What Must Be Saved

Open letter to Joseph Aoun, Nawaf Salam and Nabih Berri

In truth, we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of the abyss

Democritus of Abdera

Messrs. Presidents,

To say that Lebanon finds itself today facing a new major existential crisis — the result of a malicious streptococcus, Hezbollah, which was not, or could not be, treated in time — borders on truism.

For what is unfolding today goes far beyond the familiar mechanics of Lebanese crises.

This is no longer about yet another reshuffling of confessional balances, nor even another sequence of the interminable proxy war that others have waged on our soil. What is wavering this time, more than ever, amid the din of the Israeli invasion and the collapse of the Iranian hegemonic project, is the very substrate of Greater Lebanon — that fragile, often betrayed, but irreplaceable idea that allowed antagonistic communities to cohabit, to clash violently, and, at times, to recognize one another. Which is, in the end, the lot of any couple learning to live together.

In its decompensatory escapade, Hezbollah is now finishing itself off — and, in doing so, finishing off Lebanon as well. Its strategic suicide — gnostic in its logic of self-immolation, imperial in its ambitions, sectarian in its vertigo — reveals not so much a military defeat as a profound ontological fracture. For a long time, Hezbollah claimed to embody a resistance, and its followers believed it. Yet it embodied, in the end, nothing but servitude — to Iran, its dreams of regional supremacy, its theocratic project exported into the veins of a Lebanon it bled to the bone. This pro-Iranian supremacism, from which the Shia component of Lebanese society has ultimately suffered the most, has chosen to consume itself — and no one can do anything about it.

But Hezbollah did not metastasize alone. It must be said plainly: the entire Lebanese political, social, and communal body did so alongside it, each in its own way, especially during the long years of Michel Aoun’s tenure, with its infinite turpitudes and its assumed vassalization to Tehran and to the logic of the alliance of minorities.

Messrs.,

Look at the state of the communities you de facto represent within the institutions, by virtue of your respective functions.

The Christians — even the most sovereignists among them, those who carried for decades the idea of a pluralist and independent Lebanon in the tradition of Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir — are today retreating into a defensive particularism. The federalist idea, long marginal, is gaining ground — as if, at the depths of despair, partition had become the only possibility of survival. This is a tragic regression on the part of those who were the pioneers of Greater Lebanon, the architects of the very idea of an institutionalized common life within a shared State. That they should desert it now constitutes a cultural defeat as much as a political one.

The Shia community, for its part, is traversing a distress of a depth that the triumphalist discourses of another age can no longer conceal. To have believed in the resistance, to have given it everything — sons, villages, decades — only to see it turn into a machine of regional domination in the service of a foreign power: this is an immense mourning, which few outside observers measure with the empathy it deserves. Lebanon’s Shia deserve infinitely better than what Hezbollah offered them: martyropathy. They deserve to survive this nightmare that has gone on far too long, without feeling crushed.

The Sunnis, for their part, are navigating a painful political void. Not that they have renounced Lebanon — far from it. But in the absence of reference figures and a unifying project, some are looking once again toward the Syria of Ahmad al-Sharaa and, beyond that, toward the Turkey of Erdoğan. This temptation is understandable in its genesis, yet it would be devastating in its effects. To dilute Lebanese sovereignty once more into a regional space that does not resemble it, in the name of a poorly defined civilizational solidarity, would be to repeat the Arab error of 1958 — under different flags, but with the same renunciation of self. The blood of Hassan Khaled and Rafik Hariri was not shed for nothing.

As for the Druze — a community viscerally rooted in the idea of Greater Lebanon, the one that has paid the blood price with the greatest constancy —, they find themselves confronted with a leadership rivalry whose certain manifestations, in the neighboring Hauran, are eyeing alliances that would have been utterly unimaginable a decade ago. No, the vertigo of the Zionist neighborhood is not an abstraction.

Messrs.,

This portrait is not that of a country dying all at once. It is that of a country disintegrating slowly, community by community, reflex by reflex, retreat by retreat — without the maps of the Levant being geographically redrawn, without even imploding in a visible paroxysm. It suffices for Lebanon to lose its national unity to disappear of its own accord, without its own function, engulfed by interests that surpass it — Israel, Syria, Turkey — and that have no reason to spare it if it no longer knows how to defend itself through the coherence of its project. We have almost always relied on others as a way of shedding our own responsibilities. It was more comfortable, easier. The calamitous result is plain to see — the country now reeks of carrion.

