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With the eruption of the second Israeli-American-Iranian war, questions and observations crowd around this great conflict that will, beyond any doubt, reshape the face of the region and the world, leaving in its wake profound consequences for the future of the Middle East and the nature of its political relations. The following are perhaps the most significant observations: — It is clear that this war was not well prepared. Despite the elimination of the Supreme Leader, Iran's Defense Minister, and the supreme command in the very first hours, Iran's command-and-control architecture is equally clearly decentralized — as evidenced by the uninterrupted volleys of missiles fired in every direction. The inability of the United States and Israel to strike Iran's Second Strike Capability confirms this impression. The wager on a wave of protests sweeping across Iran has likewise failed and cannot be relied upon. Nor can one overlook the fact that the Iranian fighter operates from a religious doctrine in which martyrdom is not feared but sought as both goal and gain. — Alongside Iran's considerable losses, one cannot avert one's gaze from the fact that Iranian missiles have already destroyed all American military bases in the Gulf states, according to a striking report published by The New York Times — a fact that raises the serious and probing question of whether American immersion in this war truly serves "the national interest of the United States." Political commentary has multiplied, asserting that Israel has "entangled" Washington in this battle, informing it of its decision to go to war rather than seeking American approval, as previous Israeli governments habitually did before launching any military operation. This glissement, in turn, raises questions about Trump's pledge to stop all wars and his boast of having ended at least eight of them. — There is no political or legal cover for this war, neither at the international level — with a deliberate bypassing of the United Nations and all its bodies — nor at the domestic American level, President Donald Trump having entirely circumvented Congress without seeking its approval, disregarding America's political institutions and its Constitution. — The debate within the United States is widening over the true objectives of the war and whether Iran genuinely poses a threat to American national security. Tehran has long raised the banner of "Death to America" and stands accused of numerous attacks against American forces — that much is true. But the serious discussion turns on whether Iran actually threatens American domestic security, and whether going to war is the optimal response to the challenge it represents. This debate returns, inevitably, to Israel: the threat is aimed at Israel, not America, and it is Israel that has drawn the United States into this conflict. Washington is paying a far higher price than Israel itself. — Iran's bombardment of the Gulf states ought to impel the United States to think deeply about its ramifications, and to make an unavoidable comparison: the Gulf states contribute to the American economy through arms and non-arms deals worth billions of dollars, while Israel has cost Washington tens of billions of dollars annually since the Nakba of 1948. Is there not a growing American sense that Israel has become more of a "strategic burden" than a genuine "strategic ally"? It is a serious political debate circulating in many American circles. Whatever the case may be, the region is open to every possibility. Israel's ambition to dominate the region and bite off its lands one by one may prove no easy task, given the sweeping transformations now unfolding across the Middle East. Its policy — built on the refusal to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, on the perpetuation of the occupation of the 1967 lands, on decades of complete indifference toward every peace initiative, and on the rejection of every proposed solution — cannot endure forever. Who said that Arab acceptance — and non-Arab acceptance — of Israel's total dominion over the region would come within easy reach, even if Arab performance over the past decades has been disappointing and inadequate in confronting the mounting challenges posed by the Israeli project at each of its stages — from the establishment of the Zionist state on the lands of historical Palestine, to the progressive encroachment on other Arab lands, to the refusal to establish an independent Palestinian state, to the prevention of refugee return or any understanding on arrangements for Jerusalem, up to the collapse of every political and moral barrier in the recent war on Gaza, where the number of martyrs has approached seventy thousand civilians and innocents? The region has entered a painful labor, and emerging from this war will be far harder than entering it. The events to come will bear witness to that.

