A Thousand Plateaus

At a time when large swaths of Lebanese society are plunging into the hateful pitfalls of the friend-enemy divide, there is more reason than ever to reread Michel Seurat. The Barbarian State — his posthumous collection of articles devoted to the deconstruction of Assad's Syria — remains the most rigorous analytical landmark for anyone seeking to understand the deep structure of Arab politics, Lebanon's included. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun, recast here within a Deleuzian tradition, Seurat evokes the zaamat-state (the state of chiefs) and the jamaat-state (the state of communities) as constructions intrinsic to the Syrian stato-national model. Diametrically opposed, however, to Assad's tyrannical model, Lebanon is also the superimposition of both: the state of chieftaincies and the state of communal bodies — organized, however, into autonomous and rival entities — which makes it simultaneously… too much of a state and not enough of a state… "The Douweylat-State" To this must be added a third layer, inherited from the Eastern Question and the system of millets and capitulations: the absurd oxymoron of the douweylat-state — the state of micro-states with international ramifications, para-statal structures that recognize in the central state only what it can offer them, while disputing its monopoly on legitimate violence, which has been, since Max Weber, one of the very elements of the definition of the state itself. And this is where the struggle is knotted. Lebanon is the territory of dialogue under constraint — as in Geneva, Lausanne, Taif, Doha — which yields "agreement" only under the pressure of collapse or foreign tutelage, and relapses into mistrust the moment that constraint is relaxed, as witnessed by the failure of the national dialogue conference in 2006, barely a year after the Syrian withdrawal. It is also the terrain of mimetic rivalry for power as a sign of communal superiority, and of the caste consciousness of chieftaincies confronting any challenge to their authority. Revolutions there occur only through violence and within each community separately — and even then. Popular uprisings manage to coalesce against a common foreign oppressor, but struggle thereafter to produce a political contract, because the multiplication of allegiances and the persistence of residual legitimacies prevent any lasting centralization. The War Against Weber Political modernity rests in principle on a simple and revolutionary Weberian proposition that Lebanon has never truly traversed. It has produced Constitutions, institutions, ministries and embassies, while maintaining beneath the surface — in a state of quasi-organic preservation — pre-state residual legitimacies: charismatic chieftaincies, historical feudalities, militias, which have claimed and obtained an existence parallel to constitutional legitimacy. The demand for a politics of the countryside and the mountains against urbanization, of particularism against stato-national construction, anticipated by half a century the global identitarian movement we witness today — lending Lebanon's fate a significance that exceeds it. So long as the state has not been invested by a community through its party-force, it remains an object of distrust. The rivalry for power obeys a mimetic mechanics: it is coveted because another holds it, and becomes, consequently, far more a sign of communal superiority than a program of governance… Lacanian hainamoration in all its splendor… March 14, 2005, or the Royal Abortion There was, however, a singular moment in Lebanon's contemporary history… March 14, 2005. A superimposition of the new and the old, the modern and the archaic, of an authentic sovereigntist impulse and the communal apparatuses which, threatened by the emergence of a transversal civic dynamic, immediately set about recuperating it — to drain it of all reformist substance and re-communitarize it. A million and a half people in the streets of Beirut, moved by a demand for sovereignty, who were not responding to the summons of a zaim but to something stranger and more fragile — it was at once fascinating and unsettling. The zaamats had stepped back, and the movement was running on autopilot — or nearly so, led essentially by intellectuals, civil society cadres and students. As for the jamaat , its frame was overflowed. For a moment, the aspiration to a rational and national legitimacy had crossed communal lines rather than folding back within them. Only Hezbollah, loyal to Assad and quite content to inherit his legacy, had openly positioned itself in confrontation with the movement. It too saw in the stato-national construction that had become possible a threat to its weapons and its hegemony over its community. The moment was thus quickly smothered by its own bearers. The inability of March 14 to choose between its passage toward the state and the continued existence of enclaves within the state stems from the very nature of the movement — simultaneously a desire for a sovereign state, subsequently transmuted into a gathering of communities that wanted nothing of the other's state. Though real and exhilarating, the grace — that of a last chance? — was brief. Fleeting. A dream. And it is on the ruins of that singular adventure — deconstructed both under the hammer blows of the Assad-Hezbollah axis and by the petty power stakes of its own leaders — that Lebanon's current tragedy is now playing out.

The conflict currently unfolding in Lebanon — and more broadly, across the Middle East — is doubly lethal. There are, of course, the victims first, the material damage, and their economic consequences for the world at large. But beyond that, a binary logic governs minds on both sides, and it appears far more destructive in the long run. In the usual rhetoric, wars are presented as the shortest path to resolving an intractable problem. Yet the results of the past century prove the opposite. Wars have generated a multitude of problems, whatever the justification for waging them. Military solutions are no longer sufficient to settle matters, and the political management of the post-war period — above all the American variety — has been catastrophic at best since Saigon. The current war between Iran and Hezbollah on one hand, and the United States and Israel on the other, far exceeds the Lebanese context. To address it solely through the Lebanese lens — the Hezbollah weapons issue — would be a mistake, despite the perfectly justified exasperation at the totalitarian situation created by the pro-Iranian party in Lebanon over four decades. But the enemy (Israel) of my enemy (Hezbollah) is not my friend. A drift in certain current positions assumes that one must choose, in this war, between one of the two camps, with the aim of settling internal scores. In its wake, the discourse at times takes a sectarian turn — and renews ties with the old demons of intercommunal vendettas, all the more so against the backdrop of the unprecedented crisis the country is traversing, with the displacement of populations provoked by Israel's boundless hubris in complete impunity. This is to forget that all Lebanese communities have made the same mistake — namely that of being, in the end, amalgamated into a project of hubris that has created in each of them, in turn, an unbearable feeling of defeat and dejection. The Shia question did not arise yesterday. It was driven by a desire for social recognition after decades of marginalization from state-building. Finding no echo, the Shia abandoned their modernist project and turned toward identity-based forms of organization with a strong social character. And this organization shattered traditional structures without the state being strong enough to replace them. If Hezbollah does not represent the entire Shia community, it nonetheless represents a part of it — by conviction or structural necessity. And the other part of the community cannot, in all likelihood, remain neutral or indifferent — despite its lack of enthusiasm for the party — in the face of a bloody and systematic aggression that strikes their kin and their property. Especially when no political alternative exists to allow them to escape the catastrophe into which they have been dragged, willing or not. The bond between the Shia and Hezbollah goes beyond the simple black-and-white context, owing on one hand to blood ties, and on the other to the specificities of mimetic rivalry between Lebanese communities within the public space. Hezbollah, and before it Amal, long played on the Shia trauma of exclusion inherited from the injustices of the past. Moreover, the party has worked systematically to marginalize, exclude, or crush all Shia Lebanese sovereigntist opponents of the Khomeinist doctrine of wilayat al-faqih , in all its expressions — from Imam Mohammad Mehdi Shamseddine to the liberal intellectual Lokman Slim, including the Lebanese sovereigntist left. Hezbollah has thus deliberately, for decades, established an intentional confusion between the two levels of belonging — national and communal — which was, moreover, the model of all parties during the war, obsessed by a single thing: the conquest of power. The difference is that the Hezb did so exclusively as a satrapy of the new Persia, which has drawn from it its political and material dividends. Yet between Hezbollah and Iran on one side, and Israel on the other, there is a third camp: Lebanon, Lebanese legitimacy. And whatever its fragility, it is the only one worthy of allegiance. If the Lebanese state has been rickety since 1973 on account of wars and tutelages, and is now struggling to get back on its feet as best it can, it nonetheless remains the only guarantee for the country — for all Lebanese, whatever their community. The entire complexity of the Lebanese state lies in the fact that it is called upon to govern not only individuals but also communities, human groupings, regions, and cultures. A simple state can only be reductive, and a reductive state is, by definition, a totalitarian state which, being unable to exist in harmony with a complex society, will attempt to reshape it according to its will, to simplify it. This is the pitfall into which each communal faction fell when they sought to mold Lebanon in their own image, excluding and marginalizing the country's other components. The Lebanese state remains the only guarantee, yes. Provided that its communities — and with them their respective leaders, who continue to behave like clan chiefs out of feudal times, cloaked in a divine historical mission to restore the greatness and security of their horde — finally pledge a definitive allegiance to the state and to the idea of Greater Lebanon within its internationally recognized borders — without conditions and without compromises to anyone. And provided that the state, too, proves that it assumes without wavering its responsibility to preserve Lebanon, in accordance with the Constitution. Lebanon cannot emerge victorious from a war over which it controls none of the elements, and Hezbollah's jihad is absurd — as is, for that matter, the idea that Israel will be able to totally annihilate an eschatological militia that feeds on death and martyrs. The Land of the Cedar is, after all, nothing more than an abscess-terrain for a crisis that has lasted since 1969, if not since 1948, and that bears upon its unity, its sovereignty, its peace — as well as the sine qua non condition for enshrining these: benevolent neutrality toward the region's conflicts, within the framework of respect for the common good of its Arab neighborhood, international law, and the fundamental rights of the human being. At some point, the cannon must fall silent, and there must be a return to reality. And even if it seems difficult to believe that the Hezb will renounce its suicidal and epic — indeed gigantomachic — bravado, those Lebanese leaders who still retain some hold on events must stop contemplating the disaster and propose, within the framework of a vast transcommunal council of notables, a political initiative capable of allowing the Shia community to escape the insidious binary trap in which Iran has been locking them for decades — Israel or me, the Sunnis or me, etc. Hezbollah's tyranny has lasted far too long, but — the experience of the past notwithstanding — it is certainly not another tyrannical enterprise — one that comes from outside, no less — that will put an end to it, but rather an inclusive peace project founded on the constitutive elements of a state and the fundamental values of the Republic. Otherwise, beware the return of the repressed! All the more so since Lebanon's components and the international community have allowed things to unfold, by action or omission, by interest or by the will not to take the bull by the horns... to "avoid a civil war." This project, which existed between 2000 and 2005 to restore the unity-sovereignty axis in the face of Assad, does not exist at present. Nothing has been done to create it, with all political factions obsessed by their narrow short-term political gains. The only plausible roadmap for escaping the murderous madness should be as follows: cessation of hostilities, disarmament of Hezbollah and restoration of state authority over the entirety of its territory through the intensive deployment of the army at the border, in conjunction with Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories, followed by peace negotiations under UN auspices, and a status of benevolent neutrality for Lebanon. The alternative is Lebanon's disappearance, with, once again, the "peace of others" over its corpse — and ours. We have only one. Let us not contribute to its destruction, but to its salvation. René Maheu observed in 1975 that Lebanon had succeeded in producing a "style of civilization" founded on dialogue and living together; a society which, despite its inequalities, remained "the least inhuman in the world," as Georges Naccache put it. A world in deliquescence, ravaged now by the very same identity anxieties that presided over its destruction, would sorely need that Lebanon.

