Lebanese army tanks withdraw from the border town of Rmeish amid residents’ pleas.
The scene was less military than it was painfully human. Men and women from the town stood in front of the vehicles, not to block a military maneuver, but to delay a moment in which the village felt it was being left to its fate. Faces were tense, suspended between fear and hope, as if clinging to the last remaining idea of the state.
At the heart of this scene stood the town’s priest, Father Najib Al-Amil, not so much addressing the army as speaking to the moment of rupture itself: “We place our trust in God. The land is full of crops. We have soil we can live on, and we will remain in our village. Either we all die, and our village is lost, or we all live, and our village lives on.”
His words were not merely an expression of resilience, but a declaration of a painful paradox: the people’s attachment to their land until their last breath, at a moment when the “state” that is supposed to protect them is withdrawing.
The Lebanese army’s withdrawal from Rmeish was not merely a field move within the context of an open and brutal Israeli war on Lebanon. It was a moment dense with meaning, encapsulating a long trajectory of the erosion of the very idea of the state in Lebanon. In that border village, residents did not feel only that the army had stepped back, but that the state itself, in its role as protector and sovereign authority, was no longer capable of standing where it should. This feeling cannot be explained solely by the imbalance of power with Israel, but by a complex history in which the army’s role has been gradually hollowed out, until it remains present in form and image, but rarely as a decision-maker.
To understand this tragic moment, it is not enough to look at recent years or the current war. One must return to a deeper question: how was the Lebanese army formed, and what role was it intended to play from the outset?
Since the founding of the Lebanese state, the army has never resembled those of the region. It was not, as in Egypt, Syria, or Iraq, the backbone of the political system, nor the instrument through which it ruled. In those countries, the modern state was often built around the military institution through bloody coups, which then transformed into centers of power, monopolizing violence and producing strong authoritarian regimes capable of imposing control by force. That model, despite its repression, was clear: the army is the state, and the state is the army.
Lebanon, by contrast, was built on delicate sectarian balances and political compromises, not on the dominance of a single institution. Within this framework, the army was not meant to govern, but to reflect this balance. It was a “civil” army in the political sense, composed of multiple affiliations mirroring the country’s sectarian distribution, cautious in its use of force, and constrained by a political ceiling that prevented it from engaging in internal conflicts that could tear the country apart. This characteristic made it less repressive than armies in the region, but at the same time, less capable of asserting itself as a supreme authority that monopolizes violence.
This fragile balance did not withstand the civil war. With the outbreak of conflict in 1975, the army began to fragment gradually, not only militarily but politically as well. One of the earliest turning points was the split that led to the formation of what became known as the “Arab Lebanon Army” in 1976, when units led by Ahmad Al-Khatib broke away from central command, a clear indication that the institution could no longer remain above divisions.
At that stage, the army was accused, particularly in West Beirut, of leaning toward the ruling authority, which was seen as aligned with the right-wing Christian camp, in opposition to the “National Movement” allied at the time with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Within this context, Al-Khatib justified his defection by rejecting the use of the army against what he considered “national and Arab forces.” He sought to redefine its role within a broader political project linked to the National Movement led by Kamal Jumblatt, and in direct alignment with Palestinian factions.
The “Arab Lebanon Army” was not merely a name, but a clear ideological positioning at the heart of the war, and proof that the army could no longer remain above divisions, but had itself become a battleground for them. This split marked the first warning of a trajectory that would later take hold: the gradual disintegration of the military institution, culminating in its near-total collapse in the 1980s.
Yet this collapse fully materialized with the uprising of February 6, 1984. On that day, the army did not just lose a battle; it lost its position as a unifying force. In West Beirut, its units rapidly disintegrated along political and sectarian lines. Some withdrew, while others joined the uprising forces. This was not merely a military failure, but a moment that declared the collapse of the institution itself. The army was no longer above divisions; it was governed by them. At the time, the Amal Movement, led by Nabih Berri, played a central role in the uprising and in splitting the army through what was known as the “Sixth Brigade.” The uprising effectively toppled the authority of the state in West Beirut and brought down the May 17 Agreement signed by President Amin Gemayel with Israel. From that moment, a deep conviction took root: the Lebanese army is not immune to fragmentation, nor capable of imposing its authority over a divided society.
