A Thousand Plateaus

The following text is a translation of the speech delivered in Arabic by our colleague Michel Hajji Georgiou during a panel discussion organized on Friday, May 15, in Beirut by the news and analysis website Janoubiya , in tribute to the memory of the writer and political scientist Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine. The event featured the participation of our colleague Ali Mohammad Hassan al-Amine, director of Janoubiya , former minister Ibrahim Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine, our contributor and political scientist Hisham Dibsi, and the writer and political scientist Hassan Bazih. The objective of the text is to place Shamseddine's thought and work within the continuity of the historical, political, and moral Libanist and statist heritage of the ulema of Jabal Amel. Dear friends, I would like, first of all, to thank Mr. Ali el-Amine for this initiative in paying tribute to our friend Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine, and for his invitation to this occasion, particularly in the presence of personalities of such stature, all of whom I hold in deep respect. Mohammad Hussein is without doubt one of my masters, to whom I owe a great part of the experience I have gained and the formation of my understanding of the Lebanese idea over the past two decades, from the period that followed the declaration of the Maronite bishops in 2000 and led to the fourteenth of March 2005. I would like to take this occasion — for Mohammad Hussein “lived the other” so fully that he no longer distinguished between his own work and that of his companions along the way — to salute the memory of those companions. To speak of Mohammad Hussein Chamseddine is to speak, at the same time, of Samir Frangieh, of Nassir al-Assaad, of Saoud al-Mawla, of Fares Souaid, of Tony Khawaja — the list goes on — and of all those who, living or departed, contributed to the founding of the Permanent Congress for Lebanese Dialogue in the early 1990s. It is to speak also of sayyed Hani Fahs and sayyed Mohammad Hassan al-Amine, and, at their head, of imam Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine. The symbolism of the place where we gather requires us to salute their memory. I ask the indulgence of those present, for in speaking of Mohammad Hussein I speak at the same time of a tradition from which I am still learning, slowly and carefully, thanks to my Shia friends and maestros: the tradition of Jabal Amel, that luminous and inexhaustible source of knowledge, wisdom and fiqh. A tradition more resilient than all the ordeals that have afflicted it in the past, and than those that tear at it today. The light of this authentically human Lebanese culture will without doubt outlast this new ordeal of fire and blood through which it once again passes. Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine left as he had lived: on tiptoe, in calm and humility, without excessive eulogy or funeral oration. He did not wake on the morning when Lebanon was preparing, once again, to be sacrificed on the altar of two pathologies, one martyropathic, the other exterminatory. Like a teacher who has accomplished his mission, he departed without the quiet certainty that his legacy and his thought would outlive him. Like all those who fought for more than half a century so that the sovereign Grand Lebanon and its living together might endure, he left without even knowing whether Lebanon itself would survive. This is assuredly one of the components of the Lebanese misfortune: a century after the founding of its State, Lebanon itself remains threatened with disappearance. And we now witness, before our eyes, how a part of its land, dear to my heart, this cradle of the culture I wish to speak of through Shamseddine, has been criminally reduced to ashes and dust. Such is the curse of Lebanon. Such is the curse of Cain. * * * Mohammad, the maestro — for that is how one approached him — was not a mere thinker. He was an educator, a pedagogue, who engaged with those around him according to the level of their culture and their thought, offering his knowledge with a keen sense of service, free of any ostentatious display. Precise, rigorous, concise, not given to many words. But lavish with meaning. And he always left you with far more than the intellectual baggage you had brought to him. He was even something more demanding than that: a political thinker who offered his work as a gift to others without claiming anything in return. All the political literature on which we built the dynamics of sovereignty and independence since the 1990s, from the documents of the Kornet Chehwan Gathering to those of the secretariat-general and the annual conferences of the March 14 movement, passing through the Beirut Appeal of 2004, was born at Mohammad’s table or passed through his hands, sprung from that mind inseparable from the minds of his colleagues. * * * Dear friends, It is an honour for me that Ibrahim Chamseddine is among us this evening. Mohammad Hussein was one of the disciples of imam Mohammad Mahdi Chamseddine, from whom he inherited the conviction that wilayat al-umma takes precedence over wilayat al-faqih , and the certainty that the Shia path in Lebanon does not pass through Tehran but through the Lebanese National Pact. This conviction was not born of political circumstance alone. It is a memory extending from Jabal Amel to the present, through an intellectual chain that began with sayyed Mohsen al-Amine, passed through imam Moussa al-Sadr, reached its depth with imam Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine, and then found its critical translation in the reflections of sayyed Hani Fahs and sayyed Mohammad Hassan al-Amine, in whose symbolic legacy we are gathered this evening, in the presence of his son Ali. This conceptual chain is not a mere chronicle of ideas. It constitutes a response to a question that Lebanese Shia are living today at the heart of the war: to what does imam Hussein point? What is the meaning of Karbala? * * * Sayyed Mohammad Hassan al-Amine asked this question at his conference in Teïrdebbâh in 1993, with the precision of one who knows the limits of certainty. His answer: Ashoura is a living memory, but one that dies from misuse. When it is reduced to a mere rite, to a “hat-stand on which to hang new sorrows,” to an occasion for releasing accumulated grief nourished by disappointment after disappointment, Karbala ceases to be a driving force and becomes a burden. He warned against two equally mistaken paths: the first makes the present a repeated replica of history, under the illusion that “the mere evocation of Karbala suffices to create in our time a movement of total commitment to the causes of right and justice.” The second breaks entirely the link between present and past, reducing Karbala to a mere tragic narrative. The third path, his own, consists in reading the event within its historical conditions in order to extract what, of human motivations, has persisted across time: freedom, justice, dignity. What, then, is the essence of Karbala in this reading? Sayyed Mohammad Hassan al-Amine expressed it in an unforgettable way: Hussein had seen “the jewel of justice, unity, freedom and equality being stolen from religion in the name of religion itself.” He had seen Islam instrumentalised to cover its own contrary. He had seen jurists issuing fatwas, the Qur’an recited, the call to prayer ringing out, and behind all of this a power that pillaged, tyrannised and annihilated. And he had asked: “What could one who knew this terrifying truth possibly do?” Hussein did not go to Karbala to seek death. He went because it was impossible for him to live against what he was. He refused allegiance to Yazid, though he could have pledged it and lived — but what kind of life? A life that accepts injustice as the condition of its own continuation. That choice was not available to him. The end was not death: it was the refusal of the lie. And death was what that refusal entailed, not what it sought. This is what he said himself: “I have not gone out in arrogance or pride, nor to spread corruption or commit injustice. I have gone out to seek reform in the community of my grandfather.” One might object that the infallible imam knows his fate in advance, and that this foreknowledge makes death a choice rather than a consequence. The answer is that infallibility is not compulsion, but an absolute harmony between act and truth. Hussein did not accept death; he refused the lie, and death was what that refusal entailed. Christian experience illuminates this: Christ knows his fate and one does not say on that account that he sought death, but that he refused to betray the truth; foreknowledge of destiny does not make death an end, it makes it a testimony that there exists something greater than the fear of it. And the martyrdom of Hussein is what René Girard called the “pharmakos,” the sacrifice that does not reproduce violence but exposes its mechanism and annuls it. There is a second theft that sayyed Mohammad Hassan al-Amine pointed to: the theft of the doctrine of free will. Muawiyya “was the first ruler in Islam to wield the axe of destruction against the highest doctrine that Islam had brought: the doctrine of choice,” transforming injustice into divine decree and contestation into impiety. And it is precisely against this that Hussein rose up: against the normalisation of injustice, its sacralisation and its elevation into the will of God. This diagnosis acquires today an unbearable sharpness. Those who wage war in the name of Hussein reproduce what he resisted: they make war a fatality, martyrdom an obligation and opposition a betrayal. They steal the jewel once more, in the name of the jewel itself. Allow me, in the presence of Ibrahim Shamseddine this evening, to recall what he said in Jeb Jennin in 2008, which I had reported in my writings of the time: “God does not need human beings to defend Him. No one can present himself on the Day of Judgement and say: ‘I sent you martyrs, and therefore I deserve paradise.’ The weak god who needs our blood does not deserve to be worshipped.” Dear Ibrahim, it is as though you were describing what happens each day now… * * * From the beginning of the last century, sayyed Mohsen al-Amine had held that the rites which had transformed the remembrance of Kerbala into blood shed every year in the streets of the flagellation constituted a denaturation of the meaning of Husseinian martyrdom: they placed death at the centre of the scene when it is dignity that ought to be there. This position earned him accusations of heresy from certain circles among the ulamas of Jabal Amel themselves. He persevered nonetheless in the path of what he had discerned. More than half a century later, sheikh Mohammad Jawad Moughnieh, a Lebanese Amilite jurist, was the first to respond to the Khomeinist wilayat al-faqih with an explicit, written jurisprudential treatment, affirming that political authority in the time of occultation belongs to the umma and not to the faqih . He wrote this in 1979, shortly before his death, at a moment when opposition to Khomeini was still possible. Imam Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine completed this circle in his testaments and in his work Nizam al-Hukm wal-Idara fi al-Islam , where he distinguished between the absolute wilayat al-faqih , the governance of the jurist over State and society, and the wilayat al-umma ʿala nafsiha in the time of occultation. In his testaments he required Lebanese Shia to make their national belonging the foundation, to hold Lebanon as a definitive homeland over which no other authority could prevail. And it is Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine who transformed this vision into concrete political literature, at the heart of a Lebanese project that is national, human and universal. * * * If Mohsen al-Amine reformed the rite of memory, if Moussa al-Sadr restored to the Shia their social dignity, if Mohammad Jawad Moughnieh and Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine laid the jurisprudential framework of refusal, if Mohammad Hassan al-Amine revealed how Hussein’s name is stolen to cover what Hussein combated, it is Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine who built with all these materials the political architecture: the project of the Lebanese State as an end in itself, a State belonging to all its sons, a State that guarantees diversity without absorbing it, that watches over communities and individuals within a natural cultural complementarity grounded in the right governance of the model of living together and the idea of composite identity and a culture of empathy. What makes Lebanon what René Maheu called “a style of civilisation.” This political architecture rested on a philosophical cornerstone from which he never deviated: there is no purely Shia solution to the Shia question. The problems of each community in Lebanon are the problems of all Lebanese, and they are not resolved by the logic of confessional and identitarian withdrawal, but by that of the transversal national solution that transcends the community and touches society as a whole. In this, Mohammad Hussein extends the logic of