When Sociology White Washes Hezbollah

There is a logic that reappears every time the question of Hezbollah’s weapons is raised. It tries to present the party not as an armed authority that has confiscated the decision of a sect and a country, but as the natural extension of Lebanon’s Shiite community — as though objecting to Hezbollah were an objection to Shiites themselves, and as though disarming it meant uprooting an entire community from its history, memory, and means of protection.

This logic is not only wrong. It is insulting.

It reduces Shiites to their fear. It turns their long history into a prelude to a rifle. It treats an entire community as though it cannot exist except inside the network of an armed party — as though Jabal Amel, Najaf, jurisprudence, reform, scholars, intellectuals, farmers, students, merchants, and all the Lebanese Shiite national experiences were nothing more than a preparation for Wilayat al-Faqih.

The truth is that Shiites did not begin with Hezbollah, and they will not end with it.

Before the party, there was a full history of knowledge, politics, society, moderation, representation, and demands for justice. There was Sayyed Mohsen al-Amin, Imam Musa al-Sadr, Sayyed Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine, Sayyed Hani Fahs. There was a Lebanese Shiite discourse that understood the meaning of the state, the meaning of partnership, and the meaning of dignity — a dignity that cannot be reduced to weapons outside institutions, cannot be measured by the number of rockets, and cannot be sold in the marketplace of regional axes.

Hezbollah benefited from fear, from the Israeli occupation, from the absence of the state, from long-standing marginalization, and from real wounds inflicted on the South, the Bekaa, and the southern suburbs. But benefiting from a wound does not give anyone the right to own the body.

What may have begun, at a certain moment, as an answer to fear gradually became a permanent system for fabricating fear. The party tells people: I protect you from danger. Then it makes its own existence a permanent reason for summoning danger. It says it protects the South, then turns the South into an open battlefield. It says it protects Shiites, then makes them pay the price of its wars, sanctions, alliances, and decisions in which they have no say.

As for the talk of hospitals, schools, loans, salaries, and services, it does not prove the legitimacy of the weapons. It exposes the scale of the catastrophe.

When a citizen needs a party in order to be born, to learn, to receive treatment, to borrow money, to work, and to bury his martyr, this is not a supportive environment as much as it is a structure of social captivity. Services do not grant the right to declare war. Assistance does not justify the confiscation of decision-making. A monthly salary does not turn a family into a false witness for the legitimacy of arms.

Mafias also provide protection. Totalitarian regimes also distribute bread. Gangs also know how to make people dependent on them.

But the question is not what such a power gives. The question is what it takes.

And Hezbollah has taken far more than it has given. It has taken the decision of war and peace. It has taken the right to dissent inside the Shiite community. It has taken the image of Shiites in Lebanon and the Arab world. It has taken religion and turned it into a mobilization machine. It has taken martyrdom and turned it into political capital. It has taken fear and transformed it into a long-term contract of submission.

The most dangerous thing Hezbollah has done is that it tied the fate of Shiites to its own fate. It made any pressure on it appear as pressure on them, any criticism of it appears as an insult to them, and any attempt to disarm it appear as a threat to their very existence.

This is not social genius. It is calculated political blackmail.

When the party places a hospital, a school, a loan, a salary, a martyr, and a rocket in the same chain, it is not building a normal society. It is building a large cage — a cage with many service doors, but one that does not allow free political exit.

Shiites have every right to ask: Who will protect us?

This is a legitimate question. It is a question that must not be dismissed, because the Lebanese state has failed them, as it has failed others, and because the South has paid a heavy price in occupation, wars, and destruction.

But a legitimate question must not be turned into an eternal answer in favor of a militia. “Who will protect us?” does not mean that weapons must remain forever outside the state. It does not mean that the decision of a community and a country should remain in the hands of an organization tied to a regional project. It does not mean that people should be forced to choose between the party and annihilation, between the state and slaughter, between Lebanon and Iran.

Protection is not achieved by making fear permanent.

Protection is achieved through a capable state, one army, one decision, borders that are not controlled by an organization, and a foreign policy that is not run from the southern suburbs or from Tehran. Protection means returning Shiites to the state, not convincing them that the state is impossible and that the party is their only destiny.

Those who say that the failure of the state justifies the survival of the militia are like those who say that the failure of a doctor justifies handing the patient over to a charlatan forever.

The memory used to justify the weapons is also an incomplete memory.

Yes, there is 1978, 1982, the Israeli occupation, and official abandonment. But there is another memory too: the wars at home, the suppression of independent Shiite voices, the accusations of treason against dissenters, the dragging of Lebanon into the 2006 war, the sending of young men to Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, the transformation of the South into a platform in a conflict its people do not decide, and the forcing of people to call defeat victory and ruin steadfastness.

No one has the right to speak in the name of Shiite memory while erasing from that memory everything the party has done to Shiites themselves. No one has the right to invoke the images of Israeli occupation in order to prevent questions about the party’s occupation of political decision-making. And no one has the right to turn old fear into a title deed over the future.

Shiites are bigger than Hezbollah.

The South and its villages are not a storage site for Iran’s rockets. The southern suburbs are not a barracks. The Bekaa is not a military corridor. Martyrdom is not a blank check in the hands of a party. Religion is not a party card. Deprivation is not an eternal license to confiscate the state. Memory is not a prison. Fear is not an identity.

What is required is not to leave Shiites without protection, but to liberate them from a false equation that tells them their protection can only come from the force that has confiscated their decision.

What is required is not to ignore their wounds, but to prevent the trading of these wounds.

What is required is not to deny that the state has failed, but to reject the transformation of that failure into a permanent mandate for an armed party. A state is built when it is reclaimed from militias, not when what remains of it is handed over to them.

The worst kind of defense of Shiites is the one that presents them as a community trapped inside a single fate, with no future except weapons, no security except the party, and no dignity except in a project whose decision they do not own.

This defense may appear, on the surface, to be sympathy. In essence, it is erasure. It does not see the Shiite as a free citizen, but as a frightened dependent who needs an armed guardian to explain to him the meaning of survival.

The truth is simpler than all this rhetoric: Hezbollah no longer protects Shiites from danger. It has become the danger from which it asks them to fear everything except itself.

And when protection becomes captivity, when victimhood becomes trade, and when weapons become destiny, the duty of speech is not to ask how to preserve this system, but how to liberate people from it.

A community that produced scholars, reformers, resistance figures, thinkers, and citizens must not be reduced to an organization, especially one that has failed morally before it ever did politically. People who paid the price of occupation, wars, and abandonment must not be asked to pay new prices so that the party may remain above the state.

Anyone who truly wants to do justice to Shiites should begin by recognizing that they belong to no one — not to a party, not to an axis, and not to a Supreme Leader.

Shiites are Lebanese citizens. Their protection lies in a state that protects them, not in a militia that uses their fear.

And their future lies in Lebanon, not in waiting for another war decided by others and paid for by them.