However, the South had preceded the capital in testing the collapse of the state. Since the late 1970s, with the retreat of state presence and the disintegration of the army in that region, a wide security vacuum has emerged. Within this vacuum, local armed formations began to appear, some driven by self-defense, others gradually tied to external forces. Among these formations emerged what would later be known as the “South Lebanon Army.”
This formation traces back to officer Saad Haddad, who defected from the army in 1976 and declared the “Free Lebanon Army,” relying on local units and volunteers from border villages. As the conflict intensified, particularly with the presence of armed Palestinian factions in the South, this formation received increasing support from Israel, which sought to establish a buffer zone along its border. With the Israeli invasion of 1978, and more clearly after the 1982 invasion, these forces were reorganized under the name “South Lebanon Army,” transforming into an organized force that managed the “security zone” and operated within the framework of the occupation, becoming one of its harshest tools against the people of the South. After Haddad’s death, leadership passed to Antoine Lahad, also a former officer in the Lebanese army.
What this experience reveals is not merely collaboration with an occupying force, but a deeper reality: when the central army collapses or is constrained, force does not disappear. Instead, it is reproduced in parallel forms, often tied to external powers. Southern Lebanon became, from that point on, a testing ground for this pattern: the collapse of sovereignty does not lead to a vacuum, but to a multiplicity of authorities.
The fragmentation of the Lebanese army did not end with the events of February 6, 1984. It continued in different forms until the late stages of the war, reaching another peak in the late 1980s during the period of Michel Aoun’s leadership. In 1988, with the end of President Amin Gemayel’s term without a successor being elected, Aoun was appointed head of a transitional military government, in a precedent that marked the army’s direct entry into the heart of political conflict. From that moment on, the army was no longer merely a security institution but became a party within the power equation.
As the conflict escalated between Aoun’s government on one side and the government of Selim Hoss, backed by Syria, on the other, the country split into two authorities, a division that was mirrored within the military institution itself. In practice, some military units pledged allegiance to Aoun’s leadership in the eastern regions, while other areas, particularly in West Beirut, fell under the influence of various forces outside the framework of the central army command.
In March 1989, Aoun declared what he called the “War of Liberation” against the Syrian presence in Lebanon, using the army as the instrument of this confrontation. This decision placed the military institution in an extremely dangerous position, as it became a direct party in a complex internal and regional war. Although the rhetoric accompanying that war was grounded in reclaiming sovereignty and liberation, the outcome was further exhaustion, division, and regional dependency.
When the Taif Agreement was approved, Aoun initially refused to recognize it and continued the confrontation until Syrian forces launched a large-scale assault on the Baabda Palace on October 13, 1990, with regional and international backing to end the war. At that decisive moment, Aoun’s military front collapsed rapidly. He sought refuge in the French embassy before going into exile, leaving behind his soldiers, who faced a tragic fate.
This ending was not merely a political defeat, but another milestone in the erosion of the army’s position.
When the civil war ended with the Taif Agreement, the declared goal was to rebuild the state and unify the army. This was achieved formally. Units were reintegrated, and a single army emerged. However, Taif did not resolve the core issue that had originally ignited the war: who holds the monopoly over arms?
The settlement that followed Taif, under Syrian, Iranian, and Saudi sponsorship at the time, led to the disbanding of militias, except Hezbollah’s weapons under the banner of “resistance.” This ushered Lebanon into a new phase: a unified army, but not the sole military force, and one that does not monopolize the decision of war. In this way, the country moved from a divided army in wartime to a unified army operating alongside a parallel military force in peacetime.
Over time, this reality created a power structure within the state that exercises military and political influence without full subordination to its institutions. The slogan “Army, People, and Resistance” was coined in an attempt to legitimize this stark duality. Within this framework, the army was expected to operate under a ceiling defined by the balance of power.
