Some Lebanese are inclined to reject any peace with Israel - now, tomorrow, and the day after - regardless of who is in power. Others lean toward full peace and normalization with it, "now, now, not tomorrow," regardless of who is in power. Both faces of this impulse, rendering turn people into machines that fight Israel and turning them into machines robotically infatuated with it, are driven, more than anything else, by sectarian communities’ hatred of one another and their desire to subjugate one another.
While those who hold the former view see the world as a realm of hostility and war as the only medium of exchange among human beings, however, those who hold the latter give themselves the power to say "be, and it is", convinced that there was no history before them and that they are now founding it by their own hands.
And so, against the worst of conservative tendencies, the wish to preserve the "constants" of war and enmity as a "human nature," stand the worst of revolutionary tendencies, the wish to overcome emotion, the familiar, and the complexity of reality all at once, by an act of will usually entrusted to one person or a few people.
In fact, the roots of this way of thinking, whose adherents imagine they can turn everything upside down, are ancient and deep. The Old Testament, for instance, often tells of a single person who, through the power of his righteousness, can save a people and shape the fate of an entire community: after the episode of the golden calf, Moses' intervention spared a whole people from destruction. In Christianity, the resurrection of Christ transformed the relationship between God and humanity by triumphing over death and atoning for the sin. Greek mythology, in turn, held that humanity acquired technology and knowledge only after Prometheus dared to steal fire from the gods.
The truth is that every major transition, including the transition from deep-rooted, chronic hostility to comprehensive peace, is a process. Where it succeeds, it develops over time toward progressively higher stages. It is certainly not a mythic event achieved in a single decisive stroke. We are not dealing here with a moment like the Fall from Paradise or the Israelites' exodus from Egypt.
Deeply entrenched hostilities do not, therefore, become peace and full normalization overnight. In the most historical cases, gradual progress and the accumulation of achievements broadly prevail.
France and Germany went from hostility to peace only in a series of stages: beginning in 1951 with the European Coal and Steel Community, then the 1963 Élysée Treaty of friendship and cooperation, whose aim was to make war "politically and psychologically inconceivable." And though the US-Vietnam war ended in 1975, diplomatic relations between the two countries were not established until 1995, after which trade expanded and investment began to flow.
Between the end of apartheid in South Africa and the broader national reconciliation came constitutional negotiations and elections, the founding of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and sustained efforts to dispel mutual fears. Even today, the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David agreement of 1979 is accompanied with a "cold peace".
None of this is said in order to propose a binding "model" for the Lebanese-Israeli future. It is said, rather, to help put an end to the triumphant chants that are counting on a magician's spell, or on the push of a button as a key to history.
Naturally, in processes like these, the initiatives of individuals and groups play a part, hindering or hastening them, just as progress and a succession of achievements pull the process forward, while stumbling and the squandering of achievements pull it back. There is also the courage or hesitation of leaders, and a community's cultural readiness and background - whether encouraging or discouraging.
In the cases at hand, it would be illogical, indeed inhumane, to demand that Lebanese whose relatives were killed and whose homes and villages were burned fall in love with Israelis led by Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir. In the same sense, Israelis among the families of the "Al-Aqsa Flood" victims would rebuff a demand equally hasty and glib. How much more so when, in Lebanon's case, the matter of withdrawal has not yet been clearly settled, while the surrounding Arab environment, which may accept the principle of peace, is wary of the principle of infatuation.
"Love one another" will be neither effective nor possible in conditions like these; and in Lebanon, the enmity Hezbollah deserves will not translate into a certificate of innocence granted to the Israelis. Here, too, history supplies useful lessons. There is a famous descriptive phrase, "caught between two fires," that holds for Poland's position between Russia and Germany; for Korea between America and both Russia and China; for Afghanistan during the "Great Game" between Britain and Russia; for the Kurds, who suffered the pain of being torn among warring neighbors; and, of course, for the Lebanese.
In all these cases, the weaker party's interest may converge with the interest of one of the two great powers brutalizing it. Yet "objective analysis" and cold calculation do not necessarily equal the emotional state that follows direct personal harm. What holds for calculating machines most likely does not hold for human beings. And if the balance of power and necessity impose silence here and endurance there, they do not impose falling into an unrequited love that stirs pity for the lover.
