Lebanon’s Negations

Since Monday, March 2, Israel’s armed forces have launched daily airstrikes on Lebanon. Begun after Hezbollah fired a small volley of rockets into Israel in response to the killing of Ali Khamenei (causing no casualties), the Israeli strikes have so far killed more than nine hundred people and displaced more than a million out of a population of less than six million. Evacuation orders have been issued for almost the whole of the southern suburbs of Beirut. The evacuation order for the country’s south keeps expanding, its northern boundary moving up within ten days from the Litani River to the Zahrani River, around twenty-five miles from the Israeli border; on Monday Israel significantly expanded its ground invasion of the south, raising the threat of a long-term occupation. The strikes have also, without prior warning, targeted areas far from the evacuation zones, including the campus of the public Lebanese University in Beirut, where Israel assassinated two science professors; a seafront area where refugees were sleeping, killing eight; and buildings in the mountains overlooking Beirut, where the victims included a children’s book author and a photographer along with his toddler.

So many people had to flee at once that journeys that normally take two or three hours took twenty or more. The hundreds of thousands who have now left their homes have gone north, sheltering with relatives, in schools, on the pavements, in public squares, and in cars. In the recent rains the makeshift tents have flooded. The displaced have been trying to guess from the location of the ceaseless strikes whether their homes still stand. Most will not know before they return. But they do not know when that will be: the evacuation orders are open-ended.

Lebanon’s president, the former army head Joseph Aoun, has offered to open direct cease-fire talks, but Israel has refused. Israel’s leaders have not officially laid out their conditions for ending the hostilities. After Israeli forces attacked a bridge on the Litani on March 13, however, the defense minister, Israel Katz, issued a statement warning of more “damage to infrastructure and loss of territory” until the Lebanese government disarms Hezbollah. Taking away Hezbollah’s arms was also a condition of the cease-fire agreement of November 2024, as was Israel’s withdrawal from areas south of the Blue Line; the UN Interim Force in Lebanon has reported that Israel violated the cease-fire 10,000 times. On Friday the IDF dropped leaflets in Beirut urging residents to “disarm Hezbollah, Iran’s shield.” “Lebanon is your decision, not the decision of others,” they urged, along with a QR code with which to contact the Israeli army intelligence unit. They added a reminder of Israel’s “glowing victory” in Gaza.

This sort of messaging is intended to exploit internal debates within Lebanon, which Israel is weaponizing to present itself as a kind of savior. The leaflets have been largely ignored, and the Lebanese government has warned against scanning the codes, but the debates themselves have continued to intensify. Ever since Hezbollah liberated the south from Israeli occupation in 2000 the question of whether it can continue to hold arms has kept resurfacing, since it was only allowed to do so on the grounds that it was fighting a military occupation.

For some twenty years the two sides of this debate have remained in a modus vivendi, with tensions ebbing and flowing. The argument for disarmament gained momentum in 2006, when Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers set off a monthlong war during which Israel killed around 1,200 people and did severe damage to civilian infrastructure, including power plants and Beirut’s airport. It arose once more in 2024, when Hezbollah fired at Israel in solidarity with the people of Gaza and Israel launched a concerted attack on various parts of the country associated with the group, ultimately assassinating its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah’s opponents have argued that it acts like a state within a state, undermining the central state’s sovereign decision-making, especially when it comes to decisions of war and peace. Many people in Lebanon—typically not ones who live in the south—have suggested that the group should relinquish its weapons to the Lebanese army voluntarily, but otherwise the army should confiscate them.

For its supporters, who live in the ever-present fear that Israel will attack their lands, Hezbollah is both a resistance movement and a source of protection. Making up around a third of the country’s population, Shias have historically lived in the south and later in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the areas targeted most heavily by the evacuation orders. For decades Hezbollah has offered welfare services that the central state never provided to many Shias, including schools, hospitals, and financial help through the al-Qard al-Hassan network of credit institutions, which Israel has been striking since the start of its latest assault.

