Lebanon, the Urbicide of the Martyropaths

Recent "spillovers" of the war beyond the territorial boundaries that had delimited the conflict since its outset, with their attendant casualties, compel us to pause and reflect.

Guerrilla Warfare by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, or Régis Debray's Revolution in the Revolution?, to cite only these two works, analysed at length, in the wake of the golden age of revolution in the 1960s, how irregular warfare, far from being reducible to a simple tactic of harassment waged by weak forces against a superior adversary, takes the form of a subtler and more disquieting undertaking, in which the civilian population no longer serves merely as a refuge or logistical relay, but becomes progressively the very stakes of the confrontation, one that the dynamic of violence never ceases to work upon and recompose according to its own logics.

Within this framework, the guerrilla — the post-Clausewitzian war — does not content itself with operating within a given social milieu that it would presuppose as already won over or naturally favourable, but acts upon that milieu with a will to reconfigure it, to compel it out of indifference or ambivalence, by generating situations in which all neutrality is rendered untenable. Guevara spoke of creating the revolutionary conditions rather than awaiting their "social maturity."

This logic, which one might describe as a strategy of induced polarisation, rests on a relatively constant mechanism, whose historical iterations reveal both a remarkable plasticity and a formidable efficacy. An insurgent organisation first embeds itself within a social fabric that has not necessarily rallied to its cause in its entirety, conducts targeted actions against a state or occupying power, then exposes itself, deliberately or by calculation, to reprisals whose scale, frequently disproportionate, falls indiscriminately upon combatants and civilians alike. Through this process, the adversary's violence, far from constituting a mere strategic cost, acquires an operational function, insofar as it helps produce the conditions for an emotional and political shift within the population, transforming endured suffering into a catalyst for mobilisation.

"The fish in the water"

Such a dynamic does not arise from empirical improvisation. It inscribes itself, in fact, within an already ancient theoretical tradition, whose most influential formulations appear in the writings of Mao Zedong on protracted people's war. The celebrated metaphor of the fish swimming through water, frequently invoked to describe the osmosis between guerrilla and population, suggests in reality a constant labour upon that "water," which the guerrilla strives to consolidate and politicise, sometimes at the price of deliberate constraint, in order to ensure its own survival and expansion. In Chinese revolutionary practice, this transformation of the social milieu is accompanied, among other things, by propaganda campaigns, mechanisms of internal pressure, and an indirect instrumentalisation of the adversary's violence, called upon to reveal, through its brutality, the oppressive nature of the enemy.

The Algerian war of independence offers, in this respect, a particularly illuminating example of this dialectic, inasmuch as the Front de Libération Nationale, by conducting spectacular actions in urban centres, most notably during the Battle of Algiers in 1957, exposed itself to systematic repression by the French army, whose methods — where torture and disappearances coexisted with intensive surveillance of working-class neighbourhoods — produced a paradoxical effect. A significant portion of the population, initially reticent or cautious, found itself progressively drawn into the independence camp, not solely out of solidarity but also out of a form of moral and existential necessity, so intolerable had any intermediate position become under the weight of the violence endured.

An analogous phenomenon can be observed in the Vietnam War, where the Viet Cong's implantation within rural villages did not rest exclusively on any prior allegiance of local populations, but on a capacity to exploit the effects of American military operations, particularly the massive bombardments and forced displacements that were punctuated, at intervals, by massacres of civilians. The events at Mỹ Lai in 1968 remain emblematic in this regard, insofar as they contributed to transforming a localised act of violence into a catalyst for commitment, reinforcing the legitimacy of the insurgency among segments of the population that had until then remained hesitant.

"One, two, many Vietnams"

In more contemporary contexts, most notably in the Middle East — that privileged laboratory of innovation in post-warfare — this logic appears ceaselessly in renewed forms, as armed organisations operating within densely populated areas engage in permanent interaction with the adversary's military power, whose reprisals, frequently broadcast across the international media, feed cycles of anger and mobilisation. In the Palestinian territories, the various phases of insurrection, whether spontaneous or organised, have regularly given rise to military responses whose effects on civilian populations have contributed, in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, to reinforcing the dynamics of support for armed groups.

The Lebanese case, in its current configuration, illustrates this mechanism with singular acuity. Hezbollah, whose revolutionary heartland is today being systematically dismantled — its Iranian Pasdaran cadres and its own commanders hunted down and killed, its bastions in southern Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut reduced to rubble by Israeli strikes, while two million people were torn from their places of life — finds itself compelled to execute a strategic withdrawal toward regions that are far from well-disposed toward it: Beirut, the southern and northern Metn, for instance, milieus in which the war it initiated encounters muffled opposition and at times open hostility.

This forced displacement thus opens a new phase in the confrontation, whose stakes extend well beyond the purely territorial register to become properly social in nature. Hezbollah has always openly claimed inspiration from and application of Guevara's subversive techniques in polemological terms, in ways that distinguish it from the formal, statist foquismo applied by the PLO during the war. Hezbollah fights according to a spatial logic, not a territorial one. The foco is therefore mobile, because the space of war is that of the wilayat al-faqih. Territory in itself is of no importance — it is disposable and expendable. As are the inhabitants of the heartland, transformed into martyropaths, prepared to die for doctrine rather than for land. Hezbollah proceeds by urbicide in the name of Iran's spatial empire.