Conflict is the father of all things, the king of all things. Heraclitus Now that Hezbollah has set its mind on avenging the assassination of Ali Khamenei, many Lebanese appear to be discovering both the party’s dependence on Tehran and its frankly suicidal disposition. To have believed that a possible “Lebanonization” — some measure of moderation — was genuinely within reach was to have ignored the very nature of the party: a paramilitary organization emanating from, and directly commanded by, the Revolutionary Guards and the wali al-faqih ; and, above all, a Gnostic millenarian sect animated by a mystique of violence. An esoteric militia, in other words — akin to the Ismaili Assassins of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries — whose entire universe is collapsing at this very moment… and which will no doubt persist in denying its own demise until its very last breath. Destruction is precisely where everything begins and where everything ends. Such is the engine of history, Hezbollah-style. From the twin bombings that inaugurated its existence in 1983, through the assassinations of public figures and the militia expeditions of the 2000s and 2010s across Lebanon and Syria, violence — intrinsic to its millenarian revolutionary identity and its hegemonic project — has presided over the entirety of its trajectory. But since the cursed operation of October 7, 2023, history has taken on the quality of a tragic acceleration for the Hezb, with a boomerang effect to boot. Its war in support of Gaza cost it its entire military directorate, as well as the assassination of its totemic figure, Hassan Nasrallah — leaving it more vulnerable than it had ever been, to the point of finding itself confronted by a proactive local and international will to disarm it. Yet it continued to posture, muffling the signs of its — impossible! — decline. And then, on the twenty-eighth of February 2026, Iran itself — the vibrant heart of the party’s spiritual and political world — finds itself in the crosshairs. The unthinkable happens, and immediately: Khamenei is killed — Khamenei, the wali al-faqih in person, the Supreme Guide, the substitute imam, the divinely authorized presence in the political order of the world, the one whom Hezbollah had erected as the transcendent guarantor of its own existence… And with him, the senior cadres of the Pasdaran, the theological and praetorian corps of the empire, the armed arm and doctrinal brain of the Khomeinist revolution for forty years. An unprecedented traumatic shock. And what does Hezbollah do in response to catastrophe? It “chooses” — obedience compels it — precisely to lunge forward, and opens hostilities, as in 2024, as though every disaster called for a higher stake, and as though annihilation were never anything but a new trial on the road to Malakūt , that intermediate world… Hezbollah thus exposes, by ideology and by hierarchical discipline, all of its territories to massive Israeli reprisals. Tel Aviv orders the Lebanese to evacuate South Lebanon entirely as far as the Litani, along with certain villages in the western Beqaa and, above all, the southern suburbs of Beirut — the symbolic bastion of militant Shiism in the Arab hemisphere. The machinery of destruction is once again set in motion. A second invasion of the South has begun. The revolutionary heartland is being progressively reduced to rubble. There is in this something that exceeds mere strategic or military defeat — something that resembles the most irrefutable refutation a system of belief can endure in human time. And yet this system holds, sufficiently to reproduce sacrifice once more and to produce martyrs at the very moment when the cause for which they die has been objectively reduced to dust. The reason for this phenomenon belongs more to the domain of the sociology of the sacred — or indeed to the psychoanalysis of institutions — than to geopolitics: how can a movement survive the refutation of its own world? By what mechanism does invulnerability persist in the face of the glaring evidence of vulnerability? And above all — is this invulnerability a matter of calculation, of propaganda, of conscious manipulation, or is it sincere, deep, and structural, inscribed into the very architecture of belief? The answer is clear: Hezbollah has believed, and believes still, in the very midst of disaster, in its own invincibility — sustained, moreover, by the contagious megalomania of its superiors in Iran. And it is precisely for this reason that the tragedy is so immense for Lebanon — and more particularly for the Shiite community — who have been paying the price of this delusion of grandeur for more than three decades. A Time That Knows No Defeat Hezbollah’s suicide was inscribed in its genes from the very beginning. Its political battle was never “material,” in that sense. It always aimed at something deeper, of a conceptual and imaginary order — beyond institutions and power structures: the representations themselves of time, justice, and reality. What Iran and Hezbollah have always sought to overturn is not so much the mulk al-siyassi , the domain of power — even if that appeared to be the manifest stake — as time itself: chronological, rational, historical, Western time, the time that measures victories and defeats, that dates events and inscribes them in a causal chain. The time that is heir to Hegel and the philosophy of history. That time, Hezbollah wished to control in order to abolish it, or at least to suspend it — and to substitute for it another time: the time of Malakūt . But what is Malakūt ? It is the intermediate world in esoteric Islamic cosmology — the isthmus between the sensible and the pure intelligible, the barzakh of the soul and of the event — what Henry Corbin, following Sohravardi, called the zaman