imam Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine, the Amelit Lebanese logic: the State as the sole project, the only viable guarantor for all Lebanese components, beginning with the Shia. These words are not severed from reality: they constitute a direct response to all who today seek a “Shia solution to the Shia question,” or wager on a narrow sectarian exit that would “save” a community at the expense of the entity and the model of living together. Consistent with himself and his vision of Lebanon, Mohammad worked with his companions to break down all barriers and to meld Amelit thought into Nasrallah Sfeir’s aspiration to freedom and Hassan Khaled’s to justice and equality. He thus shattered the spiral of symbolic violence inherited from the war, which most of the forces of occupation exploited to prevent any Lebanese reconciliation. This dynamic of reweaving national unity angered the tutelage power, which reacted violently on 7 May 2001, and reacted above all against the Beirut Appeal of 2004, whose assizes it prevented. But reconciliation triumphed over violence and hatred on the fourteenth of March 2005. Mohammad Hussein did not, however, conceal his disillusionment with the way that period unfolded. He saw in the mediocrity of a Lebanese political class fleeing its responsibilities one of the fundamental causes of the retreat of the sovereignist project. This showed itself in the so-called “Orthodox” electoral law that accentuated sectarianism, then in the squalid dealings that brought Michel Aoun to the presidency and gave Hezbollah full latitude to act under the cover of legality. Mohammad saw in this not mere tactical errors, but a political and moral bankruptcy: leaders at the head of their communities, through excess of irresponsibility and lack of faith in their own capacity to weave internal understandings, and through fear of the other, resort to a regional patron who supplies them with money, weapons and surpluses of power so that they may use these against their partners and dominate them. This is the irrefutable proof of a weakness that disguises itself under the label of strength, and leads only to catastrophe, defeat, then frustration and despondency. Why this attachment to reconciliation in spite of all this? Mohammad had a golden rule he repeated, borrowed from Hamid Frangieh: “If the Lebanese agree on evil, it becomes good; and if they disagree about the good, it becomes evil.” Consensus was not for him one method among others: it was the condition of Lebanon’s very existence. My friend Hisham Dibsi knows that Mohammad Hussein began his political life as a militant in the ranks of Fatah, and as the founder of the Lebanese Popular Organisation in South Lebanon. Like Samir Frangieh, he completed his “journey to the end of violence,” and, having believed in arms as levers of change, had turned his back on them through conviction. In writing about Samir Frangieh and Hani Fahs, he was in reality describing himself: that journey from red to white, from Fatah to the construction of an inclusive national culture. He held that peace is not the mere absence of war, but “the highest degree of ethics and its most noble mission.” * * * On the very night when Hezbollah launched its absurd war, Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine left us. His departure nearly passed unnoticed in the tumult of what was unfolding. But this coincidence carries a manifest meaning: what he had intellectually combated throughout his career, the reading of Hussein as a hero of death, Iran elevated to a reference, the jewel of justice once more stolen under the banner of the jewel itself — all of this exploded that night. We are not merely commemorating today. We are affirming that Hussein died for life and not for death. We are affirming that Lebanese Shiism, that of Jabal Amel, of Mohsen al-Amine, of Moussa al-Sadr, of Mohammad Jawad Moughnieh, of Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine, of Hani Fahs and of Mohammad Hassan al-Amine, is not the extension of an imperialist project, but a part of the fabric of this homeland, difficult yet necessary. History will not forget that this slight man, seated with his cup of coffee, his cigarette and his pen as his sole instruments of work, was building, with his hands and his mind, in complete silence, the intellectual foundation of one single Lebanese project: a Lebanon founded not on the balance of forces, but on the force of balance. This long night will assuredly eventually lift, and the light of balance, reason and living together will rise, so that the Grand Lebanon may once more become that unique “style of civilisation” of which Mohammad, Samir and their companions and inspirers always dreamed and for which they tirelessly laboured.

On 10 May 2000, Raymond Eddé passed away, at the end of an exile of more than two decades in Paris. Eddé was, in the Lebanese political landscape, a wholly atypical figure. A certain reading of history retains of him today the image of an idealist and stubborn man, cut off from reality – since he refused all political compromises that sought to plug temporary gaps in the dyke by reflex of immediate survival, at the expense of the fundamental values of the Republic and the elementary foundations of the State, from the Cairo Agreement to the Taif Agreement. Unbending, the Amid? And yet, paradox of anachronism, it was the opposite that his own community reproached him for: his refusal to be swept along by currents of identitarian testosterone, and his rejection of the sweet songs of the sirens and the machine guns, unlike the popular parties and armed organizations of the era. Like Michel el-Khoury, leader of the Destour, the Amid of the National Bloc continued to hold back the escalation to extremes, opposing the temptation of arms that was ravaging the Lebanese and Christian street, including among his own supporters. Violence ultimately wore down his resolve. Victim of a series of assassination attempts by the various belligerents, he chose to leave. Without knowing, no doubt, that this departure would be permanent. The Man Who “Was Right” A piece of political folklore has it that Raymond Eddé asked that the following be inscribed, as an epitaph, on his grave: “Here lies Raymond, who was right.” The Amid was anid – obstinate – whenever it came to holding firm on his backbone of political ethics. Over time, however, the formula has not been without mixing admiration, irony and even a certain bitterness. As if it were the epitaph of a certain mode of political conduct – too idealistic, if not naive – that refuses to bend and adapt to Lebanese political realities. It defines almost an anthropological category: the honest but powerless Lebanese political figure, ill-suited to Machiavellian virtù . A “loser,” in a sense. Thus, the petty-political Lebanese time has retained of Raymond Eddé the image of a man who saw the catastrophes coming, but who, by refusing compromises in order to keep his hands clean, ended up isolated, exiled, and almost transformed into a Maronite Cassandra – where instincts preferred to follow utilitarian and populist zaïms or “men of the field” in military fatigues. And it is no doubt true that Eddé was himself a victim of his political rigorism when he refused Michel el-Khoury’s proposal to unite the Destour and the National Bloc to create a national counterweight to vatenguerrisme , at the beginning of the 1970s. “Never will the son of Emile Eddé take the hand of the son of Bechara el-Khoury!” he had replied to Sheikh Michel. And this was probably one of the Amid’s political errors, since the absence of the political centre that this national axis might have represented opened the way to an escalation to extremes, and behind it, to a puppet master named Hafez al-Assad, who knew how to exploit internecine quarrels in order to reign for three decades over the land of the Cedar. Function and Stature Nevertheless, in the present circumstances, it may be worth dismantling once and for all the myth of “idealism” and “utopianism” that continues to surround Raymond Eddé – the unloved figure of Lebanese communitarianism, all the more so of its sectarian, identitarian, populist and martial tendency. Raymond Eddé – and the author of these lines did not know him personally, but draws his conclusions from the man’s positions and trajectory – is without doubt the most unpopular of the Christian political leaders (unless it be, supreme irony, Bechara el-Khoury). Why? Because the power that interested him was not the political power coveted by traditional politicians. Eddé was in quest of an authority capable of genuinely embodying something beyond itself: a body of knowledge, an inner bearing, a coherence, an experience, a capacity for transmission, even a form of spiritual or intellectual nobility. He distinguished instinctively between function and stature. In this, he maintained a very ancient rapport with legitimacy – almost Greek or medieval in kind. True authority, not coming from status alone, necessarily had to flow from an adequacy between being, word and deed. For him, authority seemed compelled to satisfy two simultaneous requirements, rarely united: a genuine verticality of knowledge, experience or thought, and an organic recognition from below, from the human real, from the terrain and the living community. If he failed in the test of reality, it was not because he refused to roll up his sleeves. It was because he refused to play the strongman and the militiaman. A considerable difference. He refused to succumb to the illusion of the solution through violence. And in that, he was indeed right. And unfortunately, Lebanon being what it is, he is right every day, without variation. Eddé combined culture, depth and a certain popular recognition grounded in positions of principle, not in acts of war. Not popular in the raw electoral sense, but in the sense that his word genuinely reached people, circulated, transformed, generated free adherence rather than imposed obedience. Eddé created the political, there where others have done nothing but undo it for half a century. One finds here something very Mediterranean, almost antique once again: the idea that authority is not merely an institutional mechanism, but a living relation between a person and a city. A legitimacy tested in duration. In this, as in many other things, he was entirely coherent. Perhaps too coherent for a politician? The Beautiful Losers Beyond this, was Raymond Eddé a “loser,” as an entire current “school” of political thought suggests – a school that measures success in terms of crowds drawn to rallies and ballot boxes? As, after him, figures like Nassib Lahoud or Samir Frangieh, to cite only a few? The time has surely come to shatter once and for all the myth that a figure who does not seek the cult of personality as the foundation of its political legitimacy is necessarily to be discarded from politics or relegated to the margins, in the name of realism. To be wrong with Sartre rather than right with Aron? No. Certain figures now constitute specific landmarks precisely because their knowledge has been tested, recognized, embodied. They have traversed the contradiction of the real world without entirely losing their backbone. They have embodied a form of truth that was not rewarded by immediate history. And this gives more weight to their words, not less. These figures have often seen the disasters coming, understood the impasses, refused certain compromises – and then lost in spite of it all. Or sometimes because of it. There is in them something tragic in the noble sense: not so much the romantic posture of the “cursed” as the confrontation between lucidity and the balance of forces. They reveal something difficult to accept: that being right protects neither from failure, nor from isolation, nor from destruction – but perhaps from dishonour. Leonard Cohen gave his second novel a sublime title: Beautiful Losers , translated into French as “Les Perdants magnifiques.” The translation diminishes the force of the oxymoron. These “losers” are not “magnificent.” They simply inhabit a register that is not the same as that of others. Their giant wings will not allow them to walk among the crowd. Lebanon is full of tactical victors and historical losers. Many of those who won the symbolic or military wars left behind them emptiness, ruin or fear. While certain “vanquished” figures preserved a form of moral legitimacy because they had perceived something essential about coexistence, sovereignty, violence or human dignity. Raymond Eddé is one of them. He accepted to pay the price of his clear-sightedness rather than betray his reading of the real in order to belong to the camp of the victors. One might say he was inhabited by an almost Sophoclean tension, preferring just defeat to degrading victory. Not out of a taste for defeat, no. But because a victory bought at the price of falsehood or blindness would have ended, in his eyes, by becoming another form of ruin. And it is no doubt for this reason that he never truly wished, in his deepest self, to become president of a Republic that has not ceased, more than twenty years after his departure, to sell itself, again and again, to the highest bidder, rather than resolve to exist.