“In every generation they rise to destroy us, and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” — The Passover Haggadah The conflict currently pitting Israel against Iran and its proxies extends far beyond the military and geopolitical framework in which some persist in confining it. The semiology deployed by both parties — the names given to operations, the expressions chosen to announce or respond to them — reveals a battle that is eminently religious and metaphysical in character, in which each military act claims to inscribe itself within the order of scriptural fulfillment. Where military operation names ordinarily obey a logic of propaganda designed to impress the enemy, the rhetorical ornamentation here plays an entirely different role, standing at the very heart of the war apparatus. It constitutes its essence, helping to explain why this conflict unfolds on a register altogether different from strictly diachronic, historical time. At least four expressions have concentrated this logic since the fighting resumed its intensity: Al-Aasf Al-Ma'koul , the name given by Hezbollah on Wednesday to its missile operations; Al-Saa Saaein , the message broadcast in Arabic by the Israeli army as its reply; and, before that, Rising Lion and Roaring Lion , names of the two Israeli operations against Iran in 2025 and 2026. Each of these expressions summons a scriptural memory so precise, and so consciously chosen, that it is difficult to read them as mere military labels. “Al-Aasf al-Ma'koul” In designating the name Al-Aasf Al-Ma'koul to characterize its operations, Hezbollah draws from Surah 105 of the Quran — the Surah of the Elephant — which recounts the fate of Abraha, a Christian king of Yemen whose army had marched on Mecca to destroy the Kaaba. The divine punishment was total and of an almost aesthetic brutality in its radicality: the soldiers were reduced to the state of “devoured leaves”, of dry residue that the wind scatters leaving nothing behind, not even the dignity of a body to mourn. The reference is clear and direct, designed to fortify Hezbollah's public. The Islamist party plays explicitly on the register of instinctive and immediate collective memory, foregrounding a vengeful punitive character in the face of the harshness of the Israeli offensive. What deserves noting, beyond the notoriety of the reference, is the precision of the analogy it constructs. For Abraha was no ordinary enemy. He was a Christian allied with Byzantium, who believed himself the bearer of a civilizing mission and whose army possessed elephants — a symbol of technological power for the era. His defeat illustrates in the Quran that material force, however impressive, does not prevail against divine will. The parallel with Israel — a technologically advanced state, backed by the United States in its war against Iran — is constructed to be read effortlessly, as self-evident, in the circles where this discourse circulates. “Al-Saa Saaein” The Israeli reply is eloquent. By broadcasting in Arabic the message Al-Saa Saaein — “double the measure” —, the Israeli army chooses a classical Arabic expression that resonates simultaneously across several registers: that of the Arabic language itself, where the expression designates the principle of proportional or doubled retaliation; and the biblical register, where the Hebrew séah — linguistic and semantic cousin of the Arabic saa — runs through Scripture as a unit of measurement for grain but also, and above all, as a metaphor for divine retribution. Two punishments for one. This biblical root merits attention. Isaiah proclaims that Jerusalem has received double for all her sins (40:2). Jeremiah announces that God will render double to enemy nations (16:18). The Apocalypse of John reprises the same structure: “Render to her double according to her works” (18:6). And behind all these texts looms the Talmudic principle of middah keneged middah — «measure for measure» — a foundation of Jewish juridical and theological thought, according to which justice functions by returning exactly what was inflicted, or doubling it. In responding in Arabic to its adversaries within this shared scriptural register, the Israeli army is in effect saying: we know your texts, we know their equivalents in ours, and it is in this common depth that we answer you. Metaphysical and eschatological war in all its splendor, compounded by an archetypal mimetic violence that corresponds perfectly to the model defined by René Girard. The maneuver does not seek to escape the framework proposed by the adversary but to occupy it from within and reverse its logic — which is, as experts would agree, in a war of signs, the most effective form of counter-attack. “Rising Lion”, “Roaring Lion” The name given to the operation against Iran's nuclear program on June 13, 2025 — Rising Lion, the Lion that Rises — already found its direct scriptural origin in the oracle of Balaam, in the book of Numbers (24:8-9). The scene constitutes in itself a narrative device of remarkable coherence: Balaam was a foreign seer summoned by Balak, king of Moab, to curse Israel. Three times he attempted it, three times his mouth, despite himself and against his will, pronounced a blessing. It is in this third forced blessing that the verse is found: “He couches, he lies down like a lion, like a lioness; who will rouse him?” This narrative device accomplishes something theologically singular: it has the invincibility of Israel attested by the very mouth of the enemy who wished to curse it. Far from being proclaimed by those who possess it, power imposes itself on those who hoped to deny it. Better still, through them. To name a military operation after this verse is, therefore, to summon this precise archetype: we were lying down, we are rising, and it is for our enemies themselves to acknowledge that none can prevent us. It was Benjamin Netanyahu who declared that he personally chose the name of the operation in reference to this prophecy. The fact that the head of government publicly assumes reading his action within the register of biblical fulfillment speaks volumes about the prophetic reach he wishes to give to the war — no doubt to legitimize it religiously — but also about the moment Israel is traversing and about the way its leaders conceive, or at least present, their relationship to history. One must add a layer of reading that has been little highlighted: the lion before a rising sun was the emblem of imperial Iran, the one on Persian flags before 1979. In naming its operation thus, Israel kills two birds with one stone. It addresses its own citizens with a biblical reference — and simultaneously sends Iranians a message that invokes their own national memory, specifically that of the royal Persia erased by the Islamic Republic. It says, implicitly, that the lion rises not against Iran but against the mullahs' regime, and that something of ancient Persia perhaps stands on this side of the border. Semiotic warfare here reaches its paroxysm. Staggering. The textual inclusion with Jacob's blessing to his son Judah in Genesis (49:9) — “Judah is a lion's cub [...] he crouches, he lies down like a lion; who will rouse him?” — creates a prophetic continuity embracing the entire Torah: the lion of Judah is the royal lineage, it is Jerusalem whose coat of arms still bears the passant lion, it is in the Christian tradition the «Lion of the tribe of Judah» of the Apocalypse (5:5), the one who rises after having seemed vanquished. This symbolism activates the notion of a power held in reserve that chooses its moment — the crouching lion is not a weak lion, it is a lion that waits, ready to spring upon its prey in due time. It is hardly surprising, in this context, that the new Israeli offensive should be titled “Roaring Lion”. Roaring Lion — in Hebrew Sha'agat Ha'Ari — is thus the second of its kind within a deliberate sequence, a narrative progression drawn directly from biblical leonine symbolism. Balaam's crouching lion rises, then roars before striking. The roar, in the prophets, is not a metaphor for anger: it is the harbinger of the divine act itself. Amos 3:8: “The lion has roared; who will not fear?” Joel 4:16: “The Lord will roar from Zion.” Netanyahu has constructed a sequence in two scriptural acts. The common thread? The punitive, vindicative expedition. And millennialism. Purim and the Deliverance of the Jewish People The temporal dimension of these events also deserves particular attention. The exchanges of missiles and messages unfold in the days immediately following Purim, celebrated this year on March 2 and 3, 2026. The coincidence alone would merit pause, concentrating as it does within a few days the entire paradox of the Persian-Israeli relationship. Purim commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people from an extermination project devised by Haman, minister of the Persian king Ahasuerus — a project aimed at “destroying, killing and annihilating all Jews, young and old, women and children, in a single day”, in the very terms of the Book of Esther. The story takes place in Shushan, present-day Susa, in Iran. The festival thus refers not to some vague Oriental reminiscence, but to nothing less than a threat of annihilation emanating from Persia itself, foiled by a woman's cunning and turned against its instigator. Haman is hanged on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai. The narrative structure is that of the perfect reversal — and it is precisely for this reason that Purim is called the Festival of Lots: Haman had drawn lots to choose the date of the massacre, and it is that very lot which turned against him. That hostilities resume with renewed intensity in the week following this festival — whose narrative has staged, for twenty-five centuries, Jewish survival in the face of a Persian threat — may not be the fruit of deliberate calculation. But in a conflict where both parties have demonstrated such refined mastery of religious semiology, the hypothesis of chance is the least convincing. And even if it were chance, those reading these events from within the concerned traditions will not fail to interpret it as a sign — which, in the realm of eschatological wars, amounts to exactly the same thing. What the calendar adds to the picture is a depth that ordinary geopolitical analyses struggle to grasp: that the confrontation surpasses the conflict between two states or two ideologies and pits against each other two wounded memories, whose dates of commemoration overlap with a tragic precision. The Persia that was the empire of Haman is today the empire of Khamenei — and Purim, which celebrated an ancient victory over an ancient enemy, finds itself celebrating, in this new context, something that is not yet resolved. The Shadow of Armageddon What sets this conflict apart from ordinary wars — and this may be its most troubling characteristic for anyone still hoping for a political resolution — is that its principal protagonists do not reason in terms of tactical victory or negotiable balance of power, but in terms of historical finality and eschatological fulfillment. Khamenei's theocracy is architectured around the doctrine of the Mahdi, the hidden twelfth imam whose return will bring history to an end. According to anthropological readings of this tradition, this return is conditioned by a preceding great chaos, so that the destruction of Israel goes beyond a mere political objective, insofar as it is presented as a theological condition for eschatological fulfillment, an investment in an end of times whose promoters hope to accelerate the advent. In national-religious Judaism, and even more so in the currents of American evangelism that constitute a decisive support base for Israel, current events are often read through the prism of Ezekiel 38-39 — the prophecy of Gog and Magog, a coalition of nations from the North and East that rises against Israel gathered in its land, and whose defeat manifests divine glory before all nations. What makes this collision of two eschatologies so perilous is what Hannah Arendt would no doubt have