al-latif : the subtle time, the time between times , outside all calendars and outside all history. The true locus of every Great Event. For Sohravardi, the theorist of the Ishraq, of the philosophy of illumination, the inner dawn of the Orient reveals the vanity of Western sensible reality — which he names “the trap, the fiction.” It is in Malakūt that the hidden imam, the Mahdi, abides in his Occultation, awaiting the moment of his return. It is there that the true event unfolds — the one unmeasurable by historians, the one the enemy can neither see, nor comprehend, nor reach. Hezbollah lives in that time. Not metaphorically. Ontologically. It has no use for losses and gains tallied in kilometers or in the bodies of senior officers. Its calendar is eschatological, and every event is reread in the light of Karbala — the founding martyrdom of 680 AD that transformed, once and for all in the Shiite memory, the most crushing military defeat into absolute spiritual victory. Consequently, in the mental universe of Hezbollah, nothing is truly what it appears to be. To lose is not truly to lose, but to fulfill; to die is not to die, but to bear witness; and, above all, to be annihilated is not to be annihilated, but to be purified in preparation for the imminent return. This is why the death of Khamenei, the destruction of the southern suburbs, and the collapse of the axis of resistance do not constitute, in Hezbollah’s internal logic, arguments against its own legitimacy. They constitute, on the contrary, its most blazing confirmation. The imam is not dead. He is more hidden still. And he will return — beyond violence, destruction, and chaos — through this very medium, even. It is the promise of eternal return and of victory over material life through martyrdom. Gnosis as Armor: What the Enemy Cannot See To understand the psychic architecture of this invulnerability, one must return to the sources with Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, whose works on original Shiism constitute without doubt the most rigorous excavation ever undertaken in the foundational strata of this esoteric Islam. What he demonstrates, from the fundamental sacred texts composed between the ninth and tenth centuries, is that the figure of the imam was not, from the beginning, that of a political or even spiritual guide in the ordinary sense. The imam of the earliest Shiite communities is a master of wisdom, clothed in occult and magical powers — the alpha and omega of teaching and the earthly manifestation of the hidden God. Wilaya — devotion to this imam — is the indispensable foundation of Shiite faith. A religion deprived of wilaya is mutilated in what it has that is essential; it is nothing more than an empty shell. One thus better understands the speed with which the Iranian Assembly of Experts seeks to replace Khamenei. Without the wali al-faqih , reality is suspended, null and void. This Gnostic substrate — for it is one, nourished by the esoteric currents of late Antiquity circulating in the Sassanid-Mesopotamian space, a syncretic amalgam of Docetism, Manichaeism, and Hermeticism that irrigated nascent Shiite Islam — bears a direct consequence for the construction of the movement’s collective identity. The true Shiite believer possesses an ʿilm bātin: a science of hidden realities, an inner knowledge inaccessible to the adversary. He sees what the other cannot see. He knows what the other cannot know. He is, by definition, beyond visible history — in that space between worlds where the true truth, the truth of Malakūt , alone resides. The doctrine of wilayat al-faqih forged by Khomeini is the political transposition of this gnosis. By proclaiming that the Iranian Supreme Guide is the temporary representative of the hidden imam — his lieutenant in the sensible world — Khomeini was not merely legitimizing a theocracy: he was transferring onto a political institution the ontological invulnerability proper to the imam. To attack Hezbollah thus becomes, by definition, an offense against the divine — what Hassan Nasrallah repeated word for word, refusing to acknowledge the distinction that even the great Shiite reference authorities in Lebanon, such as Mohammad Mahdi Chamseddine or Mohammad Hassan al-Amine, had always maintained between a debatable juridical doctrine and an intangible religious creed. Khomeini had created a mental universe in which politics and the sacred had fused to the point of indiscernibility — and in which he was the absolute demiurge, master of the temporal and the spiritual. What occurred in 2024 — with the systematic neutralization of Hezbollah’s structures by Israeli intelligence, the penetration of encrypted communications, the simultaneous explosion of pagers, the elimination of Nasrallah in a bunker believed to be impenetrable — can be read, in this light, as something more than a tactical victory. It is a Gnostic violation of unprecedented existential depth. What was, by doctrinal definition, to remain invisible — the underground network, the secret caches, the chain of command, the hidden knowledge — was seen. Symbolically, the enemy had penetrated Malakūt . The ontological armor had been pierced. And this wound is without doubt more shattering, for a movement built on the irreducibility of the bātin , than any military defeat. It is perhaps this wound, more than any territorial or human loss, that explains the decision of March 2026 following the inconceivable disappearance of the Guide: an eschatological forward flight — the last recourse of a belief system that unhesitatingly prefers annihilation to revision. Martyropathy: The Spiral That Devours Its Own Ashes The Iranian sociologist and anthropologist Farhad Khosrokhavar — specialist in Islamism — forged, in his works on contemporary Islamic martyrology, a concept