Lebanon must enforce plan to disarm Hezbollah immediately 

If your country was in ruins and I asked you to take a stranger fleeing war into your home, knowing it might make your building a target for missiles, would you agree?

I guess if you are comfortably sitting in a safe place far away and it is a hypothetical question, you will say yes, maybe talk about being a humanitarian and how life is about taking a stand.

Yet, if it is not hypothetical and you are in Lebanon facing real risk, your instinct will be to refuse. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It is called survival. Today, we are seeing this situation unfold in real time in the country. And because it is mostly the Shiite community which is fleeing, on top of this you would be called racist. 

As the US and Iran agree to a truce that does not seem to include Lebanon, it is time for the Shiite community in Lebanon to ask itself: Why the suffering? Hezbollah joined a war to defend its master Iran, which subsequently slips out but leaves the entire country of Lebanon in the dirt. As US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was listing the destruction of Iranian targets that led to the ceasefire, news feeds were reporting that Israel was bombing Lebanon. Let us see how this unfolds, but it is at a greater scale. The whole of Lebanon has been transformed into a target because of Hezbollah’s actions for its masters in Tehran.

Yet there is no doubt that with a huge number of internal refugees, mostly from the Shiite community, we are witnessing an increase in sectarian tensions in Lebanon. Only a few days ago, an Israeli strike on a building in Ain Saadeh, a largely Christian area near Beirut, killed at least three people. These included Pierre Moawad, a Lebanese Forces official opposed to Hezbollah, and his wife. The building had been largely spared from previous fighting and the exact target of the strike is unclear. The Israeli military acknowledged it hit a “terror target” but said the civilians were not intended targets. This is not the only case, and several others have taken place, putting entire neighborhoods in danger. The reality is that most Lebanese do indeed believe that the targets were members of Hezbollah. Needless to say, on the intelligence level, the Iranian proxy is completely transparent to Israel, which also renders it obsolete and a liability to the country.

There will be no peace, truce or even the hope of a better tomorrow as long as Hezbollah keeps its arsenal

Khaled Abou Zahr

 

These attacks have hence raised sectarian tensions, as some fear displaced people arriving from Hezbollah-linked areas could draw further strikes. Lebanese authorities are investigating several incidents, but this does not reassure areas witnessing high arrivals; there are no actions possible at this level in order to change the situation. Some have also mentioned the need to vet new tenants, and politicians such as Beirut MP Fouad Makhzoumi, a Sunni, are calling for registration of displaced individuals to prevent civilian harm. The reality is that on top of these strikes, there is a level of chaos and overcrowding of Lebanon’s streets that invites clashes or even criminality and nobody has the capacity to manage the situation.

While a new breed of Western geopolitical analysts on Instagram are framing Hezbollah as a fabric of the Lebanese society and anyone stating the opposite as ignorant, the current situation proves Hezbollah is not part of the Lebanese society. This is a temporary page in Lebanese history, and soon the Shiite community will break free from this force-fed ideology. Those who want to make Hezbollah the representative of the Shiite community are doing the greatest disservice not only to this community, but also to the entire country.

The social tools used by Hezbollah to control the Shiite community must be dismantled. The state or even the local community must be the provider of care and health to its inhabitants. This is why it is high time to treat the root reason for these strikes and destruction, and to bring a phase of de-Hezbollahization of Lebanon. Any entity or organization linked to Hezbollah and the old regime in Tehran needs to be dismantled and all their assets confiscated by the state. Any person linked to Hezbollah’s terrorist actions must be brought to justice. Yes, right now this is fantasy talk because of what is happening on the ground, but soon it will be a reality.

We need to understand and accept reality. There will be no peace, truce or even the hope of a better tomorrow as long as Hezbollah keeps its arsenal. It should not only surrender it, but compensation should be paid to the Lebanese people for all this destruction by the Iranian regime, as some have suggested. They cannot claim they did not know what the Israeli reaction would be. Everyone knew it. Their drones and missiles were useless while the Israeli strikes ripped through their organization, and it is Hezbollah who made the entire country pay the price. 

This current status quo has also outlined that the central Lebanese state is a fantasy. Regionalization and localization in Lebanon are set to remain. This is why it is important for a new Lebanon based on federalism to be built, or we will repeat the same mistakes. To be clear, if Sunni MPs today are standing against the free movement of displaced Lebanese, a few decades ago, under the banner of socialism and a free Palestine, they were willing to sacrifice the entire country. We owe it to ourselves to state this truth. They grew their love for Lebanon at the end of the civil war. This is encouraging as it offers the possibility of the same change happening within the Shiite community.  

Yet, we cannot keep dividing a central state unable to service all its sects so that the sect leaders become the true masters. Each community must decide for itself within the framework of a federal political system. This is the hope for the future of Lebanon. Today, the first step is an end to the conflict and to stop seeing Lebanese being targeted every other month, which means that the Lebanese Armed Forces must enforce the government plan of disarming Hezbollah for the safety of the entire population. 

• Khaled Abou Zahr is the founder of SpaceQuest Ventures, a space-focused investment platform. He is CEO of EurabiaMedia and editor of Al-Watan Al-Arabi.