Forty years separate February 16, 1985, the day in which Hezbollah issued its founding statement, and November 6, 2025, the day it issued its “re-founding” yesterday. Forty, here, is not just a random number. In the view of the Sufis, it signifies passage from the outward to the inward, from knowledge to taste, from action to unveiling.” It is the timespan of complete maturity. However, we see nothing of the sort in Hezbollah’s second statement.
In its first founding statement four decades ago, “An Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World,” Hezbollah presented a political document defining its identity, goals, ideology, and frame of reference. Its identity immediately ran up against the reality of Lebanon’s diverse communities as well as the solid foundations of the country’s constitutional formula. Accordingly, the party was compelled to retreat and to adopt a more “Lebanized” modus operandi, even when it was on the ascent.
With the “re-founding” address yesterday, “An Open Letter to the Three Presidents and the Lebanese People,” the party appears to have been seeking to project a Lebanese identity, as well as concern for the state and its institutions. In practice, however, it has been taking what it is owed from the state without giving its due. Hezbollah continues, under the pretext of “resistance,” which served as the cornerstone of its first statement and remains the keystone of its second, to prevent the state from carrying out its most essential duty: monopolizing armament and deciding questions of war and peace.
In both statements, past and present, the Israeli enemy offers Hezbollah a pretext for keeping its weapons. What the party has failed to grasp, however, is that its pretexts and its approach to resistance do not meet the criteria for legitimacy. Resistance is, in principle, the inalienable right of all peoples to defend their land and liberate their homeland. In Hezbollah’s case, “resistance” has been equated to monopolizing this right, stripping the concept of its universalism, and turning it into a pretext for clinging to arms that have failed the test of strength.
The party’s second statement seems to build on a historical moment that had shaped the objectives of its first statement. This moment, however, can no longer be projected onto the reality of Lebanon, the region, or the world today. That moment was defined by the emergence of an ideological force that filled the vacuum left by the defeat of the Lebanese National Movement and the Palestine Liberation Organization, following the latter’s withdrawal from Lebanon in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of 1982.
This ideological force succeeded (as a result of intersecting regional and international factors) in toppling the Lebanese-Israeli peace agreement known as the May 17, 1983 Accord, allowing it to inherit the mantle of resistance, indeed to monopolize it, with the approval of the Syrian occupation forces.
In this second statement, Hezbollah is effectively reasserting that it is a “resistance movement” exempt from the stipulations of the state’s exclusive right to use armed force and decide on matters of war and peace, under the pretext of an enemy that continues to occupy Lebanese territory and attack the country. Hezbollah has gone from denial to outright repudiation: the party refuses to acknowledge that it had suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Israeli enemy and now seeks to avoid following through on all its commitments, placing the state in an impossible position.
Today, the party openly boasts that its “resistance” endures and does not need national consensus. It insists on making a geographic argument for its weapons, demanding that the state align with it politically and diplomatically. The latest statement of its partner in politics and arms, Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri, came to its support, affirming that “there will be neither war nor direct negotiations” and echoing the same rhetoric he had made before the war against Lebanon last year.
Hezbollah’s statement does nothing to protect southerners, and Berri’s remarks do not reassure the Lebanese. The policies and arms of the “Shiite duo” have been exposed by the war. They cannot ensure deterrence, and the ceasefire agreement exposed their failure at the negotiating table. Now, they make themselves look bigger by projecting their failures onto the state, obstructing its diplomacy and even its desperate attempts to spare Lebanon further calamities.
Therefore, the “open letter” or “statement” declares a return to arms: no returning to the state, no southerners returning to their villages, and, most ominously, the specter of a resumption of war.
