What Truth Is Naim Qassem Trying to Hide?

Every time Hezbollah faces a political, military, or popular crisis, its leaders return to the same lexicon: resistance, victory, sovereignty, the rejection of any tutelage. Heavy words, charged with strong emotion, yet losing more of their persuasive power among the Lebanese with each passing day, as the gap between the rhetoric and the reality keeps widening.

In his latest speech, Hezbollah's secretary general, Sheikh Naim Qassem, claimed that the Party remained faithful to the Taif Agreement and the Lebanese Constitution, that its weapons were aimed at Israel, and that it was facing projects of foreign allegiance and tutelage. A statement that appears coherent at first glance, but collapses the moment it meets the facts.

For politics is not what is said from podiums, but what is practiced on the ground. And the facts the Lebanese have lived through over the past decades bear no resemblance to the account Qassem presented; they are, instead, very nearly its exact opposite.

If Hezbollah remains faithful to the Taif Agreement, how then can one explain the persistence of a military force independent of the state, more than three decades after the agreement was signed?

The Taif Agreement was not a mere political settlement to end the civil war, but a project of state-building. The essence of that project can be stated in a few words: one state, one army, one authority holding the monopoly on weapons and on security and military decisions.

Has this been achieved?

The answer is one every Lebanese already knows.

A parallel authority to the state has emerged in Lebanon over the past decades — an authority possessing weapons, holding the decision, and capable of imposing political and military facts on the ground outside the constitutional institutions. And when the decision of war and peace escapes the Council of Ministers, the Parliament, and the Presidency, speaking of fidelity to Taif becomes closer to rewriting history than to describing reality.

The problem does not lie in the existence of a political disagreement over the role of the resistance or the future of the weapons; that debate is legitimate in itself. The problem lies in the pretense of presenting matters as though Lebanon had lived, throughout all these years, under the full application of Taif, when everyone knows that one of the chief causes of the Lebanese crisis was precisely this duality of power and decision.

As for the claim that the weapons are aimed solely at Israel, it is an assertion Lebanese memory can hardly take seriously.

The Lebanese have not forgotten the seventh of May. They have not forgotten the years of political intimidation during which the balance of power was imposed by weapons, or by their mere shadow. They have not forgotten that the simple existence of a military force outside the framework of the state was enough to overturn political balances, block constitutional deadlines, and impose conditions on governments, presidents, and parliaments.

Even when the weapons were not used directly, their mere presence remained a decisive factor in Lebanese political life.

And this is where the core of the problem lies.

Democracy cannot be established when a single party holds the capacity to impose its will by force, should it choose to. And a state does not deserve the name unless no political force knows that there exists, above the constitutional institutions, a higher decision still.

Then comes the talk of rejecting foreign tutelage.

This is where the paradox reaches its height.

For what tutelage has Hezbollah actually rejected, all these years? And what autonomy of decision is it speaking of?

For many years, the Party has never hidden its strategic bond with Iran. This was never an accusation leveled by its adversaries, but an acknowledged part of its own political literature. It has fought major regional battles, grounded in calculations that far exceed Lebanon's immediate interest.

It entered the Syrian war. It engaged in the region's conflicts. It tied Lebanon's fate to an entire regional axis. And it turned the country, whether the Lebanese wished it or not, into an element of the equations of conflict between Iran and its adversaries.

Today, as Qassem speaks of confronting tutelages, American-Iranian negotiations are underway over the region's files, Lebanon among them. And this fact alone is enough to expose the scale of the contradiction between the slogan and the reality.

Had the decision been purely Lebanese, the future of the weapons and of Lebanon's security and political role would not appear on the tables of regional and international negotiations.

And had the sovereignty they speak of truly existed, the Lebanese would not find themselves waiting, to learn the fate of their own country, for the outcome of arrangements concluded beyond their borders.

But perhaps what most deserves pausing over is the notion of “victory” that Hezbollah offers the Lebanese.

In Qassem's speech, as in those before it, holding on becomes victory, enduring becomes victory, and not collapsing entirely becomes victory.

By this equation, it becomes possible to declare victory under any circumstance.

But peoples do not measure victories this way.

Peoples measure victory by their standard of living, their security, their stability, by their children's capacity to remain in their own country, and by their state's capacity to protect their interests.

So what was the outcome, after so many years of these policies?

A collapsed economy.

A currency that has lost most of its value.

A bankrupt state.

Paralyzed institutions.

A mass exodus of the young and the skilled.

Growing Arab and international isolation.

And destroyed regions that will need years to rebuild.

Are these the signs of victory?

Or are they rather the signs of a deep national crisis that some are trying to wrap in slogans?

What is painful is that the Lebanese who paid the heaviest price no longer seek out speeches. The people of South Lebanon do not need more theories of victory so much as they need to rebuild their homes. Families who lost their children are not seeking political eloquence, but a rational explanation for the scale of what they have lost.

And the young people leaving Lebanon by the thousands are not asking about ideological speeches, but about a future that no longer exists in their own country.

This is why the language of repeated victories sounds, each day, more disconnected from the reality people live.

Hezbollah has grown accustomed to winning in the narrative even as it loses on the ground. But today it faces a different dilemma. For the facts have grown too vast to conceal, the costs too heavy to justify, and the questions too pressing to be silenced by slogans.

In the end, the Lebanese need no one to convince them whether what they lived through was victory or defeat. They already know it, from the details of their daily lives.

They know it when they stand before their bankrupt banks.

They know it when they search for work and find none.

They know it when they see their children off at the airports.

They know it when they wait for decisions made outside Lebanon to determine their country's future.

This is why the real question is no longer: did Hezbollah win, or did it not?

The question that imposes itself today is harsher still, and more essential:

If everything that happened over the past decades was victory, as Naim Qassem claims, what then would defeat have looked like?

This is precisely the question the keepers of slogans fear, for it is the question speeches cannot answer, flags cannot cover, and celebrations cannot hide.

It is the question of facts.

And facts, unlike speeches, do not lie.