recognized as the fundamental temptation of the political thinker turned prophet: to exit the domain of human action — irreversible certainly, but unpredictable and plural, always open to the unexpected — and enter that of necessity, where everything is already written and the actor's role is simply to conform. A war experienced as the fulfillment of a written destiny knows neither limit nor compromise, because stopping before the prophetic term would be to betray the prophecy itself. This is no doubt, in another language and with other references, what Pascal glimpsed in his time: the man who believes he acts in the name of God is capable of the extremities that the merely selfish man would never reach, because the selfish man, at least, still has something to lose. The Middle East now faces two eschatologies acting as two forces launched toward each other with the intent of total annihilation. The mastery of sacred texts has not been placed at the service of peace, which is also present in those same texts, but at the service of war. The same Numbers that contain the lion's oracle also contain prescriptions on mercy. The same Quran that evokes the devoured straw is traversed by verses on reconciliation. The choice of texts is therefore also a choice about what one wishes those texts to be — and that choice belongs entirely to the men who make it. The oracle of Balaam is perhaps, in this perspective, the most accurate image of the situation. Balaam had come to curse and he blessed — not out of virtue, but because something in the reality before him resisted the malediction he was commanded to pronounce. But the oracle also contains a question that no one ever asks seriously enough: “Who will rouse the lion?” — a rhetorical question in the text, meaning that none can, but which in the reality of the current conflict designates precisely what the belligerents are doing, each in their own way: provoking the adversary's lion, compelling it to rise, and finding themselves then in the position of those who have set in motion a movement they no longer control. Which is not without evoking another religious symbol, Armageddon, the end of times, common to both traditions at war, each seeing in it the sign of a return — whether of the Demiurge, whether of the Mahdi. Unfortunately for those who watch, powerless and beneath a deluge of fire, this epic struggle outside of time between two millenarian deliriums. Bibliography AMIR-MOEZZI, Mohammad Ali, Le guide divin dans le shî'isme originel (Verdier, 1992). AMIR-MOEZZI, Mohammad Ali, La religion discrète (Vrin, 2006). ARENDT, Hannah, La condition de l'homme moderne (Calmann-Lévy, 1961). ARENDT, Hannah, Les origines du totalitarisme (Seuil, 1972). BARTHES, Roland, Mythologies (Seuil, 1957). CAMERON, Averil & CONRAD, Lawrence (éd.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East (Darwin Press, 1992). CORBIN, Henry, En Islam iranien (4 vol., Gallimard, 1971-1972). FILIU, Jean-Pierre, L’Apocalypse dans l’islam (Fayard, 2008). HOROWITZ, Elliott, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton University Press, 2006). KHOSROKHAVAR, Farhad, Quand Al-Qaïda parle (Grasset, 2006). KHOSROKHAVAR, Farhad, L'Islamisme et la mort – Le martyre révolutionnaire en Iran (L'Harmattan, 1995). NEHER, André, L'essence du prophétisme (PUF, 1955). SCHOLEM, Gershom, Le messianisme juif (Calmann-Lévy, 1974).

The recent remarks by Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general, Mohammad Raad, and Mahmoud Komati, vice-president of the party’s Political Council, invite serious reflection on the political meaning of the conflict currently underway. Komati speaks of a “golden opportunity” for the State — built on what Hezbollah claims to have “proven” on the ground — to establish a deterrence equation that should now be consolidated. Raad turns his fire openly on the State itself, accusing it of refusing to become entangled in a conflict that his own party manufactured from nothing. The deputy secretary-general insists, stubbornly, on his will to liberate Lebanese territory from an occupation… that did not exist before his militia chose to open hostilities in order to avenge the Iranian spiritual guide. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which this represents a denial of reality. Granted, Hezbollah is in the process of demonstrating that, despite a series of monumental setbacks in 2024, the ongoing elimination of its cadres by Israel even through periods of relative calm, and the mounting international and domestic pressure for its disarmament, it remains a threat. But a threat to whom, precisely? Because the Hezbollah discourse is not addressed to Tel Aviv. It is addressed to the Lebanese State. In 2008, when the Siniora government made its bold decision — in terms of restoring sovereignty — to dismantle the pro-Iranian party’s landline telecommunications network, Hassan Nasrallah responded that “the weapons are there to protect the weapons,” and unleashed the militia’s punitive expedition against Beirut and the Mountain. Komati’s remarks signal that this logic endures, at the very moment when the head of state and the government are multiplying gestures to restore the monopoly on legitimate violence. What becomes clear, reading between the lines of the party’s rhetoric, is that the issue is not the preservation of the resistance’s military capabilities in the strict sense. It is the necessity of “Hezbollahing” the Lebanese State once and for all — keeping it within the axis of confrontation, meaning under Iranian influence, opposed to American pressure and to any willingness to negotiate with Israel. In other words, Hezbollah wishes to “Pasdaran-ize” the State, in the manner of what is already unfolding in Iran with the positioning of Khamenei’s son and the stranglehold of the Revolutionary Guards over the state apparatus. This is Hezbollah’s answer to the Lebanese executive’s decision to disarm it. From this follows a hard truth: the outcome of this war — provoked by Hezbollah — will be, one way or another, existential for Lebanon. The price of the party’s destruction would be exorbitant for Lebanon, likely exposing Beirut to direct Israeli influence and further weighting the scales of any negotiation with Tel Aviv — to say nothing of the human, infrastructural, economic and financial disaster already settling in day by day. The price of a Pyrrhic “victory” — achieved simply by holding out as long as possible and inflicting maximum pain on the adversary — would be equally exorbitant, to the extent that such a victory would further weaken the Lebanese State in its relationship with the party. Ironically, whatever the outcome of the conflict, Lebanon will lose in terms of sovereignty — whether vis-à-vis Israel or Iran. To borrow the iconic line from Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander: “There can be only one.” And this is not about Israel versus Hezbollah. It is about, once this war has run its course, Lebanon in its entirety versus Hezbollah and its unalterable desire for revenge against the state structure and the Lebanese model. There can be only one. And it will have to be the State — and the Lebanese model, however imperfect — whose guardianship has been entrusted to it. Can this inescapable conflict, two decades in the making, be avoided? Given the belligerent militia nature and the supremacist arrogance of Hezbollah, one would have to wager: no. The question that remains, however, is how a State can confront an organization that is suicidal by nature and prepared to fight to the last Lebanese in order to keep Lebanon under the grip of its Iranian patron — without descending into its sordid game of violence and legitimation through the posture of victimhood. For the first time since the missed opportunity of March 14, 2005, legality faces a true trial by fire. It must, through an extremely delicate balancing act, restore its uncontested authority and monopoly on legitimate violence without compromise — while simultaneously protecting the culture of connection and peace against that of violence and exclusion. In other words: though incapable of preventing Hezbollah from self-destructing, legality must be capable of reinventing itself — far from the petty interests of clan and community chieftains — and of proposing a model that stands, once and for all, at the opposite pole from the totalitarian, “chaophilic,” and mortiferous model of the Revolutionary Guards; a model worthy of the pluralist and nahda heritage of Mohammad Mahdi Chamseddine, Mohammad Hassan al-Amine, and Hani Fahs. This model is not one of divorce between communities, but of an indivisible unity — the only true guarantor of sovereignty, as in 2005. And it is directed not merely against Iran and its ideological and militia offspring, against Israel or any other political or physical tutelage, but inward — toward a positive consensus on the will to continue living together. Hezbollah, and with it a part of the Shia community, is traversing the same megalomaniacal process that led each of Lebanon’s communities, driven by a radical political tendency, to believe that Lebanon could be reduced to its domination and its vision of the country. Each paid an enormous price for that belief. It is time to learn the lesson, to set hubris aside — along with the hypocrisies. Hezbollah is not only committing suicide at this moment. In doing so, it is confronting Lebanon with itself, and with a moment of truth. The choice is between deciding, once and for all, on the basis of a rational and mature judgment, to build a composite, democratic, modern, and coherent State — respectful of the pluralism, diversity, and specificities of all its components, making room for a genuine process of civic individuation beyond clan and communal belonging — or making the choice of implosion and divorce, with the risk of yet another failure at the next turn. The voices in favor of the second option, after decades of bitter and painful disappointments spread across a century, are growing louder. Even if the temptation of withdrawal into oneself constitutes a powerful anxiolytic for communitarians, Greater Lebanon — in all its imperfections — remains a necessity for all, to the extent that it grants — and this point is never sufficiently emphasized — a strength and legitimacy to all its components through pluralism: each one legitimizing the other in the eyes of the region and its torments. Greater Lebanon is experienced by a part of its inhabitants as a curse and a suffering, because they see only its misfortunes and its failings. And yet it is also, every day, in the smallest enriching encounters, the smallest gestures of exchange at every level between its citizens, a singular experience of human life — especially in this part of the world. Provided it is given the possibility of managing its conflicts in peace: within the framework of a functional, sovereign, and regionally neutral State, holding the monopoly on violence, endowed with good governance, operating within a viable administrative arrangement, and — above all — resting on a social and political contract that commands the adherence of all Lebanese, founded on respect for the Constitution, the law, public and private liberties, and the specificities of each group. This naturally presupposes a caliber of statesmen currently almost entirely absent — since it is the men at the helm who have, in the past, through error after error, servitude after servitude, folly after folly, transformed Lebanon from paradise into hell. But events often produce this kind of providential figure, provided they choose to demonstrate courage, self-abnegation, and a sense of the common good. The battle underway is not about the defeat, victory, or survival of Hezbollah. No. To excise a metastasis from a body is to put the vital prognosis at risk. It is therefore the body — but also the soul — of Lebanon that is at stake before our eyes. May the patient choose to hold on. And, should it survive with its physical integrity intact, may it not make a choice it will regret even more in the coming half-century.

