The residents of Qlaya are fanatically devoted to St George. In this small Christian village perched on a hill of southern Lebanon within sight of the Israeli border, icons of the dragon-slayer adorn the doors, fridges and lacey television mantles of almost every home. In Qlaya's 100-year old church, a huge painting represents the mustachioed and muscular saint, straddling a white horse, slaying a black dragon. It dominates the space above the altar, dwarfing even Jesus.

 Father Mansour Hakim, Qlaya's parish priest and de facto village leader, embraces the cult: "St George is our hero--a fighter, a savior," he says. 

 The saint is credited with protecting Qlaya from countless perils. As superstitious as they are pious, people in Qlaya believe St George helped them repel sporadic marauding Bedouins, Arab nationalists in 1920, Druze rebels in 1925 and a motley collection of Palestinians, leftists and pan-Arab armies in the 1970s.

 "But now St George has abandoned us!" says Hanaa Abu Rahal, a devout young woman, the gloom in her eyes masked by laughter.

 Not only St George, she might have added--but the Israeli army also. Since the mid-1970s, Qlaya's Christian Maronite community relied on Israeli weapons to survive in hostile Muslim surroundings. In return, Qlaya's men formed the back-bone of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), the Israeli-trained, Israeli-financed militia that helped  the Jewish state maintain a so-called "security zone" along its northern border.

 In May Israel abruptly pulled its troops out of southern Lebanon, ending two decades of occupation. Qlaya's century-old record of winning wars crumbled literally overnight. Hanaa's brother Gaby made a B-line for the Israeli border; her father Marouf ended up in a Beirut jail. In 24 hours, roughly one third of Qlaya's 5,000 inhabitants fled.

 After fighting and working quite happily with Israelis for 24 years, suddenly Qlaya's new masters were the pro-Iranian guerrillas of Hezbollah.

 "Everything was turned upside down," says Hanaa. "We were used to living with the Israelis, but we got up one morning and everything was changed."

 Under the Israelis, Qlaya was flush and arrogant. Now it is a parish on its knees, praying for mercy.

 For many Lebanese who take pride in Hezbollah's improbable victory against the Israeli army, the story of Qlaya's reversal of fortunes is a morality tale: those who collaborated with the Israeli enemy should be punished--and be thankful that their lives were spared.

 On a deeper level, the story of Qlaya's fall and adaptation to the new Lebanese order is the story of Lebanon itself. Before the civil war, Lebanon was a Christian-dominated country with a modern banking sector, splashy night-clubs and a veneer of Western sophistication grafted onto abject poverty. It is now a Syrian-dominated country, corrupt, feudal  and on the verge of bankruptcy. What was once the most open, free and tolerant Arab society is now a country where public criticism of Syria is a crime and civil liberties are increasingly curbed.

 For two decades, southern Lebanon was for all practical purposes behind enemy lines, cut off from the rest of Lebanon by security hassles and military checkpoints. When 15 years of civil war ended in the rest of Lebanon in 1990, the protracted war in the south between the SLA and Hezbollah simmered on. Southern Lebanon was stuck behind "the last barricade of the civil war," says Simon Karam, a former Lebanese ambassador to the United States.

 Ten years after the rest of the country, southern Lebanon has now come under pax syriana. In Qlaya, this subtle Syrian occupation means posters of Hafez al-Assad, the late Syrian president, plastered on the walls of houses on main street, protection rackets run by pro-Syrian militias, but also an oppressive, illusory peace.

 Most Qlaya residents stay indoors to protect their houses and avoid running into trouble at the hands of plain-clothes militiamen on patrol. Relatives of the people who fled to Israel have resorted to taping pictures of Lebanese president Emile Lahoud on abandoned villas, to invoke the authority and protection of Lebanon's feeble state. On a wall on main street, a woman has written in big charcoal letters: "Yes to liberation, no to looting."

 The land was liberated, but its residents have not been liberated from their fears.