One of the defining sensations of my childhood was waiting. Waiting for the shooting to stop, for the electricity to come back, for the road to reopen, for the adults to decide whether it was safe enough to leave the house. As children, we rarely understood who was fighting, or why. We only knew that our lives depended on decisions made somewhere else, by people we had never met and could not influence. So we waited.
I have been thinking about that feeling these past few weeks, while following the negotiations over southern Lebanon. Not because they remind me of the war itself, but because they revive something I thought we had outgrown: the habit of waiting for others to decide when our country may finally belong to us.
Once again, Lebanon finds itself suspended between conditions. Israel insists it cannot withdraw before Hezbollah lays down its arms. Hezbollah insists it cannot lay down its arms before Israel withdraws. The Lebanese state, meanwhile, promises to extend its authority only once both conditions have been met. Each position is presented as logical. Together, they produce paralysis.
Sovereignty is no longer something the Lebanese state possesses by virtue of its existence. It has become something it must continuously prove itself worthy of exercising.
But the real story is not the deadlock itself. Political stalemates are hardly new to Lebanon. What is new is the solution now being contemplated. Unable to restore sovereignty across the country, we are preparing to restore it in installments.
Lebanon may soon recover parts of Lebanon. Not all of it, of course. Sovereignty, like every endangered species, must now be reintroduced cautiously into its natural habitat. A village here. A strip of land there. The Lebanese Army enters. The Israeli Army withdraws. Hezbollah disappears from sight. International observers take notes.
They call these areas “pilot zones.” The phrase sounds almost reassuring. A practical mechanism for testing a new security arrangement. Start small. Measure the results. Expand if successful. It is the language of engineers, consultants and development agencies. The language of risk management.
But words matter. And sometimes they reveal far more than those who utter them intend.
A pilot zone is something one creates to test whether a model works before applying it more broadly. We establish pilot schools, pilot projects, pilot technologies. You test a product in a limited area before deciding whether it deserves a larger launch. But the product being tested in southern Lebanon is not a new delivery service or a banking application – it is Lebanon itself. Ours is a country turned laboratory, in which foreign powers test whether a state can be reconstructed one village at a time.
There is something profoundly unsettling about this shift. Not because pragmatism is undesirable, but because it quietly transforms sovereignty from a right into a test. It is no longer something the Lebanese state possesses by virtue of its existence. It has become something it must continuously prove itself worthy of exercising.
The most troubling part is not that foreign powers are once again shaping Lebanon’s future. They have done so for decades. Nor is it that Israel, Hezbollah, the United States, Iran or others each seek to impose their own conditions. That, too, is hardly unprecedented. What has changed is something more fundamental.
For generations, sovereignty was assumed to be Lebanon’s natural state, however compromised in practice. Foreign occupations came and went. Syrian tutelage lasted nearly three decades. Hezbollah gradually established itself as a state within the state. Yet throughout these years, sovereignty remained the point of departure, even when it was violated.
Today, it has become the destination.
We no longer speak as though Lebanon possesses sovereignty that must be restored. We speak as though Lebanon must first demonstrate that it is capable of having it. Without fully realizing it, we have crossed an invisible line. The conversation is no longer about reclaiming a stolen house. It is about convincing others that we can be trusted with the keys.
Perhaps this is the true meaning of the current negotiations. The pilot zones are not really testing whether Hezbollah will withdraw, whether Israel will leave, or whether the Lebanese Army can deploy effectively. They are testing something much larger: whether the Lebanese state itself is viable.
A pilot zone may be a sensible security arrangement. No country, however, should have to audition for its own sovereignty.
Perhaps what is most remarkable is how little this idea shocks us. Imagine proposing, 20 years ago, that Lebanese sovereignty should first be tested in carefully selected areas before being extended to the rest of the country. The suggestion would have sounded absurd, even offensive. Sovereignty, by definition, was indivisible. One could violate it, occupy it or undermine it, but one could not administer it in portions.
Let’s hear that phrase again: “Pilot zones.” A seemingly harmless administrative expression. And yet hidden inside it is a radical proposition: that the Lebanese state must first succeed on probation before it can reclaim what every state is presumed to possess from the outset. That is how political realities change – not only through wars and negotiations, but also through vocabulary. A new expression enters public discourse, repeated often enough to sound reasonable, until we no longer notice the quiet revolution taking place beneath the words.
As children, we waited because we had no choice. Others held power over our lives. I never imagined that, decades later, my country would still be waiting. Waiting for enemies to withdraw. Waiting for militias to disarm. Waiting for foreign mediators to negotiate. Waiting for regional powers to settle their scores. Waiting for permission to become itself.
Perhaps that is the most painful realization of all. The real pilot project is not unfolding in a few villages in southern Lebanon but in our collective imagination. We have gradually accepted that sovereignty is no longer our starting point but our reward, something to be earned and granted in stages.
A pilot zone may be a sensible security arrangement. No country, however, should have to audition for its own sovereignty.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
