Articles

After a day marked by incendiary statements from all sides, the United States, through the voice of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, assured late Tuesday evening (Beirut time) that the offensive phase of the conflict with Iran was “over”. During a press conference at the White House, the US Secretary of State stated that Washington was now in a “defensive” phase, referring to the new operation announced by Donald Trump and dubbed “Project Liberty”. “Operation ‘Epic Fury’ is over, as the president signified to Congress. We have passed this stage,” he added. Marco Rubio clarified that this operation aimed to rescue the crews of ships stranded in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States will not open fire, but will retaliate “with deadly effectiveness” in the event of an attack.

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.

The disease afflicting the country is not solely the Hezbollah militia, although it constitutes the most significant challenge, nor is it other militias, armed groups in the Palestinian camps, the absence of sovereignty, or the perpetual corruption dating back to the Mutasarrifate (1862-1915). This disease, which is the erosion of the culture of the state and of the sovereign state, has infected and proliferated mentalities since the Syrian Ba'athist occupation. It was exacerbated later and became cancerous under Hezbollah's hegemony. For 21 years, Hezbollah, at every level of its hierarchy and wherever it is present within institutions, has relentlessly worked to shape mentalities and render them subservient, using these institutions as a socio-political and security shield for its own benefit. The state and its institutions are thus disfigured, and any official who does not adopt the rhetoric of "resistance" is labeled a traitor and a Zionist agent. Likewise, friendly countries where hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, naturalized or not, reside must be labeled enemies, and their representatives avoided or boycotted under threat of accusations of collusion with imperialism. According to this widespread culture, Lebanon should isolate itself from the Arab and Western worlds.

As the rhetoric of hatred and rancour deepens among Lebanese, questions multiply as to what can realistically be done to heal the political and media fracture that is taking root through social networks, now within everyone’s reach and allowing each citizen to voice an opinion (which is, in principle, a good thing) without exercising the minimum of self-censorship, with the result that communal and sectarian fanaticisms pour out freely, beyond any moral or political restraint. This social rift mirrors the vertical divide running through the country, a dangerous divide bound up with the major strategic choices that will define Lebanon’s identity and its regional role going forward, and that centres on such pivotal questions as how to confront Israel and its ongoing aggressions against Lebanon, and the issue of confining arms to the exclusive authority of the State, as prescribed by the Ta’if Agreement, under which all Lebanese militias had surrendered their weapons in the early 1990s, with the sole exception of Hezbollah, under the banner of the “Resistance.”

The week opened with a new diplomatic back-and-forth and a risk of military escalation between Iran and the United States. Washington stepped up its pressure on the Islamic Republic, which reacted by firing missiles at... the United Arab Emirates. At the heart of this new standoff is, once again, the strategic Strait of Hormuz, which the US Navy managed to unblock on Monday, to Tehran's great dismay, by escorting ships into Emirati territorial waters, which were quickly targeted by the Iranian army. According to various American media sources, the latest Iranian proposal submitted by Tehran for a resumption of talks with Washington was not too bad. But it did not really meet Donald Trump's expectations, especially regarding the nuclear issue, which the Iranians are seeking to postpone as much as possible, and the control exercised by Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, blocked since the beginning of the war.

Hezbollah, which for years made the entire country tremble with its weapons, its men and its threats, has now been reduced to smearing Maronite Patriarch Béchara Rahi through armies of anonymous accounts, false bravado and insults typed from behind a screen. Even the way they fall has become small. Why this rage? Because the Patriarch simply reminded them of something that has become unbearable: Lebanon belongs to the Lebanese. A simple sentence. A normal sentence. And yet they can no longer silence it. So they strike at thin air, like someone who feels the ground slipping beneath their feet. This is not a sign of strength. It is precisely the opposite. Movements that are sure of themselves do not need to send anonymous individuals to attack a man of the Church. When arguments are replaced by mud, it is because, deep down, one already knows that part of the battle is lost.