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

Open letter to Joseph Aoun, Nawaf Salam and Nabih Berri In truth, we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of the abyss Democritus of Abdera Messrs. Presidents, To say that Lebanon finds itself today facing a new major existential crisis — the result of a malicious streptococcus, Hezbollah, which was not, or could not be, treated in time — borders on truism. For what is unfolding today goes far beyond the familiar mechanics of Lebanese crises. This is no longer about yet another reshuffling of confessional balances, nor even another sequence of the interminable proxy war that others have waged on our soil. What is wavering this time, more than ever, amid the din of the Israeli invasion and the collapse of the Iranian hegemonic project, is the very substrate of Greater Lebanon — that fragile, often betrayed, but irreplaceable idea that allowed antagonistic communities to cohabit, to clash violently, and, at times, to recognize one another. Which is, in the end, the lot of any couple learning to live together. In its decompensatory escapade, Hezbollah is now finishing itself off — and, in doing so, finishing off Lebanon as well. Its strategic suicide — gnostic in its logic of self-immolation, imperial in its ambitions, sectarian in its vertigo — reveals not so much a military defeat as a profound ontological fracture. For a long time, Hezbollah claimed to embody a resistance, and its followers believed it. Yet it embodied, in the end, nothing but servitude — to Iran, its dreams of regional supremacy, its theocratic project exported into the veins of a Lebanon it bled to the bone. This pro-Iranian supremacism, from which the Shia component of Lebanese society has ultimately suffered the most, has chosen to consume itself — and no one can do anything about it. But Hezbollah did not metastasize alone. It must be said plainly: the entire Lebanese political, social, and communal body did so alongside it, each in its own way, especially during the long years of Michel Aoun’s tenure, with its infinite turpitudes and its assumed vassalization to Tehran and to the logic of the alliance of minorities. Messrs., Look at the state of the communities you de facto represent within the institutions, by virtue of your respective functions. The Christians — even the most sovereignists among them, those who carried for decades the idea of a pluralist and independent Lebanon in the tradition of Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir — are today retreating into a defensive particularism. The federalist idea, long marginal, is gaining ground — as if, at the depths of despair, partition had become the only possibility of survival. This is a tragic regression on the part of those who were the pioneers of Greater Lebanon, the architects of the very idea of an institutionalized common life within a shared State. That they should desert it now constitutes a cultural defeat as much as a political one. The Shia community, for its part, is traversing a distress of a depth that the triumphalist discourses of another age can no longer conceal. To have believed in the resistance, to have given it everything — sons, villages, decades — only to see it turn into a machine of regional domination in the service of a foreign power: this is an immense mourning, which few outside observers measure with the empathy it deserves. Lebanon’s Shia deserve infinitely better than what Hezbollah offered them: martyropathy. They deserve to survive this nightmare that has gone on far too long, without feeling crushed. The Sunnis, for their part, are navigating a painful political void. Not that they have renounced Lebanon — far from it. But in the absence of reference figures and a unifying project, some are looking once again toward the Syria of Ahmad al-Sharaa and, beyond that, toward the Turkey of Erdoğan. This temptation is understandable in its genesis, yet it would be devastating in its effects. To dilute Lebanese sovereignty once more into a regional space that does not resemble it, in the name of a poorly defined civilizational solidarity, would be to repeat the Arab error of 1958 — under different flags, but with the same renunciation of self. The blood of Hassan Khaled and Rafik Hariri was not shed for nothing. As for the Druze — a community viscerally rooted in the idea of Greater Lebanon, the one that has paid the blood price with the greatest constancy —, they find themselves confronted with a leadership rivalry whose certain manifestations, in the neighboring Hauran, are eyeing alliances that would have been utterly unimaginable a decade ago. No, the vertigo of the Zionist neighborhood is not an abstraction. Messrs., This portrait is not that of a country dying all at once. It is that of a country disintegrating slowly, community by community, reflex by reflex, retreat by retreat — without the maps of the Levant being geographically redrawn, without even imploding in a visible paroxysm. It suffices for Lebanon to lose its national unity to disappear of its own accord, without its own function, engulfed by interests that surpass it — Israel, Syria, Turkey — and that have no reason to spare it if it no longer knows how to defend itself through the coherence of its project. We have almost always relied on others as a way of shedding our own responsibilities. It was more comfortable, easier. The calamitous result is plain to see — the country now reeks of carrion. Yet, and this is what we wish to say here, contrary to received ideas that have long poisoned public debate, Greater Lebanon is not a burden inherited from French colonialism, nor some dhimmi artifice. It was conceived by its founding fathers — of all confessions — as a refuge, a guarantee, a space of pluralism in a Middle East that offered precious little of it. For the Christians, certainly. But also for the Druze, for the Shia whom geography and history had marginalized within the Ottoman space, for the Sunnis who wagered on liberal modernity against the temptations of a dissolving pan-Arabism. Greater Lebanon was, in its original vocation, a necessity for all. Errors of governance, injustices in representation, regional ambitions incompatible with its size and nature, delirious ideologies imported from outside or manufactured within, and grandiose personal fantasies have seriously shaken the edifice. But a shaken edifice is not a condemned one — provided one has the courage to repair it rather than quarrel over its rubble. The battle being waged today — against the arrogance of a collapsing Hezbollah and the infinite warmongering of the Israeli invader — goes beyond the question of the monopoly on legitimate violence or the halting of a destructive military offensive. These stakes are real and urgent. But the primary question is this: who are we, together? What does Lebanon wish to continue being, for itself and for its children? Once again, in self-destructing, Hezbollah is annihilating Lebanon. But Lebanon in general, and its Shia in particular, deserve to survive this nightmare that has gone on far too long. You are three men, at the head of three institutions, that history has placed there, at this precise moment, to answer that question. Not to sidestep it. Not to defer it to some post-crisis future — for there will be no after without the work of the now. That said, if this responsibility belongs to all without exception — for the problem is not strictly Shia — and if the Lebanese executive has sinned by lack of firmness toward Hezbollah since the end of the 2024 catastrophe, your responsibility, Mr. Berry, remains the greatest. You have always been ambivalent, pushing to the furthest limit the art of tightrope-walking to pull through and satisfy everyone — including yourself. But cunning has no place anymore. For three decades, Lebanon has wagered on a historic stance from you that would unambiguously mark a Lebanese identity and a sense of statehood in relation to Hezbollah. Until now, that wager has proven perfectly futile. End your political career beautifully. You will not be betraying your community; you will be saving it, there where the eschatological sect is bleeding it dry. And with it, Lebanon. Messrs., Of course, we do not ask you to agree on everything. Lebanese democracy, in what is most beautiful about it, has always fed on living disagreement. What we call upon you to do is to speak with one voice on the essential: Greater Lebanon is truly worth saving. And its survival demands, from all, a partial renunciation of their particular calculations in favor of a common project — the only one worth having, the only one that endures, the only one that makes sense. Be clear. Be firm. Be responsible. That the State is no longer afraid is very well. But it must no longer content itself with dissociating itself and proving that it exists independently of the para-state. It must act, firmly, making use of force itself to definitively bury the ghosts of 1969 and prevent the metastasis from metastasizing in turn into generalized neighborhood and regional quarrels. Contrary to appearances, internal conflagration will only be avoided if the State begins to exist, no longer accepting the fait accompli. It is not State action that would set the powder alight, but, on the contrary, its inaction. The party’s secretary-general openly defies you and demonizes you? This sinister buffoonery has gone on long far too long. The weapons have destroyed everything. The penal code, and beyond it the Constitution, grant you the power to act decisively, even forcibly, without hesitation, before this furious madness carries off still more innocents. Otherwise, the price of an inevitable peace accord will be more costly to pay — if Israel consents, this time, not to de facto annex part of Lebanese territory. So let us avoid the capitulation, the humiliation, and the new permanent occupation into which Hezbollah is dragging us! The only path to salvation is to restore the authority and prestige of the State once and for all. And this is said in a tone of measure and moderation, even of a weary voice… certainly not with ardor and enthusiasm… Messrs., The Lebanese idea is beautiful. It is perhaps even the only truly original idea that this corner of the Levant has offered to political modernity: to live together without resembling one another, to recognize one another without dissolving into one another. So let us not spend another half-century mourning what we will not have known how to preserve for ourselves, for having failed to honour our political duties. Please accept, Messrs. Presidents, the expression of my highest respect. Michel HAJJI GEORGIOU