Intricate and tenuous modus vivendis have always defined the Lebanese state. Because modus vivendis by design leave communities to organize their own affairs, any state that functions through them is correspondingly weak. It is true that the Lebanese have always longed for something more than a modus vivendi, for a stronger, more assertive, more sovereign state. But for Israel to imply that its war will not end until the sudden emergence of such a state is as preposterous as it is morally suspect, given how central a part Israel itself played in eroding the conditions for sovereignty in the first place—a pattern all too familiar from its war on Gaza. A strong state cannot emerge out of an all-out assault, let alone out of occupation. War begets not peace but capitulation, and all capitulation will beget—at the price of so much death and destruction—is a new modus vivendi.

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Upon independence in 1943 from the rule of the French Mandate, and against the background of rising pan-Arab nationalism, the leaders of the newly established Lebanese republic made an unwritten agreement that soon become known as the National Pact. The president, they resolved, would be a Maronite Christian and the prime minister a Sunni Muslim; neither would make too close of an alignment either with the Arab world (which worried the Christians) or with the West (which worried the Muslims). In 1955 this delicate balance of power had to be maintained in the face of the Baghdad Pact, an agreement, sponsored by the United States, to contain Soviet influence in the region. Lebanon’s then-president, Camille Chamoun, was tempted to join along with Iraq, Turkey, Great Britain, Pakistan, and Iran, but desisted in part due to the objection of leftist and Arab nationalist parties.

In 1969 this balance shifted when the head of the army allowed the Palestine Liberation Organization to operate in the country in its fight against Israel, to the enthusiasm of the leftists and nationalists and the outrage of Christian parties, who saw the decision as a breach of the founding pact. When civil war broke out in 1975, it was nominally around the PLO’s presence: the war started when Christian militias attacked a bus carrying Palestinians returning from a military parade in Beirut. But it was also the culmination of the Muslim population’s longstanding concerns about the equity of the political and economic system: the ratio of Christians to Muslims in parliament was six to five, based on a census from 1932, and the Christian president—in an echo of the French Third Republic—held much of the power. Muslims were, on average, poorer than their Christian counterparts, and generally had less access to public-sector benefits and opportunities.

The civil war, which killed around 150,000 people and displaced nearly a million, only ended in 1990. The Taif Agreement, signed the year before, inaugurated a new version of the modus vivendi: it redistributed power among the main sectarian actors away from the Christian president and toward the cabinet, still headed by a Sunni prime minister; it extended the term of the head of parliament, a Shia, from one year to four; and it stipulated that all of the militias be required to give up their weapons. Hezbollah, however, was allowed to keep its arms to fight the continued Israeli occupation. The agreement bore the influence both of Saudi Arabia, which hosted the signing, and of Syria, which now started exerting considerable political and military control over the country.

In 2005 a new modus vivendi emerged. That February the prime minister, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated in a bombing that protesters blamed on Hezbollah and Syria. Three weeks later, on March 8, Hezbollah organized a pro-Syrian rally to which its critics responded, on March 14, with a wave of mass demonstrations that led to the departure of the Syrian forces, which had been in the country since the civil war. The two dates became shorthand for the two political currents that have since divided the country. The March 8 camp, which included Hezbollah and the second Shia political party, Amal, oriented itself toward Syria and increasingly Iran—what has been known in more recent years as the “axis of resistance.” The March 14 camp, which included the Sunni Future Movement, oriented itself towards the Gulf countries, primarily Saudi Arabia, and by association the United States. Christian parties divided between the two.

The tensions heightened when Hezbollah entered the Syrian civil war in 2013 in support of Bashar al-Assad as he tortured and massacred civilians who had called for his overthrow, most of whom were Sunni. When the time came to elect a new president in Lebanon in May 2014, it took forty-five sessions of parliament to reach the required two-thirds quorum for a vote. Only in October 2016 did the competing forces reach a behind-the-scenes agreement. Parliament elected a former head of the army, Michel Aoun, favored by the March 8 coalition. Aoun in turn appointed Saad Hariri, the son of Rafik Hariri, as prime minister—an uneasy alliance that faltered and reconstituted itself until, in 2019, popular protests erupted against the government as a whole.

The October 2019 protesters marched against a range of failures: corruption; the distribution of public sector posts on the basis of loyalty to sectarian political parties; banking secrecy laws that protected the rich and powerful against tax evasion and illicit enrichment; and the state’s inability to provide such basic services as continuous electricity, running water, and, in a few memorable episodes, trash removal. They chanted that “the people want to overthrow the sectarian regime” but also that “all of them means all of them”: by their very movement they asserted their belief that it was possible to reject all of the existing political leaders and parties at once. And yet even as the subsequent financial collapse proved these critiques prescient, the movement slowly fractured, succumbing to internal divisions over leadership.

