There was a time when Beirut was not just a battlefield – it was a movie set. At least that’s how I remember it.

In the smoky glow of a flickering television, somewhere between power cuts and generator hum, West Beirut became the stage for a fantasy we desperately needed: Americans parachuting in, motorcycles roaring down runways, and one man – Chuck Norris – restoring order to a city that had long abandoned the idea of it.

We didn’t call it escapism. We called it hope.

Back then, Delta Force was not just a film. It was a parallel reality in which someone – anyone – was willing to do what no one in Lebanon could or would do: confront armed militias, rescue hostages, and impose consequences. In that universe, chaos had a counterweight. Evil had a response. And Beirut, for a brief two hours, had a savior.

Fast forward to today, and we are told Chuck Norris has passed.

But let’s be honest – this isn’t death. This is abandonment.

Because if there is one thing Norris symbolized, it was not just invincibility, but the possibility – however fictional – that someone might stand up to the very forces that, in our reality, have only grown stronger, bolder, and more absurdly immune to accountability.

Which brings me to my joke, a joke I came up with after Norris’s passing:

Hezbollah: “We don’t fear anyone.”

Chuck Norris appears.

Hezbollah: “We meant in theory.”

It’s funny because it’s true. And it’s tragic because it’s only true in fiction.

What made Chuck Norris different wasn’t just the roundhouse kicks or the stoic glare. It was the fact that he understood the joke – and embraced it. He let the myth grow, let people laugh, let humor become part of his legacy, not only brute violence. There was confidence in that. A kind of quiet strength that didn’t need to silence others to prove itself.

Now contrast that with Hezbollah.

A group so allergic to humor that satire is treated as treason. A movement that cannot survive a joke without resorting to intimidation, censorship, or worse. Where Norris allowed himself to become a punchline – and in doing so became larger than life – Hezbollah insists on crushing anything that might reduce it, even slightly, to human scale.

Because humor, at its core, is subversive. It equalizes. It exposes. And that is precisely what they cannot tolerate.

But beyond the jokes, beyond the nostalgia, there is something more uncomfortable here.

As children, we watched Delta Force and believed that someone from the outside would fix things. That somewhere, beyond the Mediterranean, there existed men who would not negotiate with militias, who would not rationalize hostage-taking, who would not dress up violence in ideological slogans.
We believed that Beirut mattered enough to be saved.

What we did not understand – what we perhaps still refuse to admit – is that this belief was also an indictment. Because the absence of local heroes was not accidental. It was structural. It was political. It was, in many ways, chosen.

When your political system rewards militias, when your society tolerates armed actors, when your economy adapts to smuggling and shadow networks, you do not produce heroes – you produce spectators.

And so, we sat, watching Chuck Norris liberate a version of Beirut that never existed.

Today, that gap feels even wider.

There is no Delta Force coming. There is no motorcycle charging down the runway. There is no last-minute rescue. There is only the quiet, suffocating realization that the people who claim to “protect” Lebanon are the very ones holding it hostage.
Which is why Norris mattered.

Not because he was real – but because he represented something we no longer even pretend to expect: accountability, decisiveness, and the willingness to confront violence without romanticizing it.

His “passing,” then, is not the triumph of death over a man. It is the triumph of reality over illusion. A reminder that we are alone with our choices.

And yet, part of me refuses to let go of that childhood image, of West Beirut, under siege, suddenly interrupted by the impossible: a man on a motorcycle, defying orders, ignoring politics, doing what needed to be done. Maybe that’s the real joke.
Not that Chuck Norris could defeat Hezbollah – but that we once believed someone should.

And perhaps, deep down, still do.