The scenario we’ve been dreading for months is becoming reality. We Lebanese will once again play with war as others play with fire. Perhaps we’ll manage to escape it. It’s even likely, as no one, including Israel, seems to want to embark on a large-scale, long-lasting conflict just yet.
But it won’t be up to us. At no point will we have a say. Our fate depends on the strategic calculations of Hezbollah — and by extension Iran — and Israel. It depends on those of Hassan Nasrallah, Ali Khamenei and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Tension is already elevated. It’s set to mount again, right up until Israel responds to the strike it attributed to Hezbollah on the town of Madjal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights. Will Beirut be targeted? Will the airport be hit? How many lives will be lost in the process? Will Hezbollah agree not to respond?
The hope is that the sequence will end without extensive damage. But why does a country already on the verge of implosion have to go through all this? Why has the south of the country had to endure this on a daily basis for nearly 10 months?
In the name of what purpose or ideal have 107 civilians been killed, tens of thousands displaced, plots of land burned and billions of dollars gone up in smoke?
Hezbollah is doing what it has to do. It did not go from being a small resistance group to a regional player that can threaten Israel and the US by promoting peace, democracy and human rights. The Lebanese-Iranian party has defended the strategic interests of its creator, which are most often also its own, and which enabled it to become Lebanon’s disputed leviathan and one of the region’s most fearsome military powers in four decades.
The last 10 months have changed its dimension yet again. The self-proclaimed “Axis of Resistance” is not far from achieving a historic victory. Hamas is resisting. The Houthis threaten the entire Gulf and part of the Mediterranean. Hezbollah is standing firm. Iran is getting ever closer to having the [nuclear] bomb.
Yet, everything can change quickly. So, if it wants to cash in on its gains, Hezbollah must hold firm, without giving anything away, and without allowing itself to be drawn into an all-out war it does not want and for which a large proportion of the Lebanese population would hold it responsible. In this logic, it’s doing its best.
We’re standing idly by. Some opted for one-upmanship. It allows them to consolidate their base, usually through identity-based language. They shout, they insult and threaten. But in the end, it’s all just posturing. Hezbollah has long ceased to be a state within a state. It’s a state above a non-state.
No one has the means to break it. The price would be far too high in any case. No one is trying to propose an alternative approach, assuming — and there is serious doubt about this — that it would be open to it.
Ten months later, we are still paralyzed at the same starting point. We are witnessing the most absurd war in history without trying, and probably without having the means, to contain it.
We are caught between the Israeli hammer and Hezbollah’s anvil, between a 40,000 death toll in Gaza and the Iran-aligned militia’s stranglehold on Lebanon, between the separatists and the moumanaaa. That is in the absence of a convincing explanation of what and whom the last 10 months have served.
This editorial was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour and translated by Joelle El Khoury.