To this must be added, moreover, on the polemological level, a neo-Achaemenid layer of Persian strategy. Bound by the logic of empire and vast territorial expanse, the Persians waged wars on multiple fronts, employing to this end proxy wars and the subsidisation of allies through their satrapy system. They also financed enemy cities — including Athens against Sparta — in order to set them against one another, which allowed them to manage fronts without always occupying them militarily.

The Persia of the Pasdaran thus fashions a kind of neo-Guevarist permanent revolution, applying across the region for two decades, and in the context of this war by bombarding vast territorial expanses, the Che's celebrated formula: "Create one, two, many Vietnams." The objective is not merely to pressure adversaries, above all the Gulf states, into conceding and seeking peace at the earliest opportunity, but also to internationalise the conflict as broadly as possible in order, paradoxically, to bring it to an end.

The "win-win" game

Beyond Hezbollah's urban maquis, a calculation of an altogether different order takes shape, one that might be described as a subversive positive-sum game working to the exclusive advantage of the armed organisation — the sinister and now notorious win-win game. By inserting itself into zones resistant to the war and by sustaining activities that expose those zones to Israeli strikes, Hezbollah compels Israel to bomb populations that are hostile to it, turning the adversary, despite itself, into an instrument of loyalty recomposition. The suffering inflicted upon milieus that had contested the war cannot, within this schema, but draw them closer, by necessity, to the one who presents itself as the only available protector.

But the calculation extends further still, for the presence of the displaced from southern Lebanon in these neighbourhoods provokes, among the host populations, reactions of hostility and at times open rejection — tensions from which the organisation profits, by a mirror effect, to foster a sense of internal cohesion among its own. There is no more powerful cement than the shared sense of belonging nowhere, and of being safe nowhere except within the ranks of the armed community, sheltered within the warmth of the communal asabiyya.

The analysis of these phenomena gains in depth when it draws upon conceptual frameworks from political philosophy and anthropology, beginning with Clausewitzian thought, which, by affirming the intrinsically political nature of war, allows us to understand how violence can be mobilised as an instrument for transforming collective subjectivities. René Girard's theory of mimetic violence illuminates the way in which cycles of reprisal tend to be self-sustaining, each act of violence serving to justify the next, in a spiral where the distinction between aggressor and victim becomes progressively blurred. Michel Seurat's analyses of fragmented forms of power in the Middle East suggest that violence, far from disorganising the social fabric, sometimes participates in its recomposition, by producing new loyalties and redefining communal fault lines.

Such a strategy, which consists in provoking or exploiting the adversary's violence in order to transform a population, inevitably raises fundamental moral questions. On one side, it may appear as a pragmatic response to a situation of radical asymmetry, in which insurgent forces possess no other lever by which to contest the domination of a superior adversary. On the other, it implies a form of instrumentalisation of civilians, exposed to heightened risks — sometimes without their explicit consent — in the name of a political objective that exceeds them. Within this tension there emerges one of the fundamental ambiguities of irregular warfare, in which the boundary between a strategy of liberation and deliberate endangerment becomes difficult to draw with any clarity.

The guerrilla, when it operates within such a logic, thus does not content itself with reflecting a given state of society, but contributes actively to producing it, by transforming violence into a vector of rallying and making collective suffering a constitutive element of political mobilisation. This displacement — whereby the population ceases to be a mere backdrop and becomes the very theatre of war — confers upon these conflicts a profoundly tragic dimension, one in which the construction of loyalty passes through the shared experience of violence, and in which neutrality progressively dissolves in the impossibility of remaining apart.

Return of the repressed?

It is necessary, however, not to leave this logic without its counterpoint, for if the strategy of induced polarisation supposes that violence can indefinitely manufacture commitment, it sooner or later encounters a resistance that one might call, after Freud, the return of the repressed. The culture of martyrdom and the culture of life cannot durably coexist without entering into conflict — their collision remaining, in the end, inevitable. The explosion at the port of Beirut in August 2020 provided the most tragic demonstration of this, less as an accident than as a symptom of an organisation that has made death a mode of governance, and that found itself one day confronted, at the very heart of the city it claimed to defend, with the consequences of that choice. Eros and Thanatos cannot durably share the same territory, and one of the two logics will ultimately prevail — without anything in history permitting us to suppose it will be the latter.

Yet here too, Hezbollah reveals itself to be devious, perverse. For beyond the asabiyya it cultivates within its own community — and indeed beyond it, through the creation of binary internal tensions, Good against Evil, summoning each person to choose a side — it is already laying the groundwork for a post-war order in which only one victory will truly count: the one that will crush dissident voices, the "enemies within," "the traitors." The victim of today, who seeks to extend the zone of support against the enemy, already presents itself openly as the executioner of tomorrow, ready to erect the gallows.

The only viable logic, when confronted with this ideological impasse, is that of the double enemy: the "territorial" enemy, Israel, with its daily crimes against the civilian population, and the "spatial" enemy, Hezbollah, with its transnational ideology in the service of the Pasdaran. The urbicide of Gaza finds its echo in another, shifting, that passes from territory to territory.

Between the two, how many more innocent victims will perish before the culture of life finally prevails, once and for all?