Lebanon: When Hatred Becomes a System

Division in Lebanon is no longer a consequence of war; it has become one of its instruments. What we are witnessing today might be described as an economy of division — hatred converted into raw material, produced daily, manufactured, distributed and consumed, serving several parties at once, even when those parties appear to be in open enmity.

The conflict has migrated from military violence to symbolic violence. When an elderly man rises to insult the head of government in abject language, when another attacks the president and reminds him of Sadat's fate, when children are trained in invective and the glorification of militarisation extends even to a shoe, the matter no longer concerns the individuals targeted but what they represent: a circumvention of felt anxiety and fear, a deliberate intent to embed in popular consciousness the image of a collapsing state, to normalise insult as a mode of political expression, shifting the conflict from a critique of power to its degradation and accusation of treason. This goes well beyond moral decline or uncontrolled rage; it is, at its core, the sign of a far graver mutation — striking the image of the state in the collective consciousness and replacing public deliberation with defamation.

When power ceases to be an object of accountability and becomes a target of humiliation, it is drained of all symbolic legitimacy.

This is precisely what Pierre Bourdieu called "symbolic violence": the moment when language itself becomes an instrument of deconstruction in the service of domination, far beyond its simple communicative function.

What we are seeing today cannot be reduced to a divergence of positions or differing political readings; it is a systematic process that remoulds society from within — through language, image and education — rendering it more fragile and less capable of producing shared meaning or a unifying national stance.

Lebanon today faces not only the danger of war but that of a society being refounded on the basis of humiliation. And what is being sown in the new generations is more troubling still. Children trained in abuse, filmed and celebrated as though performing a heroic act, integrated into a staging of collective mobilisation — this is not an incidental detail but a mechanism for reproducing division through education. The child who learns that hatred is a legitimate form of expression and that insult is a mode of presence will not become a citizen tomorrow, but an instrument in a conflict whose dimensions he cannot perceive. At that moment, the child ceases to be a victim and is transformed into a tool: an early carrier of hatred, a future citizen stripped of any capacity to think beyond what has been instilled in him. It is a slow moulding of consciousness, in which fractures are instilled in language before they ever surface in positions.

A form of "soft brainwashing", so to speak — one that is not imposed by force but built through repetition, normalisation and social encouragement.

Symbols, too, have been drawn into this trajectory. Images that glorify the military boot or turn it into a festive accessory are not simply expressions of vulgarity; they signal a redefinition of values — from dignity to submission, from citizenship to obedience — and a return to the era of the idols of the Jâhiliyya.

In this scene, the warring parties do not necessarily coordinate their actions, yet they converge in their effects. And the contradiction is striking: while Israel persists in aggression, destruction and occupation, it presents itself as respectful of Lebanese sanctities, to the point that Saar apologises for the Israeli soldier who broke a statue of Christ, even as the same forces attack churches and mosques in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and bar worshippers from entering them. Hezbollah, conversely, conceals its impotence by striking everything the Lebanese citizen holds dear.

Israel profits from the unravelling of the social fabric and from the transformation of each military strike — as in Ain Saadeh and Beirut — into material for internal discord, neutralising any possibility of a unified national response. Hezbollah, for its part, works to deepen mutual fear among Lebanese and to undermine the idea of a unifying state, thereby reinforcing the logic of "protection" outside its institutions. Paradoxically, both parties feed on the same process: the more the internal fragmentation intensifies, the more their respective justifications are consolidated.

Responsibility does not end there. The other political forces participate, to varying degrees, in entrenching this reality — through sectarian discourse, selective silences, or the exploitation of fear in the service of leadership. The public space thus becomes an open arena for instincts rather than debate, for mobilisation rather than accountability.

The gravest consequence lies not in division itself, but in the loss of standards: society loses its capacity to distinguish between what is acceptable and what is not. At that point, the problem no longer resides in any particular event but in the structure that receives it and reproduces it.

All of this occurs at a delicate moment, when Lebanon is supposed to be standing on the threshold of a new negotiating process. But instead of this process representing an opportunity to align visions and build common support, it is the fragmentation of narratives that prevails, deepening the internal fracture, weakening the state rather than consolidating it, and eroding its symbolic weight to the point of threatening to empty any negotiation of its substance. For states negotiate not only with their borders but with the cohesion of their societies and their capacity to produce a common position, or at the very least a shared narrative.

Lebanon today faces not only the danger of military strikes but that of a society dislocated from within, reduced to being a mere arena for the management of conflicts. This is the most perilous phase: when disintegration ceases to be an outcome of war and becomes a condition for its continuation. We find ourselves then before a society being reconstituted on pre-state foundations.

Faced with this, it is not enough to record positions or issue condemnations, to reject this strike or denounce that insult. What is needed is to recover a minimum of meaning: that the victims are not sects but citizens, that the state is not a belligerent but a framework, that dignity is not a detail one can relinquish. Without this, every military strike will be nothing more than one further step in a process of disintegration that began from within…

This is the most dangerous phase: when disintegration ceases to be an effect of conflict and becomes a culture. The battle is then no longer fought only on the ground but over the very meaning of the human being.

What is needed now is to reconquer meaning. To rehabilitate the idea of the citizen, not the subjugated subject. To rehabilitate the state, not the symbol; dignity, not force. For a society that makes its peace with humiliation has no need of anyone to defeat it… it need only continue as it is.