Twenty years ago this week, Hanan died of cancer. She was my uncle Hanna’s wife. I remember something she used to tell me about the illness: she felt it eating her from inside. There was something unbearable about the intimacy of what she described. The danger was inside the body she needed in order to live. She could not put a distance between herself and it. Cancer took her bit by bit.
I thought of Hanan when I read about the recent case in which a huge load of explosives was intercepted at a checkpoint in central Lebanon. The two Hezbollah men transporting them had been detained. Reports about the shipment raised fears of preparations for political assassinations, and political murder was suddenly back in the room. The possibility of a face becoming a photograph. A voice becoming a recording. A person leaving home and never returning.
We have lived through enough assassinations to know how quickly an ordinary morning can acquire a date the country will commemorate forever. We also know the aftermath: the statements, the promises of justice, the years during which everyone gradually learns to live around the unanswered question and the justice that never comes. What frightened me was how little imagination I needed to be afraid.
Disarmament cannot remain an aspiration expressed elegantly every few months. It must become an enforceable policy, with obligations, deadlines, scrutiny, and consequences.
The explosives were intercepted. That matters. Someone stopped the vehicle. A security institution did its work. Yet the relief cannot end at the checkpoint. Citizens are entitled to answers, and to an investigation that follows the evidence. We should not have to settle for knowing that something dangerous was stopped while those responsible retain the means to try again.
“It is eating me from inside.” Hanan was speaking about her body. I am speaking about my country being destroyed cell after cell by its own fatal cancer. Yet there is a huge difference between the two “illnesses.” Cancer has no soldiers, no command structure, no national and regional allies defending its prerogatives; Hezbollah has all of these. Its refusal to surrender its armed power is a conscious decision. Nothing inevitable or biological obliges it to retain an apparatus capable of exposing an entire country to consequences its citizens cannot control.
Hezbollah keeps claiming to protect Lebanon. It is doing the exact opposite. It’s killing it. And its defeat in the last war makes the danger of those arms being turned against Lebanese citizens more urgent. This has always been its modus operandi. For defeat does not automatically make an armed organization less dangerous to the people living within its reach. It may even make the obedience of those people more important to it.
This is the danger I see: Hezbollah seeking to recover at home, through intimidation, the authority its recent military losses have stripped away. Its inability to deliver the victory it promised does not mean it has lost the capacity to punish dissent or to exact revenge. There is a particular cowardice in answering demands for accountability by threatening people who cannot defend themselves against your arsenal. Yet this is what Hezbollah does: Lebanese citizens become the audience before whom a defeated party demonstrates that it can still frighten the whole country.
We remember May 2008. When the government challenged Hezbollah’s private telecommunications network, the party answered by turning its weapons against domestic opponents and taking control of much of West Beirut. An attempt to assert public authority was treated as a declaration of war. The message was delivered through Lebanese streets: Touch our privileges, and we will make you pay. Those weapons did not require an Israeli target to find a use. Lebanese opponents would do, even when those opponents were the government exercising its legitimate authority. The country learned what Hezbollah meant by the right to defend itself: the right to attack those who challenged its power.
And political assassination is not merely a fear inherited from some distant chapter of our history. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon convicted Hezbollah members for their roles in former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s murder. Whatever the intended use of the recently confiscated shipment, a militia like Hezbollah has no right to transport explosives or possess them. We do not need to wait for a target to be identified or an objective to be determined before demanding accountability. The fear it revived already has a memory: We know that a political voice can be silenced by destroying the body carrying it. The names of past assassination victims still haunt us: Samir Kassir, Gebran Tueni, Pierre Gemayel, and many others.
Who decides on war, who moves weapons, who gives orders, and who answers when lives are destroyed? These are ordinary questions in a country whose institutions possess authority over the people carrying guns. In Lebanon, they remain questions we must insist on asking, while Hezbollah reserves the right to judge the intentions of those who ask. That is how the damage moves inward. It enters the conversation before anyone speaks. You consider what a sentence might cost. You wonder whether a disagreement will be interpreted as hostility, whether criticizing an illegal armed militia will become an accusation or a death sentence. Hezbollah benefits from that fear and that confusion. Its weapons acquire communal immunity; opposition to them becomes an offense against the people it claims to represent. But Shiite citizens are not the party’s property. Their safety, their homes, their political choices cannot be pledged in defense of its arsenal. They deserve a state that protects them, too, from decisions made in their name.
Nor does Israel’s aggression give Hezbollah ownership of Lebanon’s defense. Israel must answer for its attacks, its destruction, and the suffering it inflicts. Those responsibilities remain intact. But they cannot become a permanent authorization for an armed organization to decide the fate of the Lebanese people. A country cannot be expected to accept every domestic danger because an external danger exists. We have been asked to inhabit that bargain for too long.
Earlier this year, I allowed myself to expect change. I do not want to apologize for that expectation. Wanting Lebanon to finally emerge from the rule of an armed militia serving Iran’s interests was neither childish nor extravagant. We had reason to demand (and to hope) that the state recover its authority. But hope becomes exhausting when citizens are repeatedly asked to invest in announcements whose implementation remains conditional on the approval of the party being asked to relinquish power.
This is where my anger reaches the Lebanese state. I do not expect an illegal armed organization to voluntarily welcome the loss of the power that allows it to defy public authority. I expect public authority to act. Disarmament cannot remain an aspiration expressed elegantly every few months. It must become an enforceable policy, with obligations, deadlines, scrutiny, and consequences. If Hezbollah can indefinitely determine the conditions under which it will obey, then state institutions have accepted that their authority ends wherever its refusal begins.
We must stop treating the continued existence of an armed militia as a difficulty the Lebanese are somehow obliged to accommodate forever.
I know there are risks. I know the country cannot be governed by a furious sentence, and that asserting state authority requires judgment, planning, and the protection of civilians. But the dangers of action cannot be endlessly enumerated while the dangers of inaction are treated as the weather. Every postponed decision leaves someone exposed. Every exemption preserved for the militia teaches citizens that their security is negotiable. Caution should be judged by whom it protects and what it accomplishes. When it merely prolongs the arrangement that produces the danger, we are entitled to reject it.
We are not asking the state to persuade Hezbollah to spare us. We are asking it to end Hezbollah’s power to decide whether or not it will. That requires more than confiscating a shipment. It requires pursuing criminal responsibility, preventing political protection from obstructing investigations, and bringing weapons and the decisions governing their use under exclusive state authority. These are duties. They cannot become favors the government hopes to obtain from a party. How much more of Lebanon must be consumed before the Lebanese state forces Hezbollah to surrender the power with which it consumes it?
Twenty years later, Hanan’s words have become a way of describing life in my country. And I am angry. Angry at Hezbollah for the power it continues to claim over us. Angry at the institutions that ask us to remain patient with that claim. Angry, too, at how familiar the fear remains, how readily it returns to its place in an ordinary day.
We must stop treating the continued existence of an armed militia as a difficulty the Lebanese are somehow obliged to accommodate forever. Hanan could not hold her cancer accountable. We can, and must, hold Hezbollah accountable. The Lebanese state has a duty toward us.
And it’s about time it honors it.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
