Tel Aviv–Tehran: Bloody Mimicry and "Double Enemy" (1/2)

The current conflict unfolding before our eyes in Lebanon is indeed a confrontation between Israel and Iran, and more specifically between Israel and Hezbollah. Setting aside any desire to demonise Hezbollah — and yet there is no shortage of valid reasons to do so, from political assassinations, kidnappings, extrajudicial executions, militia coups de force, humiliations of the army, the transformation of Lebanon into a regional hub for money laundering and drug trafficking, to massive contribution to corruption, and the list goes on — Hezbollah is, by its very nature, a branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guards grafted, since 1982, onto a marginalised Shia community abandoned by the Lebanese state.

In so doing, it took root in the South of Lebanon, filling the vacuum left by the Lebanese state during the war, before becoming the cherished protégé of the Syrian occupier. This implantation proceeded first through the proliferation of ideological Islamist social organisations that compensated for the absence of state institutions and thereby secured the allegiance of part of the population, then through a form of legitimacy grounded in the discourse of resistance to Israel and its proxies in the South. But it also proceeded through force: the assassination of cadres from the leftist resistance, the 'Brothers' War' with the Amal movement, the protection of the Assad regime in the aftermath of those fratricidal clashes, and above all through the terrorisation of non-Hezbollah Shia opponents, from threats to violence to outright assassination.

War, admittedly, presupposes by definition, from the perspective of its protagonists, a binary logic of confrontation between good and evil, friend and enemy. This is not merely the particular preserve of war; it is one of the fundamental axioms of the political. War, specifically, has no use for nuance where politics calls for it. Yet the 'friend-enemy' dyad proper to Carl Schmitt and Julien Freund, however theoretically tempting, cannot serve to analyse the current conflict. A more adequate framework would be that of the 'double enemy,' developed by Jacques Beauchard and better suited to fragile states incapable of influencing disputes provoked by third-party, para-state actors. 'The enemy of one's enemy remains an enemy,' says Beauchard.

It is a fact difficult to contest that neither Hezbollah nor, naturally, Israel acts in Lebanon's interest. And what is more, one is compelled to note the near-total mimicry that exists between the two.

A state of martial vigilance

Since 1948, the State of Israel has found itself in permanent war, seeking to consolidate a legitimacy founded on the erasure of an indigenous people who inhabited the land it now occupies — whatever the ideological pretexts advanced by the Zionists to justify that occupation historically.

The logic of the Israeli regime, from Ben Gurion to Netanyahu, has been to remain in a state of martial vigilance against its enemies, in the name of an existential threat it has, moreover, often cultivated — not only to mobilise the Israeli esprit de corps, but to better divide the ranks of its adversaries: the creation of Hamas to counter Fatah; the long toleration of Iranian influence in the region under the banner of the so-called 'alliance of minorities,' with the aim of weakening Arab regimes and perpetuating a state of Sunni-Shia conflict. This logic, with the sole exception of the Oslo interlude — annihilated by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 — was founded on hatred, exclusion and violence towards the Palestinians, whose abandonment and silent extermination were the sine qua non of peace with the Arab states.

Israel thus plays the role of regional gendarme in the Middle East with total impunity, while the myth of Greater Israel continues to titillate the Israeli far right, as recent declarations by certain Israeli and American officials attest. Nor can one overlook, in practice, the annexationist behaviour in Syria and, now, potentially, in Lebanon, facilitated by the current war. Netanyahu himself is a figure in whom galloping megalomania combines with political realism against a backdrop of manifest corruption.

Iran's theocratic hegemony

On its side, Iran has likewise found itself in a state of permanent war since the advent of the mullahs, and especially of Khomeini in 1979. The project of the wilayat el-faqih is that of a transnational theocratic hegemony, legitimised through those within the Shia community who choose to adhere to it. The Iranian supreme guide is its Leviathan, its hegemon, its dictator. The export of the Islamic revolution has been the daawa — in the Khaldounian sense, the political discourse elaborated to conquer power — of Khomeinist Iran since its earliest days, and Iran has never renounced it. All its militia offshoots, Hezbollah first among them, were created to that end.

