In every round of violence, Israel doesn’t only wage its battle through airstrikes and military force, it also wages it through targeted discourse. Since its withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000, and particularly following the outbreak of the July 2006 War, Israel has been crafting a political-media narrative centered around one message: “The enemy is not Lebanon, but Hezbollah.”

This narrative doesn’t deny the Lebanese state’s responsibility outright; rather, it deconstructs it to reframe the conflict as a confrontation with a “sectarian organization” that the state is unable to control. However, this narrative does not apply to Israel’s confrontation with Iran, where the rhetoric avoids sectarian framing and is instead couched in “rational,” security-oriented language, centered on concepts of power, balance, nuclear threat, and regional stability.

So what’s the difference? Where are the limits of this discourse, not only in how it’s constructed and delivered, but in its political effect? What kind of political reality is it trying to manufacture?

Sectarianism as a Weapon: A Tool to Manage Lebanon’s Fragility

Sectarianism in Israeli discourse is not just a form of speech, it is a strategic tool used by an opportunistic state. After Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, the message repeated over and over again was: “We are not fighting Lebanon; we are fighting Hezbollah.” During the July War, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared in July 2006: “We are not fighting Lebanon… we are fighting terrorism within Lebanon.”

Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman went even further in a speech at the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv on October 10, 2017, stating: “The Lebanese army has lost its independence and has become an integral part of Hezbollah. We are no longer talking about a Lebanese front alone, but about a unified front of Lebanon and Syria.”

These kinds of statements shift the nature of the war from a confrontation with a political entity to a dismantling of the very concept of the state. Hezbollah is framed as an Iranian Shiite arm, and the Lebanese state is reduced to its inability to restrain it, thus justifying Israeli strikes on Lebanon without the burden of international accountability.

What gives this narrative its power isn’t just its content, but the environment in which it circulates: a sectarian coalition-based system built on fragile power balances, making the legitimacy of the state easy to question, both domestically and internationally.

This narrative hasn’t been confined to rhetoric. It has been translated into action on the ground through the targeted bombing of specific areas in the most recent war. Airstrikes were concentrated on the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and southern Lebanon—regions with a Shiite majority—while areas associated with other sects were almost entirely spared.

This sectarian-geographic targeting was no coincidence. It reflects Israel’s deep understanding of Lebanon’s internal sectarian vulnerabilities, and its strategic use of this fragility to portray the war as one against “the Shiites,” rather than a conflict with a political or military organization. In this way, sectarian rhetoric becomes a tool of disintegration not only in words, but also through bombs and destruction.

Iran: A State to Be Deterred, Not Dismantled

By contrast, Iran is not treated according to the same logic. Although the Iranian regime is also criticized in the West for “sectarianism” and “expansionism,” Israeli discourse toward Iran maintains a language rooted in interests, power, and strategic influence, such as its nuclear program. In his speech before the United Nations General Assembly on September 27, 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “Who says we don’t strike Iran? We are striking Iran… and we will continue to strike if it gets closer to nuclear weapons.”

There is no talk here of “Shiites” or “the claws of the Supreme Leader.” Instead, Iran is addressed as a state making strategic decisions, one that Israel faces as a counter-power. Even Iran’s responses, despite its internal divisions, are consistently issued in the name of the state.

The difference lies not only in Iran’s relative “strength,” but in its centralized control over decision-making. It produces its military arms—like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—as extensions of the state, not as independent sectarian organizations. Lebanon, by contrast, is a tangle where resistance, state, sect, and street overlap without a unified center of authority.

The Issue Is Not Only Discourse, But Structure

It is true that Israel produces sectarian narratives when confronting actors that lack the recognition of a confident, legitimate state. But it does so not merely because it is a “sectarian enemy,” but because it is dealing with a political vacuum that allows for such framing. When facing Iran, Israel is forced to recognize it as a confident state, because Iran’s structure does not offer the same vulnerabilities to manipulation.

More dangerously, this sectarian narrative is not just used to justify bombing, it actively contributes to reproducing paralysis in Lebanon: Hezbollah’s inability to offer a state project, the structural weakness of the state itself that cannot disarm Hezbollah, and the people’s inability to change the equation.

A Fatal “Flexibility”?

It’s true that Lebanon’s sect-based system offers a certain “flexibility.” It creates so-called “safe zones” during times of war and allows for external loyalties to serve as sources of funding and support, each sect drawing on its own alliances.

But this same “flexibility,” useful for withstanding external pressure, can in times of intense violence, as seen in the recent war, become a source of internal fragility and even the spark for civil conflict. In those moments, flexibility turns into a trap, paving the way to internecine violence instead of protection.

This structure, based on a balance of rival sects, produces a state so incapable that it cannot function as a unified entity. It cannot respond to mass bankruptcy, curb migration waves, or rescue collapsing institutions. Paralysis is no longer an exception; it becomes the default system of governance.

Iran, on the other hand, possesses wide sectarian and ethnic diversity from Azeris to Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Sunnis and Shiites. And while tensions and unrest exist, this diversity does not translate into a sectarian power-sharing system as in Lebanon. In Iran, sects are not institutionalized: they do not function as fully-formed political or social entities with their own educational, health, and service institutions led by sectarian leaders.

Despite its pluralism, the Iranian state does not allow the formation of a sectarian political system based on intermediaries. Thus, it does not absorb external pressures through internal fragmentation, instead, it builds itself as a defensive wall. There are no “safe zones” during war, but also no sects used as fronts in a larger geopolitical conflict. The result: a higher capacity to mobilize resources—financial, military, and human—and to direct them centrally against any external threat, with a clear decision issued from a unified political structure.

What’s required isn’t just exposing Israeli rhetoric that uses sectarianism as a calculated political tool to exploit social and communal divisions. We must also ask: Why does this rhetoric work? What political and social configuration in Lebanon allows this discourse to pass, and be effective within the Lebanese context? And who is reproducing this structure from within?