In truth, we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of the abyss Democritus of Abdera Messrs. Presidents, To say that Lebanon finds itself today facing a new major existential crisis — the result of a malicious streptococcus, Hezbollah, which was not, or could not be, treated in time — borders on truism. For what is unfolding today goes far beyond the familiar mechanics of Lebanese crises. This is no longer about yet another reshuffling of confessional balances, nor even another sequence of the interminable proxy war that others have waged on our soil. What is wavering this time, more than ever, amid the din of the Israeli invasion and the collapse of the Iranian hegemonic project, is the very substrate of Greater Lebanon — that fragile, often betrayed, but irreplaceable idea that allowed antagonistic communities to cohabit, to clash violently, and, at times, to recognize one another. Which is, in the end, the lot of any couple learning to live together. In its decompensatory escapade, Hezbollah is now finishing itself off — and, in doing so, finishing off Lebanon as well. Its strategic suicide — gnostic in its logic of self-immolation, imperial in its ambitions, sectarian in its vertigo — reveals not so much a military defeat as a profound ontological fracture. For a long time, Hezbollah claimed to embody a resistance, and its followers believed it. Yet it embodied, in the end, nothing but servitude — to Iran, its dreams of regional supremacy, its theocratic project exported into the veins of a Lebanon it bled to the bone. This pro-Iranian supremacism, from which the Shia component of Lebanese society has ultimately suffered the most, has chosen to consume itself — and no one can do anything about it. But Hezbollah did not metastasize alone. It must be said plainly: the entire Lebanese political, social, and communal body did so alongside it, each in its own way, especially during the long years of Michel Aoun’s tenure, with its infinite turpitudes and its assumed vassalization to Tehran and to the logic of the alliance of minorities. Messrs., Look at the state of the communities you de facto represent within the institutions, by virtue of your respective functions. The Christians — even the most sovereignists among them, those who carried for decades the idea of a pluralist and independent Lebanon in the tradition of Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir — are today retreating into a defensive particularism. The federalist idea, long marginal, is gaining ground — as if, at the depths of despair, partition had become the only possibility of survival. This is a tragic regression on the part of those who were the pioneers of Greater Lebanon, the architects of the very idea of an institutionalized common life within a shared State. That they should desert it now constitutes a cultural defeat as much as a political one. The Shia community, for its part, is traversing a distress of a depth that the triumphalist discourses of another age can no longer conceal. To have believed in the resistance, to have given it everything — sons, villages, decades — only to see it turn into a machine of regional domination in the service of a foreign power: this is an immense mourning, which few outside observers measure with the empathy it deserves. Lebanon’s Shia deserve infinitely better than what Hezbollah offered them: martyropathy. They deserve to survive this nightmare that has gone on far too long, without feeling crushed. The Sunnis, for their part, are navigating a painful political void. Not that they have renounced Lebanon — far from it. But in the absence of reference figures and a unifying project, some are looking once again toward the Syria of Ahmad al-Sharaa and, beyond that, toward the Turkey of Erdoğan. This temptation is understandable in its genesis, yet it would be devastating in its effects. To dilute Lebanese sovereignty once more into a regional space that does not resemble it, in the name of a poorly defined civilizational solidarity, would be to repeat the Arab error of 1958 — under different flags, but with the same renunciation of self. The blood of Hassan Khaled and Rafik Hariri was not shed for nothing. As for the Druze — a community viscerally rooted in the idea of Greater Lebanon, the one that has paid the blood price with the greatest constancy —, they find themselves confronted with a leadership rivalry whose certain manifestations, in the neighboring Hauran, are eyeing alliances that would have been utterly unimaginable a decade ago. No, the vertigo of the Zionist neighborhood is not an abstraction. Messrs., This portrait is not that of a country dying all at once. It is that of a country disintegrating slowly, community by community, reflex by reflex, retreat by retreat — without the maps of the Levant being geographically redrawn, without even imploding in a visible paroxysm. It suffices for Lebanon to lose its national unity to disappear of its own accord, without its own function, engulfed by interests that surpass it — Israel, Syria, Turkey — and that have no reason to spare it if it no longer knows how to defend itself through the coherence of its project. We have almost always relied on others as a way of shedding our own responsibilities. It was more comfortable, easier. The calamitous result is plain to see — the country now reeks of carrion. Yet, and this is what we wish to say here, contrary to received ideas that have long poisoned public debate, Greater Lebanon is not a burden inherited from French colonialism, nor some dhimmi artifice. It was conceived by its founding fathers — of all confessions — as a refuge, a guarantee, a space of pluralism in a Middle East that offered precious little of it. For the Christians, certainly. But also for the Druze, for the Shia whom geography and history had marginalized within the Ottoman space, for the Sunnis who wagered on liberal modernity against the temptations of a dissolving pan-Arabism. Greater Lebanon was, in its original vocation, a necessity for all. Errors of governance, injustices in representation, regional ambitions incompatible with its size and nature, delirious ideologies imported from outside or manufactured within, and grandiose personal fantasies have seriously shaken the edifice. But a shaken edifice is not a condemned one — provided one has the courage to repair it rather than quarrel over its rubble. The battle being waged today — against the arrogance of a collapsing Hezbollah and the infinite warmongering of the Israeli invader — goes beyond the question of the monopoly on legitimate violence or the halting of a destructive military offensive. These stakes are real and urgent. But the primary question is this: who are we, together? What does Lebanon wish to continue being, for itself and for its children? Once again, in self-destructing, Hezbollah is annihilating Lebanon. But Lebanon in general, and its Shia in particular, deserve to survive this nightmare that has gone on far too long. You are three men, at the head of three institutions, that history has placed there, at this precise moment, to answer that question. Not to sidestep it. Not to defer it to some post-crisis future — for there will be no after without the work of the now. That said, if this responsibility belongs to all without exception — for the problem is not strictly Shia — and if the Lebanese executive has sinned by lack of firmness toward Hezbollah since the end of the 2024 catastrophe, your responsibility, Mr. Berry, remains the greatest. You have always been ambivalent, pushing to the furthest limit the art of tightrope-walking to pull through and satisfy everyone — including yourself. But cunning has no place anymore. For three decades, Lebanon has wagered on a historic stance from you that would unambiguously mark a Lebanese identity and a sense of statehood in relation to Hezbollah. Until now, that wager has proven perfectly futile. End your political career beautifully. You will not be betraying your community; you will be saving it, there where the eschatological sect is bleeding it dry. And with it, Lebanon. Messrs., Of course, we do not ask you to agree on everything. Lebanese democracy, in what is most beautiful about it, has always fed on living disagreement. What we call upon you to do is to speak with one voice on the essential: Greater Lebanon is truly worth saving. And its survival demands, from all, a partial renunciation of their particular calculations in favor of a common project — the only one worth having, the only one that endures, the only one that makes sense. Be clear. Be firm. Be responsible. That the State is no longer afraid is very well. But it must no longer content itself with dissociating itself and proving that it exists independently of the para-state. It must act, firmly, making use of force itself to definitively bury the ghosts of 1969 and prevent the metastasis from metastasizing in turn into generalized neighborhood and regional quarrels. Contrary to appearances, internal conflagration will only be avoided if the State begins to exist, no longer accepting the fait accompli. It is not State action that would set the powder alight, but, on the contrary, its inaction. The party’s secretary-general openly defies you and demonizes you? This sinister buffoonery has gone on long far too long. The weapons have destroyed everything. The penal code, and beyond it the Constitution, grant you the power to act decisively, even forcibly, without hesitation, before this furious madness carries off still more innocents. Otherwise, the price of an inevitable peace accord will be more costly to pay — if Israel consents, this time, not to de facto annex part of Lebanese territory. So let us avoid the capitulation, the humiliation, and the new permanent occupation into which Hezbollah is dragging us! The only path to salvation is to restore the authority and prestige of the State once and for all. And this is said in a tone of measure and moderation, even of a weary voice… certainly not with ardor and enthusiasm… Messrs., The Lebanese idea is beautiful. It is perhaps even the only truly original idea that this corner of the Levant has offered to political modernity: to live together without resembling one another, to recognize one another without dissolving into one another. So let us not spend another half-century mourning what we will not have known how to preserve for ourselves, for having failed to honour our political duties. Please accept, Messrs. Presidents, the expression of my highest respect. Michel HAJJI GEORGIOU

