In treating the rounds of military confrontation in the region, one notices that the positions of the countries involved automatically bring their domestic conditions to the fore. Those internal conditions play a large role — if not a decisive one — in determining where states stand on the war and how they respond to its rounds. This link rises to the level of a firm equation across all countries, especially the democratic ones, without being confined to them.
At every mention of the United States and the war, the midterm elections come up automatically, along with inflation and how much price increase citizens can bear. In Israel, too, mention of the war goes hand in hand with speculation about the imminent general elections, Benjamin Netanyahu's personal and legal circumstances, and the meaning of the rise of his rival Gadi Eisenkot. Even Iran — not known for public opinion being reflected in its policy, nor for having a public opinion in the first place — confronts us at every turn with news and leaks touching on the condition of its supreme leader and the "bourse" of the relationship between the Revolutionary Guard and the "moderates."
In Lebanon, however — one of the principal arenas of the war — none of this occurs. The civilian and military negotiations move between capitals without any domestic input or influence upon them, apart from pledges of allegiance on one side and vilification on the other. There is no party trying to build an effective current either in support of negotiation or in rejection of it. While the state's figureheads rely on President Donald Trump, and on a bloc of the population with a ready-made consciousness that supports negotiation, Hezbollah relies on Iran and on a bloc of the population with a ready-made consciousness that opposes it — and the party threatens of using force as its only means to halt the negotiations.
In all likelihood, this inertia is not the product of some personal trait in the leaderships of the two sides — the state and Hezbollah. But without ruling out laziness and a lack of initiative, the mother-problem lies in the absence of public opinion itself, which is precisely what confounds the leaders' conduct or strikes them mute. If the experience of March 8 and March 14, 2005, placed the country on the brink of civil conflict, repeating that experience today might detonate its division in a way that might make any unity difficult afterward.
It is true that the interior in countries like the US, Israel, and Iran is not harmonious, and there is speculation about it that does not shrink from positing collision. But it is also true that Lebanon has become wholly without an interior, and that the relationship among its many head-butting interiors has moved beyond disharmony, or the difficulty of recycling them within a single political life.
Thus, the Lebanese politician who intends to do his duty in politicizing the splintered conflict resembles someone who intends to catch a wild hedgehog with his bare hand. Approaching the hedgehog makes it curl in on itself, thrusting its wounding quills outward. It is an evasive animal, and its hunter is engaged in something of a fool's errand when he tries to catch it.
To go further: the existence of Lebanese publics, highly self-sufficient and mutually contradictory, means that the great questions of war and peace are automatically bound up with raising the question of Lebanese unity itself. Facing war, the fear of Hezbollah's weapons — until three years ago — kept the collapse of that unity latent and implicit, even as the weapons reinforced the collapse and aggravated it in the dark. But facing peace, the collapse becomes, as it is now, complete, announcing itself in broad daylight, by drawing on the weapons' inability to disguise or silence it.
It is impossible today, beneath the thin veneer of "coexistence," to broach the question of peace without questioning the country's composition, its unity, and its system. And whoever does so — even if sincere in defending what he sees as right — does not escape the accusation of a drive toward domination and supremacy.
The country's composition and system this time have nothing to do with the distribution of "shares" and their redistribution, but head straight for "coexistence" itself, particularly in its two pillars most tightly intersecting with the lives and consciousness of the Lebanese: war and peace.
In fact, the past few years have thrown the door wide open to reconsiderations across the Arab Levant, not in Lebanon alone. And while it is difficult at present to predict where those reconsiderations will lead, what is certain is that they will not revolve around the old binaries of patriotism and anti-patriotism, resistance and surrender, and the like. The rising subject is the eruption of schisms within communities that the mounting cost of Israeli demands after the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation has convinced them that they are sects and creeds more than peoples and nations.
It is as though the "flood," in our case, is the equivalent of events that previously exposed the impossibility of certain countries — among them the former Yugoslavia, overtaken by the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980, before an economic crisis erupted, accompanied by a sharp expressive rise of Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian identities. And as those developments were leading to a gradual disintegration of the declared consensus, there came the collapse of communism in Europe and Kosovo's abolition of self-rule, the national elections in the republics, then came the declaration of independence and the eruption of wars in full force.
So, the paralysis and stumbles of Lebanon's politicians loom as a decision to stop hunting the hedgehog with their bare hands, and a preference for putting their hands in their pockets and gazing at the farther horizon... in hope and expectation.
