Useful Enemy, Real Enemy

One should be grateful to Naïm Kassem for possessing neither the charisma, nor the eloquence, nor the virtù of his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah.

Over the years, and no doubt until his Syrian misstep, Nasrallah embodied in the Arab-Muslim mind a certain idea of intransigence in the face of Israel. His talents as a rhetorician had achieved a masterstroke — namely, making people forget that beneath his anti-imperialist harangues of «resistance», he himself constituted nothing less than the spearhead of an Iranian imperialist project, built on the blood of his Lebanese fellow citizens, from the Lebanese left to the pillars of March 14.

Yet there exists, in Hezbollah's rhetoric, an ambivalence so carefully maintained that it requires extraordinary feats of persuasion… and one must note that the smoke and mirrors no longer work with Kassem, whose appeal belongs more to the rigid doctrinaire than to the historic tribune.

Carl Schmitt had placed, at the very foundation of the political, the friend/enemy distinction as the sovereign act par excellence. In the German philosopher's view, he who draws the line decides, and he who decides is sovereign. Julien Freund, refining the idea, had added that no one has the luxury of choosing their enemies — it is the enemy who chooses you; and pretending to ignore this does not make him disappear, but simply disarms you in his face.

What neither Schmitt nor Freund had entirely anticipated is the perverse use that a sufficiently skilled political actor can make of such an axiom — exhibiting a substitute enemy in order to conceal the real one. All the more so when that actor is sufficiently shielded by the sacred that anyone who dares point to the substitution is immediately placed in the camp of traitors…

For what the rhetoric of Naïm Kassem reveals in the negative — what Nasrallah knew how to conceal beneath a learned blend of argument and literature — is that Israel is not Hezbollah's principal enemy. Israel is its daawa: in the Khaldunian sense used by Michel Seurat in L'État de barbarie — that is to say, the justification, the existential fuel.

The real enemy, the one the party has had in its sights since its foundation, is twofold and internal. First, the Shia community itself, which must be kept, by every means available, in an unconditional allegiance to the wilayat al-faqih, by smothering any dissent — Lebanese nationalist, democratic, or simply critical — within it. Then, the Lebanese state, which must not be destroyed — that would be too conspicuous, and functionally counterproductive — but invested, paralysed, colonised from within and drained of substance, in the name and on behalf of Tehran, until it becomes the legal vestment of a project of power that was never Lebanese.

The legitimate concealment of adversity is thus elevated into an offensive art of governance: Hezbollah declaring its wish to liberate Lebanon… while occupying it politically and militarily. It further claims to defend sovereignty while subordinating every strategic decision to Tehran. It summons the Lebanese people to unity while designating as traitors those who refuse to dissolve into it. And it brandishes Israel — with a particular talent for staging — as the curtain behind which the real drama is being played.

What makes the drama particularly formidable, moreover, is that the external enemy who justifies the daawa is not invented. Israel exists, conducts deadly raids, occupies portions of Lebanese territory, violates the November 27 agreement with documented brutality, and thereby furnishes Hezbollah with an inexhaustible alibi, renewed with each razed village. The legitimacy of resistance to Israeli aggression was not a fabrication. It is real, rooted in international law and in the collective memory of a people who genuinely suffered occupation — even if every trace of that past has been entirely and violently erased by Hezbollah since the late 1980s.

And this is precisely where the criminal sophistication of the device lies. Hezbollah did not manufacture this enemy out of thin air. It captured him, instrumentalised him, and rendered itself structurally dependent on his persistence (Tel Aviv too, for that matter — which is why the two have no doubt coexisted comfortably for so many years, before Iran became, for an Israel at peace with the Sunni Arab world, the elected adversary). Without Israeli aggression, the daawa collapses. Without the daawa, internal domination loses its semantic shield. From this perspective, peace with Israel would constitute a dual existential catastrophe. Hezbollah would find itself exposed on the domestic front, summoned to surrender its weapons, and bereft of any rhetoric justifying its control of territory and its martial conquest of the mulk — the centre of power, the state.

It is in this Gordian knot that President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam find themselves today, called upon to perform an altogether impossible feat. On one side, a Shia street — and beyond it, a Lebanese one — still wounded, still traversed by the legitimate fury of a community that Tel Aviv bombs relentlessly and indiscriminately. On the other, a domestic and international will to finally dissolve this abnormal para-state situation and restore to the Lebanese state the monopoly on legitimate violence it has never fully exercised since Taëf. These two pressures do not fail to obey different temporalities and incompatible emotional conjunctures. Anyone who attempts to reconcile them risks being accused simultaneously of complicity with the enemy and of betrayal of their own people. As necessary and fundamental as the restoration of the monopoly on legitimate violence is to the survival of the Lebanese state, the fact that it would come about under the constraint of a forced peace with Israel renders it deeply problematic.

The international community, in this context, cannot afford to lay the weight of its pressure on Lebanon's three political poles, as though they were the principal obstacles to normalisation. That would be to invert the burden of proof with culpable carelessness.

The restoration of Lebanese sovereignty requires two prior conditions that only coherent international pressure can create: that Tehran be compelled, once and for all, to relinquish its Beirut transmission belt, and that Israel be forced to rein in its destruction machine operating with complete impunity, thereby ceasing to furnish Hezbollah with the fuel of its perpetual legitimation. To demand that Nawaf Salam and Joseph Aoun — and indeed Nabih Berri — move forward without these two conditions being met is to ask them to walk on water; or, more precisely, to sign their own political, and possibly physical, death warrant.

For Naïm Kassem has more than words. Behind the ideological rhetoric and the metaphors of mythical resistance stands an organisation worthy of the Assassins, one that has demonstrated its capacity and its will to eliminate every obstacle to its hegemony. And the spectre of Sadat — assassinated for having dared chart a path toward peace that the guardians of eternal war could not tolerate — still haunts every prospect of reconciliation in the Middle East.

This is neither paranoia nor catastrophism. Simply the bitter reality of things. Need one recall that the Western powers, having incited the Siniora cabinet to take its historic decision regarding the dismantlement of Hezbollah's fixed telephone network on the road to Beirut airport in 2008, had only the smallest words of condemnation after the punitive expeditions of May 2008 against Beirut and the Lebanese Mountain? Does Donald Trump — whose power today rests on the uncertainty of the midterms — grasp the implications of what he is attempting to impose, in the current circumstances, on Joseph Aoun by forcing his hand to meet with Netanyahu? Beyond the incongruous, there is a recklessness and a frivolity driven solely by an obsession with appearances.

True courage today is not to demand bravado from the Lebanese authorities when they face a double enemy driven by the same mimetic objective: to subjugate them. It would rather be to support the Lebanese state practically, through a comprehensive plan across every domain, so that it may rebuild its institutions free from Hezbollah's grip. Even if this means a legitimate multinational force composed of friendly nations, tasked with maintaining civil peace and helping Lebanon's legal political and security forces — freed from Iranian hegemonic influence — to recover the sovereignty of the Lebanese state over its entire territory and lay the foundations of a political programme capable of restoring national unity.