On February 28, 2026, joint American-Israeli strikes killed the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Khamenei, aged 86, in his Tehran office. Iran declared forty days of national mourning, Netanyahu and Trump publicly proclaimed victory, while the Arab world — divided as it was over the dictator's figure — bore the wrath of the Revolutionary Guards. In certain streets of Tehran, fireworks erupted. It is worth pausing on this paradox to understand what, far beyond any single man, may well have breathed its last alongside him. It is particularly tempting to treat Khamenei's death as an act of war — one more episode in the spiral in which the United States and Israel have elected to play, simultaneously, the roles of surgeon-enforcer and arsonist. But to reduce the event to its military dimension would be to commit a serious error of perspective — precisely the error made by strategists who mistake the decapitation of a regime for the resolution of the contradictions that inhabit it. All the more so since Tel Aviv announced, from the very outset of the military operation, that its objective was the fall of the mullahs' regime. For Khamenei was not merely a head of state. He was, or claimed to be, the wali el-faqih — the Guardian Jurisconsult of the faith — that is, the keystone of a theologico-political edifice unique in the history of Shia Islam. And it is this edifice, far more than its occupant, that deserves to be scrutinised in the light of the event. The question worth asking here is not so much who will succeed him. It is far more vertiginous than that: was it even possible to succeed him? Was Khamenei — independently of the bombs that killed him — the last wali el-faqih , the last viable embodiment of a concept that had carried within it, since 1989, the seeds of its own dissolution? The Long Genealogy of a Persian Idea To understand the structural fragility of the wilayat el-faqih , one must go back well before Khomeini. More precisely to the Safavid Empire of the sixteenth century, and to this distinctly Persian idea of a royal authority tinged with divinity. Twelver Shia Islam, in its Arab and Najafi form, never envisaged an Islamic government administered by men. The logic is limpid, almost tragically coherent: only the Imam Mahdi — infallible, appointed by God — can establish a just government. In his absence — and he has been occulted since the ninth century — every state is by definition usurping. One tolerates it, participates in it, reforms it, but one does not absolutise it. During the period of occultation, even the khoms — the religious tithe — even the Friday prayer, were in principle forbidden, reserved solely for the authority of the Imam Mahdi. Jihad was proscribed; the use of violence in the name of commanding good and forbidding evil lay outside the prerogatives of the faqih . This is the Najafi marja'yya in all its rigour: a clear separation between the tolerated usurping state and the religious reference that guides consciences without claiming to govern bodies. It is a different logic — Safavid and Persian — that would crack this edifice. The Safavids, a Sufi family of Turkmen origin, close to the Qizilbash and Bektashis, adopted Twelver Shia Islam in the sixteenth century to distinguish themselves from the Sunni, Hanafi Ottomans and to consolidate their empire. The great Shah Ismail claimed to have encountered the Mahdi in a cave and received his sword and horse — signs of earthly power and jihad. He thus positioned himself as the repository of the Mahdi's powers, inaugurating what Shia jurisprudence would call the niyaba malakiyya — the "special vicegerency" of the Mahdi entrusted to the sultan. To consolidate this claim, he summoned the ulema of Lebanese Jabal Amel, seeking their legitimation. They refused to validate the idea that the shah was the Mahdi's deputy — but the Safavids imposed their Shia government regardless, cloaking it in a divine aura. The Safavids introduced into Shia Islam a series of practices that had not existed before: the bloody rituals of Ashura — imported into Jabal Amel only in 1912 by Iranian refugees in Nabatiyeh — the veneration of Abu-Lou'lou'a, the Persian who assassinated the Caliph Omar, and the historically false legend according to which Imam Hussein had married Shahrabano, daughter of the last Persian shah, so as to fuse the sacred lineage of the Imams and Persian royalty into a single dynastic sanctity. It was Ali Shariati who best theorised this distinction in his seminal essay on Alid Shia Islam and Safavid Shia Islam. It was also during the Safavid period that the first debates on wilayat el-faqih began — on the nature and extent of the jurisconsult's power during the occultation. But even the ulema of the time limited this power. Only one faqih in this long period dared go further: Ahmed Mahdi Naraqi, at the end of the eighteenth century, at the junction between the Safavid and Qajar empires. It is he — and not Khomeini — who first theorised that a faqih could establish an Islamic government and that his wilayat could be absolute. He did so by relying on two hadiths attributed to Imam el-Sadeq and the Imam Mahdi which, in reality, carry none of this meaning. A bold deduction resting on a fragile textual foundation — the original sin of the concept. Khomeini and the Sunni Contamination Exiled to Najaf in 1964, Khomeini delivered in 1969 a series of lectures that would become, published in 1979, his foundational text: al-houkouma el-islamiya , "the Islamic Government" — in other words, wilayat el-faqih . But one must understand the intellectual atmosphere in which this text was steeped in order to grasp its true nature. The writings of Sayyed Qotb and the Pakistani Mawdoudi were circulating and being ardently debated in Najaf. Their central concept — hakimiyya , sovereignty belongs to God, and therefore those who represent Him must govern — had profoundly marked the young Islamist intelligentsia. For Qotb, it was the Islamic vanguard of the Muslim Brotherhood that was to seize power. Khomeini, being Shia, performed the same translation by substituting the faqih for the Islamist vanguard: in the succession to the Prophet, the Imams were the most legitimate; after them, consequently, the fouqaha who are their heirs. Khomeinism's wilayat el-faqih is therefore not merely a Persian idea — it is also a radical Sunni idea dressed in Shia garb. Indeed, all major contemporary Shia Muslim fuqaha — Mohsen el-Hakim, el-Khoï, Sistani, Moussa Sadr, Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine — were opposed to the wilayat el-faqih , as the eminent scholar of Shia Islam Saoud el-Mawla has emphasised. They had introduced instead the notion of wilayat al-oumma : during the period of awaiting the Mahdi's return, power should revert to the people through democratic elections. In the wilayat el-faqih , the mandate comes from the Imam Mahdi. In the wilayat al-oumma , it comes from the voters. The former is tyrannical, the latter pluralist. Here lies an abyss between two conceptions of legitimacy. Nor was Khomeini unaware that his project fractured tradition. Between 1975 and 1978, a profound conflict set him against Moussa Sadr — the former in exile in Najaf, the latter in Lebanon, each embodying an irreconcilable vision. Rafsandjani had to travel to Lebanon in 1975 on a conciliation mission. The disagreement centred precisely on marjaïya : Moussa Sadr supported el-Hakim, then el-Khoï, as the reference for Shia Muslims — he refused to recognise Khomeini's. He refused, in effect, both the marja' and the wilayat . Sadr disappeared in Libya in August 1978, one year before Khomeini's accession to power in November 1979. A Coup Within the Revolution, then Another Coup Within the Coup In 1979, the Iranian Islamic Revolution was first and foremost a moment of plurality. Alongside Khomeini stood the democratic Islamic liberation movement of Mahdi Bazargan and Ibrahim Yazdi, the National Front of Banisadr, Ali Shariati, Ayatollah Taleqani — so many visions of political Islam that refused clerical absolutism. The first Constitution of the Islamic Republic made no mention of wilayat el-faqih . It was subsequently, between 1979 and 1981, that Khomeini staged a coup within his own revolution: Bazargan was sidelined, Banisadr overthrown, the Islamic democrats marginalised. The Mujahideen-e Khalq, who had fought the Shah, were hunted down. The wilayat el-faqih entered the Constitution by force of accomplished facts. One must here recall the origins of Hezbollah, for they cast a harsh light on the nature of the project. The al-Da'wa party, originating in Iraq, had resolved as early as 1975 to infiltrate Amal — Moussa Sadr's movement — in order to reverse it from within. This tactic of entrism, explicitly defined, was the plan. All the founders of Hezbollah — Sobhi Toufeyli, Naïm Kassem, Abbas Moussawi, Hassan Nasrallah, Ibrahim Amin el-Sayyid, Ali Kourani — were members of al-Da'wa embedded inside Amal. The scene is striking: at Amal's founding congress in 1975, when the pact was read stating that the movement "is based on Islam", Naïm Kassem rose and asked Moussa Sadr: "Which Islam are you talking about?" Moussa Sadr replied: "Islam as conceived by Moussa Sadr, not as conceived by the al-Da'wa party, ya Sheikh Naïm." The war had been declared. The destruction of the Lebanese Shia option did not begin in 1979 — it began in 1975. Sadr's disappearance becomes more legible in this light. Then came 1989, and the second coup — this time within the Islamic Revolution itself. Khomeini's designated successor was Grand Ayatollah Montazari, who was giving lectures in Qom questioning the absolutist wilayat el-faqih and defending instead a wilayat al-oumma , a return of governance to the people. Khamenei, Rafsandjani and Ahmed Khomeini formed an alliance to oust him. Mehdi Hashemi, close to Montazari and head of the Revolutionary Guards' unit overseeing liberation movements including Hezbollah, was executed in 1986. Not a single word in any Hezbollah publication. Khamenei — a mere hojatolislam , well below the rank of marja' — was elevated by political decree to the rank of Ayatollah and then elected wali el-faqih . The Constitution was amended to grant him powers Khomeini himself had never arrogated: supreme commander of the armed forces, ultimate arbiter of all institutions. By 1989, the wilayat el-faqih was no longer a theology. It was a republican monarchy dressed in Quranic language. Khamenei had, moreover, openly acknowledged his own imposture in 1989, declaring: " According to the Constitution, I am not qualified for this position, and from a religious point of view, many of you will not accept my words as those of a leader." He became the permanent holder of the function only after constitutional amendments had reduced the religious qualifications required. This confessional phrase is perhaps the most honest — and the most devastating — formulation of the concept that one could offer. Rafsandjani: The Door Closed Shut A word must be said about Rafsandjani, who died in 2017 of a heart attack in circumstances that have always fuelled rumours in Tehran. This man, nicknamed l'Âqâ — the Notable — was the pragmatist par excellence, the architect of the 1989 alliance that had propelled Khamenei to power. Yet in the final years of his life, he had broken with the hardened establishment that had formed around the Guide, drawing closer to the reformists. In circles of internal opposition, it was whispered that he was positioning himself as a possible fallback, as a transition figure acceptable to the regime's contradictory factions. His death closed that door. And the question left hanging — was an alternative wali el-faqih conceivable from within the system? — never received an answer. The Succession Impasse Iran's Constitution provides that in the event of a vacancy at the summit of power, a tripartite council — the President of the Republic, the head of the judiciary, and a member of the Guardian Council — manages the interim while the Assembly of Experts, composed of 88 clerics, designates a new Guide. But the strikes of February 28 decimated this mechanism: IRGC commander Pakpour, Defence Minister Nasirzadeh, adviser Shamkhani and Chief of Staff Bagheri were all killed. The interim falls de facto to Ali