Save Lebanon

The conflict currently unfolding in Lebanon — and more broadly, across the Middle East — is doubly lethal. There are, of course, the victims first, the material damage, and their economic consequences for the world at large. But beyond that, a binary logic governs minds on both sides, and it appears far more destructive in the long run.

In the usual rhetoric, wars are presented as the shortest path to resolving an intractable problem. Yet the results of the past century prove the opposite. Wars have generated a multitude of problems, whatever the justification for waging them. Military solutions are no longer sufficient to settle matters, and the political management of the post-war period — above all the American variety — has been catastrophic at best since Saigon.

The current war between Iran and Hezbollah on one hand, and the United States and Israel on the other, far exceeds the Lebanese context. To address it solely through the Lebanese lens — the Hezbollah weapons issue — would be a mistake, despite the perfectly justified exasperation at the totalitarian situation created by the pro-Iranian party in Lebanon over four decades.

But the enemy (Israel) of my enemy (Hezbollah) is not my friend. A drift in certain current positions assumes that one must choose, in this war, between one of the two camps, with the aim of settling internal scores.

In its wake, the discourse at times takes a sectarian turn — and renews ties with the old demons of intercommunal vendettas, all the more so against the backdrop of the unprecedented crisis the country is traversing, with the displacement of populations provoked by Israel's boundless hubris in complete impunity.

This is to forget that all Lebanese communities have made the same mistake — namely that of being, in the end, amalgamated into a project of hubris that has created in each of them, in turn, an unbearable feeling of defeat and dejection.

The Shia question did not arise yesterday. It was driven by a desire for social recognition after decades of marginalization from state-building. Finding no echo, the Shia abandoned their modernist project and turned toward identity-based forms of organization with a strong social character. And this organization shattered traditional structures without the state being strong enough to replace them.

If Hezbollah does not represent the entire Shia community, it nonetheless represents a part of it — by conviction or structural necessity. And the other part of the community cannot, in all likelihood, remain neutral or indifferent — despite its lack of enthusiasm for the party — in the face of a bloody and systematic aggression that strikes their kin and their property. Especially when no political alternative exists to allow them to escape the catastrophe into which they have been dragged, willing or not.

The bond between the Shia and Hezbollah goes beyond the simple black-and-white context, owing on one hand to blood ties, and on the other to the specificities of mimetic rivalry between Lebanese communities within the public space. Hezbollah, and before it Amal, long played on the Shia trauma of exclusion inherited from the injustices of the past. Moreover, the party has worked systematically to marginalize, exclude, or crush all Shia Lebanese sovereigntist opponents of the Khomeinist doctrine of wilayat al-faqih, in all its expressions — from Imam Mohammad Mehdi Shamseddine to the liberal intellectual Lokman Slim, including the Lebanese sovereigntist left.

Hezbollah has thus deliberately, for decades, established an intentional confusion between the two levels of belonging — national and communal — which was, moreover, the model of all parties during the war, obsessed by a single thing: the conquest of power. The difference is that the Hezb did so exclusively as a satrapy of the new Persia, which has drawn from it its political and material dividends.

Yet between Hezbollah and Iran on one side, and Israel on the other, there is a third camp: Lebanon, Lebanese legitimacy. And whatever its fragility, it is the only one worthy of allegiance.

If the Lebanese state has been rickety since 1973 on account of wars and tutelages, and is now struggling to get back on its feet as best it can, it nonetheless remains the only guarantee for the country — for all Lebanese, whatever their community.

The entire complexity of the Lebanese state lies in the fact that it is called upon to govern not only individuals but also communities, human groupings, regions, and cultures. A simple state can only be reductive, and a reductive state is, by definition, a totalitarian state which, being unable to exist in harmony with a complex society, will attempt to reshape it according to its will, to simplify it. This is the pitfall into which each communal faction fell when they sought to mold Lebanon in their own image, excluding and marginalizing the country's other components.

The Lebanese state remains the only guarantee, yes.

Provided that its communities — and with them their respective leaders, who continue to behave like clan chiefs out of feudal times, cloaked in a divine historical mission to restore the greatness and security of their horde — finally pledge a definitive allegiance to the state and to the idea of Greater Lebanon within its internationally recognized borders — without conditions and without compromises to anyone. And provided that the state, too, proves that it assumes without wavering its responsibility to preserve Lebanon, in accordance with the Constitution.

Lebanon cannot emerge victorious from a war over which it controls none of the elements, and Hezbollah's jihad is absurd — as is, for that matter, the idea that Israel will be able to totally annihilate an eschatological militia that feeds on death and martyrs. The Land of the Cedar is, after all, nothing more than an abscess-terrain for a crisis that has lasted since 1969, if not since 1948, and that bears upon its unity, its sovereignty, its peace — as well as the sine qua non condition for enshrining these: benevolent neutrality toward the region's conflicts, within the framework of respect for the common good of its Arab neighborhood, international law, and the fundamental rights of the human being.

At some point, the cannon must fall silent, and there must be a return to reality. And even if it seems difficult to believe that the Hezb will renounce its suicidal and epic — indeed gigantomachic — bravado, those Lebanese leaders who still retain some hold on events must stop contemplating the disaster and propose, within the framework of a vast transcommunal council of notables, a political initiative capable of allowing the Shia community to escape the insidious binary trap in which Iran has been locking them for decades — Israel or me, the Sunnis or me, etc.

Hezbollah's tyranny has lasted far too long, but — the experience of the past notwithstanding — it is certainly not another tyrannical enterprise — one that comes from outside, no less — that will put an end to it, but rather an inclusive peace project founded on the constitutive elements of a state and the fundamental values of the Republic. Otherwise, beware the return of the repressed! All the more so since Lebanon's components and the international community have allowed things to unfold, by action or omission, by interest or by the will not to take the bull by the horns... to "avoid a civil war." This project, which existed between 2000 and 2005 to restore the unity-sovereignty axis in the face of Assad, does not exist at present. Nothing has been done to create it, with all political factions obsessed by their narrow short-term political gains.

The only plausible roadmap for escaping the murderous madness should be as follows: cessation of hostilities, disarmament of Hezbollah and restoration of state authority over the entirety of its territory through the intensive deployment of the army at the border, in conjunction with Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories, followed by peace negotiations under UN auspices, and a status of benevolent neutrality for Lebanon.

The alternative is Lebanon's disappearance, with, once again, the "peace of others" over its corpse — and ours. We have only one. Let us not contribute to its destruction, but to its salvation.

René Maheu observed in 1975 that Lebanon had succeeded in producing a "style of civilization" founded on dialogue and living together; a society which, despite its inequalities, remained "the least inhuman in the world," as Georges Naccache put it.

A world in deliquescence, ravaged now by the very same identity anxieties that presided over its destruction, would sorely need that Lebanon.