True to form, the Lebanese are evading discussions of existential questions regarding their present and future. Instead of debate, we find vitriolic quarrels in which each side antagonizes the other, using grand causes to score petty points. In similarly typical fashion, their "opinions" reflect sectarian loyalties and motives that are not difficult to identify. That is why, despite our history of wars and bloodshed, Lebanon has never had a cross-sectarian pacifist movement.
Accordingly, peace, as a universal value and an end in itself, occupies little space in our discourse about war and peace, and by implication about Hezbollah handing its arms to the state.
We place nothing above- and thus have nothing to lift us above- sectarian polarization and our sects’ predetermined positions. As a result, we have a trivialization (and often glorification) of violence on one side and, on the other, opposition to war that is defended from several different angles but does nothing to develop a more robust and deeper culture of peace. This suggests that the pursuit of domination and its latent violence underpin both stances: the stance of the camp arguing that these arms should not be handed over and the stance of those who brandish the threat of Israel collecting these weapons itself if they are not relinquished.
Because that is the case, affect is at the heart of both sides of the debate. Those who do not want peace with the Jewish state often invoke episodes from our history of mutual hostility and point to what is happening in Gaza, before concluding that peace with this "tumor" is not tenable.
Those who want peace, on the other hand, speak like bureaucrats, adding and subtracting figures without considering sentiments that stem from past experiences. They are explicitly betting that, together, rational self-interest and the blank pages that await us in a promising future built around cooperation will turn the page on the memories of the past and the emotions of the emotional.
Peace, in any case, is not a question of emotions, though this does not imply total apathy for emotions.
Its advocates are not necessarily enamored of Israel, and it could be a positive sign that some among them are apprehensive about this extremely powerful neighbor and link their desire for peace with another, their desire to reduce the reasons for such concerns and to drain the well they spring from.
There are many rational reasons to prefer peace. War, in addition to the death and pain it engenders, has profoundly negative repercussions for inter-sectarian dynamics domestically, that is, for the little that remains of our national unity. Since the late 1960s, we have been learning that every weapon held to fight Israel is a weapon that fires at what is supposedly shared among the Lebanese.
Moreover, ending the war and laying down our arms are prerequisites for an economic recovery, foreign investment, reconstruction, and breaking our isolation from the region and the world.
The advocates of war and arms, on the other hand, have nothing left to offer but resentment and closed horizons. Sulking is of course a luxury that no one can afford at a time when political and economic calamities are grinding the Lebanese, especially after the resistance card was completely burned, and with it the fingers of its fighters.
There is no use in inventing, because of our attachment to a war that no one is fighting, Israeli "ambitions" in Lebanon, nor in brandishing the existential threats posed by an evil neighbor who will gobble us up or stamp us out even if we all embrace Mahatma Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolence.
It seems that fighting the surge of sentimentality, which continues to undercut reason, should not lead to cold calculations that are contemptuous of sentiment and avoid appeals to affect. Such a reductionist approach is harmful; we see it from those heralding a transition that, between Wednesday and Thursday, we move to trading with Israel and collaborating on developing our use of artificial intelligence. Solving the problem rhetorically- with fantasies of a transition "from ideology to technology," as though choosing to rely on the latter is a decision above ideology- does not help either. These simplistic frameworks, which mirror the Trumpian consciousness and its conception of the world and politics, are shocked by their encounter with the complexity of reality in various ways; and so they turn a blind eye to death, destruction, displacement, and gaping psychological wounds. The most recent manifestation of reality’s capacity to shock may have come for Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar. Commenting on peace with Syria, he spoke of a normalization deal that would allow Israel to maintain control over the Golan Heights. Such obstacles may not be insurmountable, but they are certainly impossible to ignore.
However, if defending peace should not obscure its complexities and challenges, then these complexities and challenges should not stand in the way of defending peace either. With regard to emotions that have always surrounded this penchant for war, there is now no point in ignoring the recent inversion of all other meanings. Those who do not wish to be "isolationists”- to be isolated from Syria and the region- must realize that the faction clinging to its arms is the only "isolationist" around today. As for "unity with our brothers in arms," it has been unraveled by the evaporation of the "brother" supporting his "brother.” Neither did Iran support Gaza and Lebanon, nor did Gaza and Lebanon support Iran.
As for the question of "abandoning Palestine," it has become abundantly clear that the only way for Lebanon (and other Arab countries) to help Palestinians at this devastating time, is to build stable and respected states. Anything else would render our "solidarity" a solidarity of one impotent with another.
