Visitors to Hezbollah’s ma’lam mlītā lis-siyāḥa al-jihādiya (Mleeta Landmark for Jihadist Tourism) will encounter a curious panorama entitled al-hāwiya (the abyss), composed entirely of military hardware left behind by the Israel Defense Forces: Designed to celebrate the militia’s guerrilla warfare against Israel’s military presence in Southern Lebanon, the panorama stands out for its prominent inscriptions in Hebrew – ha-botz ha-levanoni (the Lebanese mud) and ha-tehom (the abyss). While few of the visitors might be able to decipher the Hebrew letters, in terms of psychological warfare the panorama sends out a clear message to the distant Israeli audience: We speak your language. This paradigm of ‘know your enemy’ remains prominent in Lebanon as the last Arab frontline state – but in fact the country represents a microcosm of the multi-faceted field of Israel Studies in the Arab world: Lebanon is not only home to Hezbollah’s Iranian-trained Israel-watching department, the country also hosts institutions of higher learning once decidedly sympathetic to the Zionist cause (the Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik), Western universities teaching biblical Hebrew (the American University of Beirut), Arab universities teaching Hebrew literature (the Lebanese University) as well as research centers and publishing houses with a special focus on Israel (like the Institute for Palestine Studies and the Center for Arab Unity Studies). Based on expert interviews and archival research, this paper surveys the academic field of Israel Studies in Lebanon with a special emphasis on the paradox of ‘enemy studies’: While on the one hand the immediacy of geopolitical conflict results in strong forms of epistemological ‘othering’ (frequently according to the paradigm of Occidentalism), on the other hand Lebanon might be the Arab state with the highest density of experienced and knowledgeable Israel-watchers outside of the Palestinian territories.