whose relevance to reading these years seems almost cruelly precise, and which fits Hezbollah and its universe to perfection: martyropathy. The term does not merely designate the valorization of martyrdom in a culture or a doctrine. Martyropathy is a psychic and collective economy in which death is the primary engine — the organizing structure of action and of existence. In accomplished martyropathy, the movement no longer accepts defeat, because it has transformed defeat into a positive spiritual category. It is the failure of jihad, says Khosrokhavar, that guarantees the legitimacy of martyrdom. The martyr’s death does not close a lost battle; on the contrary, it retrospectively founds it as holy, just, and necessary. Original Shiism carried within itself a quietist dolorism — a melancholy meditation on the mourning of Karbala — which nothing necessarily invited toward political mobilization. It was Khomeini — and before him Ali Shariati, the ideologist of the Islamic cultural revolution — who effected the decisive transmutation: converting this dolorism into a mobilizing force, transforming the memory of martyrdom into a program of action, and making voluntary death not the heroic exception but the structuring norm of resistance. The result is a spiral that Khosrokhavar describes in terms that borrow as much from psychoanalysis as from sociology: the more martyrs fight against the enemy, the more they prove through that very struggle the enemy’s superiority — and the more they must redouble their sacrifices to compensate for that proof. Martyropathy feeds upon itself. It is irrefutable by construction, because it has integrated defeat into its own logic as confirmation. There is something here that, seen from outside, resembles madness — but which, seen from within, possesses a formidable coherence. Formidable and — one must say it plainly — clinically identifiable. Psychoanalysts recognize in structures marked by defensive omnipotence the recourse to a fantasized all-powerfulness, rigid and compulsive, serving to ward off an anxiety of annihilation that the subject — individual or collective — cannot consciously tolerate. The ego that cannot bear the representation of its own vulnerability produces a compensatory conviction of invulnerability — which becomes all the more inflexible as the real vulnerability is great. Transposed to the scale of an institution, this structure becomes doctrine, ritual, an entire symbolic architecture — as attested by the place of the martyr’s body in Hezbollah’s culture: unwashed according to ordinary rite, already sanctified before death, a direct passage toward the divine presence, a body that is not a defeated body but an accomplished one. This world in which one cannot lose, Hezbollah has built stone by stone over forty years. And when the real world presented its accounts, the latter was simply declared illusory. The problem is that the bombs do not know they are falling on a fiction. Or perhaps they do. After all, do they not come from another delirium of omnipotence that founds its legitimacy on a word allegedly given by God to Abraham nearly four thousand years ago…? One can almost hear the posthumous sighs of René Girard confronting this mimetic violence — founded on an esoteric mythology to underwrite an essentialist, integralist political project upon the bodies of all those who do not belong to the “chosen”… And the inevitable, apocalyptic escalation to extremes that follows… The Irresistible Totalitarian Temptation In The Origins of Totalitarianism , Hannah Arendt describes something she called the logic of an idea — an idea that detaches itself from its ordinary relationship with the real and ceases to be a tool of understanding in order to become a closed world, impermeable to whatever refutations experience might offer, because it has developed its own internal logic that integrates every event as confirmation. This ideology is not simply false — a simple error can be corrected: it is structured to be incapable of correction. And its central axiom is not, as in ordinary nihilism, that everything is permitted — but, far more dangerously, that everything is possible: that nothing in the course of human events can obstruct the free deployment of the superior laws to which the Movement obeys. By way of example: the laws of Race under Hitler; the laws of History under Stalin… or, one might say, the laws of God and of the occult imam under Khomeini and his heirs… What strikes one in Arendt’s analysis is the impossibility for such a movement to stop. A totalitarian movement that were to halt on a given territory, accept the limits of a stable regime, and recognize a fixed hierarchy and structures, would betray itself — because it would cease to be a movement and become an institution. Now, an institution can lose; a movement inhabited by the superior laws of the universe cannot. This is precisely what explains why Hezbollah — of which everyone, in informed circles, knew in October 2023 that it was not ready for total war — nonetheless chose to enter it, and did so again in March 2026. No doubt, once again, there is a part of calculation responding to stakes specific to Iranian regional strategy, as in 2006 and 2024 — and Tehran, as always, gave the signal to its hired swords to rush toward martyrdom. But to abstain would also have been to admit that there exist situations in which political prudence overrides divine law. Such an admission, in the Hezbollah psyche, is simply unthinkable. More than the instrument of a regime that seeks to maintain itself, terror — in the Arendtian system — constitutes the essence, the very law governing the conduct of men when the possibility of free and spontaneous action has been structurally eradicated. In an organization governed by wilayat al-faqih , there