In the period following Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, the country lost a historic moment that could have set it on a different path, one in which the state would return to the South through the deployment of the Lebanese army and the assertion of its monopoly over arms. That moment, however, was not seized. On the contrary, a different reality was consolidated under the Syrian tutelage of the time, where Hezbollah’s weapons were framed as part of the “resistance” equation and treated as a permanent exception rather than a transitional phase. In this context, the debate over deploying the army along the southern border was not treated as a natural step for a state seeking to assert sovereignty, but was often met with rejection or accusations of betrayal, seen as undermining the “role of the resistance.”
Since then, a model of a dual state has gradually taken hold: a formal state with its institutions, alongside a parallel military-security structure with a wide margin of autonomy. This dynamic has not been limited to arms, but has extended into growing political and security influence, reflected in the ability to shape government decisions, influence appointments within security and military institutions, and draw red lines around areas and activities that the state finds difficult to fully address. The issue is no longer confined to the existence of weapons outside state control, but to the emergence of an integrated system of power built around them.
The July 2006 war brought this dilemma into sharp relief. Hezbollah’s operation, which involved the capture of Israeli soldiers along the border, quickly escalated into a large-scale Israeli war, without being the result of a state decision or national consensus. Once again, the war revealed that the decision of war and peace is not made within official institutions, but outside them. Despite the immense human and material cost, the war ended without reshaping this reality. On the contrary, Hezbollah emerged internally strengthened and more firmly attached to the legitimacy of its weapons.
After that, Hezbollah increasingly turned its weapons inward, most notably during the events of May 7, 2008. The imbalance shifted from confrontation with Israel to the Lebanese domestic arena itself. At that moment, Hezbollah used its military force in Beirut and other areas in response to government decisions, in a dangerous precedent that revealed that weapons outside state control, long justified as resistance against Israel, were in fact a tool of internal influence.
At that moment, the Lebanese army faced a deeply sensitive dilemma: intervention risked sliding into a broad internal confrontation, while non-intervention appeared as an inability to protect sovereign decision-making. The army chose a path of containment and avoided confrontation in an attempt to prevent civil strife. Yet the political outcome was clear: a reaffirmation of its limited ability to enforce state decisions when they clash with the existing balance of power.
In this sense, the period between 2000 and 2008 was not merely a passing political phase, but a foundational stage in entrenching the duality of arms and consolidating a model of a state operating under a ceiling defined by a parallel force. It is this model that is now reaching its most critical tests.
The years following the May 7 events remain marked by deep ambiguities regarding the army’s role and Hezbollah’s growing influence, particularly through its cross-border engagements, including fighting in Syria, the smuggling of weapons across borders in plain sight of security agencies, and the consolidation of various security enclaves.
With the economic collapse since 2019, the capabilities of the military institution have significantly deteriorated, leaving it operating in conditions closer to managing collapse than to exercising authority.
Today, with the second open Israeli war, all these contradictions are laid bare at once. The question that has lingered since Taif returns with force: who holds the decision of war and peace? The army, despite its symbolism, is not the one. As the war expands, it finds itself trapped between equally dangerous options: an unequal confrontation, neutrality, withdrawal, or entanglement in a potential internal conflict.
In this context, the scene in Rmeish becomes almost unbearably painful. The withdrawal is not merely a military decision, but an expression of the army’s position within a system that does not grant it full capacity to act. The tragedy deepens with the overwhelming force of Israel, whose destructive power expands unchecked, killing and demolishing without restraint.
What is unfolding today is not simply the weakness of an institution, but the outcome of a long historical trajectory: an army that was never built to enforce sovereignty, that fractured when the state collapsed, that was later rebuilt within a settlement that did not grant it full authority, and that now operates within a reality where the state coexists with arms outside its control. Lebanon, fortunately, was never meant to be a military state, but it has also failed to become a state that monopolizes violence.
