Hezbollah may have succeeded in reviving Lebanon’s troubled memories without actually having to act. Here, the “act” means eliminating opponents, namely political assassination, which has been surrounded by near-certain suspicions since 2005, from former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri to Lokman Slim. In this case, restoring fear to the heart of Lebanese political life no longer requires explosives to serve its purpose.
From this perspective, the findings of the investigation into the source of the C4 shipment, its destination, or its intended recipient are no longer particularly important. The intimidation has already taken place, and the C4 shipment has achieved its purpose. This raises another possibility: What if Hezbollah deliberately allowed its shipment to be discovered? By doing so, it would spare itself the need to use it while still imposing an equation of intimidation and reviving the memory of assassinations in Lebanon’s collective consciousness, particularly among politicians who oppose it.
Within the logic of intimidation and political elimination under Hezbollah’s current circumstances, acknowledging ownership of the shipment and assuming responsibility for it, even indirectly, may be far less costly than bearing responsibility for any political assassination that might occur. Under the pretext of resistance and confronting the Israeli enemy, Hezbollah can justify possessing explosives. Using them in a political assassination, however, would expose it to political and social repercussions that would be difficult to contain.
Hezbollah is not a conventional or traditional political party that can easily come to terms with its waning influence or its inevitable and painful decline. As an ideological organization, its danger may become most pronounced during periods of retreat and weakness, when it seeks to target those benefiting from its crisis and decline, while preventing the emergence of alternatives that could challenge its claim to represent its own constituency.
Yet under current conditions, and given the scale of the transformations it is undergoing, the room for assassination has become extremely narrow. A single assassination could unite everyone against it, draw it into an all-out confrontation, and undermine the “sanctity of its weapons,” which derives from their portrayal as weapons of resistance. This is especially so after Hezbollah lost its historic leadership, which had been capable of compelling Lebanese society to accept its narrative, as well as its strategic depth in Syria, whose loss has effectively pushed Iranian geopolitics out of the Lebanese equation. Given Iran’s current circumstances, assassination would amount to suicide.
This is where the idea of “intimidation through memory” comes into play: accumulated fear stemming from past assassinations can once again perform a political function without those killings having to be repeated. When politicians understand that the possibility of violence remains present, they may resort to self-censorship, reconsider their positions, and refrain from carrying confrontation through to its conclusion. The memory of assassination thus becomes an instrument of intimidation before any crime has even occurred.
Could the discovery of explosives, then, become a substitute for their actual use, allowing fear to achieve what assassination might no longer accomplish without exacting a prohibitive price? The question here is no longer confined to the shipment itself. It extends to a society being made to calculate its political positions under the shadow of possible death, and to a state whose true test remains its ability to end the capacity of any actor to turn weapons and memory into tools for subjugating political life.
Accordingly, the distinction between acknowledging possession of a tool that can be politically justified and bearing responsibility for its actual use in a security operation remains key to understanding this hypothesis.
