Yousef Al-Dayni Tuesday - 30 June 2026
The situation in Lebanon cannot be reduced to the existence of a state within the state, Hezbollah's weapons, and its discourse hostile to the logic of the state. It extends to legitimizing Lebanon’s oscillation between being subordinate to Iran and being transformed into an inherent element of the Iranian body politic, and silence over Israel's violation of its southern borders, as though Lebanese territories were a field for deterrence under the pretext of Israel's security.
Despite the catastrophic condition in Lebanon, the deeper threat goes beyond security and the economy: living with the damage that has afflicted it for decades by treating Hezbollah as a subordinate of Iran or a representative of Lebanon that may be targeted, and by turning this damage into a "fait accompli" that must be managed. Here, the most basic idea is meant to die: Lebanon is a sovereign state, not an experimental arena for the projects of others.
The story of the settlement with Iran - into which Lebanon is being forced by reducing it to Hezbollah - must not be lost amid the crush of deadlines. Any new American-Iranian understanding should not be read only through the window of the nuclear program, or sanctions and the security of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. More dangerously, the agreement could constitute implicit recognition of Iran's right to operate proxies in sovereign Arab countries under the pretext of the unity of arenas. Meanwhile, the Iranian crisis has revealed that the Middle East is one arena whose struggles are inseparable from the chaos of interference in sovereign states, and from Israeli arrogance as well.
Including Lebanon in any agreement through Hezbollah is dangerous for the region. It cannot be legitimized no matter how powerful the urge to escape it may be. This means turning Beirut, and perhaps other capitals later, into Iranian bargaining ships. Sovereign states will thereby lose the ability to make decisions of war and their monopoly on violence, two of the most important pillars of the modern concept of the state. This negotiating shortcut is troubling, not merely as conduct, but even as political language, because it is asking to Iran to provide guarantees regarding Hezbollah's behavior instead of ending its subordination.
Lebanon’s fragility allowed Iran and Israel to turn it into a proxy battlefield. This fragility did not begin on October 7, 2023; it goes back to the Cairo Agreement of 1969, which legitimized the Palestine Liberation Organization's violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and opened the gates to the chaos of arms outside state control. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to expel the PLO, a more complex and more deeply embedded Iranian proxy in Lebanon was born.
Since the 1982 invasion, then the 2006 war, and up to the escalation after October 7, belligerence and attempts to erase these entities have proved unrealistic. It is true that Israel can limit Hezbollah's arsenal, eliminate its leaders, and strike its military structures. It cannot, however, reclaim Lebanon or build the state. Indeed, excessive and futile strikes are a kiss of life to the party's narrative.
The paradox is that speaking of the arms as part of the Iranian body is an illogical shift after the functional failure of these entities. Tehran long bet that Hezbollah, the Iraqi militias, the Houthis, and Hamas were its forward lines of defense. But the recent wars proved that those arms are no longer capable of producing deterrence as Tehran had imagined it. Hamas emerged exhausted, Hezbollah received painful blows that reached its most important leaders, and the remaining arms hovered at the margins and limits of the desire to survive.
What remained was the real damage that states continue to endure to this day: these entities replaced the function of deterrence with the aggravation of domestic crises and the obstruction of the state. This explains Hezbollah's ability to stand as a stumbling block all these years in the project of restoring the Lebanese state.
The realist political discourse effectively calls for mortgaging Lebanon, in all its diversity and capacities, to remain captive between Iranian subjugation and Israeli arrogance. Any negotiation that consolidates this state of affairs would have consequences for the region. It is very true that disarming Hezbollah will be extremely arduous. However, the difficulty of the task does not justify surrender, nor becoming preoccupied with the symptoms of an incurable disease on the pretext that there is no cure.
It is not enough to demand that Iran and Israel leave Lebanon alone or respect its sovereignty. More importantly, Lebanon must stop being part of Tehran's sphere of influence in the Iranian agenda, and it must stop being an explosive buffer zone in the Israeli agenda.
With the fragile agreement, war and its tragedies are no longer the most dangerous challenges of the day after; it would be even more dangerous for the world to normalize these political deformities that violate the sovereignty of states and gamble with the destinies of people and countries.
