Lebanon Caught in a Vice

In times of war and crisis, the Lebanese scene divides between those who drag every division and grievance back to the surface in order to inflame and worsen them, and those who work to build a climate of national unity capable of carrying the country through the difficult period, waiting for calmer days in which the great national questions might at last be addressed.

It is certain that this is not the moment to plunge into questions as deep and fraught as the validity of the Taif Agreement, the nature of the political system, or the abolition of political confessionalism. This is a phase for ending the war, for tending the wounds, for finding a way out of the impasse into which the country has sunk — an impasse that nothing, for now, suggests will be easy to escape in the near term.

There are axioms that cannot be abandoned if the country is to pull itself out of the deep rut it is in — axioms whose abandonment has already proven, in practice, to carry a very steep price:

— The exclusivity of arms in the hands of the Lebanese State.

There is no alternative but to reach this reality, which is taken for granted in every country in the world. No state agrees to "outsource" the defence of its territory to an armed faction that does not answer to its authority and is bound, in its relationships, its financing and its weaponry, to a foreign state.

The Lebanese government has made meaningful advances in this direction, but neither the unrelenting Israeli strikes have helped it accomplish its mission, nor has the very nature of implementing this difficult decision — that of the arms monopoly, which touches on numerous internal complexities and sensitivities — provided it the means to do so. As for those counting on Israel to take care of this, the experience of the fifteen months between the ceasefire and the resumption of hostilities should make it hard to believe in that option, however devastating the blows dealt to Hezbollah have been.

— The decision of war and peace.

If the conviction has taken root in the minds of the vast majority of Lebanese that the State must hold the monopoly on arms and the defence function, the same applies to the decision of war and peace, of which the State alone must be the holder. The irresponsible invocation of the refusal of this reality, on the pretext that it is Israel which today decides war and peace with Lebanon, does not remove the necessity of settling this question on Lebanese terms — this argument is just as unacceptable as the claim once made that Israel would have launched the war regardless, even had Hezbollah not fired its six rockets at the occupied territories.

— A defence plan.

It is impossible to look away from the necessity for Lebanon to think seriously, going forward, about how to protect its territory from Israeli aggressions that have never truly ceased on its soil since the Nakba of 1948, ebbing and intensifying according to political and military circumstances. While Lebanon will certainly never be able, with its official forces alone, to face an Israeli army guaranteed regional military supremacy by unlimited American backing, it is nonetheless essential to devise more flexible arrangements capable of protecting its southern border and the frontline villages, as they have come to be known.

It remains the case that the political and military challenges now facing Lebanon call for an active diplomatic mobilisation, led by the Lebanese government, to place the proposals of the President of the Republic on the table — through the intermediary of Lebanon's friends — even if those proposals have been met with an Israeli political coldness that stands in sharp contrast to the blaze on the Lebanese front.

It is clear that the diplomatic paralysis that set in days after the start of the war stems from Israel's rejection of all proposals and its complete lack of urgency in extinguishing this front — all the more so as Hezbollah, driven by the anger provoked by the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has recovered something of the initiative, launching salvos of rockets that deprive the inhabitants of northern Israel, along the Lebanese border, of all security and stability, forcing them to seek refuge in underground shelters.

If Israel shows no sign of haste in bringing the war against Lebanon to an end, the greater danger remains its intention to reoccupy large swathes of southern Lebanon — which would represent a major reversal of the liberation of 2000, wrested at the cost of great sacrifice, honour and defiance, and the loss of a considerable achievement that set Lebanon apart at the time as the only Arab country to have compelled Israel to withdraw from the territories it occupied, not only without a peace agreement, but without restriction or condition of any kind.

Lebanon today faces a bitter truth: it is Lebanon that is offering negotiations to Israel, and Israel that is refusing them — whereas in the past it was Israel that repeatedly sought to conclude a peace treaty with Lebanon, and Lebanon that would not consent. Between that moment and this one, what matters is that the country not lose itself in the incendiary rhetoric coming from both sides: on one side, those who boast of their strength despite the strikes and ceaselessly threaten to descend on the Lebanese interior when the time comes; on the other, those ready to absolve Israel of all its aggressions and all its targeting, who seem barely capable of registering that more than a thousand martyrs have fallen in Lebanon in the space of two weeks alone!