There are enemies you want to defeat, and enemies you need to survive. Sometimes they are one and the same.
Not because of a secret agreement, or because the hatred is false and the belligerence an act. Both can be perfectly sincere. Yet two adversaries may still become useful to one another, each providing the other with the danger, the validation, and the audience it needs in order to justify its actions. They do not have to meet in a dark room. History can arrange the understanding on their behalf.
With Israel’s election approaching, many Lebanese are watching Benjamin Netanyahu’s political fate with the understandable hope that he will lose. He has presided over the serial destruction of Lebanese towns and villages, the killing and displacement of civilians, and an Israeli occupation that continues to wound Lebanon’s sovereignty. There is every reason to want him gone, as fervently as many Lebanese want Hezbollah’s arms gone.
But I find myself considering a more uncomfortable question. What if Netanyahu is not only one of Hezbollah’s most destructive enemies? What if he is also the enemy Hezbollah can use most effectively?
Netanyahu has inflicted grave military losses on the party. Hezbollah’s leadership, infrastructure, arsenal, and aura of invincibility have all suffered. Its promises of deterrence and victory have been exposed to a reality no speech can disguise. Yet military damage and political usefulness are not opposites. An enemy may destroy your capabilities while restoring your argument. In fact, every Israeli strike repairs something in Hezbollah’s narrative that the strike has destroyed on the ground.
The party is under growing local and international pressure to surrender its weapons to the Lebanese state, although the state is not yet doing what it takes to enforce that demand. But the party has a ready-made pretext for refusing: Israel is still occupying Lebanese territory. Israel is still attacking. Israel is still threatening. How can the “resistance” disarm while the enemy remains at the door?
And it is Netanyahu who keeps making that pretext available.
An armed Hezbollah performs a comparable service. It sustains the image of Israel as a country surrounded by permanent existential danger and therefore in permanent need of the man who has built his identity around managing it.
The current framework between Lebanon and Israel has created an almost perfect loop. Israel says it cannot leave while Hezbollah remains armed; Hezbollah says it cannot relinquish its weapons while Israel remains. Each side presents the other’s refusal as the reason for its own. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers remain on Lebanese land, Hezbollah retains its arsenal, Lebanese civilians remain displaced, and the Lebanese state is expected to prove its authority while both parties deny it the conditions in which authority could be exercised.
However, this is not a stalemate without beneficiaries.
Netanyahu’s occupation, attacks, and maximalist language allow the party to present its weapons not as an illegal power retained against the will and authority of the state, but as the last wall between Lebanon and annihilation. The weaker Hezbollah becomes militarily, the more valuable this argument becomes politically. The party can no longer plausibly promise that it will defeat Israel. It can, however, insist that the threat from Israel proves why the party must continue to exist.
For Netanyahu, an armed Hezbollah performs a comparable service. It sustains the image of Israel as a country surrounded by permanent existential danger and therefore in permanent need of the man who has built his identity around managing it. Hezbollah’s weapons allow him to justify occupation, repeated military operations, and the postponement of any political settlement. They help him transform insecurity from a failure of government into a reason to preserve the government. That is how the enemy becomes an electoral resource.
This does not mean Netanyahu wants Hezbollah strong, or that Hezbollah wants Lebanese villages destroyed so its slogans may survive. It means each benefits politically from the other’s continued menace. Netanyahu has weakened Hezbollah sufficiently to proclaim success over it, but it remains sufficiently present to embody danger. Hezbollah wants Netanyahu to remain sufficiently hostile to keep the rationale for its weapons alive.
Then there is Gadi Eizenkot.
No Lebanese should confuse him with a man of peace. He is a former Israeli chief of staff and the officer most closely associated with the Dahiya doctrine, the use of overwhelming and disproportionate force against areas from which Israel believes it is being attacked. His name does not promise mercy to Lebanon. Yet he presents himself to Israeli voters as a disciplined institutional figure, a man of the state rather than a man who has made the state an extension of his political survival. He speaks of accountability, governmental repair, and a state commission of inquiry into October 7.
Whether he would actually pursue a different policy toward Lebanon remains uncertain. Anyhow, what matters here is not what Eizenkot has promised Lebanon, but what his candidacy makes conceivable: an Israeli government that might use force as an instrument of strategy rather than as a permanent political habitat. Yet if an Israeli government were to replace permanent escalation with a finite strategy, withdraw from Lebanese territory, stop its attacks, and negotiate seriously with the Lebanese state, it might become politically more dangerous to Hezbollah than Netanyahu has ever been.
Not because it would bomb the party more fiercely, but because it would remove the argument behind its weapons.
Imagine Israel withdrawing completely from Lebanon. Imagine the attacks stopping. Imagine international guarantees, a reinforced Lebanese army, and a political agreement that recognizes Lebanese sovereignty rather than treating our south as an Israeli security annex. Hezbollah would still invoke Israel’s nature, intentions, history, and potential future aggression. But the immediate evidence it presents to the Lebanese every day – the occupation, the drone, the strike, the demolished house – would no longer be there to do its political work.
The question would become brutally simple: if the enemy has left, why have the weapons stayed?
That question is more threatening to Hezbollah than another Israeli threat. A threat closes ranks. A political settlement opens arguments. Bombardment allows Hezbollah to demand obedience. Peace would oblige it to explain itself.
The same logic works in the opposite direction. If Hezbollah surrendered its weapons to the Lebanese state, Netanyahu and the Israeli far right would lose their most persuasive northern specter. Israel would then have to justify every incursion, occupation, and attack without pointing to an independent Iranian-backed army across the border. It would have to confront Lebanon as a state rather than as terrain containing a militia. The disappearance of Hezbollah’s military role would not automatically produce Israeli restraint, but it would strip Israel of an alibi it has used repeatedly and effectively.
The Israeli elections will not rescue Lebanon. Lebanese sovereignty should not depend upon which Israeli general or politician is in power, just as it should not depend upon whether Hezbollah decides to respect it.
Perhaps this is why the Middle East’s most uncompromising enemies so often seem to defeat everything except the conditions that keep their enemies alive.
Hamas’s crimes on October 7 gave Netanyahu the catastrophe through which he would seek to authorize the destruction that followed. Israel’s devastation of Gaza, in turn, gives Hamas and movements like it an endless archive of grief from which to recruit, radicalize, and claim vindication. Iran points to Israeli aggression to legitimize its regional militias. Israel points to those militias to legitimize aggression. Each atrocity becomes evidence that the previous atrocity was necessary. Each side finds its prophecy confirmed in the brutality of the other.
And the people trapped between them are told there is no alternative because the enemy has made alternatives impossible.
This is the most successful product of their relationship: the disappearance of political imagination. Anyone proposing negotiation is called naïve or treacherous. Anyone demanding accountability is accused of weakening the front. Anyone asking whether war has achieved its declared purpose is told that the question itself serves the enemy. Extremists do not merely fight moderates on their own side. They use the extremists on the other side to make moderation appear suicidal.
The Israeli elections will not rescue Lebanon. Lebanese sovereignty should not depend upon which Israeli general or politician is in power, just as it should not depend upon whether Hezbollah decides to respect it. But the elections offer us an opportunity to examine a relationship we too often describe only through the vocabulary of hatred.
Hatred is real. So is usefulness. Netanyahu and Hezbollah do not need to conspire; they need only continue making each other necessary. Lebanon has spent too long as the place where two enemies prove each other right. It is time to deprive them both of the proof.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