That the various factions in Lebanon should be directly concerned by the existential battle currently unfolding there is entirely natural. The contrary would be unhealthy. Yet between apathy and unbridled enthusiasm, or even blind enlistment, there lies a whole emotional spectrum which, as usual, is obscured in favour of alignments that are deadly for the country — alignments with a conflict that inhabits it, but that utterly surpasses it. As has always been the case, for that matter. The Lebanese body is immunodeficient. It attracts every virus, every disease. Hence its propensity to flirt permanently with death. And, contrary to the traumatic notions of identitarian supremacism that resurface with remarkable convenience at every period of crisis, the source of Lebanon's ontological weakness is not pluralism, but an archaic political culture. A confederation of tribes governed by charismatic leaders who, a hundred years after the founding of Greater Lebanon, still baulk at building a state and managing public affairs in a sound and rational manner, and who persist in aligning themselves with the strongest power in accordance with regional and international shifts. That is not the question. Mimetic reactions have invariably destroyed this country since its creation. They are precisely the product of a race for domination, even hegemony, in which individual anxieties carried over to a communal body are superimposed on the search for an external force to compensate for an inability to establish total domination within. Two logics have been proposed to break this vicious circle. The first is a divorce between the communities or between the different regions — a kind of return to pre-Greater Lebanon formulas. This presupposes above all a common will to separate, and no doubt population movements if the underlying nature of the project is communitarian. The second is the construction of a national legitimacy respectful of pluralism, founded on five fundamentals: freedom, justice, equality, coexistence, citizenship. But this too presupposes a will — one that must be vast, individual, and transversal. Otherwise the communal reflex will never be broken, and the tribal chiefs will continue to govern the country like a loya jirga dependent on regional upheavals, playing, as skilled seismologists within, on the tectonic plates between Lebanon's communal groups. These two projects have been competing in Lebanon since 1920, the third — that of fusion into a larger whole — having been abandoned. The Taëf Constitution nonetheless stipulates in its preamble that Lebanon in its current borders is a definitive homeland for all its sons. Are the principal Lebanese political formations of today, after the failure of 14th-of-March transversalism, of that mind? The question deserves to be asked and answered, without pretence. But the most alarming thing is not the debate about the fate of Greater Lebanon itself, but the way in which Lebanon's constituent parts have chosen to conduct it — in the worst possible circumstances on the ground — in a manifest hatred of one another, compounded by a will to vengeance that resonates like the cataclysmic return of a deep repressed. In this context, it is difficult not to return to this will toward mimetic 'reprisals' or 'revenge,' and to the mechanism that governs it: a return to a fantasmatic mythic age when one was the strongest, which one has lost and which is once again within reach. This is the expression of a profound pathological delusion. History may repeat itself in appearance, but times have changed, and in the Near East, equilibria are fragile. Partial, supremacist or separatist projects are tenuous, if not mad — not because they are risky, but because they depend on factors that are never in the hands of those who defend them tooth and nail. In Lebanon, one does not decide, or very little. Especially if one is not united transversally — and this is not a matter of a few dissident figures willing to 'step out' of their communal positions, out of interest or conviction, to join the opposing camp in an illusion of a trans-communal front. The 14th of March 2005 is proof of this. The United States did not want — David Satterfield had said so openly — a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. It took place because of that enormous demonstration which was the work of a plural political and civic will. In Lebanon, one attempts to adapt as best one can, to navigate by sight to prevent the vessel from sinking entirely. This vessel needs a steady and moderate captain to manage the navigation through troubled waters. And that captain is the State — notwithstanding all its failings — because today it is the only compass, the only space that can bring us together. And it deserves to receive the broadest possible support in its perilous mission, without being battered and torn asunder by the ambitions, the euphoria and the frantic nostalgic fits of one faction or another.

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. Yet there exists, in Hezbollah's rhetoric, an ambivalence so carefully maintained that it requires extraordinary feats of persuasion… and one must note that the smoke and mirrors no longer work with Kassem, whose appeal belongs more to the rigid doctrinaire than to the historic tribune. Carl Schmitt had placed, at the very foundation of the political, the friend/enemy distinction as the sovereign act par excellence. In the German philosopher's view, he who draws the line decides, and he who decides is sovereign. Julien Freund, refining the idea, had added that no one has the luxury of choosing their enemies — it is the enemy who chooses you; and pretending to ignore this does not make him disappear, but simply disarms you in his face. What neither Schmitt nor Freund had entirely anticipated is the perverse use that a sufficiently skilled political actor can make of such an axiom — exhibiting a substitute enemy in order to conceal the real one. All the more so when that actor is sufficiently shielded by the sacred that anyone who dares point to the substitution is immediately placed in the camp of traitors… For what the rhetoric of Naïm Kassem reveals in the negative — what Nasrallah knew how to conceal beneath a learned blend of argument and literature — is that Israel is not Hezbollah's principal enemy. Israel is its daawa : in the Khaldunian sense used by Michel Seurat in L'État de barbarie — that is to say, the justification, the existential fuel. The real enemy, the one the party has had in its sights since its foundation, is twofold and internal. First, the Shia community itself, which must be kept, by every means available, in an unconditional allegiance to the wilayat al-faqih , by smothering any dissent — Lebanese nationalist, democratic, or simply critical — within it. Then, the Lebanese state, which must not be destroyed — that would be too conspicuous, and functionally counterproductive — but invested, paralysed, colonised from within and drained of substance, in the name and on behalf of Tehran, until it becomes the legal vestment of a project of power that was never Lebanese. The legitimate concealment of adversity is thus elevated into an offensive art of governance: Hezbollah declaring its wish to liberate Lebanon… while occupying it politically and militarily. It further claims to defend sovereignty while subordinating every strategic decision to Tehran. It summons the Lebanese people to unity while designating as traitors those who refuse to dissolve into it. And it brandishes Israel — with a particular talent for staging — as the curtain behind which the real drama is being played. What makes the drama particularly formidable, moreover, is that the external enemy who justifies the daawa is not invented. Israel exists, conducts deadly raids, occupies portions of Lebanese territory, violates the November 27 agreement with documented brutality, and thereby furnishes Hezbollah with an inexhaustible alibi, renewed with each razed village. The legitimacy of resistance to Israeli aggression was not a fabrication. It is real, rooted in international law and in the collective memory of a people who genuinely suffered occupation — even if every trace of that past has been entirely and violently erased by Hezbollah since the late 1980s. And this is precisely where the criminal sophistication of the device lies. Hezbollah did not manufacture this enemy out of thin air. It captured him, instrumentalised him, and rendered itself structurally dependent on his persistence (Tel Aviv too, for that matter — which is why the two have no doubt coexisted comfortably for so many years, before Iran became, for an Israel at peace with the Sunni Arab world, the elected adversary). Without Israeli aggression, the daawa collapses. Without the daawa , internal domination loses its semantic shield. From this perspective, peace with Israel would constitute a dual existential catastrophe. Hezbollah would find itself exposed on the domestic front, summoned to surrender its weapons, and bereft of any rhetoric justifying its control of territory and its martial conquest of the mulk — the centre of power, the state. It is in this Gordian knot that President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam find themselves today, called upon to perform an altogether impossible feat. On one side, a Shia street — and beyond it, a Lebanese one — still wounded, still traversed by the legitimate fury of a community that Tel Aviv bombs relentlessly and indiscriminately. On the other, a domestic and international will to finally dissolve this abnormal para-state situation and restore to the Lebanese state the monopoly on legitimate violence it has never fully exercised since Taëf. These two pressures do not fail to obey different temporalities and incompatible emotional conjunctures. Anyone who attempts to reconcile them risks being accused simultaneously of complicity with the enemy and of betrayal of their own people. As necessary and fundamental as the restoration of the monopoly on legitimate violence is to the survival of the Lebanese state, the fact that it would come about under the constraint of a forced peace with Israel renders it deeply problematic. The international community, in this context, cannot afford to lay the weight of its pressure on Lebanon's three political poles, as though they were the principal obstacles to normalisation. That would be to invert the burden of proof with culpable carelessness. The restoration of Lebanese sovereignty requires two prior conditions that only coherent international pressure can create: that Tehran be compelled, once and for all, to relinquish its Beirut transmission belt, and that Israel be forced to rein in its destruction machine operating with complete impunity, thereby ceasing to furnish Hezbollah with the fuel of its perpetual legitimation. To demand that Nawaf Salam and Joseph Aoun — and indeed Nabih Berri — move forward without these two conditions being met is to ask them to walk on water; or, more precisely, to sign their own political, and possibly physical, death warrant. For Naïm Kassem has more than words. Behind the ideological rhetoric and the metaphors of mythical resistance stands an organisation worthy of the Assassins, one that has demonstrated its capacity and its will to eliminate every obstacle to its hegemony. And the spectre of Sadat — assassinated for having dared chart a path toward peace that the guardians of eternal war could not tolerate — still haunts every prospect of reconciliation in the Middle East. This is neither paranoia nor catastrophism. Simply the bitter reality of things. Need one recall that the Western powers, having incited the Siniora cabinet to take its historic decision regarding the dismantlement of Hezbollah's fixed telephone network on the road to Beirut airport in 2008, had only the smallest words of condemnation after the punitive expeditions of May 2008 against Beirut and the Lebanese Mountain? Does Donald Trump — whose power today rests on the uncertainty of the midterms — grasp the implications of what he is attempting to impose, in the current circumstances, on Joseph Aoun by forcing his hand to meet with Netanyahu? Beyond the incongruous, there is a recklessness and a frivolity driven solely by an obsession with appearances. True courage today is not to demand bravado from the Lebanese authorities when they face a double enemy driven by the same mimetic objective: to subjugate them. It would rather be to support the Lebanese state practically, through a comprehensive plan across every domain, so that it may rebuild its institutions free from Hezbollah's grip. Even if this means a legitimate multinational force composed of friendly nations, tasked with maintaining civil peace and helping Lebanon's legal political and security forces — freed from Iranian hegemonic influence — to recover the sovereignty of the Lebanese state over its entire territory and lay the foundations of a political programme capable of restoring national unity.

