In recent months, the name of Lebanese Foreign Minister Youssef Raggi has risen to the forefront of political debate, emerging as one of the most prominent official voices opposing Hezbollah and its weapons.
His confrontational rhetoric, supported by admirers who see in him, at last, a minister who “says what must be said,” has turned him into a media phenomenon with a loyal audience among a segment of Lebanese society, particularly within Christian right-wing circles. In their narrative, Raggi is the “best foreign minister” Lebanon has had in decades, because he confronts the party from within the state rather than from outside it, and speaks the language of “sovereignty” without equivocation or calculation.
Yet the question absent from this praise is not trivial: Do the minister’s statements serve Lebanon, or do they endanger it? Is the role of Lebanese diplomacy today to score internal political points, or to shield the country from wars and external pressures?
From a position of opposition to Hezbollah, its weapons, and its domestic and regional roles, it is necessary to engage critically with Raggi’s discourse. The foreign minister has taken upon himself a mission for which his office did not appoint him. He has transformed a ministry that is supposed to represent all Lebanese into a partisan platform, given that he represents the Lebanese Forces party.
One may not find excess, for example, in what Samir Geagea says about the war. On the contrary, it is a legitimate position and political choice that does not depart from the Lebanese consensus on the right to opinion and action. But for Raggi to carry that choice into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is an act that resembles what so-called “resistance” ministers previously did when they used the ministry to serve Hezbollah.
Yesterday, amid political escalation over the prospect of a US war on Iran and legitimate fears that Hezbollah might once again drag Lebanon into a conflict that could bring further devastation, Minister Raggi rushed to declare that “Lebanon has received warnings indicating that any intervention by Hezbollah could prompt Israel to strike infrastructure.”
Within hours, Israeli officials were quoted in the media denying any intention to target Lebanese infrastructure.
It is reasonable to assume that Israel may be manipulating the situation. It is also reasonable, domestically, to argue that Minister Raggi may have sought to pre-empt any potential Hezbollah adventurism by signaling the risk of Israeli retaliation. But in light of Raggi’s own previous statements, his remarks appeared closer to an appeal for Israeli intervention to restrain Hezbollah — a position openly voiced by many who describe themselves as “sovereigntists” in Lebanon.
Just weeks earlier, in a press interview, Raggi granted political and moral legitimacy to the continuation of Israeli bombardment of Lebanon so long as Hezbollah had not surrendered its weapons.
These are not minor slips. A state that complains of Israeli aggression and publicly declares that its airspace has been violated for years cannot have its foreign minister acting as a party that justifies such attacks on the grounds of opposition to Hezbollah’s project. What the minister says contradicts the government’s own positions, as well as UN and international reports affirming that Israel is the party most frequently violating the ceasefire and UN Security Council resolutions.
More importantly, this position overlooks a fundamental principle: however legitimate or urgent the debate over Hezbollah’s weapons may be, it does not grant an occupying state the right to kill, bomb homes, schools, buildings, and infrastructure under any pretext.
This paradox reveals a deeper flaw in Raggi’s approach to foreign policy. The question of Hezbollah’s arms is not being handled as a strategic file aimed at shielding the state from risks, but rather as a rhetorical confrontation with Hezbollah, even at the expense of the national interest.
In the past, foreign ministers aligned with the so-called “axis of resistance” turned Lebanon into an open arena for others’ wars under the banner of resistance. Today, the same scene is replayed in reverse: Lebanon becomes a small room governed not by the logic of the state, but by the logic of hostility toward Hezbollah.
But Raggi is not alone. What he says is the most official expression of a political mood that has been growing for years, a mood that views any harm inflicted upon Hezbollah’s “environment” as a legitimate, acceptable, or even desirable price. This sentiment was particularly visible during the last war.
In September 2024, Israel carried out one of the most complex and brutal operations in the history of its attacks on Lebanon: the “pagers” operation, in which booby-trapped communication devices were detonated, killing and injuring hundreds of people, including children and women, It is a crime that international organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have described as a war crime.
That operation could have been a moment of collective reckoning, a realization that Israel does not treat Lebanon as a political adversary but as a testing ground for military experimentation. Instead, within broad segments of anti-Hezbollah discourse, the reaction was the opposite: celebration of what was described as a “breach” of the party, and indifference to the bodies, the eyes lost, and the civilians turned into fuel in a game that was never theirs.
Yes, Hezbollah uses civilians as shields, shows little regard for the likelihood of them being targeted, and wields its weapons like a knife pressed against the very community in which it entrenches itself. Making people understand that anti-weapons rhetoric seeks first and foremost to protect them is the soundest path toward containing the culture of arms. This is precisely what our minister has failed to do. On the contrary, he has helped Hezbollah reinforce the belief that disarmament would be followed by the targeting of the Shiite community itself.
Those who genuinely seek to restore sovereignty cannot reduce it to a retaliatory discourse. The state cannot be turned into an instrument for settling internal scores. Sovereignty is built through a political, security, and diplomatic project that places Lebanon’s interests above the party’s interests, above the adversary’s interests, and above the calculations of regional axes.
Moreover, criticism of Hezbollah itself loses meaning when stripped of a state-centered project. A diplomacy that relies on Israel to correct the internal balance of power is merely an extension of political failure.
The real challenge, therefore, is not only dismantling Hezbollah’s weapons and its regional apparatus, vital as that may be, but also dismantling the collective neurosis that has turned opposition to the party into a project of revenge. Between the logic of “Lebanon as an arena,” imposed by the resistance axis, and the logic of “Lebanon as a small room,” now advanced by its new opponents, the country disappears. Society disappears. Citizenship, the rule of law, the Lebanese University, the public school, the public hospital, and the very concept of the common good all disappear.
Those who truly want a state and sovereignty cannot legitimize bombardment simply because they oppose Hezbollah. And those who want a state for all cannot see Netanyahu’s Israel as a partner or an arbiter in an internal dispute. The only viable future for Lebanon is the future of the state, not the future of sectarian “environments.” A state that holds Hezbollah accountable as an organization operating outside legitimacy, while simultaneously refusing to grant Israel an open license to dismantle the country at every juncture.
This is not a centrist position. It is the core of the republican idea we have lost twice: once when militias abolished it, and again when the resistance axis did.
