There Can Be Only One

The recent remarks by Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general, Mohammad Raad, and Mahmoud Komati, vice-president of the party’s Political Council, invite serious reflection on the political meaning of the conflict currently underway.

Komati speaks of a “golden opportunity” for the State — built on what Hezbollah claims to have “proven” on the ground — to establish a deterrence equation that should now be consolidated. Raad turns his fire openly on the State itself, accusing it of refusing to become entangled in a conflict that his own party manufactured from nothing. The deputy secretary-general insists, stubbornly, on his will to liberate Lebanese territory from an occupation… that did not exist before his militia chose to open hostilities in order to avenge the Iranian spiritual guide.

It is difficult to overstate the extent to which this represents a denial of reality.

Granted, Hezbollah is in the process of demonstrating that, despite a series of monumental setbacks in 2024, the ongoing elimination of its cadres by Israel even through periods of relative calm, and the mounting international and domestic pressure for its disarmament, it remains a threat.

But a threat to whom, precisely?

Because the Hezbollah discourse is not addressed to Tel Aviv. It is addressed to the Lebanese State. In 2008, when the Siniora government made its bold decision — in terms of restoring sovereignty — to dismantle the pro-Iranian party’s landline telecommunications network, Hassan Nasrallah responded that “the weapons are there to protect the weapons,” and unleashed the militia’s punitive expedition against Beirut and the Mountain.

Komati’s remarks signal that this logic endures, at the very moment when the head of state and the government are multiplying gestures to restore the monopoly on legitimate violence.

What becomes clear, reading between the lines of the party’s rhetoric, is that the issue is not the preservation of the resistance’s military capabilities in the strict sense. It is the necessity of “Hezbollahing” the Lebanese State once and for all — keeping it within the axis of confrontation, meaning under Iranian influence, opposed to American pressure and to any willingness to negotiate with Israel. In other words, Hezbollah wishes to “Pasdaran-ize” the State, in the manner of what is already unfolding in Iran with the positioning of Khamenei’s son and the stranglehold of the Revolutionary Guards over the state apparatus.

This is Hezbollah’s answer to the Lebanese executive’s decision to disarm it.

From this follows a hard truth: the outcome of this war — provoked by Hezbollah — will be, one way or another, existential for Lebanon. The price of the party’s destruction would be exorbitant for Lebanon, likely exposing Beirut to direct Israeli influence and further weighting the scales of any negotiation with Tel Aviv — to say nothing of the human, infrastructural, economic and financial disaster already settling in day by day. The price of a Pyrrhic “victory” — achieved simply by holding out as long as possible and inflicting maximum pain on the adversary — would be equally exorbitant, to the extent that such a victory would further weaken the Lebanese State in its relationship with the party. Ironically, whatever the outcome of the conflict, Lebanon will lose in terms of sovereignty — whether vis-à-vis Israel or Iran.

To borrow the iconic line from Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander: “There can be only one.”

And this is not about Israel versus Hezbollah. It is about, once this war has run its course, Lebanon in its entirety versus Hezbollah and its unalterable desire for revenge against the state structure and the Lebanese model.

There can be only one. And it will have to be the State — and the Lebanese model, however imperfect — whose guardianship has been entrusted to it.

Can this inescapable conflict, two decades in the making, be avoided?

Given the belligerent militia nature and the supremacist arrogance of Hezbollah, one would have to wager: no.

The question that remains, however, is how a State can confront an organization that is suicidal by nature and prepared to fight to the last Lebanese in order to keep Lebanon under the grip of its Iranian patron — without descending into its sordid game of violence and legitimation through the posture of victimhood.

For the first time since the missed opportunity of March 14, 2005, legality faces a true trial by fire. It must, through an extremely delicate balancing act, restore its uncontested authority and monopoly on legitimate violence without compromise — while simultaneously protecting the culture of connection and peace against that of violence and exclusion.

In other words: though incapable of preventing Hezbollah from self-destructing, legality must be capable of reinventing itself — far from the petty interests of clan and community chieftains — and of proposing a model that stands, once and for all, at the opposite pole from the totalitarian, “chaophilic,” and mortiferous model of the Revolutionary Guards; a model worthy of the pluralist and nahda heritage of Mohammad Mahdi Chamseddine, Mohammad Hassan al-Amine, and Hani Fahs.

This model is not one of divorce between communities, but of an indivisible unity — the only true guarantor of sovereignty, as in 2005. And it is directed not merely against Iran and its ideological and militia offspring, against Israel or any other political or physical tutelage, but inward — toward a positive consensus on the will to continue living together.

Hezbollah, and with it a part of the Shia community, is traversing the same megalomaniacal process that led each of Lebanon’s communities, driven by a radical political tendency, to believe that Lebanon could be reduced to its domination and its vision of the country. Each paid an enormous price for that belief. It is time to learn the lesson, to set hubris aside — along with the hypocrisies.

Hezbollah is not only committing suicide at this moment. In doing so, it is confronting Lebanon with itself, and with a moment of truth. The choice is between deciding, once and for all, on the basis of a rational and mature judgment, to build a composite, democratic, modern, and coherent State — respectful of the pluralism, diversity, and specificities of all its components, making room for a genuine process of civic individuation beyond clan and communal belonging — or making the choice of implosion and divorce, with the risk of yet another failure at the next turn.

The voices in favor of the second option, after decades of bitter and painful disappointments spread across a century, are growing louder. Even if the temptation of withdrawal into oneself constitutes a powerful anxiolytic for communitarians, Greater Lebanon — in all its imperfections — remains a necessity for all, to the extent that it grants — and this point is never sufficiently emphasized — a strength and legitimacy to all its components through pluralism: each one legitimizing the other in the eyes of the region and its torments.

Greater Lebanon is experienced by a part of its inhabitants as a curse and a suffering, because they see only its misfortunes and its failings. And yet it is also, every day, in the smallest enriching encounters, the smallest gestures of exchange at every level between its citizens, a singular experience of human life — especially in this part of the world.

Provided it is given the possibility of managing its conflicts in peace: within the framework of a functional, sovereign, and regionally neutral State, holding the monopoly on violence, endowed with good governance, operating within a viable administrative arrangement, and — above all — resting on a social and political contract that commands the adherence of all Lebanese, founded on respect for the Constitution, the law, public and private liberties, and the specificities of each group. This naturally presupposes a caliber of statesmen currently almost entirely absent — since it is the men at the helm who have, in the past, through error after error, servitude after servitude, folly after folly, transformed Lebanon from paradise into hell. But events often produce this kind of providential figure, provided they choose to demonstrate courage, self-abnegation, and a sense of the common good.

The battle underway is not about the defeat, victory, or survival of Hezbollah. No. To excise a metastasis from a body is to put the vital prognosis at risk. It is therefore the body — but also the soul — of Lebanon that is at stake before our eyes.

May the patient choose to hold on. And, should it survive with its physical integrity intact, may it not make a choice it will regret even more in the coming half-century.