The division among the Lebanese is not over matters of detail or marginal questions in national life. It is over strategic choices. How do we liberate the land from the Israeli occupation, which some believe we brought upon ourselves once again? How do we implement the decision to confine weapons to the hands of the Lebanese state? What is the future of Lebanese-Syrian relations, particularly after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024? How are depositors' savings to be returned, some six years after the largest financial collapse? And other such fateful, central questions, to which few have been able to offer any decisive answer.
The Lebanese may have taken heart at the restoration of the constitutional institutions' working order with the election of General Joseph Aoun to the presidency in January 2025, after years in which obstruction was the defining feature of the situation, delaying and stalling a great many decisions. But the nature of Lebanon's complex composition suggests that even the functioning of institutions requires a minimum of national understanding- without that meaning, in any way, an acceptance of the idea of obstruction, or a justification of it.
It is true that the balance of power has changed, and that the mechanism for taking decisions has become more fluid in one particular place, which is what running the machinery of government and the state requires. But this does not mean the capacity to implement those decisions is marked by the same fluidity. Major decisions have been taken, particularly on confining weapons to the hands of the state and on making Beirut a city free of weapons. These are sound decisions in terms of the very concept of a state and of extending its control over the whole of its territory, as is the practice in every country in the world. Yet putting them into effect does not look easy in light of an internal intransigence driven by external backing.
The point here, of course, is not to signal a return to the earlier formulas of what was called consociational democracy- which is supposed to be among the most refined forms of democracy, in that it forecloses any group's feeling wronged or marginalized, on condition that the group does not exploit it to obstruct and paralyze the work of institutions, as happened in Lebanon during the years following the Syrian military withdrawal in 2005 and Hezbollah's domination of Lebanese political decision-making. The political exploitation of this consociational character effectively disabled Lebanese democratic life and drew it into conflicts that came close to civil war- the May 2008 assault on the capital being one example.
The Lebanese have grown weary of practices that scattered any possibility of real progress in developing their fragile democracy, afflicted as it is by the sectarian and confessional taint summoned up at every juncture and every turning point, and that drew them into unending wars- wars that cost them the historic achievement of 2000, when the Israeli army withdrew from the occupied Lebanese territories without condition or reservation, without signing a peace treaty or even an agreement on security arrangements.
Yet with all this, and with the legitimacy of the Lebanese longing for deliverance, there is no escape from holding firm. Deliverance cannot come at any price, and however it may be. There are national principles and givens that cannot be leapt over or looked away from, and they concern the liberation of the occupied land- which constitutes some 6 percent of Lebanon's area and takes in more than 60 villages from which some 200,000 Lebanese citizens have been displaced- as well as the need to halt the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, which cannot be reduced to the strategic hill of Ali al-Taher.
And with the emergence of the dilemma of "handing over weapons or withdrawal first," years will pass before Lebanon recovers its full stability. It will go on walking the edge of an internal explosion fed by the divisions over the strategic choices noted in the opening lines of this article, and the Lebanese of the south will pay a doubled price for choices they had no part in framing- a repeated settling of bills that have been coming due for a very long time.
The most important thing is that the Lebanese should grasp that the balance of power has changed. If what is required of certain parties is that they stop denying these changes and stop carrying out foreign agendas unconnected to the Lebanese national interest, what is equally required of other parties is that they not draw strength from an external enemy in order to fall upon a domestic party, however deep their disagreement with it- because doing so would transfer the conflict into Lebanon itself and prepare the ground for civil conflicts that are endless and pointless, a tedious and lethal repetition of earlier experiences whose blood has not yet dried.
