Lebanon: acknowledging the cost of defeat…

In a world where only self-interest holds sway, what can a country like Lebanon do when an internal faction works directly in the service of Iran and wages war against the Lebanese State and its institutions?

Lebanon can do nothing so long as there is no national consensus on how to conduct the direct negotiations with Israel in Washington. More importantly, it can do nothing without acknowledging that a price is owed if it wishes to free itself from the Israeli occupation that Hezbollah, and behind it the Islamic Republic of Iran, has brought about.

What we have here is nothing more than Lebanese impotence, born of the inability to affirm that Lebanon is a free and independent state, master of its own decisions on war and peace within its own territory. It is in 2026, once again, that Lebanon must establish that its State is the genuine State, that it is not the state of Hezbollah, which is itself nothing more than a brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, nothing else.

It is striking to observe, in the run-up to the Washington negotiations, that Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri did not meet Simon Karam, head of the Lebanese delegation tasked with negotiating with Israel. Beyond that, no meeting took place at the Baabda Palace between President of the Republic Joseph Aoun, the Parliament Speaker, and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam before Simon Karam headed to Washington. Such a meeting was nonetheless imperative, in the presence of the Lebanese negotiator, in order to attest that the Lebanese State stands behind him and to enable him to say that he represents that State in all its components — Christians, Sunnis, Druze and Shia alike. In concrete terms, this means that Lebanon came to the table without being able to guarantee full and undivided support for its delegation, which nevertheless negotiated with the Israelis in Washington under American sponsorship.

Lebanon nonetheless chose, with a certain courage, to negotiate with Israel, even as the Jewish state continues its war against this small country whose fate remains in the hands of the Islamic Republic governed by the Revolutionary Guards.

The Lebanese delegation negotiating with the Israelis had one single question to answer: is Lebanon prepared to pay the price of its defeat, yes or no? To answer that question, it first had to acknowledge the defeat itself. Nothing speaks more eloquently to the scale of that defeat than Israel's control over 68 villages and towns in the South, which it is methodically destroying, compounded by the displacement of one million two hundred thousand Shia citizens from southern Lebanon.

This question lies at the very heart of what Lebanon is enduring, for the country cannot go on bearing the weight of a time bomb: on one side this enormous number of occupied and destroyed villages, on the other this mass of displaced persons.

In terms of figures, in terms of the number of villages and towns under Israeli control, Bint Jbeil included, with its particular symbolic weight, Lebanon has no choice but to absorb the reality born of losing two wars against Israel. The paradox is that, in essence, Lebanon had no original connection to either of those wars. Both, the "Gaza support war" of 2023 and the "Iran support war" that followed the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on 28 February 2026, were part of the Iranian expansionist project, which has never seen in Lebanon anything more than a bargaining chip to be brandished by Tehran.

Is Lebanon prepared to pay the price of two wars that were imposed upon it by force and from which it emerged utterly crushed? This question cannot be evaded; it imposes itself if Lebanon intends to avoid further destruction and displacement, and if it genuinely refuses the return of Israeli occupation. For what Lebanon must finally admit is that Israel is not a charitable organisation.

Lebanon needed a national consensus to answer that question. This means, simply, that Simon Karam could not leave for Washington in search of an end to the renewed Israeli occupation without such a consensus, one that would naturally include Nabih Berri, who seems to have preferred, rather than direct negotiations, to provide Hezbollah with the cover it demands of him, Hezbollah, which is itself under the total domination of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Israel will continue its aggressions against Lebanon for as long as Hezbollah's weapons remain, and Lebanon will have to keep seeking ways to rid itself of them, until the day it asks itself a question of absolute simplicity: what is the price of the Israeli withdrawal and the guarantee of the return of inhabitants to their villages and towns in the South, or what remains of them? Once that price is known, a united front will be needed, rather than leaving the entire burden of negotiations to rest solely on the shoulders of the President of the Republic and the government represented by Nawaf Salam.

Ultimately, what does Lebanon want? Does it want to recover its territory, on the grounds that the restoration of its territorial sovereignty constitutes for it the priority of priorities… or does it prefer to remain an Iranian "terrain," that is to say, a hostage of the Revolutionary Guards?