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No one really likes modus vivendis. Liberal political theorists since John Rawls have criticized them as mere concessions to the balance of power, neither stable nor just. They require the constant tabulation of sects, seats, and names, the constant rearrangement of a small political pie among elites who decide where to bestow rewards and where to deny them. They distract from the work of politics: the creation of a citizenry, a state, and a civil, collective life. “Two negations do not form a nation,” the Lebanese journalist Georges Naccache wrote about the National Pact in 1949.

But eighty-three years after independence, it is hard not to conclude that the negations did form the nation, and still do. They were a necessary condition for coexistence in a state that not all of its citizens wanted to join, and for protection in a small country nestled amid bigger ones, one of which has always been perceived as a foreign imposition and the embodiment of lingering dispossession (for most people in Lebanon the Palestinian cause remains central). At crucial points the modus vivendis have failed abjectly, ensuring neither coexistence nor protection. But at other moments they have permitted the country to survive and in some respects to flourish. The restraint they require from all parties—each of which knows it can never impose its own ideological vision on the nation as a whole—has given the society a wide margin of freedom for debating these diverse visions. In Lebanon as in other postcolonial countries, there is no straight line that leads from debate to agreement, conflict to unity, independence to sovereignty, and weakness to strength.

The current government emerged in February 2025 from another two-year-long vacuum. After the Israeli attacks of October and November 2024, which weakened Hezbollah severely, the balance tilted against the group. Parliament finally elected a new president, Joseph Aoun, who appointed a new prime minister, Nawaf Salam, a former president of the International Court of Justice. When Salam formed a cabinet, he balanced considerations of merit with the need to represent all the country’s main sects and parties. Shias and Hezbollah had seats as usual, but not enough to give them the veto power they had previously enjoyed.

Right before the recent attacks, the government was dealing with a more quotidian dilemma. It had resolved to raise the salaries of teachers, military personnel, and other public servants, which had dropped fivefold since the financial crisis of 2019. To make up the difference it had also resolved to increase the value-added tax that citizens paid on consumer goods. That prospect prompted a backlash from a range of Lebanese taxpayers, who resented having to fund a state that did not deliver on the public goods it promised: public schooling was weak, welfare services almost nonexistent. The public servants, on the other hand, objected that the raise was too low for them to make ends meet.

After Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel at the start of this month and Israel retaliated on a grand scale, Salam’s government immediately tried to calm the situation. After a long meeting it issued a declaration that, for the first time, officially and explicitly banned Hezbollah’s military activities, restricting it to its political ones. Since then there have been reports that the head of the army, Rodolphe Haykal, has refused to confiscate Hezbollah’s weapons as ordered by the cabinet. He is said to have expressed fears that doing so would break up the army, which mirrors, in its makeup, the country’s sects and orientations.

On March 9 a military court tried three members of Hezbollah heading south for unlicensed possession of weapons. Their weapons were confiscated, they were charged a small fine, and then they were released. The Lebanese media has been discussing rumors about internal and external calls to remove Haykal over his reluctance to disarm Hezbollah; there was also much talk of a leaked report—since found to be fake—that army officers had issued a statement emphasizing the importance of unity in the army as a source of strength. In the meantime Israel continues to pound the country. It is hard to imagine that these are the conditions in which the Lebanese state will find the solution to the predicament that has beset it since its creation. The best that can be hoped for is that a new modus vivendi emerges to prevent another civil war.

If Israel follows through on its current threat to occupy parts of the south, it will intensify both enmity toward Israel itself and resentment toward the Lebanese government. In a new modus vivendi in which Hezbollah loses still more power, the twin factors of resentment and enmity will give rise to another liberation movement. Even in the highly improbable event that Israel finds itself pressured to backtrack its evolving ground incursion in the south, the challenge for the government will be not just to rebuild homes but also to ensure the Shia community’s security. That the government will succeed at either is hard to imagine. The only clear achievement of Israel’s and America’s current war is death, destitution, and despair.