The Lebanese were perhaps turning the page on a chapter that began in 1982, following Israel’s invasion of the country and Hezbollah's emergence as an armed force.
This phase (42 years) of its brief history as an independent country (less than double that number) constituted the most violent existential threat to the survival of the Lebanese nation. However, the Lebanese are lying to themselves when they claim that the bitterness began with Hezbollah’s establishment and that with this chapter coming to an end, so will the reasons for their dispute over the meaning and nature of their political existence. We might arrive at a more accurate assessment if we see this party, its origins, and its role as having culminated our misfortunes rather than laying the foundations for them.
As is well known, Lebanon witnessed ferocious dispute in 1958 amid the rise of Nasserism, and it was then followed by even more ferocious clashes over the Palestinian resistance in 1975. Both episodes broke out before Hezbollah came into existence and the tragedies branched out of this existence, which could soon be crowned by the "limited" Israeli ground operation that might bring many surprises.
Common to all of these episodes is a refusal to see Lebanon as a country whose decisions are born of its people's conception of their interests. Instead, Lebanon is seen as an arena for conflicts that transcend it, ebbing and flowing to the rhythm of the struggle with Israel and the West. The proponents of the arena theory have always reflected the convergence of two streams of thought that dismiss the Lebanese nation-state; one is imperial and goes beyond the nation and its state, and the, other, communal and sectarian which is beneath the nation-state and less than it.
Adding to the bitterness, and making it more acute and noticeable, is that this theory is not innocent of blatantly and cynically exploiting the country. This exploitation was particularly flagrant under Hafez al-Assad, who firmly shut the Golan front and turned an armed Lebanon into a blood-soaked sponge that absorbed the contradictions of the Syrian regime. Then, with the Khomeinist regime’s emergence in Iran, Hezbollah equipped this theory with iron fangs. In the latest chapter of this abuse, we were threatened with droves of fighters from neighboring countries coming to "support us" (after similar droves had "supported" the Syrian people’s effort to ward off their "conspiracy" against themselves), the patent violation of sovereignty and entanglement of borders that this entails.
Egypt, which undoubtedly has the longest history and most firmly rooted traditions of statehood in the Arab world, offers an example that the Lebanese would do well to consider. Since 1978-79, some Egyptians have expressed their opposition to the Camp David Accords and the policies that sprung from them. However, no prominent voices in Egypt advocate canceling those accords if doing so would lead to a resumption of war. There are certainly no Egyptian forces willing to fight a civil war in order to annul them.
In the same sense, a stable Lebanon can continue to support the Palestinian people and their right to a state, criticize Israel's policies and tendencies, and offer whatever political, diplomatic, and media support it can to the Palestinians. However, plunging the country, time and again, into war or conflict for the sake of the Palestinian cause, or any cause described as one of "national liberation," is seen as a crime by many in Lebanon. Contrary to the claims of textbooks and ideological manuals, the Lebanese experience suggests nothing tears countries apart like what has been placed under the category of "national liberation." Moreover, the pretext of "Lebanon's Arab identity" has become extremely ineffective, especially since this Arabism they are championing has been abandoned and outdated since the 1980s. Glancing at the Arab countries today, or at the "Arab masses," one cannot fail to notice that those keen on war have become a species threatened with extinction. Even less coherent is the reasoning of those among Hezbollah's opponents who criticize it for “not resisting” Israel, while the immense calamity is that it is resisting while this resistance goes against the wishes and interests of most Lebanese citizens. Thus, the disaster does not stem from how it is resisting or the tools it is using to do so, resistance is itself the disaster amid the avoidance of political and diplomatic means. Lazy references to Vietnam and Algeria only add another layer of rust to the obsolescence.
Thus, ending the state of war, or its various states, cannot be complete or final without the abandonment of the arena theory and recognition of the fact that the nation must be militarily neutral in the face of external conflicts, thereby allowing us to go back to politics, retrieve our sovereignty, and allow the state and its democratic institutions to make decisions and maintain a monopoly on the means of violence. This is something that the Lebanese, across all sects, must candidly discuss to avoid finding themselves, sooner or later, faced with the same question and the same tragedy.
The current war has revealed, for the third time, that there are two irreconcilable forms of patriotism: one anchored in a particular homeland and another whose homeland is the cause or hostility to some enemy. It is healthy to avoid repressing these two notions or their contradiction through an artificial unity in a country that experience shows is still being founded and unfounded. If the two turn out to be irreconcilable, it would be better to announce the end of Lebanon and stop repeatedly spilling blood for slogans that have become destructive, tedious, hopeless, and vulnerable to exploitation by foreign powers. Those who wish to resist, over territory that is theirs alone, have the right to do so, even if they want to go as far as joyously dying as martyrs ‘on the path to Jerusalem.’ Those who do not wish to resist and decide to stay here with us, choosing instead to contribute to building a better country in a better world, have the right to do that as well.
