Lebanon: Squaring the Circle?

While American and Iranian negotiators step back from the negotiating table, Hezbollah circles, despite the manifest contradictions within their directorate, are delighting in hurling wholesale accusations of treason at Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam.

The timing of these attacks is not fortuitous. It is not without revealing a panic that one strives to conceal beneath the habitual garb of resistance rhetoric. For the first time since the 1990s, the Lebanese card has slipped from Hezbollah's grasp—and, by extension, from Tehran's. Which is not good news for the Hezb. Certainly, it retains the capacity to ignite hostilities in the country's streets, but it is increasingly isolated. In 2006, after 14 March 2005, it had resorted to a war, then to a coup de force to offset this handicap. But we are no longer in 2005, and this time the Hezb would be taking a risk by becoming mired in internal conflict. The result will be to plunge Lebanon into violence. The pacifist logic of 14 March has disappeared, and, unfortunately, the party will collide with grave tensions. Perhaps it is even seeking this. But no one ever emerges victorious from such a game with fire.

The rupture between the Lebanese and Iranian dimensions explains the dual attack the State is suffering today in Beirut. On one side, the intemperate reaction of a militia determined to reclaim through internal destabilisation what it has lost on the political terrain. Time always plays in Hezbollah's and Iran's favour: the more bellicose Israel shows itself, the more the legitimacy of the «resistance» is reinforced, and the more the «rightness» of its recapture of power in Beirut seems founded in the eyes of its supporters. On the other side, the Israeli trap, which exploits this work of undermining to weaken the State further on the eve of Tuesday's negotiations. Tel Aviv wants neither a State too weak, nor a State too cohesive. The current division suits it perfectly. Attacks on the executive are manna from heaven. Hezbollah, once again, proves particularly cooperative in Israel's strategy of torpedoing the Lebanese State.

It is necessary, however, to call things by their name. The recent deadly strike on Beirut, which left more than three hundred victims, illustrates with a brutality that needs no commentary what we call the dual responsibility. Two equally murderous logics, two equally inhuman fundamentalisms: the Israeli one, which strikes without warning, without regard for civilian lives, invoking a pseudo «precision of fire» that belongs to the domain of war propaganda; and the militia one, for which martyrdom is a promotion, war a reason for living, and civilian death one more political argument. This disease has a name: martyropathy. And that Hezbollah hides among civilians who are unaware that their next-door neighbour is a target, that no one has sounded their opinion on the war into which they are enrolled against their will—this is what this «resistance» has, at bottom, always been: a cohabitation imposed by force, that one still dares to call protection.

Ideologues will retort that the Lebanese State is weak, that the army is weak, and that all this is the fault of the international community. That is true, in part. But what these ideologues refuse to admit is that the weakening of the State was also the work of the Assad regime, then of Hezbollah itself—without forgetting corruption and the jirga-style loyalties of the internal fiefdoms. Hezbollah magnified its power under the Assad regime, of which it was the protégé, before Aounism handed it definitively the keys of the Lebanese State. And if the Assad regime governed Lebanon, it was under Israeli and American patronage, within the logic of the minority alliance, to break the Sunni Arab world and destroy the Palestinian cause. Palestine quasi-annihilated, Hamas and its patrons having lent it the scythe, Israel decided to cut Iran down to its proper size. Moreover, if one does not negotiate with a super-powerful enemy... what is the point of the concept of negotiations? Of diplomacy? Should everything be settled by arms? And then what?

That is the great powers' game of fools. The boundaries between friend and enemy are fluid and shift constantly. The great principles and boastful ideologies? Rubbish. In this war as in all wars, the partisans of each side are nothing but cannon fodder.

A cohabitation between two logics—one for which war is an art and the other which simply wishes to live in peace, build a State, raise children without living in fear that a missile might suddenly fall on their head—is impossible. Not that one must yield to essentialist impulses or a project of separation. The problem is not sectarian. Hezbollah is more than a militia: it is a state of mind.

What to do, then?

Lebanon is necessarily a country of measure. No excess can have a positive repercussion on the domestic scene. This does not argue for the rickety compromises that have presided over the country's destiny since 1969, to the point of draining it of substance. This argues for a consensus encompassing all parties, without that consensus being made at the expense of republican values. As much as Hezbollah is a cancer gnawing at Lebanon for forty years, humiliating its supporters, and with them a wounded Shia community, would be a colossal, monstrous error. There is in Lebanon at this moment too much hatred and too steep an ascent towards the extremes. Far more than Lebanon could bear. And extremes are Tehran's and Tel Aviv's favourite dish. Since time immemorial, warmongering invites external interference and the logic of mutual support for the mimetic reinforcement of supremacy.

On the eve of Tuesday's negotiations, the Lebanese State should urgently call for an internal peace conference, inviting all parties to agree on a document similar to the Baabda Declaration of 2012 under the presidency of Michel Sleiman, by which Lebanon committed itself to neutrality and to withdrawal from the axes of regional tension, officially dissociating itself from any external conflict. Whoever refused to respond to the invitation would find themselves de facto marginalised and outside national legitimacy; those who participated would recognise, by their very presence, the legitimate authority of the Lebanese State, far from the political islands of which we have been witnesses until now. This is the means of containing both traps at once: the insurrectional one from Hezbollah, and the subversive one from Israel.

This document could also respond to the question of how to approach the negotiations, by proposing a return to the tacit restraint line established following the 1949 armistice agreements, which delimited the zones of military engagement between Lebanon and Israel and allowed for a precarious but real form of coexistence, before militia logic shattered it definitively.

The Lebanese State should also take advantage of the political weakening of Tehran and Hezbollah, consequent upon the failure of the Iranian-American negotiations, to gather the forces that have had enough of seeing their country mortgaged since the 1970s by the logic of capitulations and the millet system. This trans-communautarian politico-popular rally is fundamental, today more than it has ever been. We must today defend the Lebanese State against the insidious assault of the dual enemy. The real battle is the one that aims to bring it down. And the State, whatever its numerous imperfections and errors, constitutes the centre that unites the Lebanese. It is also the only guarantee of peace. Of internal peace, before anything else.

A majority of us is conscious of our responsibilities in the catastrophe ravaging this country. Many have drawn the lessons and wish to found a State built on common life, liberty, peace and the respect of individuals and groups, in pluralism and the right to difference. We have suffered too much. All the world's wars have been waged here. All of them. We pay the price of our errors and seek only to take our destiny in our own hands. But others, too, must finally assume theirs—and this can only happen through a dynamic similar to that of 14 March 2005: a conjunction of international efforts and a transversal popular movement oriented towards the reconquest by the Lebanese State of its sovereign authority, and a definitive refusal of violence in the name of positive neutrality.

Lebanon finds itself now caught in the squaring of the circle.

But this can finally change.

Yes, we can.