Position of Lebanon in the 2006 Lebanon War had made comments on television saying that Israel should consider a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. On 13 July, a prominent Lebanese Druze member of parliament, Walid Jumblatt, criticized Hezbollah in an interview with the French daily "Le Figaro": "Hezbollah played a very dangerous game by kidnapping these two soldiers. ... Israel has withdrawn from Lebanon. These kidnappings took place outside our country's borders. Hezbollah is raising the stakes, with the support of Iran and Syria, which in the past year has become a satellite state of Tehran. … Hezbollah will have to explain itself to the Lebanese. ... [We need
History of the Jews in Lebanon an open society tolerant of Judaism, none of the Jews involved in the project agreed to be identified, nor were the non-Jewish construction workers willing to show their faces or be photographed. The international media and even some members of the Jewish community (in and out of Lebanon) questioned who would pray there. The self-declared head of the Jewish Community Council, Isaac Arazi, who left Lebanon in 1983, eventually came forward but refused to show his face on camera in a television interview, fearing that his business would suffer if clients knew they had been dealing with a Jew. Philanthropist