This persistent astonishment at the brutality of an enemy whose capacity for violence we have known well for decades is striking. An enemy that does not hesitate to target all forms of life, and will show no mercy. Crime after crime is committed, layered upon one another, as if to construct an impregnable fortress of evil. An enemy that has signed its crimes in the blood of countless innocents, intensifying its bombardment of hospitals, schools, and densely populated civilian areas. Gaza is a clear lesson. So too are the accumulated crimes across decades, whose memory time has not erased.
An enemy armed with every form of advanced technology, and whose essence lies in bloodshed. Will it restrain itself or hesitate to target crowded residential areas filled with countless civilians who have no connection to any fighting? Will it refrain from compounding one crime with another to prove, time and again, what evil looks like when embodied in individuals or institutions? Of course not. But is merely flattening our description of this brutality enough? What does that achieve? Does repeating the same words bring us any closer to possible solutions?
We all know this violence by heart. And because we know it so well, understand its arrogance, its greed, its appetite, its destructive capacity, and the extent of its penetrations, we must approach it differently. We must rethink the mechanisms that could allow us to undermine it, to attempt to strip it of the advantages it holds over us.
How can that be done? This is the most urgent question today. The question of politics, of possibility, of legitimacy. A question centered on discovering and opening whatever limited gaps remain, perhaps enough to shield us from death and destruction. Realism, in its most basic sense, requires acknowledging the catastrophe unfolding before us, far from any romanticization of rockets whose sound exceeds their actual destructive power. Such narratives are merely attempts to beautify an illusory “victory” here or there.
But the problem does not stop there. If this discourse is rejected and labeled as defeatist, so be it. The language of defeat belongs to the defeated. We are defeated, if not in fact, then in potential. If not today, then tomorrow. Refusing to acknowledge defeat is nothing more than an attempt to entrench it, to retreat into it knowingly and deliberately.
We are defeated internally before we are defeated externally: when we fight on behalf of others, and when we become ideologically tied to those who sit beyond the borders, pursuing their interests at the expense of ours.
We are also defeated when we accept the unseen as a tool of thinking, and when we fail in the project of building a state that protects its people. And, always, when we do not work to dismantle the barricades erected between people.
We are defeated when we submit to a collective national lie, when we fight for every cause in the world except our own, instead of confronting the truth of division and decay. Defeated when we chose, quite simply, to replace experienced experts with a chorus of applauders, when we accepted the destruction of society from within before any external force came to exploit its ruins.
Today, all questions must be raised again, in every form. Answers echo nothing but the continued spectacle of killing and destruction. Easy answers are nothing more than denial, especially those we retrieve from the cold storage of stale positions and treat as if time had frozen at the moment they were preserved. This is nothing but stagnation, nothing but an attempt to count the falling rockets while promising to color the flowing blood.
If there must be an admission, then let it be this: we are defeated. Let us accept reality as it is, through the eyes of fracture and despair, and recognize that what we dream of and aspire to is not even possible to articulate. Let us accept what contradicts our convictions, perhaps to save some lives. Let us be defeated, honestly, today, rather than inscribe false victories in the blood of innocent civilians.
How can this be done? There are many possibilities that do not necessarily mean outright surrender, nor standing bare-chested before a killing machine. To concede, for now, to a Lebanese state that is neither the state we aspire to nor the institution we wish it to be. To yield, slightly, to a reality that besieges all ideologies, not out of belief in it, but as an attempt to open a crack in the wall of dealing with it.
The state has never been the institution we hoped for in terms of social order, especially as it has long been nothing more than the remnants of a system we rejected, one that serves those who hold power, internally and externally. Yet this state, with all its failures, is today the lesser evil. The crippled state, the silent state, the submissive state, the state of ruins, or rather the ruins in the shape of a state we do not want, is what we must want today. For no reason other than that it remains the only link between us and any possibility.
We may be defeated within the state, and this cannot be ignored or denied, especially as there are no guarantees. But defeat within the state, with the least possible bloodshed, is far better today than the absence of a state, whose void is filled with blood spilled on sidewalks or dried beneath the rubble of buildings. This tactical fracture is all we have. A temporary, localized breaking before what we do not desire is far better than breaking before what others desire for us.
Can this be achieved with a little courage? Can we bite down on the wound to avoid a fatal blow? Do we have the luxury of debating definitions of states when we are unable to secure shelter for the forcibly displaced in alleys and schools? Do we really have the option to choose between different models of the state, to favor one over another, when the state, with all its flaws, remains the only possible means to provide even the bare minimum of what we need?
All of this is a luxury in the face of the smell of blood and the piling up of bodies. What is needed today is to stop the killing and the destruction. The priority today is for people to remain on their land. The priority today is to sacrifice all grand concepts and overarching narratives for the sake of survival and continuity. Perhaps this may grant us some capacity to grasp whatever may come next, if there is to be a next at all.
