The State and the Resistance

The Complex Relationship Between the State and Armed Groups

The debate surrounding the role of the state in Lebanon, particularly in relation to armed groups like Hezbollah, is a complex and multifaceted issue. Many critics argue that those who advocate for the state are not truly seeking its establishment but rather aim to maintain a corrupt status quo that prevents the creation of a genuine state. While some individuals on the receiving end of these criticisms may indeed be corrupt and focused on preserving the existing order, others approach the question differently.

For them, the central issue is whether a true state can be built under the shadow of arms and whether an impactful reformist position can be developed. These questions arise not only because Hezbollah is allied with corruption and its state, fiercely fighting to ensure their survival, as seen during the 2019 experience, but also because arms tend to amplify sectarian polarization. This makes cross-sectarian reform efforts oscillate between lofty rhetoric and frustrated calls.

Getting rid of these weapons is a necessary, if insufficient, condition for anyone who still believes in pursuing a reform project that curbs corruption and other obstacles to state-building. This lesson was discovered by many Lebanese in the late 1960s when divisions over Palestinian armed factions prevented the crystallization of ideas around social justice and the development of non-sectarian political forces. Anyone who sees how fragile parties that had arisen to oppose sectarianism can only come to this conclusion.

It seems that reducing the debate to a binary between Hezbollah’s “resistance” and a corrupt state is not always innocent. Even when this position is advocated in opposition to the party, it reveals a certain affinity with a mindset from which that party itself had never been far removed.

In his famous speech in Bint Jbeil in 2006, Hassan Nasrallah declared that his party was prepared to grant the state authority over its weapons once Lebanon established a “strong, just, capable, and courageous state” capable of protecting the country and deterring Israel. He added that when opponents succeeded in building such a state, “we will return to our mosques, schools, and farms and fight under the command of this state.” He reiterated the same idea in numerous interviews and speeches emphasizing that “when there is a state that protects Lebanon, we no longer need the resistance,” or that “the resistance is not an alternative to the state but rather support needed until the state becomes capable.”

However, the mother claiming to raise the little girl so she could grow up and inherit her possessions had in fact been strangling her time and again. On one hand, strong resistance was needed to confront an enemy with whom war was unavoidable, whether its forces were occupying the country or had withdrawn. On the other, the state had to be pure as snow, and it had to be strong and fair before weapons could be surrendered and “we could fight under its command.”

Those who never wanted a state even minimally worthy of the name have always saturated the debate with doublespeak. But those who lived through the first two years of the civil war remember how popular it had been to lampoon the state, with every positive quality attributed to it denied and its flaws blown dramatically out of proportion.

Those behind the lampoons, they themselves would say, wanted the Lebanese to live in a world free of corruption, sectarianism, and division. Instead, we sank deeper and deeper into a civil war that was crowned by two Israeli occupations: a small one in 1978 and a big one in 1982.

Today, after enduring all that we have, we now know that we can influence a bad state a lot more than we can influence “the resistance,” which only major wars can influence. We also know that dismantling the state, be it good or bad, is the necessary condition for maintaining factional arms, while a key driver of infatuation with factional arms, as can be demonstrated empirically, is precisely hatred of the state.

It is very suspicious and unsettling that those who today refuse to accept anything less than an ideal state give their loyalty to the Iranian state in a manner that leaves no room for loyalty to anything else. Others share the refusal to accept anything less than a perfect state that descends upon us immediately, including those who spent decades denouncing the “artificial” “Sykes–Picot state,” or those whose political culture preaches the prophecy of the state - every state - will “wither away” because it is nothing more than a bourgeois tool destined to disappear shortly after the bourgeoisie itself, to say nothing of those who had launched two military coups (in 1949 and 1961) in order to replace the state with a military junta.

Since the late 1980s, with his sharp satire the late Lebanese poet and writer Mohammad Abdullah mocked this convoluted discourse in his small, but eloquently titled book, “My Beloved State,” in which he sets the bar for love of state far lower than that of all its alternatives.

Indeed, the experiences of past decades, both in Lebanon and throughout the Levant, should have consolidated conservative caution in the public debate, teaching us to be skeptical of anti-state rhetoric and actions, even when its proponents are sincere, let alone when they are militias and traffickers.

Experiences show that even the worst state is better than the best resistance movement; what then, are we to say when we have the worst resistance movement?