Lebanon’s Shiites are fighting a two-front war

Resistance camp

In the opposite camp are the Shiites who hold fast to armed resistance. Their reasoning is that experience since 1948, together with the Lebanese army's decision last month to withdraw its units from the border region, shows that the state has no intention of defending Shiite southerners, their land or their property. This pattern of behaviour has effectively become standard policy—one that the authorities in Beirut unfailingly apply whenever southerners are struck by the recurring crises they face.

This viewpoint sees no benefit to negotiating with the Israelis, who only understand the language of force and arms. The heavy human price paid by the Shiites is therefore seen as a necessary sacrifice to ensure that their future is protected from aggression, occupation and subjugation. They are also wary of plots by fellow countrymen to strip Shiites of the gains they have made since the Taif Agreement and consolidated through the Doha Agreement of 2008.

Thus, according to this logic, the Shiites are fighting a war on two fronts. The first is on the border against Israel, which seeks to seize their land and drive them northwards. The second is within Lebanon itself, against a state that seeks to curtail them, marginalise them and return them to the wretched conditions in which they lived in the 1940s and 1950s. In both cases, there is no alternative but to take up arms and hold on to them as the only effective tool in this war on two fronts.

These two discourses, voiced by writers, journalists and politicians from the Shiite community, point above all to the profound crisis that community has lived through for years as it struggles to define its identity and allegiance: to resistance or to the state, to Lebanon or to Iran, to the Lebanese social contract or to a form of self-administration that has begun to encourage members of other sects to imitate it and follow the same path.

This deep division in the perception of self and other cannot readily be overcome because of the gulf separating the two camps, to the point that each scarcely acknowledges the other's existence or right to express its opinion. There is an urgent need for a framework to reduce this irrational tension.

Catastrophic crisis

It hardly needs saying that this crisis has now become a catastrophe whose scale is no less severe than that which befell the Palestinians in 1948. The comparison between the Palestinian Nakba and the Lebanese one is prompted by the repeated statements of Israeli officials that the inhabitants south of the Litani River will not be allowed to return to their homes. Their number is roughly equal to that of the Palestinians expelled from Palestine in the year of the Nakba.

Lebanon's Shiites, along with the rest of the Lebanese, are confronting a situation unlike anything the country has experienced before. The two opposing Shiite discourses confirm this reality, yet they do little to help restore the Shiites to a just state—one that itself must be rebuilt almost from scratch after the calamities that continue to reproduce themselves in Lebanon.

The Shiites are fighting a war on two fronts: The first is on the border against Israel, which seeks to seize their land and drive them northwards; the second is within Lebanon itself, against a state that seeks to marginalise them