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

Lebanon has for years been subjected to this dual logic of violence and exclusion, that famous “escalation to extremes” — to borrow René Girard's expression, itself drawn from Clausewitz — punctuated by moments of objective collusion and a measured relaxation of hostility. It is the only country paying the price of a confrontation with Israel, no longer even in the service of an Arab cause, the just and legitimate Palestinian cause, but for the greater glory of the mullahs of Tehran.

In that sense, Hezbollah's behaviour — having triggered three devastating wars in 2006, 2024 and 2026 — cannot be justified by any purported concern for confronting the Jewish state. Certain voices will invoke the villages of Shebaa and the Kfar Shouba hills to justify the continuation of the resistance, but that argument has been dismantled, maps in hand, since 2006, exposed as a fabrication designed to legitimise the continuation of the Hezbollah project and, at the time, as a pretext for justifying the perpetuation of Syrian occupation — namely, the struggle against Israel.

The reality is bitter, but it must be spoken plainly: if Hezbollah's fighters are battling on Lebanese soil, and if they are themselves Lebanese through and through, they fight for and on the orders of Iran. Their party has triggered three wars at Tehran's instigation, on command. In the name of a manufactured will to resist Israel, Hezbollah has literally invited the Israelis to occupy Lebanon. Not that they needed a pretext — but why hand them one freely? Why strew the road to Jerusalem with Israeli checkpoints on Lebanese territory? Why contribute, paradoxically, to giving life to Greater Israel?

Called upon to restore to the state its legitimate monopoly on force, its Iranian mother-house under attack, its marjaa assassinated, the party chose the path of suicidal escalation. The Lebanese state cannot be held responsible for that choice. Besides, Hezbollah never sought its opinion before taking its decisions for war. The height of the absurdity is that the state should bear, in every way and on every occasion, the weight of Iran's strategic manipulations on the backs of the Lebanese, with Hezbollah's foot soldiers serving, each time, as pawns.

A peace of the vanquished

Lebanon does not want this war, despite the frenzied enthusiasm of various parties eager to use it for settling scores on the domestic scene. This is, once again, a war between Israel and Iran being fought on its territory. There are no 'good' and 'bad' actors here — only two occupiers who must cease instrumentalising Lebanon, recognise its sovereignty and return within their own borders, and a militia that must surrender its weapons to the Lebanese state and cease suiciding its own community by transforming it into cannon fodder through voluntary servitude.

Iran handed Israel the opportunity to complete its destruction of the Palestinian cause through Hamas's folly, and now the same scenario is playing out with Hezbollah. Neither project has any use for Lebanon as a sovereign and independent country. An Israeli victory would impose upon Lebanon a peace of the vanquished. A Hezbollah victory, even obtained by default, would produce a new episode of vengeance against the Lebanese state — and against those Lebanese who reject this war and oppose its project. Those who wish to fight and settle accounts by supporting one or the other side, with that delicious and insufferable outbidding from the depths of their salon armchairs in North America or Europe, are contributing to Lebanon's destruction, willingly or not.

Whatever the outcome of the conflict, Lebanon is not an end in itself for either party. The settlement will be made at its expense, in the international sphere, because it has once again consented — through a mixture of decisional incompetence and impotence — to being transformed into a battleground.

But the Lebanese are not without the capacity to weigh meaningfully on the outcome of a conflict that surpasses them. They can, and must, rally behind Lebanese legality — provided that legality continues to take itself seriously. Now more than ever. It is the only remaining possibility of saving Lebanon.

Iran first

It is time for the hardliners of every community who support Hezbollah to understand that the party fights neither for the banner of Palestine, nor for the honour of the Shia community, nor for the South, the Beqaa and the rest of Lebanese territory, but for Iran, Iran first, and Iran alone. The “resistance to Israel” as conducted by Hezbollah has transformed Lebanon into a field of ruins without advancing the Palestinian cause by a single iota. On the contrary, the gains of the liberation of 2000 have been squandered and reversed for the greater glory of Tehran. Lebanon is, once again, nothing more than a vast field of ruins, of displaced persons and the dispossessed.

The camp opposed to Hezbollah must understand, for its part, that the Shia community is not responsible for the Hezbollah tumour — which is the product of cumulative factors — and that one cannot ask intellectuals and unarmed forces to stage an intra-muros democratic intifada against a militia armed to the teeth, moreover under cannon fire, or to form some equivalent of the Qornet Shehwan Gathering to delegitimise Hezbollah. The Qornet Shehwan example is particularly impossible to replicate: that gathering had a patron, namely the Maronite Church under the aegis of Nasrallah Sfeir and Youssef Béchara, capable of bringing together Christian political forces that otherwise refused to sit and converse. Who is the Shia authority — spiritual or temporal — capable of uniting the Shia opposition, at a moment when the Supreme Islamic Council has itself been absorbed by the militia?

No. The political solution to the Hezbollah problem is Lebanese, not Shia. It lies in the formation of a coalition of representative forces from all communities, including Shia figures, committed on one hand to preserving the idea of the state and reinforcing its decisional capacity in the coming phase, and on the other to putting an end to the logic of violence and exclusion, and to championing a culture of connection, neutrality and peace.

Without this, Lebanon is inexorably doomed to disappear. And everyone will bear responsibility for that — not only Hezbollah, and certainly not the Shia community and its valiant democrats.