is no political space in which a cadre could stand and say: we are losing, Lebanon is dying, let us change course. That space has been suppressed doctrinally — because the doctrine itself has rendered it unthinkable. There is no course to change when one obeys the laws of the hidden imam; only to advance — until annihilation, which will be experienced within the framework of Malakūt as the fulfillment of the divine promise. Terror, in that sense, ends by turning against those who exercise it as much as against those who endure it. It eliminates individuals for the good of the Cause. It sacrifices Lebanon for the good of the Revolution. And it does so with an absolute clear conscience — because real Lebanon, that plural, fragmented country irreducible to any single project, is merely a platform, a deployment territory within a wider space: that of the Iranian empire. It is not, has never been, and will never be an end in itself. Lebanon as a Sacrificed Object One must now pose the most difficult question — the one that truly preoccupies the Lebanese: why has Hezbollah been able to lead this country to the abyss, at least three times, without this producing in it the slightest questioning of its own legitimacy? The answer is not cynical, even if cynicism would be tempting — even if the temptation is great to reduce this history to a calculated manipulation of a community by its leaders. The answer is structural, and thereby far more troubling. Lebanon as it has been constructed — in its pluralism, its contradictions, its refusal to be defined by a single identity, its vertiginous relationship to West and East that makes its singularity in the region — this Lebanon is ontologically incompatible with the logic of “Malakūt on earth” that Hezbollah wishes to impose. A country that negotiates, compromises, admits the pluralism of truth, recognizes that justice can be a universal secular value, that the West is not incarnate Evil, that international justice is a legitimate power and not an emanation of the infernal machine of modern times — such a country contradicts, at every instant, the phantasmatic image Hezbollah holds of it, steeped as that image is in syncretic mystical philosophy and Iranian-style Islamic revolution. Once again, the gradual coup conducted by Hezbollah from 2005–2006 onward aimed not only at reducing bodies to impotence, but the soul and thought as well. What the Hezb and its ideologue Naïm Qassem wished — following Sohravardi turned political program — was to make the inner dawn of the Orient triumph over the sensible reality of the West, perceived as trap and fiction. What was aimed for was a definitive exit from the Lebanese exile — the exile of Western values and rationality — to recover what they consider the pure vision of the Orient. What was aimed for was Malakūt . And Malakūt leaves no room, by definition, for what Lebanon has that is irreducibly its own. There is in this story a double bind of tragic perversity. For forty years, Hezbollah presented its armed presence as the only protection of Lebanon against the external enemy. But the external enemy was partly summoned, maintained, at times deliberately provoked — through the firing on Galilee, through support for Gaza, through participation in the regional wars of the axis of resistance — to justify and perpetuate this domination. This is the structure of the perfect, inescapable double bind: Hezbollah protects Lebanon from the war it has itself made inevitable. And when the war arrives — in 2006, in 2024, in 2026 — it simultaneously proves the necessity of its armed presence and its absolute indifference to the fate of the country it claims to defend. Once again: Lebanon is perfectly expendable. What the Hezb Leaves Behind In March 2026, the revolutionary heartland is being reduced to ashes, and the delirium of invulnerability has no more hearth. The substitute imam is dead. The corps of the Pasdaran has been decapitated. The southern suburbs burn for the second time. The South is invaded for the third. The mass displacement of the population has the authentic appearance of a deportation. And yet Hezbollah continues — because a movement built on martyropathy and totalitarian logic cannot stop, does not know how to stop. Because to stop would be to admit that its entire psychic edifice is a delusion, that the zaman al-latif has not suspended the time of bombs, and that the laws of the hidden imam are worth no more, in the world of facts, than the laws of physics and of war. There is in this moment something of an absolute refutation — and yet martyropathy cannot recognize it. So it transforms it, ingesting it as fuel for the next sacrifice. This, precisely, is the lucid madness of the Movement — this lucidity turned against itself, the capacity to see defeat and to metabolize it instantaneously as confirmation of the truth one is defending. Sohravardi — whom one must perhaps wrest once and for all from the hands of those who have made his philosophy a manual for violent revolution — said that the inner dawn triumphs not through force of arms but through illumination: that light which traverses forms without destroying them. But it is not that Sohravardi — relayed by the Islamologist Henry Corbin — that Khomeini retained. And it is certainly not the one that Hezbollah has put into practice. Yet it is perhaps, in the rubble of this catastrophic spring, the only one who can still say something useful to those who survive. The question that will have to be asked, once the desolation has passed, is whether something can be born in these ruins that is not a new version of the same delirium — a martyropathy of defeat calling for a martyropathy of vengeance calling for a martyropathy of the vengeance of vengeance — infinitely, until there is nothing left to