Lebanon and “the Day After”

“When will the war end? I say: when we meet again.”

Mahmoud Darwish

I am by nature an optimist, without being armoured against sadness. Yet, despite the darkness and brutality of the war, I find myself living through one of the most hopeful periods of my life — contrary to many around me. I believe we are witnessing Lebanon’s last wars, and in the quiet of the night my thoughts drift toward “the day after the war.” I think, with genuine compassion and without seeking to blame anyone, in near-total neutrality, about the shock that will strike households whose members were raised in a deep hatred of Israel, its people, and Jews in general — Arab nationalists, Syrian nationalists, communists, Islamists of every stripe.

Those who cannot bear to hear the word “Israel” and replace it with the “Zionist entity” or the “occupied and temporary entity”; those who once preferred — and some still do today — to burn Lebanon rather than abandon the liberation of Palestine, raising the banner of “freedom of armed Palestinian action across all Lebanese territory,” forcing their own state to surrender its sovereignty through the “Cairo Agreement,” as a sacrifice to the Palestinian cause. How will they bear a new reality in which Israel will not withdraw from Lebanon this time except through a comprehensive peace agreement? In which there can be no return to the 1949 armistice, but rather strict and binding security arrangements designed to guarantee the safety of its northern border forever?

A heavy price Lebanon will be forced to pay to recover its land

To those who ask me these days, I say: when the hour of genuine negotiation arrives, there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The price we will have to pay, if we wish to restore the land and people of the South to the Lebanese state, will be steep.

Once more, read the text of the 1983 Israeli withdrawal agreement, which you scorned by naming it “May 17” or “the accord of humiliation and shame” — the same accord you brought down through the uprising of 6 February 1984. Read it again, wish fervently, and pray that Israel will agree to something resembling it after the war. My intuition, borne out by every visible sign, tells me it will not. This time, Israel will no longer settle for a conditional withdrawal or fragile security arrangements susceptible to being undone by suicide operations; sustained and sporadic attacks against its occupation forces will no longer be possible. The Assad regime no longer exists to support the “resistants” and cover their flanks; the theocratic Iranian regime is tottering; the Soviet Union has long since dissolved; and the land, now emptied of its inhabitants, no longer resembles what it once was — the people of that territory are the water without which the fish of resistance cannot survive. Israel will demand permanent guarantees and genuine international monitoring mechanisms in which it will participate and which it will oversee — or, at best, that role will fall to the armies of the United States and the Arab nations hostile to the Iranian regime. Foreign powers may even impose radical transformations in the very structure of the Lebanese state, so that the South does not once again become a launchpad for rockets fired at northern Israel, or a network of tunnels from which to strike it.

Those who built their identity upon “the Islamic resistance in Lebanon” will discover that this chapter has definitively closed, and that the Khomeinism they had embraced as a faith and a way of life now belongs to another era — a crushing burden for themselves, their families, and Lebanon as a whole, one that will be impossible to carry. They will confront a bitter reality: Palestine has not been liberated, Lebanon has paid the full price, and Israel has not been defeated — on the contrary, it now finds itself in a position to impose its own terms. The Lebanese will then understand that those who set Beirut ablaze repeatedly, who devastated the South time and again, are the very same people who today oppose any political solution capable of sparing the country a renewed catastrophe.

But the day I speak of will not be one of revenge or mockery. It will be the day of an encounter grounded in the shared conviction that the wager on liberating Palestine at the expense of Lebanon’s existence was a grave mistake. What happened is that we were already living the Palestinian tragedy, and now we find ourselves immersed in the Palestinian and Lebanese tragedy together, having gained nothing but destruction and grief, at the cost of sons and daughters whose young lives were cut short for nothing. A day on which the Lebanese will acknowledge that the peace reached by sister Arab nations was not a betrayal, but the best of what was possible — the only choice that preserves what remains of our country and our state. A peace that means secure borders, a state capable of exercising its sovereignty fully, an economy open to the world rather than closing in on itself under the slogans of “resistance.”

That day will mark the beginning of a truly new era. An era in which Lebanon emerges from the cycle of endless, chained wars fed since 1969 by the illusions of “the central cause” and “armed resistance to the last breath.” An era in which the Lebanese recover their right to an ordinary life: building their homes, cultivating their land, raising their children far from the sound of explosions, airstrikes, rockets, and fiery speeches.

It will not be easy, for a generation raised in the conviction that “Israel is the enemy forever, and we must struggle without respite, whatever the losses, to erase it from the map from the river to the sea,” to wake suddenly to a world in which this “enemy” will not leave except after signing a weighty agreement designed precisely to protect it. But history shows no mercy to those who remain prisoners of the past, and the day after the war will be, whatever the outcry and whatever the cost, the day of those who chose Lebanon first — whether they arrived at that choice early or late — to rebuild together and heal the wounds of the homeland and of souls.