Larijani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and the sole senior survivor of the chain of command, who vowed on X that Iran would deliver the United States and Israel "an unforgettable lesson." Larijani is, by all accounts, a capable politician and a genuine strategist — but not a faqih . He possesses neither the religious authority, nor the stature of a marja' , nor the theological legitimacy that the function of Supreme Guide requires, even in its most diluted form. A Larijani wali el-faqih would be an admitted aberration — the mask dropped over the theological void the system has been concealing since 1989. The other name in circulation is that of Mojtaba Khamenei, the Guide's younger son — a mid-ranking cleric, the IRGC's man in the shadows, behind the doors of power for 27 years. His appointment would represent precisely what Shia revolutionary ideology has always claimed to reject: a dynastic transfer of power, a hereditary theocratic monarchy — exactly what the revolution of 1979 claimed to abolish. Israeli intelligence indicates he survived the strikes, but his fate is unconfirmed. Ali Khamenei's daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter were killed, according to Iranian agencies. Among the regime's internal candidates, three names were selected by the Assembly of Experts in secret before the strikes. Their identities remain officially confidential. Two names nonetheless circulate in the analyses: Mohammad Arafi, deputy chairman of the Assembly of Experts, head of the seminary system, a confidant of Khamenei — a religious technocrat fluent in Arabic and English, but without political weight or ties to the IRGC; and Mohammad Mirbagheri, representing the most conservative wing of the clerical establishment, low-profile, without popular base. Sadeq Larijani — Ali's brother, former head of the judiciary — is also mentioned, as is Hassan Khomeini, 53, the founder's grandson, who stood in for Khamenei at an important revolutionary ceremony in February 2026 — a signal that his candidacy has not been foreclosed in clerical circles, an option of compromise that would preserve the revolutionary fiction while offering it a face of reconciliation. None of these men possesses the full stature of a marja' . None could convince the Shia world beyond Iran's borders. And then there is the scenario that few chancelleries are willing to name clearly: the de facto transfer of power to the Revolutionary Guards. As researcher Behnam Ben Taleblu has formulated it, Khamenei's true partner in power was not the clergy — it was the security apparatus. The IRGC is a hydra, and cutting off one head does not exhaust the institution. The real question is which faction of the Guards is the most coherent and organised to take the helm. This scenario — an Islamic Republic without a faqih , governed in practice by its own Praetorians — would be the terminal liquidation of the concept. The Internal Opposition: Between Lucidity and Impotence A word must be said about those figures who, from within the system, had long since broken with the absolutist wilayat el-faqih . Mir-Hossein Mousavi, 84, the face of the 2009 Green Movement, has been under house arrest since 2011. Just before the strikes, he had published, from his confinement, a blazing appeal: "The game is over." He demanded a referendum for a new Constitution and called on the security forces to lay down their arms. His position aligns precisely with Montazari's — governance must return to the people, not to the jurisconsult. Mehdi Karroubi, the other figure of the Green Movement, had his house arrest lifted less than a year ago after fifteen years of confinement. He declared that the regime had "lost all moral basis to continue governing without the consent of the people", naming Khamenei as responsible for a "costly and futile nuclear project." Where is Karroubi today? No one knows. Hassan Rouhani, who served as president from 2013 to 2021, had gathered his former ministers just before the strikes to call for fundamental reforms — some said he was positioning himself for an internal transition. He denied these rumours, calling them "American-Israeli psychological operations." The irony: the bombs rendered the question moot before he could answer it honestly. Mostafa Tajzadeh, former adviser to Khatami, is in prison and explicitly demands a democratic transition. He carries some legitimacy among dissidents and mid-ranking officials. What all these men share is an effective rupture with the absolutist wilayat el-faqih . But they also share a common weakness: in the eyes of the young Iranians who died in the streets in January, they remain insiders compromised by decades of partial loyalty to the system. They can bear witness. They cannot embody. One does not build the new with the old — not at the extravagant price the Iranians are currently paying. The Alternatives: Between Monarchical Nostalgia and Republican Utopia Khamenei's death provoked, within hours, a torrent of statements revealing all the fractures of a deeply divided opposition. Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah deposed in 1979, exiled in Washington for decades, published an op-ed in the Washington Post on Saturday night, positioning himself as leader of the transition. He declared that the Islamic Republic "has in effect reached its end", that any attempt to name a successor to Khamenei "is doomed to fail", and presented his Iran Prosperity Project as a road map for the transition. He is undeniably a cultivated and diplomatic man who has managed to broaden his base beyond the strict monarchist circle. But he remains his father's son — and the memory of SAVAK has not faded. Monarchical nostalgia has its militants; it also has its ceilings, ones that the crowds in Los Angeles brandishing the imperial flag cannot simply erase. Maryam Rajavi, president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), responded bluntly by declaring that Iranians "reject both the Shah and the mullahs." Her ten-point plan calls for separation of religion and state, gender equality, and a non-nuclear Iran. But the problem with the Mujahideen is structural and insurmountable in the short term: they supported Iraq against Iran during the 1980-88 war, and this betrayal remains unforgivable for millions of Iranians, including some of the regime's fiercest opponents. Their network is real, their financial resources in the West considerable, but their popular legitimacy inside the country is virtually nil. Between these two poles lies the silent mass of technocrats, academics, economists — two hundred of whom signed, before the strikes, an appeal for a "change in the paradigm of governance." No face, no leader. A reality without incarnation. So who? No one knows. One can only hope the answer will come from the people themselves — and that Washington will not be tempted to repeat the disastrous experiences of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, or, worse still, Ahmad Chalabi in Iraq. Hezbollah: Orphaned of a Theology Nineteen years ago, the writer Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine — who died, by a bitter irony, just hours before Khamenei's assassination — wrote with a prescience that commands admiration today that "the Lebanese Shia are in the majority opposed to the general authority of the faqih." He described Hezbollah as an organisation that "has never attempted to develop a Lebanese vision of itself", condemned to remain the armed instrument of a Khomeiniste vision of Lebanon, serving a State-Resistance duality already weakened by the death of Nasrallah. Khamenei's death poses to Hezbollah an existential question no bomb could have formulated more cruelly: to whom does the wali amr al-muslimin — the phrase Nasrallah invoked as the foundation of his authority — now owe obedience? Hezbollah was born from a political decision in 1982, from the methodical infiltration of al-Da'wa into the ranks of Amal — its theological DNA is indexed to the validity of the wilayat el-faqih . What becomes of an organisation whose founding concept has just been orphaned? The short-term answer is predictable: resistance to the strikes will be brandished as proof of vitality. But the fundamental question has been posed, and it will not dissolve in the smoke of missiles. The Arab militias born of the export of the revolution are all orphaned now, and their identity crisis may well push them, out of despair and decompensation, toward collective martyrdom. A Fiction That Was Already Gone Before the Bomb The true question, ultimately, is not military. It is whether an Islamic Republic can survive without a wali el-faqih . The concept has traversed fifteen centuries — from the Safavid niyaba malakiyya to Naraqi's intellectual overreach, from the contamination by Qotb and Mawdoudi to the double revolution-within-revolution carried out first by Khomeini and then by Khamenei. At every stage, it survived by betraying itself: by lowering its theological requirements, by purging its critics, by substituting political decree for religious legitimacy. Khamenei had himself admitted in 1989 that he was not qualified for the function. He became the permanent holder of the highest theological office in Shia Islam by having the Constitution amended so that his own inadequacies would no longer constitute a legal obstacle. This is what one might call the constitutive confession: the last wali el-faqih reigned by lowering the bar of entry for himself, thereby guaranteeing that no successor could ever occupy the post with a legitimacy greater than his own — which is to say that no one could occupy it legitimately at all. The missile of February 28 merely formalised what theology had already pronounced. What remains is the question of the rubble — human, geopolitical, confessional. What remains is the Iranian people, celebrating in the streets with exemplary courage despite the scale of the repression they have just endured, and trembling perhaps as well, knowing that the revolutions that follow decapitations are not always the revolutions of which one dreamed. What remains too is Iraq, Yemen, and above all Lebanon, suspended from equilibria that the death of one man in Tehran has rendered more precarious still. With death squads whose fate, if it is indeed sealed — and it is, without doubt — may well impel them to bring the whole temple down with them. And what remains, finally, is that phrase of Montazari's — the man Khamenei had helped remove in 1989, who until his death in 2009 never ceased to repeat that the absolute wilayat el-faqih was a political heresy. He was right. He was simply wrong to believe that regimes die of their contradictions before dying of their bombs. It took, in the supreme cynicism of history, Netanyahu and Trump — two Caesars who believe themselves each invested by God — to bury, literally, the wilayat el-faqih along with the man who erected this pontifical theology into an instrument of domination and repression of the region's peoples. Robespierre used to say that "a pure man always finds a purer man to purge him" — with that dark humour peculiar to despots. History has never ceased to prove him right.

