There are some Lebanese voices, not necessarily coming from the same political camps, who warn Lebanese negotiators not to go as far as they can and stress their unequivocal preference for stopping at the bare minimum.
These arguments could be made on solid grounds. Nothing undermines them more, however, than their limited regard for the current balance of power between Lebanon and Israel, which occupies territory that is no longer limited and could increase. Realistically speaking, so long as the Lebanese state remains incapable of disarming “Hezbollah,” its weakness would only further weaken Lebanon’s negotiating position, pushing the Israelis to pile on new conditions and aggravate their blackmail. After all, no party can compel the Israelis to change course other than their close ally, the United States.
Realism, here, does not require a complete submission to reality. It entails engaging with the possibilities it offers, because the alternative is willful irresponsibility. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s trajectory offers a lesson: he went from being a judge who had been prosecuting Israel to a prime minister who, alongside the president, is overseeing negotiations with it. The symbolism here is a stark testament to the shift of reality and the weight of the task at hand.
We would be allowing ourselves to be taken by our illusions when we imagine that the Jewish state could possibly meet Lebanon’s demands like it were the defeated party! Accordingly, returning to the Armistice Agreement, for example, would be wholly unacceptable to the Israelis for reasons they consider justified. As more than one observer has pointed out, the armistice had been in place when the Palestinian resistance emerged and its military presence expanded. Later on, and while armistice was still in place, “Hezbollah” existed and became what it has now become.
As for putting our hopes behind an “internal dialogue” with the party regarding its disarmament, modest familiarity with the many previous attempts to do so is enough to conclude that they were efforts to plough the sea. If we want such a “dialogue” to accompany negotiations, we would be placing a ball of fire in our own net.
More importantly, these proposals revive a tradition we have long seen in our ideological parties: presenting a conception supposedly representing “the right thing to do” even when it goes against the composition and history of the society concerned.
A large segment of the Lebanese population, not a small handful of collaborators nor a marginal force in the country’s establishment and formation, wants not only to leave the state of war behind but also to put the culture of war behind.
This culture deprived this segment of the population of its right to freely decide a matter related to its life and death. Since the 1950s, and especially the 1960s, it has been dragged into a state of war against its will, whose opposition was branded treason on the grounds, raised either sincerely or opportunistically, that rejecting conflict with Israel was treachery. The moment “the cause” is mentioned, bearing arms becomes appealing to those who wish to do so for all manner of reasons, while those who hesitate are cast as a fifth column waiting for an opportunity to exploit.
This notorious history of civil wars, Israeli invasions, Syrian tutelage, and Iranian domination stomped on the will of those who wished to live in their country as though it were truly their own.
While some among them have resorted, with varying degrees of frivolity, to gouache flattery of Israel, this behavior was a backlash that drew its force from the lethal blows they had previously endured.
Accordingly, the current war has created the conditions for the eruption of disagreements over almost everything in this history of annexation and subjugation. The central axis of this disagreement is whether the path to an exit from this war must be a path of no return to war. Whatever facilitates this outcome is good; whatever impedes it is bad.
This radical rejection of war and desire to close all the roads leading to it, ought also to meet the aspirations and desires of Lebanon’s other communities as well, especially those most harmed by the war, provided they free themselves from “Hezbollah’s” capture of their minds. That is what makes the struggle against war a struggle in defense of reason, rationality, and liberation.
As for the response that Israel will pursue its criminal agenda regardless of whether security is provided to it or not, and regardless of what we do or fail to do, it is contradicted by numerous facts showing that it is always possible to deprive Israeli crimes of their pretexts.
Recently, in an investigative piece, our colleague the novelist Mohammad Abi Samra showed that the mixed villages of the Arqoub region avoided the miserable fate of other southern villages and towns. The same can be said of Christian villages that were spared because, like Arqoub, the party had been unable to dig tunnels beneath them or launch rockets from them.
Accordingly, Lebanese diplomacy must consider the sensitivities of all the components of this fractured society. Above all, it must be stressed that treating the country’s unity as self-evident and imposing a single interpretation on this unity are no longer guaranteed. This is what no one who wants this country to remain united should ignore. While the costs and difficulties of partition are undoubtedly immense, the place we have reached with this war suggests that the costs and difficulties of maintaining unity are, at an accelerating pace, becoming even greater.
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