with dubious swing-state demographic data. More or less what you’d expect from the guy who once told an X user ranting about Jews that “you have said the actual truth.” Musk had one other big policy theme throughout the town hall: deregulation. Again and again, he returned to his fervent desire to shrink government so that private industry can work its alleged magic — employing tired anti-government rhetoric that could have been cribbed from any national Republican campaign since Ronald Reagan. “The larger government gets, the less individual freedom you have,” Musk said. “They’re currently making new agencies at a rate of two per year, and every one of them is chipping away at your freedom. It’s essential for us to unwind that process and restore your personal freedom — and with that will come great prosperity and personal happiness.” One might note the irony of a man whose companies benefit immensely from subsidies and government contracts proposing to starve the beast. But Musk, for his part, seems unconcerned. The perfect Trumpist “Rich guy supports Republicans to eliminate regulations and increase profits” is a tale as old as time. But what’s interesting about Musk is that he pairs it with an almost naïve faith in the rankest culture war conspiracies: the sorts of thing that the ultra-wealthy aren’t *supposed* to believe. Theoretically, the Republican Party is torn between its “populist” and “establishment” wings. The populists are culture warriors who take a more government-friendly line on the economy; the establishment are elite cultural squishes and free market dogmatists. Yet this stylized description has never really captured the reality on the ground. Trump, the populist-in-chief, is a billionaire whose sole first-term legislative accomplishment was a tax cut for the wealthy. And many of the party’s big-money elite — including Musk, Rebekah Mercer, and Bill Ackman — are all-in on the culture war. In emerging as Trump’s leading surrogate, Elon helps bring this reality to the fore. His unoriginality, cribbing equally from X trolls and hoary anti-government cliches, shows us what the true priorities of a second Trump term might be. Not the faux-populism of JD Vance and staged McDonald’s shifts, but the co-equal prioritization of culture and class war — both waged on the wealthy’s behalf. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

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