destroy in Lebanon. Whether human communities, laid bare by catastrophe, can find the path to a narrative founded no longer on fantasized invulnerability but on recognized vulnerability. Whether this country — this country whose fragile and magnificent vocation is to be irreducible to nothing: neither to the Orient nor to the West, neither to Islam nor to Christianity, neither to resistance nor to collaboration, neither to the Malakūt-on-earth as fantasized by the Hezb, nor to modernity, but to itself, to its own irreducible complexity — whether this country can survive what one has wished to make of it: the territory of an absolute that was not its own. Hezbollah’s earthly Malakūt is in ruins. Where is the promised victory — other than in misery and destruction? How does one deprogram and return to reality men who wish to remain in psychosis? The Hezb’s invincibility is no more — and it will no doubt never have been anything more than the result of others’ fallibility: a metastasis born of the feebleness of the Lebanese state and the self-preservation instinct of a political elite too preoccupied with its own interests and endemic corruption to look the monster in the eye. Who within this elite will have the intelligence, the courage — and the know-how — to extend a hand, once the Nakba is over, to the civilian victims of the Hezb’s fantasies, to take them in their arms and hold them close, to break the obsessive mechanism of violence — in a fundamental gesture of reconciliation with the spirit and being of Lebanon? An anti-hallali gesture par excellence, aimed at breaking the curse of the ihbāt — that mixture of frustration, psychic collapse, Edenic fall, and existential despair that has irredeemably struck, one by one, each Lebanese community in the aftermath of the collapse of its hegemonic and supremacist delusion? For that, political alternatives are needed — and men. We are still desperately seeking them. References Amir-Moezzi, Mohammad Ali — Le Guide divin dans le shīʿisme originel (Verdier, 1992); La Religion discrète (Vrin, 2006); Qu’est-ce que le shīʿisme? (with Ch. Jambet, Fayard, 2004) Arendt, Hannah — The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt); The Nature of Totalitarianism (Payot) Corbin, Henry — En Islam iranien (Gallimard, 4 vols.); Corps spirituel et Terre céleste (Buchet-Chastel) Khosrokhavar, Farhad — L’Islamisme et la Mort (L’Harmattan, 1995); Les Nouveaux martyrs d’Allah (Flammarion, 2002) Sohravardi — L’Archange empourpré (trans. H. Corbin, Fayard, 1976)

The Lebanese government undertook intensive diplomatic activity on Friday, March 6, in an attempt to put an end to the rampant degradation shaking the country, following the reopening of the South Lebanon front by Hezbollah, on the night of the 1 st to March 2, disregarding all warnings addressed to Lebanon on this plan in recent weeks. Faced with this new suicidal adventure by the formation allied with the Pasdaran, the paramilitary and security activities of the pro-Iranian party were banned on Monday by the government of Nawaf Salam. But Hezbollah remains completely deaf to official injunctions and remains deeply engaged, under instruction from the Islamic Republic of Iran, in a regional war to which Lebanon is completely foreign. The outcome of the standoff between the state and Hezbollah will be decisive for the fate of a Lebanon that has been living, since Thursday, under the threat of an intensification of raids carried out by Tel Aviv against several regions of the country, in retaliation for the pro-Iranian group's attacks against northern Israel. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who received Western and Arab ambassadors accredited to Beirut on Friday morning, reaffirmed his government's determination to hold the decision of war and peace and to implement its decision to impose a monopoly on weapons. He outlined the official measures taken for this purpose and asked them to request their respective governments to intervene with Israel to spare civilian infrastructure in particular, insisting that Lebanon was drawn into this war against its will. While tens of thousands of displaced people from South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of the capital remain homeless, after being ordered by Israel on Thursday to evacuate the areas where they live, Nawaf Salam warned his interlocutors of the seriousness of «the humanitarian catastrophe» looming on the horizon. At the same time, Lebanese Foreign Minister Joe Raggi undertook intensive diplomatic contacts to try to curb a potential large-scale Israeli offensive. Meanwhile, an unofficial Hezbollah spokesman, Jaafari Mufti Ahmad Kabalan, implicitly criticized the state for «its defeatism», calling on it to «assume its national responsibilities» in the face of the war with Israel. A French project In this context, the pan-Arab channel Al-Hadath reported on Friday morning information according to which France transmitted to Lebanon a definitive solution project based on the following points: Hezbollah's announcement that it ceases combat and lays down its arms; deployment of the army in the southern suburbs and in Hezbollah strongholds in the South and in the Bekaa to seize the formation's weapons within a maximum of two weeks; the weapon collection operation would be carried out under the supervision of the United States; the Lebanese state would officially announce that it is prepared to enter into peace negotiations with Israel. According to the pan-Arab channel, Tel Aviv has given the Lebanese authorities until the end of the week to respond to this solution project, failing which attacks against Hezbollah would be intensified. However, sources from the pro-Iranian formation, quoted by Al-Hadath channel, affirm that Hezbollah «will react to any descent of the