A ceasefire... yes, but what happens next?

The image of Israeli flags fluttering over Beaufort Castle is painfully striking. It is as painful as those of villages completely or partially destroyed, or families decimated.

It is as violent as videos of desperate Southerners trying to salvage what they can before the next merciless volley of missiles, who risk death to feed herds and pets abandoned by their owners, who cry out their anger, frustration, and despair at a war that nothing could justify.

The banners on Beaufort and the unbearable Israeli triumphalism that followed the seizure of this strategic archaeological site hit like a punch. Because they recalled the machinery of pointless wars in which Lebanon has been trapped for decades, caught in a time loop of a bad movie.

Many of the actors remain the same. While some may change faces and others are added, the script itself stays the same and repeats endlessly.

This vicious cycle, set in motion particularly by the infamous Cairo agreement, has invariably served the interests of regional actors: from Palestinians to Iranians, passing through the sad Assad regime in Syria.

The flags planted on Sunday on Beaufort cruelly recalled June 1982, when Lebanese endured the same spectacle: Israeli colors on this majestic site, the direct consequence of others' war on their soil.

They acted as an irritating reminder: in 44 years, Lebanon has missed every opportunity to escape foreign influences and build a true state. Even today, despite promises and declarations of good intentions, the state continues the same policy of hesitation while the population desperately yearns to see it bang its fist on the table, say "enough is enough," and adopt a range of concrete political, administrative, and judicial actions that would allow it to reclaim its decision-making power and the monopoly on legitimate violence.

Three years after Hezbollah opened a first front in support of the axis to which it belongs, people are still dreaming. Three wasted years searching for a hypothetical adequate formula to impose the monopoly of arms.

In the end, this sad picture only reinforces the contradictory feelings that arose facing the horror imposed daily since Hezbollah decided to avenge the death of Iranian Ali Khamenei, when it knew full well what Israeli retaliation to expect.

It knew well, after the November 2024 ceasefire agreement, that Israel would turn the south into scorched earth in case of another attack on its territory and would "bring Lebanon back to the stone age."

The Lebanese state was not unaware of these intentions. Even journalists had been briefed on the matter to echo Tel Aviv's recurring warnings, transmitted through diplomatic channels to Lebanese authorities and to the leaders of this formation.

Lebanese are therefore torn between two contradictory feelings: their hearts bleed for villages that exist now only in the memory of those who built their lives there.

But at the same time, they fear the current war will end in anticlimax.

That a new ceasefire will plunge Lebanon back into a state of permanent war on hold, of deadly stalemate, and bring it back under Hezbollah's control…

That a regional agreement will be reached at the country's expense…

That the Hydra that is the mullah regime will survive the agreement being negotiated…

Far from geopolitical analyses of the stakes linked to the current regional conflict, they focus on their own future in a country now in tatters.

All just to break this time loop.

And this is what fuels the dilemma, sometimes guilt-ridden, that they face: their desire to see this horror end as soon as possible clashes with their wish to see Hezbollah completely neutralized, at any cost.

Since October 8, 2023, with the opening of the southern front in support of Hamas in its war against Israel, the masks have fallen. The subsequent course of events has shown that the only viable equation for Lebanon's survival is for Hezbollah to cease to exist in its current form.

This group's sustained efforts to attribute bellicose and expansionist ambitions to Tel Aviv, in order to justify the nightmare into which it has plunged Lebanon twice in the span of three years, fall far short of concealing its true nature as an executive vassal of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and its disregard for the country's interests.

As for the intimidation it exercises against its detractors, through threats and accusations of treason, it only further turns the Lebanese against it, while the authorities practice ostrich politics, whose effects only fuel what they claim to want to prevent, by evoking potential internal unrest.

For this erasure only deepens internal polarization and widens the gap between a Lebanese minority that wants to keep Lebanon within Iran's sphere and a majority that seeks to break free from it under the leadership of a central authority unfortunately held captive by its fears.

Hezbollah's unacceptable threats against authorities who see direct negotiations with Israel as the only lifeline for the country do indeed intensify this group's isolation on the local scene, but they simultaneously confirm the urgency for the State to fully assume its role as regulator of public order and sole holder of decision-making power.

This urgency imposed itself because of the policy of procrastination and erasure pursued for a year by those in power. Yet they had committed to the population and the international community to reclaim the monopoly on violence to spare the country further devastating adventures—first with the election of a new president, then again with the formation of Nawaf Salam's government, and a third time following the November 2024 ceasefire.

The urgency became inescapable because without it, the Lebanese will remain, against their will, actors in a bad film whose course they cannot change, because of a ruling body that demonstrates daily it lacks both the means and, above all, the courage of its convictions.

Nothing that could still happen can be worse than the horror being endured today by thousands of families.