Mona Fayad

Division in Lebanon is no longer a consequence of war; it has become one of its instruments. What we are witnessing today might be described as an economy of division — hatred converted into raw material, produced daily, manufactured, distributed and consumed, serving several parties at once, even when those parties appear to be in open enmity. The conflict has migrated from military violence to symbolic violence. When an elderly man rises to insult the head of government in abject language, when another attacks the president and reminds him of Sadat's fate, when children are trained in invective and the glorification of militarisation extends even to a shoe, the matter no longer concerns the individuals targeted but what they represent: a circumvention of felt anxiety and fear, a deliberate intent to embed in popular consciousness the image of a collapsing state, to normalise insult as a mode of political expression, shifting the conflict from a critique of power to its degradation and accusation of treason. This goes well beyond moral decline or uncontrolled rage; it is, at its core, the sign of a far graver mutation — striking the image of the state in the collective consciousness and replacing public deliberation with defamation.

In seeking to understand what is happening to us, to understand myself and to recover some equilibrium in the face of what we are living through, I turn to books and novels about peoples who have known the ravages of war as we know them. Japan, with what it endured during the Second World War and in the aftermath of the atomic bombings, offers in this regard a model that may help us locate our own pain. Let us note, in passing, that the quantity of weapons poured onto Lebanon over the years now amounts to more than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Two works stand out here, Urashimasō and The Silent Cry . The first was written from within the event itself; its author witnessed the ruins with his own eyes, bearing testimony and describing the tragedies, the mutilations and the wandering he observed. The second was written after Japan’s defeat, and bears witness to the inner devastation of the human being. Comparing what they describe with what we live through, I found that the Lebanese situation brings together both sufferings simultaneously, with no separation between them and no temporal interval of any kind.

Ten minutes were enough for Beirut and the other regions to endure the most ferocious Israeli attacks they had ever witnessed. The toll was hundreds dead and thousands wounded. All of this came to pass after the conclusion of the opaque agreement between America and Iran on a ceasefire. Israel, led by a Netanyahu unwilling to accept any agreement that would return him to the difficult domestic reality of Israeli politics, sought to convey to all parties that Iran's declaration of including Lebanon in that agreement was null and void. Iran repudiates it verbally, while continuing on its side to observe the agreement. As for Hezbollah, dispersed across every corner of the country and intermingled with the civilian population, it declared its adherence to the ceasefire and has, until now, refrained from retaliating against Israel beyond a handful of rockets fired at Kiryat Shmoneh.

Ten minutes were enough for Beirut and the other regions to endure the most ferocious Israeli attacks they had ever witnessed. The toll was hundreds dead and thousands wounded. All of this came to pass after the conclusion of the opaque agreement between America and Iran on a ceasefire. Israel, led by a Netanyahu unwilling to accept any agreement that would return him to the difficult domestic reality of Israeli politics, sought to convey to all parties that Iran's declaration of including Lebanon in that agreement was null and void. Iran repudiates it verbally, while continuing on its side to observe the agreement. As for Hezbollah, dispersed across every corner of the country and intermingled with the civilian population, it declared its adherence to the ceasefire and has, until now, refrained from retaliating against Israel beyond a handful of rockets fired at Kiryat Shmoneh!

Those who have studied war, such as Gaston Bouthoul or Marvin Harris, never confined their analysis to the immediate geopolitical dimension alone. They did not merely ask "why did it break out?" but also "what does it do?" and "whom does it serve?" For societies, when they prove unable to resolve their internal contradictions, tend to export them outward, and war is transformed into a means of reorganising the interior through violence directed toward the exterior. This approach allows for a reading of contemporary wars that escapes their reduction to the military or directly geopolitical sphere. The conflict blazing today across the Iranian-American-Israeli triangle cannot be understood simply as a struggle for influence or mutual deterrence; it must rather be grasped as a complex process serving multiple functions, aimed at consolidating embattled domestic legitimacies, redrawing regional balances, and producing mobilisation narratives that simultaneously redefine the enemy and the self.

What is happening in Lebanon today can no longer be understood within the framework of a war or a conventional conflict, but within what René Girard described as the “spiral of violence”: violence is no longer a means, it becomes an autonomous system that reproduces itself through discourse before it does so on the ground. In this context, Hezbollah’s discourse, no less than the statements of figures such as Mahmoud Qomati, cannot be read as situational or emotional expressions. We are facing a coherent discursive structure, one that goes beyond politics to remake society through symbolic and material force alike — the discourse itself becoming an instrument for reshaping reality, not merely reflecting it.

At this hour in Lebanon's life, the debate is no longer about technical matters — will negotiations with Israel be direct or indirect? Will they precede a ceasefire or follow one? These are secondary questions beside the real one, which imposes itself with irresistible force: why negotiate at all, and what does it mean for a state to refuse to do so? In its most elementary definition, negotiation in international relations is neither a sign of weakness nor a surrender. It is the natural instrument states use to manage conflicts when the cost of war exceeds their capacity to bear it. This is how rational states operate. Wars themselves always end in negotiation — after the bloodshed, after the destruction, after the warring parties discover that force alone neither solves problems nor produces lasting stability.

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.

We have long lived under the shadow of the imagined power of Iranian propaganda — or let us say, the propaganda of the Axis of Resistance — which had made Iran into a great, cohesive, and untouchable power. Events have shown that there is a vast gulf between actual power and narrative power. This had already happened with Hezbollah: many had believed in the image of its absolute supremacy. Iran deceived us, through its followers and its media army — disguised television channels, paid journalists, digital influencers of every kind, and others — by propagating its fictional narrative about: the image of technological supremacy, and the image of powerful allies who support it (China, Russia), thus fashioning in public opinion the image of an "unbreakable axis."

The US military strike in Venezuela, followed by the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro and his transfer outside the country, sent a powerful shockwave through international politics. The arrest triggered widespread international condemnation, with many states and organizations describing it as a violation of international law and an assault on Venezuela’s national sovereignty. International law experts, including in analytical pieces published by The Guardian , point out that the American operation in Venezuela violates the United Nations Charter, particularly the provision prohibiting the use of force in the absence of self-defence or explicit authorization from the Security Council.