Lebanese army into its arms caches, as if it were an Israeli attack». Israeli pressure remains strong On the Israeli side, military pressure remains strong. Israeli air forces, which carried out a series of violent raids against the southern suburbs and several regions of the Bekaa and the south of the country on Thursday night to Friday, targeted the predominantly Sunni city of Saida and the Dahr el-Baydar international highway on Friday. These strikes killed four people in Saida, where Hamas leaders were targeted. Hezbollah had previously launched several rocket barrages against northern Israel. Faced with this scenario, will official Lebanon succeed in withdrawing the country from a catastrophe made inevitable by Hezbollah's excessive vassalage to Tehran? The outcome of the race against time in which the authorities are engaged remains uncertain. Through its Defense Minister, Tel Aviv announced that it would continue its military operation in Lebanon «until the battle with Hezbollah is decided». In other words, until Iran is brought to its knees. According to Israeli media, citing army officers, Tel Aviv has noted a decrease in the frequency of ballistic missile launches against Israeli territory. «That's a good thing, but we shouldn't be satisfied with it. A lot of work remains to be done,» an Israeli security official was quoted as saying by Kan. US President Donald Trump also expressed satisfaction with the progress of the military offensive against Iran, believing it was going «better than initially planned. According to him, the operation should still last «a few weeks», despite internal opposition in the United States to the war against Iran. However, the majority in the Senate and House of Representatives remains favorable to this war, as shown by Thursday's vote. The US House of Representatives thus rejected a draft resolution aimed at limiting President Trump's powers and preventing him from continuing the war against Iran without congressional approval.

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

In his latest address, Naim Qassem attempted to present Hezbollah’s decision to launch rockets and widen the war as a reluctant act of defense forced upon it by Israeli violations. According to his account, Hezbollah exercised patience for fifteen months after the November 2024 ceasefire, allowed diplomacy to run its course, and finally acted only when it became clear that Israel would not stop violating Lebanon’s sovereignty. This argument does not deserve to be debated seriously, because it is built on a lie. Qassem is not mistaken, misinformed, or presenting an alternative interpretation of events. He is lying. The facts are neither complicated nor ambiguous, and the timeline itself exposes the dishonesty of his claim. Hezbollah did not suddenly discover Israel’s violations after fifteen months of silence, nor did it decide that Lebanese sovereignty had finally reached a breaking point. The organization chose its moment very carefully, and it did so immediately after the killing of Ali Khamenei. That timing alone is enough to dismantle the entire narrative. If Hezbollah’s war was truly about Lebanon, then it should have begun long before now. Qassem himself spent a considerable portion of his speech listing thousands of alleged Israeli violations during the past year—airspace incursions, border attacks, property destruction, and civilian casualties. By his own logic, these violations were severe and constant. Yet despite this supposedly unbearable situation, Hezbollah repeatedly insisted that it would remain patient and that the Lebanese state should pursue diplomacy. For fifteen months, Hezbollah waited. Then suddenly, after Iran’s supreme leader was killed, rockets were launched from southern Lebanon and the country was dragged once again to the edge of war. Qassem would like the Lebanese public to believe that this sequence of events is purely coincidental, that Hezbollah simply reached the limit of its patience at exactly the same moment that Iran’s leadership was struck. No serious observer can accept such a claim. Hezbollah did not act because Lebanese sovereignty was violated; it acted because Iran was hit. The organization’s leadership may try to wrap this decision in the language of resistance, martyrdom, and national defense, but the underlying reality remains unchanged. Hezbollah’s strategic compass does not point toward Beirut. It points toward Tehran. In fact, Qassem himself inadvertently revealed the truth when he referred to the targeting of Khamenei during the speech as part of the context of the confrontation. That reference was not accidental. It exposed the emotional and ideological center of Hezbollah’s reaction. When Iran’s leadership was attacked, Hezbollah felt compelled to respond—not as a Lebanese political actor defending a national interest, but as a loyal component of Iran’s regional axis. This is why engaging Qassem’s speech as if it were a legitimate political argument misses the point. The speech was not an honest attempt to explain events; it was an attempt to conceal them. Hezbollah’s leadership understands perfectly well that openly admitting the real reason behind its escalation would expose the extent to which Lebanon is treated as a battlefield for someone else’s war. The behavior of Hezbollah’s leadership today resembles something far less noble than the heroic image it attempts to project. What remains of the organization’s leadership increasingly resembles a group of arsonists who enjoy lighting fires across Lebanon, fully aware that it is the homes of ordinary Lebanese that will burn first. They ignite wars, celebrate sacrifice, and invoke martyrdom from the safety of political speeches, while the destruction spreads through villages and neighborhoods that never chose this