There is in the Lebanese-Israeli ceasefire concluded under American auspices a promise. But this promise is at once tenuous and taut, so fragile — like the thread of the Fates — that it seems capable of snapping at any moment. Lebanon has long learned to live on little and to transform the scraps of stability into the raw material of survival. So it welcomes this truce as a remission — though one knows, from experience, that it may in reality be nothing more than the prelude to a relapse. This is the whole of the Lebanese tragedy in its most harrowing expression. The ineluctable recurrence of misfortune, and its cyclical return, which the collective memory has never truly ceased to anticipate. For Lebanon knows ceasefires. It knows them all too well. Since the war of 1975, it has lived through enough of them to know that their lifespan owes less to the will of the parties than to regional circumstances, to the internal balances of the sponsoring powers, and to a series of variables that no one in Beirut truly controls. The Lebanese people have consequently developed a kind of bitter wisdom — that of the child who has learned, at its own cost, that the teacher's intervention stops the "bully" only for the briefest of pauses. The moment the schoolyard is left unsupervised, violence reclaims its rights. Inevitably. But what truly weighs today, beyond the immediate uncertainty, is the temporal depth of this déjà vu. The memory of 1982 or 2006 returns like a curse, accompanied by something more structural: the interminable reign of the ephemeral. In Lebanese time, compromise drags on and the anguishing in-between labors slowly until it becomes a condition of existence. One has consequently learned to internalize a paradoxical message — almost unbearable through sheer repetition — one that has not been without provoking a latent schizophrenic state: that of living ceaselessly in hope while always expecting the worst simultaneously. Like a fatality. This survival reflex was forged by decades in which the worst, precisely, came to pass each time one had begun to believe that the best was possible… Yet this paradoxical message, this contradictory injunction that has structured the Lebanese collective psyche since 1975, today reaches a hyperbolic degree of intensity — precisely because the actors involved have not changed in their deeper logics, even if their operational capacities have been severely diminished. Hezbollah, riven by internal divisions between a pragmatic current and an intransigent fringe that certainly reflect the split between doves and hawks within the Iranian regime itself, possesses a considerable capacity for procrastination. It knows how to feign playing the game of the Lebanese state — through Nabih Berry or by preserving its ministers in government — while continuing to outbid all others and working to rebuild its military capabilities… awaiting the propitious moment to reverse the balance of power, as it did by force of arms in May 2008… or, with more "classical elegance," by toppling the Hariri cabinet in 2011, precisely as Hariri was visiting Barack Obama at the White House. The path chosen by Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam — that of negotiation and the gradual assertion of sovereignty — proves, in this context, as necessary as it is perilous. The Lebanese state finds itself caught in a vice between two adverse wills that converge, paradoxically, in their effect of undermining: Israel, which seeks to weaken the state sufficiently to keep it malleable while maintaining it solid enough to serve as a useful interlocutor; and Hezbollah, which cannot survive the disappearance of its arms and the severing of the existential link between its Lebanese branch and its Iranian patron, and which knows that the peace dynamic, if it succeeds, spells its strategic obsolescence. A movement that has built its entire identity on armed violence and the rhetoric of "resistance" cannot convert itself into an ordinary political force without ceasing to be what it claims to be. It would be condemned to disappear by the very logic of its own hubris — like a sect whose doctrine collapses — were it to enter the political game and agree to lay down its arms. This is moreover equally the case of the Pasdaran in Iran, which is why the truce with the United States will in all likelihood fall through. War as a way of life… and as a device for tightening cohesion and relentlessly re-legitimizing itself. External hostility in the service of exterminating enemies within. From this standpoint, there is little doubt that Hezbollah will do everything in its power to re-embed itself in the Lebanese state and reduce it once again to the puppet-like, cadaverous subaltern of its satrapal mini-state. To return to Lebanon — accustomed to the sinister shadow of ancient curses hovering over the City — the precedent of 1982 ought to weigh more heavily on the collective memory. A genuine window of opportunity, however fiercely contested, had opened between Beirut and Tel Aviv, backed by American resolve then embodied by Secretary of State Alexander Haig. The fall of Haig and the collapse of Menachem Begin were sufficient to reverse the dynamic and turn the May 17 agreement into the most bitter symbol of diplomatic illusion, before it was abrogated under pressure from Hafez al-Assad and part of the Lebanese political establishment. History in Lebanon — far from being farce, even a tragic one — repeats itself, but always as wound. And the slightest change in Washington — the midterms — or in Tel Aviv — the fall of the current cabinet — would suffice to send this fragile truce, along with the entire negotiating dynamic and its protagonists, down the same path. Lebanon cannot afford to wait for history to finish repeating itself. This is why, independently of external dynamics, what must be built — and quickly — is a Lebanese roadmap endowed with sufficient political and popular legitimacy to withstand internal pressures and the vagaries of the capitals of influence, whose priorities can shift within weeks, and whose interests are certainly not those of Lebanon, whatever the best (or less than best) intentions in the world may be. Peace with Israel is not a panacea, but Lebanon cannot remain forever — and alone — in a state of war. Moreover, Hezbollah, which claims to be resisting, never ceases to drag Lebanon — paradoxically, through its disastrous escapades and its delirious "victories" — into a peace of the vanquished. By weakening the state and positioning itself as the sole interlocutor with Tel Aviv to negotiate deals, it erodes, each time, whatever sovereignty and authority still remain. And it does so deliberately, subversively. Successive nails in Lebanon's coffin. Yet one must acknowledge that the institutions of the current state — as in the aftermath of the Cedar Revolution of 2005 — are incapable of purging themselves of an ideological and political gangrene, the Syrian-Iranian axis, that has been eating away at them since 1990. What the United States demands of Lebanon amounts to asking a cancer patient to heal himself despite the gravity of his condition. The patient can barely strive to survive and remain functional with whatever strength he still possesses. This too must be borne in mind, whatever the profound desire of a large part of Lebanese society to be done with Hezbollah's hegemony. Lebanon can no longer bear this regime of permanent emergency — this perpetual movement from crisis to war and from war to crisis which, since 1967, has literally devastated its institutions and its people, and indefinitely defers the elementary right to something resembling a normal life. The Lebanese deserve to live. Not heroically. Simply humanly. If only from time to time… Can the international community — while calling upon Lebanon to display courage even as it is caught between the hammer and anvil of the "double enemy" — offer the Lebanese state and its population durable guarantees of stability alongside the ongoing negotiating process, in order to prevent a return to this tragedy, made of precariousness, uncertainty, and ultimately chaos? Given the current state of the world, it is legitimate to doubt it. In this senseless maelstrom, it is far more likely that the Lebanese can, in the end, count only on themselves. And it becomes imperative for them to work, in so doing, to consolidate a united domestic scene grounded in clear and non-negotiable constants — the republican values and the spirit of coexistence, under the sole guarantee of the Lebanese Constitution — far from the triumphalist outbidding of all sides. And if Hezbollah persists in refusing to be part of this consensus, as usual, it will be Hezbollah that has chosen, once again, the path of deadlock and irrationality over the measured and salutary choice of rational legitimacy. The moira of Lebanese hope against the suicidal hubris of Hezbollah. No one can save, against his will, someone who has truly decided to perish. To save oneself, however, in such a case, is a duty.

