Lebanon: What About the Post-War Period?

What will the situation of Lebanon and the region look like in the aftermath of the American-Israeli war against Iran? And what will become of the Lebanese-Lebanese rift, which has deepened to unprecedented levels under the combined weight of this conflict, of Hezbollah's engagement in it, and of the Israeli aggressions that continue to spread across Lebanese territory, as the death toll surpasses a thousand and climbs further with each passing hour?

On the Iranian side, the regime's survival roughly a month after hostilities broke out constitutes an achievement in itself, and it is precisely what the partisans of what once styled itself the "axis of resistance" would readily describe as a "victory." The term, of course, remains relative, since what counts as a victory by the standards of that axis amounts to a resounding failure when measured against the actual course of the war. A regime that clings to power over ruins cannot genuinely lay claim to victory, and Iran will need many decades to recover from the collapse into which this devastating conflict has plunged it.

Yet by the calculations of a theocratic and dogmatic regime deeply entrenched in its ideological certainties, the fact of having withstood the greatest power in the world, which boasts of its military might, as well as its regional ally that managed in a matter of months to overturn the balance of forces across the region, represents an undeniable feat. Beyond that, in the Iranian reckoning, Tehran succeeded in challenging the Iron Dome system, penetrating Israel's security shield and raining hundreds of missiles down on Israeli cities and towns, in coordination with Hezbollah, which itself fired hundreds of rockets at northern Occupied Palestine while simultaneously resisting the columns of the Israeli army that pressed relentlessly into southern Lebanon and advanced in the occupation of its villages, as a prelude to establishing a new fait accompli that would translate into an unprecedented ceasefire agreement. For the 2024 agreement appears to have been rendered void, having never been honoured by Israel since the moment of its signing, throughout more than fifteen months during which Lebanese sovereignty was violated hundreds of times without the "mechanism" committee ever managing to compel Israel to implement any of its provisions.

On the domestic Lebanese front, those who had wagered on "the end" of Hezbollah can no longer afford to look indefinitely away from what is unfolding in Iran, nor can they deny that this "Iranian resilience," however costly, will sooner or later provide Hezbollah with some measure of breathing room. More fundamentally still, they cannot ignore the Israeli aggressions that strike innocent civilians, paramedics, doctors and journalists, while targeting civil infrastructure such as bridges and public installations in order to sever the region south of the Litani River from the rest of Lebanese territory, not to mention the wholesale razing of front-line villages with the aim of permanently displacing their inhabitants and preparing for a long-term occupation, one of a radically different nature from what occurred during the occupation of the South beginning in 1978, then during the great invasion of 1982 that reached Beirut, until the complete liberation of the territory in 2000.

If this new reality compels those Lebanese who justifiably opposed Hezbollah's engagement in this war on behalf of all and without prior consultation to reconsider their certainties and their bets on the Party's elimination, it simultaneously demands that Hezbollah itself immediately renounce its language of threats, intimidation, accusations of betrayal and charges of "Zionization" levelled at one official or another.

One cannot accept that this armed party, which has dragged Lebanon into a war from which the country gains nothing, should turn against the rest of the Lebanese people once the fighting subsides, as several of its leaders and certain media figures moving within its orbit have suggested, in a brazen challenge to the feelings of broad segments of society and to the very idea of the State, which is supposed to be the common ground shared by all components of the nation.

What Israel perhaps derives the greatest benefit from is the stoking of discord and resentment among the Lebanese, the pitting of communities against one another, since this spares it considerable effort by keeping the Lebanese consumed with internal strife and turned away from confronting its expansionist project, which is now taking on alarming dimensions as voices rise from within Israel itself calling for a "Greater Israel" and the necessity of expanding northward into southern Lebanon in order to protect villages and settlements condemned to chronic instability.

The Lebanese have already lived through the painful experience of 7 May 2008, which amounted to nothing less than an armed coup carried out against the idea of the living-together among the various components of Lebanese society, at the height of Hezbollah’s power and armed hegemony over the country's national, constitutional and political life. Such an experience remains unacceptable in any form whatsoever, for it would be a ready-made recipe for civil war and the repudiation of all the achievements of civil peace, reconstruction and stability, however fragile, made possible by the Taëf Agreement of 1989.

What the Lebanese must cultivate in this historic moment is humility and a return to fundamental positions, so as to work toward ending the war and the aggressions, rebuilding the national climate conducive to consolidating stability and internal peace, and thereby defeating every project that seeks to fuel divisions through violence, the very violence that the country endured throughout fifteen years of devastating civil war.