Analyze

In Lebanon, education is meant to liberate minds, but Iran’s proxies weaponize it. Lebanon has long prided itself on something rare in this region: a belief that education is not a privilege, but a pathway. A country where, despite war, collapse, and political decay, parents still scrape together what little they have to send their children to school. A country where classrooms have historically produced doctors, engineers, writers, and thinkers, not martyrs for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The numbers tell part of that story. Lebanon boasts one of the highest literacy rates in the region, hovering near 98 percent. For years, it ranked among the top countries globally in the perceived quality of education. Mathematics and science are not taught as luxuries but as necessities, often delivered in English or French from an early age. Education here is not simply about acquiring knowledge; it is about mobility, dignity, and escape, from sectarianism, from violence, from the suffocating limits of geography.

Hundreds of images, every day. Grey as the dominant tone, at times interrupted by a flash of orange, a coloring book, a doll. At other times, images reach us stained with memories, those of strangers we do not know, who do not know us, and who may no longer recognize their own. Memories held in suspension. Fleeting flashes across phone screens. Fragments scrolling on television beneath a red ticker hastily composed, saturated with approximations, where a place name is thrown in as a token of precision. Or brief sequences designed to sustain the continuity of an endlessly renewed flow. Within this flow, the image ceases to emerge as an event.

A “Shia question” has now forcefully emerged within Arab reality — a reality that is not isolated from its regional environment or from the policies of the major powers. Some argue that the “Shia question” reveals, in certain of its manifestations and circumstances, a weakening or a wavering of Arab Shia loyalty toward their national states, owing to an Iranian centralism that seeks to extend its influence throughout the Arab region by exploiting existing vulnerabilities and creating new ones in the foundations of those states. Those Shia targeted by this accusation respond collectively, arguing that their movements in their respective countries arise either from the raising of grievances and a demand for political and social justice — Iraq and the Gulf countries being cases in point — or from a commitment alongside their compatriots to the duty of resisting Israeli aggression, as in Lebanon and Palestine.

While some Beirut residents continued on Friday, April 10, to inspect the sectors severely hit on Wednesday by Israeli aviation, as part of a surprise attack against Hezbollah cadres based in various neighborhoods of the capital, air raids continued in the South against several villages in the southern part of the country. One of these raids killed 12 people (State Security agents) in Nabatiyeh. But in the absence of major developments in military operations, it is the direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel, scheduled for early next week in Washington, that are currently focusing the attention of local diplomatic and political circles.

Since the outbreak of the latest military escalation on the southern border, Lebanon has found itself at the heart of the regional picture as a theatre of open confrontation, reviving longstanding questions about its role, the limits of its decision-making autonomy, and its capacity to bear the cost of engagement in conflicts that far exceed its borders. Against this backdrop, a fundamental question presents itself: how is one to assess the merits of this confrontation from a strictly Lebanese perspective, in light of the consequences it has produced on the military, economic, and social levels?

Thirty-nine days into the war, the question that now hangs over the Middle East is no longer whether the conflict will reshape Iran. It already has. The real question is whether we are approaching the moment when the war moves from its destructive phase into its political phase — the moment when wars historically reach their climax and the foundations of the post-war order begin to emerge. Every war follows a brutal but recognizable trajectory. First comes shock. Then escalation. Then devastation. And finally — when the human, economic, and political costs become unbearable — the search for a new equilibrium begins.

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

The debate over state monopoly on arms in Lebanon has ceased to be a simple question of sovereignty or legality; it has become a genuine test of the state's capacity to fulfil its fundamental functions. The problem has moved beyond the principle itself, which enjoys a near-unanimous theoretical consensus: what is lacking are the internal leverage and the national strategic vision capable of making it applicable, against a backdrop of deep regional entanglements and unprecedented economic and institutional fragility. The absence of a clear trajectory, the persistence of a policy of procrastination, and the erosion of the time factor could well constitute, in and of themselves, the gravest threat to Lebanon's stability and the future of its state.

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

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