The irony is that Iran's chief diplomat, Abbas Araghji, boasted on the book market about teaching the 'strength of diplomacy.' His diplomatic 'talents' were useless against the common Israeli-US will to put an end to the mullahs' regime. Diplomacy has indeed never been the strong suit of Iranian regimes, for whom the term has meant, for ages, procrastination and duplicity, while secretly, the nuclear program continued despite endless chatter and other agreements. Also impossible, because the chances of an Iran-US agreement were minimal, even insignificant, given Israeli will and a large part of the American pressure groups and think-tanks American think-tanks wanting to put an end to the regime once and for all. Also considering that the latter, with its ballistic program - coupled with its nuclear project - capable of reaching Europe, Russia, and China, was becoming a threat to the entire world. The massive and bloody repression of last January's anti-Khamenei popular protests was undoubtedly the direct justification legitimizing American intervention, even if aid to the Iranian people is probably not truly a priority for the US administration - JD Vance's cynicism was clear enough in this regard. In fact, Trump played the Iranian game to the end. For the first time, the mullahs, the masters of political tempo, could not impose their rhythm on the USA. The Persian cunning did not work. By massing an impressive armada around Tehran while giving diplomacy a 'chance,' the US president thereby invalidated any possibility of an agreement in itself. The Iranians were ordered to choose between unconditional capitulation through diplomacy - via the dismantling of their ballistic and nuclear programs and the end of the export of the revolution beyond their borders, that is, in essence, the collapse of the very essence of the regime and the Revolutionary Guards - and strategic suicide through a military rush forward. In the end, even this choice was not given to them: they face surrender at the end of a total war triggered by the USA, even if this will allow them to adopt a victim stance and justify their suicidal all-in by the ongoing aggression. In other words, Trump did not give the Iranian leaders enough time to patiently weave the fabric of their survival by negotiating indefinitely while waiting for better days, a hobbyhorse of totalitarian regimes. They are now confronted with what is undoubtedly their absolute fantasy - martyrdom - and their most terrifying nightmare - their downfall. One should therefore expect them to combine the two in a suicidal deluge of fire, which is characteristic of millenarian cults facing the prospect of their own destruction. Undoubtedly, they think that a war of attrition, which would cause the most harm and destruction possible to their enemies, will allow them to hold on until the storm passes - and, consequently, to save their heads. Or that other parallel events, such as the fallout from the Epstein affair or a US public opinion uprising against the war, will do the job for them. In short, they will continue to gamble on time, just as the USA and Israel will want, for the same reasons, to finish as quickly as possible. It is therefore a war of time. Provided, simply, that it does not open the way to the end of times. After all, Megiddo is indeed at the heart of the conflict…

There are moments when a sentence cast into the media storm reveals more than entire treatises of doctrine. When the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, declared a few days ago that “it would be acceptable if they took it all,” invoking the notion of an Israel extending, in a biblical reading, from the Nile to the Euphrates, before adding that “Area C is Israel,” he was not merely departing from diplomatic reserve—though that goes without saying—but displaying a political partiality which, if unsurprising given Washington’s near-unconditional alignment with the Hebrew State, remains intolerable in its gravity. The diplomat inscribed his remarks within an expansive territorial logic subordinating international law to a theological-historical narrative—precisely the kind of mythic framework upon which Tel Aviv has grounded the legitimacy it claims for occupying Palestine. It matters little whether he later tempered his words or invoked hyperbole. What has been said has been said. And what is thought becomes visible, at a time when Netanyahu’s team has repeatedly expressed its determination to translate its mythical dream into reality. Before him, the American envoy Tom Barrack, denouncing the legacy of Sykes-Picot as a Western mistake that had “imposed maps, mandates, borders drawn in pencil,” and asserting that “there is no Middle East, only tribes and villages turned into artificial nation-states,” opened, in 2025, another breach—one equally perilous. Under the guise of criticizing the colonial engineering of 1916, he suggested that the states born of that arrangement might be fragile constructions, perhaps even illusory ones. Behind the denunciation of former imperialism lies a new temptation—ideological, perhaps—to once again reconfigure the Levantine space according to parameters dictated elsewhere. These two discourses, so different in tone, converge nonetheless on a single point: they relativize the full and complete existence of local sovereignties by advancing the notion that a territory may be redefined by biblical narrative or post-colonial critique, by strategic power or by realpolitik. They remind us above all of a historical constant: in the imagination of certain chancelleries, the Levant remains a malleable space. Since at least Kissinger, the Middle East has often served as a laboratory of experiments—each as disastrous as the last—and American diplomats have too often played the role of sorcerer’s apprentices. More recently, Obama offered the most striking illustration by implicitly paving the way, through the Iranian nuclear agreement, for the consolidation of an Iranian empire across the region. This must be stated plainly. Neither Greater Syria nor Greater Israel; neither Syrian, Israeli, Iranian nor Western pseudo-protectorate. Neither the resurrection of a mythologized unity, nor absorption into a biblical continuum, nor management under tutelage disguised as regional stabilization. Lebanon first. And this stance does not stem from a narrow reflex of identity politics, but from the principle that sovereignty is not a rhetorical luxury; it is the minimal condition of any politics worthy of the name—even for a small country whose weight on the global scale may seem negligible. Yet the problem does not end with American declarations. Lebanon’s own history clearly shows that every internal weakening has served as pretext or opportunity for an external hand. Whenever the elites replaced the authority of the State with parallel allegiances, whenever strategic decision-making fragmented among militias, regional patrons and sectarian calculations, the resulting vacuum was filled, and the logic of the State devoured by that of the non-State. Syrian tutelage did not arise in a desert. Nor did the Israeli invasion of 1982. The Palestinian presence found favorable cover among a significant portion of the Lebanese— including many of its future adversaries—after 1967. Iranian influence did not flourish without local complicities. Western mediations did not impose themselves upon a fully sovereign State. It is true that Lebanon lies along a corridor through which conquerors, passing through, have succeeded one another since Antiquity. This geographical position has fostered a political culture of waiting: hoping for the least brutal occupier, the most useful protector; wishing for a shift in the balance of power in order to adjust one’s allegiance; expecting “others” to do the dirty work. This realism, often presented as strategic intelligence, has at times amounted to resignation in disguise. Breaking this cycle requires more than occasional rhetoric. It demands that institutions cease to be façades and once again become effective centers of decision. It requires that no armed force claim to embody a parallel sovereignty; that Lebanese diplomacy speak with a single voice; that justice not be subordinated to partisan balances. Institutions are never abstract. They are what men make of them, as Napoleon once said. The statements of Huckabee and Barrack may well constitute, for those jealous of their country’s sovereignty, external provocations. But they should also act as a mirror, reflecting the curse whereby a country that fails to draw its own red lines eventually sees them redrawn by others, and a State that does not safeguard its internal coherence exposes itself to becoming a mere strategic object—a toy for others, entirely dispensable. So yes: neither Greater Syria nor Greater Israel, nor tutelage recycled under new garments. Lebanon first. And Lebanese leaders would do well to heed it. Each time its officials have failed to defend its sovereignty, someone else has stepped in to govern in their place. Hassan Rifai used to say that the Republic needed men and women to protect it. But where, indeed, have the few yet valiant Guardians of the Republic disappeared?