The eternal return of tragedy?

There is in the Lebanese-Israeli ceasefire concluded under American auspices a promise. But this promise is at once tenuous and taut, so fragile — like the thread of the Fates — that it seems capable of snapping at any moment. Lebanon has long learned to live on little and to transform the scraps of stability into the raw material of survival. So it welcomes this truce as a remission — though one knows, from experience, that it may in reality be nothing more than the prelude to a relapse.

This is the whole of the Lebanese tragedy in its most harrowing expression. The ineluctable recurrence of misfortune, and its cyclical return, which the collective memory has never truly ceased to anticipate.

For Lebanon knows ceasefires. It knows them all too well. Since the war of 1975, it has lived through enough of them to know that their lifespan owes less to the will of the parties than to regional circumstances, to the internal balances of the sponsoring powers, and to a series of variables that no one in Beirut truly controls. The Lebanese people have consequently developed a kind of bitter wisdom — that of the child who has learned, at its own cost, that the teacher's intervention stops the "bully" only for the briefest of pauses. The moment the schoolyard is left unsupervised, violence reclaims its rights.

Inevitably.

But what truly weighs today, beyond the immediate uncertainty, is the temporal depth of this déjà vu. The memory of 1982 or 2006 returns like a curse, accompanied by something more structural: the interminable reign of the ephemeral. In Lebanese time, compromise drags on and the anguishing in-between labors slowly until it becomes a condition of existence. One has consequently learned to internalize a paradoxical message — almost unbearable through sheer repetition — one that has not been without provoking a latent schizophrenic state: that of living ceaselessly in hope while always expecting the worst simultaneously. Like a fatality. This survival reflex was forged by decades in which the worst, precisely, came to pass each time one had begun to believe that the best was possible…

Yet this paradoxical message, this contradictory injunction that has structured the Lebanese collective psyche since 1975, today reaches a hyperbolic degree of intensity — precisely because the actors involved have not changed in their deeper logics, even if their operational capacities have been severely diminished. Hezbollah, riven by internal divisions between a pragmatic current and an intransigent fringe that certainly reflect the split between doves and hawks within the Iranian regime itself, possesses a considerable capacity for procrastination. It knows how to feign playing the game of the Lebanese state — through Nabih Berry or by preserving its ministers in government — while continuing to outbid all others and working to rebuild its military capabilities… awaiting the propitious moment to reverse the balance of power, as it did by force of arms in May 2008… or, with more "classical elegance," by toppling the Hariri cabinet in 2011, precisely as Hariri was visiting Barack Obama at the White House.

The path chosen by Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam — that of negotiation and the gradual assertion of sovereignty — proves, in this context, as necessary as it is perilous. The Lebanese state finds itself caught in a vice between two adverse wills that converge, paradoxically, in their effect of undermining: Israel, which seeks to weaken the state sufficiently to keep it malleable while maintaining it solid enough to serve as a useful interlocutor; and Hezbollah, which cannot survive the disappearance of its arms and the severing of the existential link between its Lebanese branch and its Iranian patron, and which knows that the peace dynamic, if it succeeds, spells its strategic obsolescence. A movement that has built its entire identity on armed violence and the rhetoric of "resistance" cannot convert itself into an ordinary political force without ceasing to be what it claims to be. It would be condemned to disappear by the very logic of its own hubris — like a sect whose doctrine collapses — were it to enter the political game and agree to lay down its arms. This is moreover equally the case of the Pasdaran in Iran, which is why the truce with the United States will in all likelihood fall through. War as a way of life… and as a device for tightening cohesion and relentlessly re-legitimizing itself. External hostility in the service of exterminating enemies within. From this standpoint, there is little doubt that Hezbollah will do everything in its power to re-embed itself in the Lebanese state and reduce it once again to the puppet-like, cadaverous subaltern of its satrapal mini-state.

To return to Lebanon — accustomed to the sinister shadow of ancient curses hovering over the City — the precedent of 1982 ought to weigh more heavily on the collective memory. A genuine window of opportunity, however fiercely contested, had opened between Beirut and Tel Aviv, backed by American resolve then embodied by Secretary of State Alexander Haig. The fall of Haig and the collapse of Menachem Begin were sufficient to reverse the dynamic and turn the May 17 agreement into the most bitter symbol of diplomatic illusion, before it was abrogated under pressure from Hafez al-Assad and part of the Lebanese political establishment. History in Lebanon — far from being farce, even a tragic one — repeats itself, but always as wound. And the slightest change in Washington — the midterms — or in Tel Aviv — the fall of the current cabinet — would suffice to send this fragile truce, along with the entire negotiating dynamic and its protagonists, down the same path.

Lebanon cannot afford to wait for history to finish repeating itself.

This is why, independently of external dynamics, what must be built — and quickly — is a Lebanese roadmap endowed with sufficient political and popular legitimacy to withstand internal pressures and the vagaries of the capitals of influence, whose priorities can shift within weeks, and whose interests are certainly not those of Lebanon, whatever the best (or less than best) intentions in the world may be. Peace with Israel is not a panacea, but Lebanon cannot remain forever — and alone — in a state of war. Moreover, Hezbollah, which claims to be resisting, never ceases to drag Lebanon — paradoxically, through its disastrous escapades and its delirious "victories" — into a peace of the vanquished. By weakening the state and positioning itself as the sole interlocutor with Tel Aviv to negotiate deals, it erodes, each time, whatever sovereignty and authority still remain. And it does so deliberately, subversively. Successive nails in Lebanon's coffin.

Yet one must acknowledge that the institutions of the current state — as in the aftermath of the Cedar Revolution of 2005 — are incapable of purging themselves of an ideological and political gangrene, the Syrian-Iranian axis, that has been eating away at them since 1990. What the United States demands of Lebanon amounts to asking a cancer patient to heal himself despite the gravity of his condition. The patient can barely strive to survive and remain functional with whatever strength he still possesses. This too must be borne in mind, whatever the profound desire of a large part of Lebanese society to be done with Hezbollah's hegemony.

Lebanon can no longer bear this regime of permanent emergency — this perpetual movement from crisis to war and from war to crisis which, since 1967, has literally devastated its institutions and its people, and indefinitely defers the elementary right to something resembling a normal life. The Lebanese deserve to live. Not heroically. Simply humanly. If only from time to time…

Can the international community — while calling upon Lebanon to display courage even as it is caught between the hammer and anvil of the "double enemy" — offer the Lebanese state and its population durable guarantees of stability alongside the ongoing negotiating process, in order to prevent a return to this tragedy, made of precariousness, uncertainty, and ultimately chaos?

Given the current state of the world, it is legitimate to doubt it.

In this senseless maelstrom, it is far more likely that the Lebanese can, in the end, count only on themselves. And it becomes imperative for them to work, in so doing, to consolidate a united domestic scene grounded in clear and non-negotiable constants — the republican values and the spirit of coexistence, under the sole guarantee of the Lebanese Constitution — far from the triumphalist outbidding of all sides. And if Hezbollah persists in refusing to be part of this consensus, as usual, it will be Hezbollah that has chosen, once again, the path of deadlock and irrationality over the measured and salutary choice of rational legitimacy.

The moira of Lebanese hope against the suicidal hubris of Hezbollah.

No one can save, against his will, someone who has truly decided to perish.

To save oneself, however, in such a case, is a duty.