Chronicle of a suicide foretold

Could it have been otherwise?

Lebanon, which has been since 1973 the sole active front of every regional war, could it, for once, have remained outside an existential conflict for one of its political components — Hezbollah — insofar as the latter forms an integral part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, currently under Israeli-American fire in Tehran?

No.

Hezbollah thus magnificently ignored the international warnings relayed these past days by the Lebanese state, to the effect that its intervention in the ongoing war between Iran and the American-Israeli axis would provoke its annihilation and cost Lebanon dearly. As if the party wanted to deliver a resounding snub to the President of the Republic, Joseph Aoun, and to the Salam cabinet.

During the night of March 1st to 2nd, the pro-Iranian party fired missiles and launched drones toward Israeli army positions in northern Israel, notably in Haifa, before officially announcing that this constituted a legitimate response to the assassination of the wali el-faqih, Ali Khamenei, on February 28th in Tehran.

In doing so, Hezbollah once again flung open the gates of hell, acting, as is its habit, unilaterally by virtue of its direct allegiance to the Revolutionary Guards. Israel seized upon the pretext it had been waiting for to immediately unleash a series of particularly violent raids on southern Lebanon as well as on Beirut's southern suburbs — fifteen raids in a matter of minutes, their detonations as powerful as those that had killed Hassan Nasrallah and then Hashem Safieddine in late September 2024 — in the name of retaliation.

The Israeli army subsequently announced that it had targeted "with precision a number of prominent figures and leaders" of the party through these raids, without providing further details.

The President of the Council, Nawaf Salam, issued a communiqué characterizing the rocket fire on Israel as "irresponsible and suspect," specifying that "the Lebanese state would not allow Lebanon to be dragged into new adventures and that it would take the necessary measures to apprehend those responsible for the firing and to protect the Lebanese people."

For its part, the Israeli army added that its chief of staff had approved an attack against Hezbollah, accusing the pro-Iranian party of plunging Lebanon into war, and threatening to exact an exorbitant price from "any enemy that threatens our security." Israeli official media also announced that the operation against Hezbollah "would continue for several days," calling on residents of 53 villages in South Lebanon and the Bekaa to evacuate.

An Inevitable Psychic Collapse

If it shatters forty-eight hours of impromptu and unusual Lebanese calm — all the more so as the entire Gulf, Iraq, and even Cyprus are now being drawn into the spiral of war against Iran — Hezbollah's move is hardly surprising.

True, many had wagered on the party's lucidity and pragmatism, particularly since the deadly Israeli strikes of 2024 during which its entire military directorate had been decimated — notably its leader, Nasrallah, then his successor, Hashem Safieddine. That is to misunderstand Hezbollah structurally.

Since the massive setback of 2024, American pressures on the Lebanese state have multiplied, calling on the party to hand its weapons over to the Lebanese state and dismantle its positions south of the Litani. Its paramilitary organization is constantly targeted by the Hebrew state's targeted assassinations; its weapons caches and attempts to reconstitute its strike force — with the help (and under the direct control?) of the Revolutionary Guards — are precisely monitored and systematically destroyed by the Israeli air force, notably in Baalbek, north of the Litani.

Moreover, there exists a near-unanimous political consensus on the Lebanese scene around the necessity of restoring the monopoly on legitimate violence, which means that Hezbollah will have to renounce, sooner or later, what constitutes its superpower — if not its totalitarian hegemony over the entirety of Lebanon's political components for the past twenty years: its arsenal. Which it naturally refuses to do, openly defying the Lebanese executive authority — and, beyond that, the Lebanese people's desire to finally live in a posture of neutrality vis-à-vis regional conflicts.

More still: with the disappearance of Khamenei and all the senior Revolutionary Guard commanders over the past forty-eight hours, Hezbollah has lost all its existential reference points at once. No longer merely on the political and military plane. It is Hezbollah's very doctrine — since its founding in the early 1980s as the privileged instrument for the export of the Islamic revolution to Lebanon — that has been struck at its very heart. In killing Khamenei, the United States and Israel killed not only Hezbollah's political, military and spiritual reference, but — in the eyes of the party and its followers — nothing less than God's representative on earth. In the millenarian sectarian spirit of this theocratic, martyrdom-obsessed pro-Iranian party — which resembles an eschatological millenarian cult — this cannot but provoke total decompensation and dissociation from reality.

In other words, with the assassination of the wali el-faqih, every prospect of transcendence has been annihilated within Hezbollah. It is, in a sense, a negationist shock capable of triggering total psychic collapse.

The only response to this shock, for a militia cornered — whatever its desire for political realism — into remaining faithful to its vocation, its mission, its doctrine and its beliefs, confronted simultaneously with the annihilation of its military and political power and of its founding myth, can only be a strategic suicide of the Masada variety. Even if this must mean the total destruction of Lebanon and its inhabitants, beginning, once more, with the party's "revolutionary heartland" — South Lebanon, the Bekaa, the southern suburbs. And one must wager that Israel will not limit itself to these regions, as it did in 2024, when it notably bombed Jbeil, the North, and Beirut.

Hezbollah has just dragged Lebanon into war solely out of a drive toward self-destruction, without any viable gain possible, merely as a final bravado, a last-ditch stand in service of an Iranian directorate that has cared nothing — as it has ceaselessly demonstrated over the past two decades — for the Arab human lives that fall for its geopolitical calculations and personal interests.

This is the other name for the absurd — in the mold of Jim Jones and David Koresh.

Lebanon need not pay the price of a mortifying eschatological delirium, of a death drive provoked by a psychopathological plunge of gnostic character into total nothingness.

One thing is certain: Israel was waiting — doubtless with behavioral foreknowledge — for precisely this suicidal gesture in order to position itself as a victim and justify a premeditated and carefully prepared military intervention — or even, who knows, a potential invasion.

Once again, as in 2024 when it acted to support Gaza, Hezbollah — to avenge Khamenei and the ongoing destruction of the Iranian empire — has handed Israel the golden pretext, in a symbolic gesture not unlike that of Zopyrus, the Persian notable who, according to Herodotus, insidiously offered, "from within," the keys of Babylon to Darius I.