Anyone familiar with the Lebanese question understood that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the “party of the axis” in Lebanon would both reject the latest Lebanese-Israeli-American joint statement and describe it in the ugliest terms.
Behind the thick dust that has enveloped Lebanon’s immensely complex issues for more than 40 years, obscuring vision with a vast mass of slogans and positions, one must grasp the essence and purpose of the “party of the axis” established in 1982 by the Khomeinist revolution in the “Land of the Cedars”.
There is a degree of contempt for reason and disdain for memory in contemporary Lebanon, and a degree of cunning, camouflage, and manipulation that is hard to bear. The overwhelming prioritization of petty interests and base personal aims over the national interest among the vast majority of Lebanon’s political and financial class fully explains the abyss into which this country has descended and settled.
For decades, Lebanon was like a slowly sinking ship, while the greater part of those in charge of it strove to plunder its contents with unmatched speed, eagerness, and skill, without mercy or remorse.
And there was the “party of the axis.”
Yet this party was not truly a new phenomenon. Since the emergence of the Lebanese entity 165 years ago until today, its trajectory can only be understood through one equation: the constant struggle between the Lebanese project and the regional project in Lebanon. The Lebanese project has remained the same over time. The regional project, meanwhile, moved from the Ottoman to the Faisalite Syrian, to the Baathist unionist, to the Syrian nationalist, to the Nasserist-Arafatist, to the Assadist Syrian, and finally to the Iranian Khomeinist project under the banner of Velayet e-faqih.
Before Israel’s establishment in 1948, regionalist projects in Lebanon raised the banner of unity against the Lebanist tendency. Since Israel’s establishment, the dominant slogan has been the liberation of Palestine starting from southern Lebanon.
The uncompromising struggle remained the same: an uncompromising struggle between regional projects and the state representing the Lebanese project, and it paints the same picture of the impossibility of reconciling the “party of the axis” with the Lebanese state.
What distinguished the Assadist Baath Party and the Iranian “party of the axis” from earlier regional projects was that they managed to dominate the Lebanese state and its institutions for years, leading each of them to believe that they had definitively laid their hand on this state. Who expected the Syrian regime to collapse and withdraw from Lebanon in that way in 2005? Who expected the “party of the axis” to now enter into this open conflict with the Lebanese state, whose leadership has decided to disarm it, outlawed its armed organization, declared the Iranian ambassador persona non grata, then settled the matter that no one negotiates on Lebanon’s behalf except itself, and then entered into direct political and military negotiations with Israel under American sponsorship, culminating in the latest joint statement?
Despite the change in circumstances and conditions, this is the same elusive Lebanon. It is indomitable by virtue of its geographical and historical, political, social, cultural, and spiritual pluralism; by virtue of its deep-rooted and unique civilizational and everyday achievements in the Levant; by virtue of its broad and distinguished human presence overseas; and by virtue of its permanent place at the heart of modernity and the world. These are invisible but highly important sources of strength, which those who possess only the one-sided power of arms fail to see or grasp, and which they are unable to control.
What comes next? There is no glimmer of hope for convergence between the Iranian leadership in Tehran and the “party of the axis” in Lebanon, on the one hand, and the government carrying the Lebanese project, on the other. The party and the state are two absolutely irreconcilable entities.
What the party wants from the state is one of two things: either complete domination or paralysis. In the party’s eyes, no shift is of any significance unless it strengthens Iranian influence in Lebanon. Even the unconditional Israeli withdrawal in 2000 mattered to the party only because in its eyes, this handed the south not to the Lebanese state, but to the axis, militarily and politically. And if the state is able now or tomorrow to achieve the dream of a full Israeli withdrawal from the south, reconstruction, and economic revival, the party will be completely rejected if they lead to entrenching the presence of this state, rather than the axis, in the south.