While American and Iranian negotiators step back from the negotiating table, Hezbollah circles, despite the manifest contradictions within their directorate, are delighting in hurling wholesale accusations of treason at Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam. The timing of these attacks is not fortuitous. It is not without revealing a panic that one strives to conceal beneath the habitual garb of resistance rhetoric. For the first time since the 1990s, the Lebanese card has slipped from Hezbollah's grasp—and, by extension, from Tehran's. Which is not good news for the Hezb. Certainly, it retains the capacity to ignite hostilities in the country's streets, but it is increasingly isolated. In 2006, after 14 March 2005, it had resorted to a war, then to a coup de force to offset this handicap. But we are no longer in 2005, and this time the Hezb would be taking a risk by becoming mired in internal conflict. The result will be to plunge Lebanon into violence. The pacifist logic of 14 March has disappeared, and, unfortunately, the party will collide with grave tensions. Perhaps it is even seeking this. But no one ever emerges victorious from such a game with fire. The rupture between the Lebanese and Iranian dimensions explains the dual attack the State is suffering today in Beirut. On one side, the intemperate reaction of a militia determined to reclaim through internal destabilisation what it has lost on the political terrain. Time always plays in Hezbollah's and Iran's favour: the more bellicose Israel shows itself, the more the legitimacy of the «resistance» is reinforced, and the more the «rightness» of its recapture of power in Beirut seems founded in the eyes of its supporters. On the other side, the Israeli trap, which exploits this work of undermining to weaken the State further on the eve of Tuesday's negotiations. Tel Aviv wants neither a State too weak, nor a State too cohesive. The current division suits it perfectly. Attacks on the executive are manna from heaven. Hezbollah, once again, proves particularly cooperative in Israel's strategy of torpedoing the Lebanese State. It is necessary, however, to call things by their name. The recent deadly strike on Beirut, which left more than three hundred victims, illustrates with a brutality that needs no commentary what we call the dual responsibility. Two equally murderous logics, two equally inhuman fundamentalisms: the Israeli one, which strikes without warning, without regard for civilian lives, invoking a pseudo «precision of fire» that belongs to the domain of war propaganda; and the militia one, for which martyrdom is a promotion, war a reason for living, and civilian death one more political argument. This disease has a name: martyropathy. And that Hezbollah hides among civilians who are unaware that their next-door neighbour is a target, that no one has sounded their opinion on the war into which they are enrolled against their will—this is what this «resistance» has, at bottom, always been: a cohabitation imposed by force, that one still dares to call protection. Ideologues will retort that the Lebanese State is weak, that the army is weak, and that all this is the fault of the international community. That is true, in part. But what these ideologues refuse to admit is that the weakening of the State was also the work of the Assad regime, then of Hezbollah itself—without forgetting corruption and the jirga-style loyalties of the internal fiefdoms. Hezbollah magnified its power under the Assad regime, of which it was the protégé, before Aounism handed it definitively the keys of the Lebanese State. And if the Assad regime governed Lebanon, it was under Israeli and American patronage, within the logic of the minority alliance, to break the Sunni Arab world and destroy the Palestinian cause. Palestine quasi-annihilated, Hamas and its patrons having lent it the scythe, Israel decided to cut Iran down to its proper size. Moreover, if one does not negotiate with a super-powerful enemy... what is the point of the concept of negotiations? Of diplomacy? Should everything be settled by arms? And then what? That is the great powers' game of fools. The boundaries between friend and enemy are fluid and shift constantly. The great principles and boastful ideologies? Rubbish. In this war as in all wars, the partisans of each side are nothing but cannon fodder. A cohabitation between two logics—one for which war is an art and the other which simply wishes to live in peace, build a State, raise children without living in fear that a missile might suddenly fall on their head—is impossible. Not that one must yield to essentialist impulses or a project of separation. The problem is not sectarian. Hezbollah is more than a militia: it is a state of mind. What to do, then? Lebanon is necessarily a country of measure. No excess can have a positive repercussion on the domestic scene. This does not argue for the rickety compromises that have presided over the country's destiny since 1969, to the point of draining it of substance. This argues for a consensus encompassing all parties, without that consensus being made at the expense of republican values. As much as Hezbollah is a cancer gnawing at Lebanon for forty years, humiliating its supporters, and with them a wounded Shia community, would be a colossal, monstrous error. There is in Lebanon at this moment too much hatred and too steep an ascent towards the extremes. Far more than Lebanon could bear. And extremes are Tehran's and Tel Aviv's favourite dish. Since time immemorial, warmongering invites external interference and the logic of mutual support for the mimetic reinforcement of supremacy. On the eve of Tuesday's negotiations, the Lebanese State should urgently call for an internal peace conference, inviting all parties to agree on a document similar to the Baabda Declaration of 2012 under the presidency of Michel Sleiman, by which Lebanon committed itself to neutrality and to withdrawal from the axes of regional tension, officially dissociating itself from any external conflict. Whoever refused to respond to the invitation would find themselves de facto marginalised and outside national legitimacy; those who participated would recognise, by their very presence, the legitimate authority of the Lebanese State, far from the political islands of which we have been witnesses until now. This is the means of containing both traps at once: the insurrectional one from Hezbollah, and the subversive one from Israel. This document could also respond to the question of how to approach the negotiations, by proposing a return to the tacit restraint line established following the 1949 armistice agreements, which delimited the zones of military engagement between Lebanon and Israel and allowed for a precarious but real form of coexistence, before militia logic shattered it definitively. The Lebanese State should also take advantage of the political weakening of Tehran and Hezbollah, consequent upon the failure of the Iranian-American negotiations, to gather the forces that have had enough of seeing their country mortgaged since the 1970s by the logic of capitulations and the millet system. This trans-communautarian politico-popular rally is fundamental, today more than it has ever been. We must today defend the Lebanese State against the insidious assault of the dual enemy. The real battle is the one that aims to bring it down. And the State, whatever its numerous imperfections and errors, constitutes the centre that unites the Lebanese. It is also the only guarantee of peace. Of internal peace, before anything else. A majority of us is conscious of our responsibilities in the catastrophe ravaging this country. Many have drawn the lessons and wish to found a State built on common life, liberty, peace and the respect of individuals and groups, in pluralism and the right to difference. We have suffered too much. All the world's wars have been waged here. All of them. We pay the price of our errors and seek only to take our destiny in our own hands. But others, too, must finally assume theirs—and this can only happen through a dynamic similar to that of 14 March 2005: a conjunction of international efforts and a transversal popular movement oriented towards the reconquest by the Lebanese State of its sovereign authority, and a definitive refusal of violence in the name of positive neutrality. Lebanon finds itself now caught in the squaring of the circle. But this can finally change. Yes, we can.

