The dramatic events unfolding in Lebanon with the Israeli occupation extending — despite a declared ceasefire that no one can see in practice — all the way to the Zahrani River, far beyond the limit Israel had previously set and now encompassing roughly twenty percent of the entire country, have turned one million civilians into internal refugees. The level of destruction is so severe that the future habitability of these territories is in doubt: homes, civilian infrastructure, and farmland have been devastated, while collective evacuation orders now cover entire cities like Tyre, not just villages. Hezbollah is attacking northern Israel and its army primarily with drones.
Yet there is no unified Lebanese narrative. There are two opposing narratives: that of Hezbollah, which for decades has called itself the “resistance” (with or without an occupation), and that of the rest of the country, which, together with the government, wants to liberate the territory through a negotiated peace with the enemy. Hezbollah rejects negotiation, viewing it as a political and cultural capitulation; the government considers the militia’s stance to be a sentence to perpetual war. One could trace this double narrative endlessly — through the history of internal conflict, with Lebanese blood spilled over the years, and through the external conflict. For the sake of brevity, it is better to follow the political thread of the two visions.
In 1992, shortly after being elected secretary-general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah gave a lengthy interview to as-Safir in which he explained the party’s meaning:
We were a young movement that wanted to resist a legendary army. This orientation required men who were not concerned about the destruction of their homes, or about finding themselves hungry, thirsty, wounded. We needed men with the spirit of jihad, of self-sacrifice and endless devotion. The only name possible for a group created with these motivations and this spirit, a group that has dedicated itself to Almighty God and chooses martyrdom by resisting enemies, despite the enormous difference in forces and means, is the name Hezbollah (Party of God).”
These are not trivial words, and history would make that abundantly clear.
Hala Jaber, in her book on Hezbollah, observes that “the group’s original goal was to spark a revolt against the Israeli occupation, which would then expand into a liberation of Lebanon from Western forces and influence”. We will come back to this—a crucial point—in a moment.
The story continued with the war between Hezbollah and the other Shia movement, the secular Amal. That conflict, fought with automatic weapons, ended when Hezbollah accepted the terms of a power-sharing arrangement with the Syria ruled by the Assads — then the real power guiding Amal. Under that arrangement, Hezbollah would not claim an independent political role: Amal would remain the “influential” actor, and Hezbollah, financed by Iran and protected by Damascus under these terms, would have the exclusive right to armed struggle against Israel. In this way, Hezbollah made clear it had no intention of creating an Islamic emirate: its project was different, broader. It was the one announced publicly on February 16, 1985, by Sheikh Ibrahim al-Amin, when Hezbollah’s program was unveiled:
We, the sons of the Nation of the Party of God in Lebanon, whose vanguard God has granted victory in Iran, and which has established the central nucleus of the Islamic State, obey the orders of one just commander, who is currently the supreme guide Ayatollah Khomeini. We in Lebanon are not an organization enclosed within party structures — we are a nation interconnected with all Muslims of the world, bound by a strong ideological and political connection: Islam. What happens to Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, or elsewhere concerns the body of our Islamic nation, of which we are an inseparable part, and we face it in the light of the decisions of our leader, the Wilayat al-Faqih.”
Samir Kassir, in his masterwork on Beirut, describes it as “an Arab, Mediterranean, Westernized metropolis.” That formula alone is enough to explain the incompatibility between the two visions. The great intellectual of the Lebanese left, assassinated shortly after the killing of Rafiq Hariri (widely attributed to Hezbollah), describes a cosmopolitan and pluralistic city that, in my view, makes all of Lebanon lean toward the sea and the encounter with the Mediterranean, bringing along with it the country’s mountains, part of its identity: the other pole. What emerges is an Arab convoy moving toward a plural Mediterranean, carrying with it the tension with the pole in the mountains — traditional, communitarian, closed — a tension that doesn’t have to be resolved once and for all, but is rather carried forward, through provisional syntheses, always rising to a higher level, where the exchange continues. On the other side, the other pole, stands a vision that is centered around death and self-sacrifice, which Nasrallah articulated with such clarity in the interview cited above.
This ongoing tension has created two poles that no longer simply oppose each other — like sea and mountains, which can coexist — but are contradictory, and therefore irreconcilable: faith in the martyr who, through his sacrifice, hastens Armageddon and the final victory of good, versus faith in pluralism, in the cosmopolitanism of the Arab, Mediterranean, Westernized city.
Lebanon is trapped in this condition, which makes a creating a shared national narrative impossible. On one side is the possibility of a state that learns to overcome its paralyzing tribal and communal dimension, resolving the polarity between sea and mountain with a new plural arrangement — guardian of traditions, yet projected into Mediterranean innovation — that is capable of gradually affirming itself through the effort of holding a polar tension in balance. On the other side is the path of a foundational sacrifice tied to the Khomeinist doctrine of rule by jurist.
Everything that happens plays out within this irreconcilable contradiction. Compatibility is the product of opposites that do not negate each other; here, instead, the poles are mutually exclusive. Resolving the tension between the two “compatible” poles of Kassir’s Beirut — Arab, Mediterranean, Westernized — would require finding ways of engagement in order to rise to a higher level and continue the dialogue. Between these two contradictory poles — the pluralist country and the country of the martyr — such an engagement is impossible. It is precisely this impossibility that paralyzes the first discussion, leaving Lebanon imprisoned in its tribal and confessional dimension, far from the Mediterranean.
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