Articles

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.

By imposing Mojtaba Khamenei as "Guide" to succeed his father, the Revolutionary Guards have brought to an end a regime whose very cornerstone was the categorical rejection of dynastic succession. The first directive issued by Mojtaba in the immediate wake of his accession to the office of "Guide" — the supreme and absolute authority of the "Islamic Republic" — is proof enough. The directive, which lays bare the Guards' appetite for escalation, reads as follows: “First: we grant the armed forces full and unconditional authorization to choose the time, place, and means appropriate for responding to any aggression threatening our national security.

This tenth day of the American-Israeli offensive against the Iranian mullahs' regime was marked by three highlights: the strong stance adopted by President Joseph Aoun, who severely condemned the behavior of Hezbollah, and furthermore declared himself in favor of direct negotiations with Israel under international supervision; the intense Israeli aerial bombardments against the southern suburbs of Beirut, specifically against the offices of Qard el-Hassan (Hezbollah's illegal financial structure); and the Parliament's vote to extend the mandate of deputies for a period of two years. This vote, which passed with a slim majority of 76 votes, is explained by the State's inability to organize the legislative elections that were supposed to take place in two months, next May. At the current stage, no one can predict the duration of the armed conflict initiated by Hezbollah on the local scene, especially since this new war, which is once again shaking Lebanon, is entirely dependent on the overall regional context.

To be or not to be. In this famous tirade, Shakespeare symbolizes life with its share of pain, injustice, and suffering, which we have endured for decades, but it also embodies death and suicide as a way out. If a fanatical splinter group has decided to take this path in the name of an obscurantist cause, the majority of Lebanese openly reject it. The Announced End of a Tyranny The signs are not deceiving. History teaches us this again and again. When a dictatorship such as that of the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards finds itself cornered, when danger looms, when the delusions and megalomania it long fed on for its survival crash against harsh reality, when the house of cards it painstakingly built for decades at any cost, in defiance of all moral and ethical consideration for a population it believes it holds under its yoke, collapses, when despair takes over and all indicators turn red, then blind fanaticism, furious hysteria, and kamikaze madness take over and prevail over reason.

They have precision missiles, but they have no blankets for the children. This is not an oversight or a logistical failure — it is a choice. Cement was not used to build shelters to protect families; it was used to dig tunnels to protect rockets. In this logic, a warhead holds strategic value, while a civilian is considered replaceable. You simply produce more. Demography becomes, in this way, a form of arsenal. And the suffering of those civilians is not a failure for those who run this system. On the contrary, it becomes a tool. A mother weeping in a school before the cameras of the entire world produces a powerful message that spreads on its own: look at what they are doing to us. What one rarely says is that the enemy did not destroy the shelters. There simply never were any.

The complex relationship between a segment of Lebanon's Shia community and Hezbollah cannot be grasped through conventional political analysis alone. It reaches beyond strategic calculations or immediate interests into a deeper realm — the cultural and symbolic architectures that shape how communities perceive themselves and inhabit the world. This is where the tools of sociology and anthropology become indispensable, particularly what Émile Durkheim offered us on the collective consciousness, and what Claude Lévi-Strauss illuminated about the deep cultural structures that organize how societies make sense of reality.