Recent "spillovers" of the war beyond the territorial boundaries that had delimited the conflict since its outset, with their attendant casualties, compel us to pause and reflect. Guerrilla Warfare by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, or Régis Debray's Revolution in the Revolution? , to cite only these two works, analysed at length, in the wake of the golden age of revolution in the 1960s, how irregular warfare, far from being reducible to a simple tactic of harassment waged by weak forces against a superior adversary, takes the form of a subtler and more disquieting undertaking, in which the civilian population no longer serves merely as a refuge or logistical relay, but becomes progressively the very stakes of the confrontation, one that the dynamic of violence never ceases to work upon and recompose according to its own logics. Within this framework, the guerrilla — the post-Clausewitzian war — does not content itself with operating within a given social milieu that it would presuppose as already won over or naturally favourable, but acts upon that milieu with a will to reconfigure it, to compel it out of indifference or ambivalence, by generating situations in which all neutrality is rendered untenable. Guevara spoke of creating the revolutionary conditions rather than awaiting their "social maturity." This logic, which one might describe as a strategy of induced polarisation, rests on a relatively constant mechanism, whose historical iterations reveal both a remarkable plasticity and a formidable efficacy. An insurgent organisation first embeds itself within a social fabric that has not necessarily rallied to its cause in its entirety, conducts targeted actions against a state or occupying power, then exposes itself, deliberately or by calculation, to reprisals whose scale, frequently disproportionate, falls indiscriminately upon combatants and civilians alike. Through this process, the adversary's violence, far from constituting a mere strategic cost, acquires an operational function, insofar as it helps produce the conditions for an emotional and political shift within the population, transforming endured suffering into a catalyst for mobilisation. "The fish in the water" Such a dynamic does not arise from empirical improvisation. It inscribes itself, in fact, within an already ancient theoretical tradition, whose most influential formulations appear in the writings of Mao Zedong on protracted people's war. The celebrated metaphor of the fish swimming through water, frequently invoked to describe the osmosis between guerrilla and population, suggests in reality a constant labour upon that "water," which the guerrilla strives to consolidate and politicise, sometimes at the price of deliberate constraint, in order to ensure its own survival and expansion. In Chinese revolutionary practice, this transformation of the social milieu is accompanied, among other things, by propaganda campaigns, mechanisms of internal pressure, and an indirect instrumentalisation of the adversary's violence, called upon to reveal, through its brutality, the oppressive nature of the enemy. The Algerian war of independence offers, in this respect, a particularly illuminating example of this dialectic, inasmuch as the Front de Libération Nationale, by conducting spectacular actions in urban centres, most notably during the Battle of Algiers in 1957, exposed itself to systematic repression by the French army, whose methods — where torture and disappearances coexisted with intensive surveillance of working-class neighbourhoods — produced a paradoxical effect. A significant portion of the population, initially reticent or cautious, found itself progressively drawn into the independence camp, not solely out of solidarity but also out of a form of moral and existential necessity, so intolerable had any intermediate position become under the weight of the violence endured. An analogous phenomenon can be observed in the Vietnam War, where the Viet Cong's implantation within rural villages did not rest exclusively on any prior allegiance of local populations, but on a capacity to exploit the effects of American military operations, particularly the massive bombardments and forced displacements that were punctuated, at intervals, by massacres of civilians. The events at Mỹ Lai in 1968 remain emblematic in this regard, insofar as they contributed to transforming a localised act of violence into a catalyst for commitment, reinforcing the legitimacy of the insurgency among segments of the population that had until then remained hesitant. "One, two, many Vietnams" In more contemporary contexts, most notably in the Middle East — that privileged laboratory of innovation in post-warfare — this logic appears ceaselessly in renewed forms, as armed organisations operating within densely populated areas engage in permanent interaction with the adversary's military power, whose reprisals, frequently broadcast across the international media, feed cycles of anger and mobilisation. In the Palestinian territories, the various phases of insurrection, whether spontaneous or organised, have regularly given rise to military responses whose effects on civilian populations have contributed, in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, to reinforcing the dynamics of support for armed groups. The Lebanese case, in its current configuration, illustrates this mechanism with singular acuity. Hezbollah, whose revolutionary heartland is today being systematically dismantled — its Iranian Pasdaran cadres and its own commanders hunted down and killed, its bastions in southern Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut reduced to rubble by Israeli strikes, while two million people were torn from their places of life — finds itself compelled to execute a strategic withdrawal toward regions that are far from well-disposed toward it: Beirut, the southern and northern Metn, for instance, milieus in which the war it initiated encounters muffled opposition and at times open hostility. This forced displacement thus opens a new phase in the confrontation, whose stakes extend well beyond the purely territorial register to become properly social in nature. Hezbollah has always openly claimed inspiration from and application of Guevara's subversive techniques in polemological terms, in ways that distinguish it from the formal, statist foquismo applied by the PLO during the war. Hezbollah fights according to a spatial logic, not a territorial one. The foco is therefore mobile, because the space of war is that of the wilayat al-faqih . Territory in itself is of no importance — it is disposable and expendable. As are the inhabitants of the heartland, transformed into martyropaths, prepared to die for doctrine rather than for land. Hezbollah proceeds by urbicide in the name of Iran's spatial empire. To this must be added, moreover, on the polemological level, a neo-Achaemenid layer of Persian strategy. Bound by the logic of empire and vast territorial expanse, the Persians waged wars on multiple fronts, employing to this end proxy wars and the subsidisation of allies through their satrapy system. They also financed enemy cities — including Athens against Sparta — in order to set them against one another, which allowed them to manage fronts without always occupying them militarily. The Persia of the Pasdaran thus fashions a kind of neo-Guevarist permanent revolution, applying across the region for two decades, and in the context of this war by bombarding vast territorial expanses, the Che's celebrated formula: "Create one, two, many Vietnams." The objective is not merely to pressure adversaries, above all the Gulf states, into conceding and seeking peace at the earliest opportunity, but also to internationalise the conflict as broadly as possible in order, paradoxically, to bring it to an end. The "win-win" game Beyond Hezbollah's urban maquis, a calculation of an altogether different order takes shape, one that might be described as a subversive positive-sum game working to the exclusive advantage of the armed organisation — the sinister and now notorious win-win game. By inserting itself into zones resistant to the war and by sustaining activities that expose those zones to Israeli strikes, Hezbollah compels Israel to bomb populations that are hostile to it, turning the adversary, despite itself, into an instrument of loyalty recomposition. The suffering inflicted upon milieus that had contested the war cannot, within this schema, but draw them closer, by necessity, to the one who presents itself as the only available protector. But the calculation extends further still, for the presence of the displaced from southern Lebanon in these neighbourhoods provokes, among the host populations, reactions of hostility and at times open rejection — tensions from which the organisation profits, by a mirror effect, to foster a sense of internal cohesion among its own. There is no more powerful cement than the shared sense of belonging nowhere, and of being safe nowhere except within the ranks of the armed community, sheltered within the warmth of the communal asabiyya . The analysis of these phenomena gains in depth when it draws upon conceptual frameworks from political philosophy and anthropology, beginning with Clausewitzian thought, which, by affirming the intrinsically political nature of war, allows us to understand how violence can be mobilised as an instrument for transforming collective subjectivities. René Girard's theory of mimetic violence illuminates the way in which cycles of reprisal tend to be self-sustaining, each act of violence serving to justify the next, in a spiral where the distinction between aggressor and victim becomes progressively blurred. Michel Seurat's analyses of fragmented forms of power in the Middle East suggest that violence, far from disorganising the social fabric, sometimes participates in its recomposition, by producing new loyalties and redefining communal fault lines. Such a strategy, which consists in provoking or exploiting the adversary's violence in order to transform a population, inevitably raises fundamental moral questions. On one side, it may appear as a pragmatic response to a situation of radical asymmetry, in which insurgent forces possess no other lever by which to contest the domination of a superior adversary. On the other, it implies a form of instrumentalisation of civilians, exposed to heightened risks — sometimes without their explicit consent — in the name of a political objective that exceeds them. Within this tension there emerges one of the fundamental ambiguities of irregular warfare, in which the boundary between a strategy of liberation and deliberate endangerment becomes difficult to draw with any clarity. The guerrilla, when it operates within such a logic, thus does not content itself with reflecting a given state of society, but contributes actively to producing it, by transforming violence into a vector of rallying and making collective suffering a constitutive element of political mobilisation. This displacement — whereby the population ceases to be a mere backdrop and becomes the very theatre of war — confers upon these conflicts a profoundly tragic dimension, one in which the construction of loyalty passes through the shared experience of violence, and in which neutrality progressively dissolves in the impossibility of remaining apart. Return of the repressed? It is necessary, however, not to leave this logic without its counterpoint, for if the strategy of induced polarisation supposes that violence can indefinitely manufacture commitment, it sooner or later encounters a resistance that one might call, after Freud, the return of the repressed. The culture of martyrdom and the culture of life cannot durably coexist without entering into conflict — their collision remaining, in the end, inevitable. The explosion at the port of Beirut in August 2020 provided the most tragic demonstration of this, less as an accident than as a symptom of an organisation that has made death a mode of governance, and that found itself one day confronted, at the very heart of the city it claimed to defend, with the consequences of that choice. Eros and Thanatos cannot durably share the same territory, and one of the two logics will ultimately prevail — without anything in history permitting us to suppose it will be the latter. Yet here too, Hezbollah reveals itself to be devious, perverse. For beyond the asabiyya it cultivates within its own community — and indeed beyond it, through the creation of binary internal tensions, Good against Evil, summoning each person to choose a side — it is already laying the groundwork for a post-war order in which only one victory will truly count: the one that will crush dissident voices, the "enemies within," "the traitors." The victim of today, who seeks to extend the zone of support against the enemy, already presents itself openly as the executioner of tomorrow, ready to erect the gallows. The only viable logic, when confronted with this ideological impasse, is that of the double enemy: the "territorial" enemy, Israel, with its daily crimes against the civilian population, and the "spatial" enemy, Hezbollah, with its transnational ideology in the service of the Pasdaran. The urbicide of Gaza finds its echo in another, shifting, that passes from territory to territory. Between the two, how many more innocent victims will perish before the culture of life finally prevails, once and for all?