Hezbollah did, admittedly, transform itself — more through realism and opportunism than through conviction or reform — into a political party, in pursuit of entrism within the Lebanese political system. But its command remained miliciano-religious, entirely subordinated in its decision-making to the Pasdaran. Its project, consequently, has no concern for the Lebanese perimeter, as Nasrallah's speeches made plain: they typically reserved only a small portion for the Lebanese situation, at the tail end of interminable analyses of regional affairs through an Iranian lens. The 'Open Letter to the Oppressed' remains Hezbollah's political document, notwithstanding its cosmetic enterprise of 'softening' its face through political opportunism.

To legitimise its existence, Hezbollah adopted the daawa of resistance to Israel, after having systematically liquidated the cadres of the national resistance formed by the left — notably the Lebanese Communist Party. Part of the left was subsequently placed under Syrian tutelage and brought to heel by Assad, then financially and politically absorbed by Iran. Moderate, Lebanese-oriented leaderships were marginalised — even Nabih Berri reduced gradually, especially after the end of Syrian tutelage, to the rank of politico-institutional screen serving Hezbollah's purposes.

This tribunician function of resistance to Israel did not, however, prevent Hezbollah from implicitly playing the role of border guard for the Jewish state following the Israeli withdrawal of 2000, with Tel Aviv's tacit approval. Israel's paramount objective was to be done with the Palestinian cause, Hezbollah serving, in that framework, as an objective ally on Lebanese territory, the very antithesis of its rhetoric of 'liberating Palestine.' Iran thus laid its hands on the Palestinian cause, via Hamas and Hezbollah — a genuine windfall for Tel Aviv, which could thereby justify a permanent escalation against Islamist actors, impossible to legitimise in the eyes of the international community, rather than against moderate political actors such as Fatah or the left.

This objective alliance collided sporadically with Iranian ambitions to maximise pressure on Israel through its proxies, in the context of regional negotiations with the West. The tacit entente was thus shaken in 2006 by the July War. But, paradoxically, that war — and the adoption of Resolution 1701, which temporarily pushed Hezbollah back from the southern border — proved a golden opportunity for the party, marginalised on the Lebanese scene and starved of legitimacy since its assassination of Rafic Hariri in February 2005, to restore its image by draping itself in a Pyrrhic 'divine victory.' After 2006, it therefore devoted itself to its initial and fundamental objective: seizing power in Beirut on Tehran's behalf. This enterprise had begun with the arrangements of April 1996 and the campaign against Rafic Hariri, aimed at hollowing out the Lebanese state and transforming it economically and politically into an emaciated skeleton, to the benefit of the viable mini-state it had built for itself.

In the same spirit, it blocked in 1993 the army's deployment to the South, intervening with Damascus to annul the decision taken in that direction by Hariri. After the July 2006 war, it again prevented the troops from deploying to the South in accordance with Resolution 1701, while multiplying attacks against UNIFIL.

Hariri's assassination was likewise inscribed in this broader project of sapping the state. The occupation of downtown Beirut after the 2006 war as an act of vengeance against the Lebanese state and the March 14 camp, then the siege of the Grand Sérail to force the fall of the Siniora cabinet, the coup de force of 7 May 2008, the obtaining at Doha of the blocking third within the government, the disintegration of March 14 under the obsessive power-seeking of its various components, and the accession of Michel Aoun to the presidency — all of these brought this process to completion.

The Lebanese state has been in Hezbollah's crosshairs from the outset. The party lost its grip on it with the collapse of the Iranian empire following 7 October 2023 and its catastrophic war in support of Gaza, and it is on that state that it will potentially unleash itself once the current war is over. The work has already begun: it has turned its fury on Nawaf Salam as it did in 2006 against Fouad Siniora — who had, it should be recalled, halted the war and the destruction in Rome, saving the pro-Iranian party from a far grimmer fate. The Lebanese state is now seeking to stop the war, and yet it is on that very state that Hezbollah vents its rage — even though it is the party that, once again, has landed itself, and Lebanon with it, in this predicament.

Finally, the paroxysm of mimicry: the imperialist project of Greater Israel, driven by a fundamentalist and sectarian logic, finds its perfect mirror in the imperialist project of Greater Persia, realised on the ground after the 2015 nuclear agreement through Iran's grip on Damascus, Beirut, Sanaa and Baghdad — propelled by another megalomaniac, opportunist and corrupt figure, the late Khamenei.

Both forces are animated by a nostalgia for a golden age, rooted in religious myths and a shared millenarian and eschatological vision.

In sum: enemies, yes. But also two sides of the same coin — and two calamities for Lebanon.