Yet, and this is what we wish to say here, contrary to received ideas that have long poisoned public debate, Greater Lebanon is not a burden inherited from French colonialism, nor some dhimmi artifice. It was conceived by its founding fathers — of all confessions — as a refuge, a guarantee, a space of pluralism in a Middle East that offered precious little of it. For the Christians, certainly. But also for the Druze, for the Shia whom geography and history had marginalized within the Ottoman space, for the Sunnis who wagered on liberal modernity against the temptations of a dissolving pan-Arabism. Greater Lebanon was, in its original vocation, a necessity for all.

Errors of governance, injustices in representation, regional ambitions incompatible with its size and nature, delirious ideologies imported from outside or manufactured within, and grandiose personal fantasies have seriously shaken the edifice. But a shaken edifice is not a condemned one — provided one has the courage to repair it rather than quarrel over its rubble.

The battle being waged today — against the arrogance of a collapsing Hezbollah and the infinite warmongering of the Israeli invader — goes beyond the question of the monopoly on legitimate violence or the halting of a destructive military offensive. These stakes are real and urgent. But the primary question is this: who are we, together? What does Lebanon wish to continue being, for itself and for its children?

Once again, in self-destructing, Hezbollah is annihilating Lebanon.

But Lebanon in general, and its Shia in particular, deserve to survive this nightmare that has gone on far too long.

You are three men, at the head of three institutions, that history has placed there, at this precise moment, to answer that question. Not to sidestep it. Not to defer it to some post-crisis future — for there will be no after without the work of the now.

That said, if this responsibility belongs to all without exception — for the problem is not strictly Shia — and if the Lebanese executive has sinned by lack of firmness toward Hezbollah since the end of the 2024 catastrophe, your responsibility, Mr. Berry, remains the greatest. You have always been ambivalent, pushing to the furthest limit the art of tightrope-walking to pull through and satisfy everyone — including yourself. But cunning has no place anymore.

For three decades, Lebanon has wagered on a historic stance from you that would unambiguously mark a Lebanese identity and a sense of statehood in relation to Hezbollah. Until now, that wager has proven perfectly futile. End your political career beautifully. You will not be betraying your community; you will be saving it, there where the eschatological sect is bleeding it dry. And with it, Lebanon.

Messrs.,

Of course, we do not ask you to agree on everything. Lebanese democracy, in what is most beautiful about it, has always fed on living disagreement.

What we call upon you to do is to speak with one voice on the essential: Greater Lebanon is truly worth saving. And its survival demands, from all, a partial renunciation of their particular calculations in favor of a common project — the only one worth having, the only one that endures, the only one that makes sense. Be clear. Be firm. Be responsible.

That the State is no longer afraid is very well. But it must no longer content itself with dissociating itself and proving that it exists independently of the para-state. It must act, firmly, making use of force itself to definitively bury the ghosts of 1969 and prevent the metastasis from metastasizing in turn into generalized neighborhood and regional quarrels. Contrary to appearances, internal conflagration will only be avoided if the State begins to exist, no longer accepting the fait accompli. It is not State action that would set the powder alight, but, on the contrary, its inaction.

The party’s secretary-general openly defies you and demonizes you? This sinister buffoonery has gone on long far too long. The weapons have destroyed everything. The penal code, and beyond it the Constitution, grant you the power to act decisively, even forcibly, without hesitation, before this furious madness carries off still more innocents. Otherwise, the price of an inevitable peace accord will be more costly to pay — if Israel consents, this time, not to de facto annex part of Lebanese territory. So let us avoid the capitulation, the humiliation, and the new permanent occupation into which Hezbollah is dragging us!

The only path to salvation is to restore the authority and prestige of the State once and for all. And this is said in a tone of measure and moderation, even of a weary voice… certainly not with ardor and enthusiasm…

Messrs.,

The Lebanese idea is beautiful. It is perhaps even the only truly original idea that this corner of the Levant has offered to political modernity: to live together without resembling one another, to recognize one another without dissolving into one another. So let us not spend another half-century mourning what we will not have known how to preserve for ourselves, for having failed to honour our political duties.

Please accept, Messrs. Presidents, the expression of my highest respect.

Michel HAJJI GEORGIOU