Lebanon has for years been subjected to this dual logic of violence and exclusion, that famous “escalation to extremes” — to borrow René Girard's expression, itself drawn from Clausewitz — punctuated by moments of objective collusion and a measured relaxation of hostility. It is the only country paying the price of a confrontation with Israel, no longer even in the service of an Arab cause, the just and legitimate Palestinian cause, but for the greater glory of the mullahs of Tehran. In that sense, Hezbollah's behaviour — having triggered three devastating wars in 2006, 2024 and 2026 — cannot be justified by any purported concern for confronting the Jewish state. Certain voices will invoke the villages of Shebaa and the Kfar Shouba hills to justify the continuation of the resistance, but that argument has been dismantled, maps in hand, since 2006, exposed as a fabrication designed to legitimise the continuation of the Hezbollah project and, at the time, as a pretext for justifying the perpetuation of Syrian occupation — namely, the struggle against Israel. The reality is bitter, but it must be spoken plainly: if Hezbollah's fighters are battling on Lebanese soil, and if they are themselves Lebanese through and through, they fight for and on the orders of Iran. Their party has triggered three wars at Tehran's instigation, on command. In the name of a manufactured will to resist Israel, Hezbollah has literally invited the Israelis to occupy Lebanon. Not that they needed a pretext — but why hand them one freely? Why strew the road to Jerusalem with Israeli checkpoints on Lebanese territory? Why contribute, paradoxically, to giving life to Greater Israel? Called upon to restore to the state its legitimate monopoly on force, its Iranian mother-house under attack, its marjaa assassinated, the party chose the path of suicidal escalation. The Lebanese state cannot be held responsible for that choice. Besides, Hezbollah never sought its opinion before taking its decisions for war. The height of the absurdity is that the state should bear, in every way and on every occasion, the weight of Iran's strategic manipulations on the backs of the Lebanese, with Hezbollah's foot soldiers serving, each time, as pawns. A peace of the vanquished Lebanon does not want this war, despite the frenzied enthusiasm of various parties eager to use it for settling scores on the domestic scene. This is, once again, a war between Israel and Iran being fought on its territory. There are no 'good' and 'bad' actors here — only two occupiers who must cease instrumentalising Lebanon, recognise its sovereignty and return within their own borders, and a militia that must surrender its weapons to the Lebanese state and cease suiciding its own community by transforming it into cannon fodder through voluntary servitude. Iran handed Israel the opportunity to complete its destruction of the Palestinian cause through Hamas's folly, and now the same scenario is playing out with Hezbollah. Neither project has any use for Lebanon as a sovereign and independent country. An Israeli victory would impose upon Lebanon a peace of the vanquished. A Hezbollah victory, even obtained by default, would produce a new episode of vengeance against the Lebanese state — and against those Lebanese who reject this war and oppose its project. Those who wish to fight and settle accounts by supporting one or the other side, with that delicious and insufferable outbidding from the depths of their salon armchairs in North America or Europe, are contributing to Lebanon's destruction, willingly or not. Whatever the outcome of the conflict, Lebanon is not an end in itself for either party. The settlement will be made at its expense, in the international sphere, because it has once again consented — through a mixture of decisional incompetence and impotence — to being transformed into a battleground. But the Lebanese are not without the capacity to weigh meaningfully on the outcome of a conflict that surpasses them. They can, and must, rally behind Lebanese legality — provided that legality continues to take itself seriously. Now more than ever. It is the only remaining possibility of saving Lebanon. Iran first It is time for the hardliners of every community who support Hezbollah to understand that the party fights neither for the banner of Palestine, nor for the honour of the Shia community, nor for the South, the Beqaa and the rest of Lebanese territory, but for Iran, Iran first, and Iran alone. The “resistance to Israel” as conducted by Hezbollah has transformed Lebanon into a field of ruins without advancing the Palestinian cause by a single iota. On the contrary, the gains of the liberation of 2000 have been squandered and reversed for the greater glory of Tehran. Lebanon is, once again, nothing more than a vast field of ruins, of displaced persons and the dispossessed. The camp opposed to Hezbollah must understand, for its part, that the Shia community is not responsible for the Hezbollah tumour — which is the product of cumulative factors — and that one cannot ask intellectuals and unarmed forces to stage an intra-muros democratic intifada against a militia armed to the teeth, moreover under cannon fire, or to form some equivalent of the Qornet Shehwan Gathering to delegitimise Hezbollah. The Qornet Shehwan example is particularly impossible to replicate: that gathering had a patron, namely the Maronite Church under the aegis of Nasrallah Sfeir and Youssef Béchara, capable of bringing together Christian political forces that otherwise refused to sit and converse. Who is the Shia authority — spiritual or temporal — capable of uniting the Shia opposition, at a moment when the Supreme Islamic Council has itself been absorbed by the militia? No. The political solution to the Hezbollah problem is Lebanese, not Shia. It lies in the formation of a coalition of representative forces from all communities, including Shia figures, committed on one hand to preserving the idea of the state and reinforcing its decisional capacity in the coming phase, and on the other to putting an end to the logic of violence and exclusion, and to championing a culture of connection, neutrality and peace. Without this, Lebanon is inexorably doomed to disappear. And everyone will bear responsibility for that — not only Hezbollah, and certainly not the Shia community and its valiant democrats.

The current conflict unfolding before our eyes in Lebanon is indeed a confrontation between Israel and Iran, and more specifically between Israel and Hezbollah. Setting aside any desire to demonise Hezbollah — and yet there is no shortage of valid reasons to do so, from political assassinations, kidnappings, extrajudicial executions, militia coups de force, humiliations of the army, the transformation of Lebanon into a regional hub for money laundering and drug trafficking, to massive contribution to corruption, and the list goes on — Hezbollah is, by its very nature, a branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guards grafted, since 1982, onto a marginalised Shia community abandoned by the Lebanese state. In so doing, it took root in the South of Lebanon, filling the vacuum left by the Lebanese state during the war, before becoming the cherished protégé of the Syrian occupier. This implantation proceeded first through the proliferation of ideological Islamist social organisations that compensated for the absence of state institutions and thereby secured the allegiance of part of the population, then through a form of legitimacy grounded in the discourse of resistance to Israel and its proxies in the South. But it also proceeded through force: the assassination of cadres from the leftist resistance, the 'Brothers' War' with the Amal movement, the protection of the Assad regime in the aftermath of those fratricidal clashes, and above all through the terrorisation of non-Hezbollah Shia opponents, from threats to violence to outright assassination. War, admittedly, presupposes by definition, from the perspective of its protagonists, a binary logic of confrontation between good and evil, friend and enemy. This is not merely the particular preserve of war; it is one of the fundamental axioms of the political. War, specifically, has no use for nuance where politics calls for it. Yet the 'friend-enemy' dyad proper to Carl Schmitt and Julien Freund, however theoretically tempting, cannot serve to analyse the current conflict. A more adequate framework would be that of the 'double enemy,' developed by Jacques Beauchard and better suited to fragile states incapable of influencing disputes provoked by third-party, para-state actors. 'The enemy of one's enemy remains an enemy,' says Beauchard. It is a fact difficult to contest that neither Hezbollah nor, naturally, Israel acts in Lebanon's interest. And what is more, one is compelled to note the near-total mimicry that exists between the two. A state of martial vigilance Since 1948, the State of Israel has found itself in permanent war, seeking to consolidate a legitimacy founded on the erasure of an indigenous people who inhabited the land it now occupies — whatever the ideological pretexts advanced by the Zionists to justify that occupation historically. The logic of the Israeli regime, from Ben Gurion to Netanyahu, has been to remain in a state of martial vigilance against its enemies, in the name of an existential threat it has, moreover, often cultivated — not only to mobilise the Israeli esprit de corps, but to better divide the ranks of its adversaries: the creation of Hamas to counter Fatah; the long toleration of Iranian influence in the region under the banner of the so-called 'alliance of minorities,' with the aim of weakening Arab regimes and perpetuating a state of Sunni-Shia conflict. This logic, with the sole exception of the Oslo interlude — annihilated by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 — was founded on hatred, exclusion and violence towards the Palestinians, whose abandonment and silent extermination were the sine qua non of peace with the Arab states. Israel thus plays the role of regional gendarme in the Middle East with total impunity, while the myth of Greater Israel continues to titillate the Israeli far right, as recent declarations by certain Israeli and American officials attest. Nor can one overlook, in practice, the annexationist behaviour in Syria and, now, potentially, in Lebanon, facilitated by the current war. Netanyahu himself is a figure in whom galloping megalomania combines with political realism against a backdrop of manifest corruption. Iran's theocratic hegemony On its side, Iran has likewise found itself in a state of permanent war since the advent of the mullahs, and especially of Khomeini in 1979. The project of the wilayat el-faqih is that of a transnational theocratic hegemony, legitimised through those within the Shia community who choose to adhere to it. The Iranian supreme guide is its Leviathan, its hegemon , its dictator. The export of the Islamic revolution has been the daawa — in the Khaldounian sense, the political discourse elaborated to conquer power — of Khomeinist Iran since its earliest days, and Iran has never renounced it. All its militia offshoots, Hezbollah first among them, were created to that end. Hezbollah did, admittedly, transform itself — more through realism and opportunism than through conviction or reform — into a political party, in pursuit of entrism within the Lebanese political system. But its command remained miliciano-religious, entirely subordinated in its decision-making to the Pasdaran. Its project, consequently, has no concern for the Lebanese perimeter, as Nasrallah's speeches made plain: they typically reserved only a small portion for the Lebanese situation, at the tail end of interminable analyses of regional affairs through an Iranian lens. The 'Open Letter to the Oppressed' remains Hezbollah's political document, notwithstanding its cosmetic enterprise of 'softening' its face through political opportunism. To legitimise its existence, Hezbollah adopted the daawa of resistance to Israel, after having systematically liquidated the cadres of the national resistance formed by the left — notably the Lebanese Communist Party. Part of the left was subsequently placed under Syrian tutelage and brought to heel by Assad, then financially and politically absorbed by Iran. Moderate, Lebanese-oriented leaderships were marginalised — even Nabih Berri reduced gradually, especially after the end of Syrian tutelage, to the rank of politico-institutional screen serving Hezbollah's purposes. This tribunician function of resistance to Israel did not, however, prevent Hezbollah from implicitly playing the role of border guard for the Jewish state following the Israeli withdrawal of 2000, with Tel Aviv's tacit approval. Israel's paramount objective was to be done with the Palestinian cause, Hezbollah serving, in that framework, as an objective ally on Lebanese territory, the very antithesis of its rhetoric of 'liberating Palestine.' Iran thus laid its hands on the Palestinian cause, via Hamas and Hezbollah — a genuine windfall for Tel Aviv, which could thereby justify a permanent escalation against Islamist actors, impossible to legitimise in the eyes of the international community, rather than against moderate political actors such as Fatah or the left. This objective alliance collided sporadically with Iranian ambitions to maximise pressure on Israel through its proxies, in the context of regional negotiations with the West. The tacit entente was thus shaken in 2006 by the July War. But, paradoxically, that war — and the adoption of Resolution 1701, which temporarily pushed Hezbollah back from the southern border — proved a golden opportunity for the party, marginalised on the Lebanese scene and starved of legitimacy since its assassination of Rafic Hariri in February 2005, to restore its image by draping itself in a Pyrrhic 'divine victory.' After 2006, it therefore devoted itself to its initial and fundamental objective: seizing power in Beirut on Tehran's behalf. This enterprise had begun with the arrangements of April 1996 and the campaign against Rafic Hariri, aimed at hollowing out the Lebanese state and transforming it economically and politically into an emaciated skeleton, to the benefit of the viable mini-state it had built for itself. In the same spirit, it blocked in 1993 the army's deployment to the South, intervening with Damascus to annul the decision taken in that direction by Hariri. After the July 2006 war, it again prevented the troops from deploying to the South in accordance with Resolution 1701, while multiplying attacks against UNIFIL. Hariri's assassination was likewise inscribed in this broader project of sapping the state. The occupation of downtown Beirut after the 2006 war as an act of vengeance against the Lebanese state and the March 14 camp, then the siege of the Grand Sérail to force the fall of the Siniora cabinet, the coup de force of 7 May 2008, the obtaining at Doha of the blocking third within the government, the disintegration of March 14 under the obsessive power-seeking of its various components, and the accession of Michel Aoun to the presidency — all of these brought this process to completion. The Lebanese state has been in Hezbollah's crosshairs from the outset. The party lost its grip on it with the collapse of the Iranian empire following 7 October 2023 and its catastrophic war in support of Gaza, and it is on that state that it will potentially unleash itself once the current war is over. The work has already begun: it has turned its fury on Nawaf Salam as it did in 2006 against Fouad Siniora — who had, it should be recalled, halted the war and the destruction in Rome, saving the pro-Iranian party from a far grimmer fate. The Lebanese state is now seeking to stop the war, and yet it is on that very state that Hezbollah vents its rage — even though it is the party that, once again, has landed itself, and Lebanon with it, in this predicament. Finally, the paroxysm of mimicry: the imperialist project of Greater Israel, driven by a fundamentalist and sectarian logic, finds its perfect mirror in the imperialist project of Greater Persia, realised on the ground after the 2015 nuclear agreement through Iran's grip on Damascus, Beirut, Sanaa and Baghdad — propelled by another megalomaniac, opportunist and corrupt figure, the late Khamenei. Both forces are animated by a nostalgia for a golden age, rooted in religious myths and a shared millenarian and eschatological vision. In sum: enemies, yes. But also two sides of the same coin — and two calamities for Lebanon.

