Nigeria, Oct. 3 -- As Israeli bombs rained down on southern Lebanon in 2024, I found myself thinking about Rabih, a Lebanese man I had once met at his furniture store on Lagos Island. I wondered what had become of him and his family back in Beirut. By October, the escalating hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah had displaced more than 1.2 million people, while Lebanon's already tenuous infrastructure lay in ruins and its beleaguered economy was once again teetering on the precipice of collapse.

My first impression of Rabih was that he was an exceptionally pleasant man, which, of course, is hardly unusual for a business owner eager to make a sale. But Rabih seemed to possess something beyond the customary affability of a salesman. He ...