A Thousand Plateaus

The text that follows is long, but it forms a whole that would be artificial to divide. We hope the reader will forgive us. Born of the high-school protests in France, it takes these events as the starting point for a broader reflection on society, the world, political life and the future of generations to come. It does not claim to offer definitive answers but seeks, above all and with humility, to raise questions, prompt further inquiry and encourage reflection. “You who build the altars now to sacrifice your children, you must not do it any more.” In 1969, among the songs on his second album, Songs from a Room , Canadian poet Leonard Cohen offered the world Story of Isaac , a song inspired by the biblical account of Isaac, whom Abraham prepares to sacrifice in obedience to the divine will.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.