From the rubble of March 14, 2005, nothing emerged but further rubble, embodied most symbolically in the debris of the atomized port of Beirut on August 4, 2020. Hollowed out by wars, occupations and relentless waves of corruption, the Lebanese state has been transformed into a platform, its sovereign power usurped in turn by various de facto forces. With the state structure — even in the bygone time of its glory and splendor — Lebanon’s communities have all maintained a phantasmatic, almost libidinal relationship, shot through simultaneously with contempt, violence, something approaching BDSM. The Shiites, or the Journey to the End of De-statization The Shia community has always maintained, for its part, a relationship of hainamoration with the Lebanese state. Marginalized since the founding of Greater Lebanon, insurgent within the communist left and secular parties, then behind Moussa Sadr, its traditional project — that of Sadr, Shamseddine, Fadlallah, in the tradition of Jabal Amel — was nonetheless that of wilayat al-umma : statist in orientation, for whom Lebanon is a definitive homeland for all its sons (proof of which is that he who wielded this formula as a profession of faith was a Shiite, the former Speaker of Parliament Hussein Husseini), and the Lebanese state an end in itself — as against the Khomeinist innovation of wilayat al-faqih and Hezbollah’s pan-Iranian ambitions. But the culture of the Amilite Shia territory was progressively supplanted by a culture of space distilled by the Pasdaran and subordinated to Tehran. Hezbollah then acquired, under the compulsion of arms after 2005, progressive control of the state’s mechanisms — on top of Amal’s systematic institutional investment since the 1990s, under the Assad umbrella. The collapse of the Iranian empire, from Damascus to Tehran, has however marginalized the party and returned it to its original para-statal status, back below the Weberian line, in open war against a Lebanese state that now struggles, as best it can, to recover its authority in a particularly complex context. Nabih Berri, politically absorbed by the Hezb since March 8, 2005, finds himself fully responsible for the fate of the Shia duopoly within the institutions — in a position that is at once uncomfortable… and gratifying. If Berri continues to innovate in tightrope-walking, Hezbollah openly declares war on the state. But neither loses its compass when it comes to mulk — to power — charging against the institutions… while participating in them. The Amal leader solicits the Iranian ambassador to disregard an executive decision aimed at expelling him, while Hezbollah pulls off the feat of unleashing its attack dogs against the Salam cabinet… while keeping its ministers in it. It boycotts, but does not surrender its portfolios. The politics of the empty chair, since 2005, has always been its preferred instrument — causing damage without ever clearing out. The Shia community has thus reached the apex of its journey to the end of the de-statization into which Hezbollah has been dragging it since the 1980s. The myth of exporting the revolution has collapsed. The status of vanguard resistance guard has evaporated. There is no longer any special status. Psychically, political Shiism is in existential crisis. Sunni Ihbât and the Risk of the Border The Sunni community, originally hostile to the creation of Greater Lebanon owing to the pan-Arab dream, evolved undoubtedly toward Lebanism from the defeat of 1967 and the end of the Nasserist dream. Looking inward within the national borders and recognizing the injustice of the absence of Muslim-Christian parity, it anchored itself in the Palestinian resistance and the National Movement to obtain reforms and equitable participation within the institutions. This re-inscription in territorial culture occurred, however, in pain. First the pain of the Israeli siege of 1982, when, abandoned by the Arab world, it witnessed — after the fall of the pan-Arab dream — the departure of Arafat from Beirut: a double myth collapsing at once. Then the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005. The liquidation of Hariri completed this process of territorialization and gave rise to the Beirut Spring and the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon — the result of a cross-communal and proto-civic coalition gathered under the slogan Lebanon First. Since then, and especially with Hezbollah’s stranglehold on the institutions after May 7, 2008, the Sunni community has been passing through a deep ihbât. Its traditional leaders are disgraced or marginalized, its representation fragmented, its relationship to the state diffuse. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam represents an aspiration toward renewal, but an embryonic and fragile one, without a solid parliamentary or popular base. In this void, a familiar mechanism risks reactivating itself: the attraction exerted by Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa as a symbol of a politico-communal reconquista, or the temptation of Erdogan’s protective shadow — signs of confusion and an existential quest for internal anchorage. If the Lebanese state does not recover its authority and restore substance to its national project, this drift could consolidate, reproducing in a different context the mechanics of 1967: when the border of the state no longer suffices to contain the passions, those passions end up escaping outward. One can wager that Tom Barrack, the voice of the great decision-maker, did not let slip his negationist remark regarding Lebanon through ideological inclination alone. The Temptation of Little Lebanon: The Christian Community The Christian community, above all the Maronites, was Greater Lebanon’s pampered child until the civil war. After the war — and above all the inter-Christian fratricidal wars that accelerated the Syrian stranglehold — the Christians entered a deep ihbât, all their popular figures having been marginalized and exiled until 2005. But since then, the discourse of the deep Christian hinterland has drifted. It is no longer that of the Lebanese state and of Greater Lebanon — the function the community had always assigned itself, from Patriarch Howayek to Sfeir. There is a resurgence of the temptation of identitarian federalism — the old separatist discourses of the civil war dressed up in the pragmatics of administration. A portion — a particularly vociferous one — of Christians no longer wishes so much to defend the perimeter of Greater Lebanon’s sovereignty as to live in a small, well-administered Lebanon: homogeneous, Europeanized and tension-free, ignoring the fact that even a federated identity wishing to live in a haven of peace cannot coexist in tranquility with neighbors locked in permanent war. That is, should they not themselves be seized by the Mephistophelian impulse toward self-annihilation in the name of the pseudo-sacred unity of the community, as occurs cyclically. The irony is cruel: holding the Presidency of the Republic, command of the army, a Muslim-Christian parity respected by their Muslim partners despite demographic realities, Christians have lost faith in the state, and wish to ratify this disillusionment through another formula. A mirage. The Orphaned State At the moment when the Lebanese state is attempting, for the first time since the end of the civil war, to fully restore its sovereignty and authority, it has never been so orphaned of father and mother. The forces of fait accompli within the Shia community — committed to resisting any recentralization and to unconditional allegiance to a project of permanent imperialist war — want nothing of it. The Sunni community, in a state of perdition, looks upon it with the disabused and powerless eyes of the left behind. The Christian community, tempted by silent secession into an imaginary haven, lets itself be lulled by the poisoned call of the sirens. Even the United States and Europe seem to treat it as a pariah. And that is precisely, no doubt, because for once it truly belongs to no community or dominant component. The former Syrian Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam had a phrase of staggering cynicism: “We governed the Lebanese because they are tribes that hate one another.” Horrible as it was, the formula was not entirely false. But it was true at a time when each tribe sought in foreign tutelage the guarantee of its superiority over the others — not today, when each community is simultaneously orphaned and exhausted. There is a truth that generations of Lebanese politicians and thinkers from all communities have discovered, each on their own, at the end of different and often painful — sometimes broken — paths: Greater Lebanon is the only guarantee, the only salvation for all. It has been spoken by men who came from Arab nationalism and arrived at Lebanism, by men who came from the Islamic project and chose citizenship, by men who came from a Christian particularism and understood that isolation was a slow death. And these words were almost always, for those who spoke them publicly and without calculation, their last. This sacrifice deserves to be preserved. If the Lebanese — individuals and groups — finally wish to live in peace, there is no better moment than now to rally to the state, to surround it and recreate a Lebanist center of gravity — not to plunge into nihilism out of weariness or despair. But for that, the state too must cease — beginning with its Prince, guardian in principle of the Constitution and the Republic — to disappoint all its sons through omission, and must at last believe in itself. Orphaned of father and mother? So be it. It is high time it became the father itself.