confrontation in the first place. Their reaction to the killing of Iran’s supreme leader reveals this mentality with unsettling clarity. Instead of treating the moment with restraint, Hezbollah rushed to demonstrate loyalty through escalation, effectively turning Lebanon into a symbolic arena for mourning and revenge. In doing so, they asked Lebanese civilians to pay the price for the death of a man who spent his life ruling Iran through repression and exporting violence across the region. Ali Khamenei did not defend Lebanon, did not answer to the Lebanese people, and did not sacrifice anything for the country whose territory Hezbollah now places on the frontline of retaliation. Yet Hezbollah’s leadership expects Lebanese citizens to accept this war as if it were their own. The contradiction is glaring. Qassem speaks endlessly about sovereignty while rejecting the authority of the Lebanese state whenever that state attempts to regulate Hezbollah’s weapons. He speaks about defending Lebanon while reserving for Hezbollah the exclusive right to decide when Lebanon goes to war. He calls for national unity while accusing critics of betraying the resistance. But sovereignty cannot exist in a country where a militia decides the fate of the nation, and unity cannot be built on a lie. Lebanon deserves honesty about why it is repeatedly dragged into wars that devastate its towns and displace its people. What it received instead was another speech designed to obscure the truth behind ideological slogans and emotional appeals. Qassem may hope that repeating the language of resistance will eventually convince the public that Hezbollah is acting in Lebanon’s interest. Yet the timing of this war, the structure of Hezbollah’s alliances, and the content of his own speech reveal something very different. This is not Lebanon’s war. It is the war of an organization that continues to treat Lebanon as the stage upon which it proves its loyalty to a foreign cause, even if the fires it lights consume the country it claims to defend.

The Council of Ministers, meeting on Thursday at the Grand Serail, adopted several measures aimed at preventing any activity and presence of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Lebanon, in what is perceived as a real hunt for Pasdaran in the country. The government has asked the relevant ministries (Defense and Interior), as well as municipalities and various security services, to take all necessary measures to prevent any military and security activity of the Revolutionary Guards on Lebanese territory. The concerned authorities have been tasked with detecting the presence of Pasdaran in the country, arresting them, and expelling them. Furthermore, upon a proposal from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joe Raggi, the government decided to require an entry visa for all Iranian nationals wishing to travel to Lebanon. It should be noted that at the beginning of the Council of Ministers meeting, the head of government sharply stigmatized those who “committed the sin of dragging Lebanon into adventures that we all could have well done without.” Mr. Salam deplored the attitude of those who acted in this way “disregarding the catastrophic consequences of their behavior on the country, to serve foreign interests contrary to the interest of Lebanon.” On another note, the streets and entrances of Beirut were the scene on Thursday afternoon of a widespread panic and traffic jam after the Israeli army’s call to evacuate several neighborhoods in the southern suburbs without delay. Tens of thousands of residents left their homes in a hurry, most not knowing where to go. This massive exodus caused inextricable traffic jams in the capital’s streets. It should be recalled that the Israeli army also requested on Wednesday the evacuation of the entire southern region located south of the Litani. According to various sources, the Israeli army intends to simply raze several neighborhoods in the southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold. The Israeli Minister of Finance declared unequivocally on Thursday that Beirut’s southern suburbs would suffer the same fate as Khan Younis in Gaza, i.e., total destruction. In this context, it should be noted that President Joseph Aoun contacted President Emmanuel Macron to ask him to intervene with the Israeli government to spare the southern suburbs. In this context, it should be recalled that in recent months the Trump Administration had repeatedly urged the Lebanese authorities to implement without delay the content of Security Council Resolution 1701 as well as the provisions of the November 2024 ceasefire agreement concerning the handover of Hezbollah's military arsenal to the Lebanese army. Failing that, US leaders stressed, the Israeli army would disarm the pro-Iranian militia. US efforts on this front, however, remained a dead letter. At the same time, the Trump Administration had warned in recent weeks against any attempt by Hezbollah to drag Lebanon into a new warlike adventure, in the wake of the conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Washington had repeatedly warned the authorities that Hezbollah's involvement in the conflict with Iran would have disastrous and dramatic consequences for Lebanon. Here too, US warnings remained a dead letter… Joumblatt speaks out against “the madness of certain parties in Lebanon” In this context, it should be noted that after a meeting on Thursday evening with President Joseph Aoun, the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, MP Taymour Joumblatt, declared that “the inhabitants of the South are paying the price for the madness of certain parties in Lebanon and abroad.” Mr. Joumblatt emphasized in this regard that the decision of war and peace should be in the hands of the central state.