The Salam government’s cabinet statement, which must be approved by parliament later this week, is another sign that much has changed in the way Hezbollah is addressing Lebanon’s new realities. The statement makes no mention of the triptych of “the Army, the People, and the Resistance,” which had long placed Hezbollah on the same level as the Lebanese armed forces. Today, both the president, Joseph Aoun, and the cabinet, led by Nawaf Salam, have affirmed, for the first time, “the right of the state to secure a monopoly over the holding of weapons.”
Where does this place Hezbollah and the Shia community in general? The answer is paradoxical, and in many regards Lebanon is the better for it. The Shia are alive and well and remain a major component of the country’s sectarian landscape, as they should be. But Hezbollah is crippled, with no broader regional vision to justify retaining its weapons. Its main patron, Iran, is now focused on saving itself from what may soon become a perfect storm of critical challenges: an Israeli strike against its nuclear facilities; heightened U.S. sanctions that will only be lifted if Tehran disbands its nuclear and missile programs and makes concessions when it comes to its regional network of allies; and, perhaps most perilously, the succession question once Ayatollah Ali Khamenei passes away, which may require imposing an unpopular successor on a system whose legitimacy and continuity are increasingly being questioned by many Iranians.
By now, many Hezbollah supporters realize there will be no major Iranian funding to rebuild what Israel devastated in its conflict with the party last year. When Hezbollah’s secretary general, Naim Qassem, declared on February 16 that “the state must lead reconstruction efforts” since “what Israel destroyed, it destroyed in the Lebanese state,” he affirmed indirectly that Hezbollah’s followers should not rely on Tehran to pay for reconstruction. He also provoked the anger of many Lebanese who are simply fed up with sacrificing to rebuild what the party keeps destroying in its wars.
Hezbollah’s major miscalculation, and arrogance, was to open its so-called “support front” for Gaza while blithely ignoring that it had no domestic backing for such a reckless action. Today, the hostility among most Lebanese to Hezbollah’s hubris is widespread and the party and its broader community now find themselves isolated. This was not always the case. In 2005, Hezbollah realized that the Syrian withdrawal threatened its power and it avoided isolation by opening channels to Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement. This allowed it to mount a counterattack against the post-Syrian order embodied by the March 14 coalition and impose its hegemony on the country, especially after the elections of 2009 and Saad al-Hariri’s ouster in 2011.
Such a path is no longer possible with Hezbollah destabilized and weakened, Syria lost to the so-called Resistance Axis, and Lebanon run by a de facto form of regional and international trusteeship. Iran’s project of arming and bolstering a region-wide network of nonstate actors to advance its interests and surround Israel with a ring of fire has failed. Two ideologues of this scheme, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s former secretary general, and Qassem Soleimani, the former head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, are dead. Iran doesn’t have the money to revive this sand castle, which it anchored in unstable, fragmented Arab societies, generating much resentment for turning countries into vast landscapes of ruin.
In this context, what value do Hezbollah’s weapons still have? To be used against Israel? Not realistically. But what then, to be used against fellow Lebanese? The party tried that in 2008, and brought about unremitting animosity that it never managed to overcome, so that today such an approach would lead only to armed conflict that discredits Hezbollah permanently and divides its community, as many Shiites have no intention of fighting their countrymen. Already, the intimidation tactics of bands of young men riding scooters through areas of Lebanon not controlled by the two main Shia parties backfired a few weeks ago, as they were attacked by locals in several localities. The decision to burn UNIFIL vehicles last weekend also embarrassed Hezbollah and Amal, although it’s not clear that Hezbollah encouraged this or whether the party no longer has as tight a rein on its community as it once did.
So, as we survey this dismal state of affairs, what options are open to the Shia community? Everywhere the Shia look, the cards are stacked against them. In neighboring Syria, a Sunni revival is taking place after roughly 62 years of minority rule. The main regional protagonist today is Türkiye, which has made major inroads into the Levant and Central Asia. This will doubtless affect dynamics in Lebanon. Indeed, don’t be surprised if the Shia soon find common cause with the country’s Christians, in a defensive political alliance to counterbalance the Sunnis.
Now may be a good time for Lebanon’s leaders to begin thinking of organizing a national forum on the country’s future and on communal relations, one that aims to put in place a new social contract to replace the dysfunctional Lebanese system. There is only one text that can be a foundation for such a discussion, namely the Taif Accord of 1989, even if the aim would be to transcend Taif and bring it up to date. Given that all of major communities—Sunnis, Druze, Maronites, and Shia—have at one time faced decisive defeats from alliances with outside actors, the driving force for such an endeavor would be to unify around a principle of Lebanon First for everyone.
We can ask whether the country’s political class, invariably a reservoir of incapacitating stalemate, could lead such a resurrection for the republic. Fortunately, perhaps, we happen to be in a transitional stage in the country’s leadership. The old militia leaders who transposed the wartime structure of power to peacetime in 1990 are on their way out, are handing power over to their children, or are dead. The successors may be as bad as their fathers, but then again they may not be. The political order they have inherited is not really theirs, and the temptation to succeed after decades in which Lebanon has become a near-failed state may be too much to resist.
In a book written a decade and a half ago, I had this to say about Hezbollah and the Shia: “Hezbollah is both a consequence of and a reinforcing factor in Lebanon’s inability to forge a strong state. But there may be an irony here for the future: the party, by so brazenly reflecting the limits of the state, may compel those Lebanese uncomfortable with Hezbollah to think more carefully about the state they really want, and to find ways of drawing a majority of Shiites over to a project that fulfills the latter’s aspirations and encourages them to look beyond Hezbollah.”
Quoting oneself may be tawdry, but it does show that Lebanon’s preoccupations have changed little. It’s not enough to draw a line through Hezbollah to say the country’s troubles are over. All that the party’s defeat against Israel has done is create an opening to lay the groundwork for the state we really want, and think of a mechanism that can neutralize a political class that wants things to remain as they are. It’s not a bad thing if Lebanon can suddenly find itself focused on the big idea of national renewal.
