At a moment when a devastating Israeli war is ravaging southern Lebanon, with the Shiite community bearing one of the heaviest human, social, and material tolls, the call for solidarity with it seems like a duty that requires little debate.

Many rightly believe that, given the extreme sensitivity of this moment, Lebanon’s Shiites need national solidarity, as they are bearing the brunt of the war, particularly in Jabal Amel. What is needed today is collective support, mutual aid, and solidarity with the community under attack.

From a humanitarian, national, and moral standpoint, this approach is unquestionably justified. Indeed, it is an immediate and unconditional duty that must not be made subject to any political conditions imposed by any side.

The serious problem, however, lies in attempts by some to make solidarity with Shiites, as a community and as citizens, conditional on embracing Hezbollah as a political, military, and security apparatus. By this logic, any expression of solidarity that excludes Hezbollah and its choices is deemed incomplete, insufficient, and suspect. 

What makes this conflation even more dangerous, one that Hezbollah, its media apparatus, and its allies actively reinforce, is the attempt to subject the country’s other communities and partners to an unjust form of moral blackmail, effectively stripping them of the right to oppose the party and what the author describes as its catastrophic gambles.

The implicit equation being imposed is this: either fully embrace the Shiite community, including Hezbollah’s military apparatus and regional alliances, or be deemed devoid of moral and national principles. This is despite the widespread recognition that embracing Hezbollah on its political and military terms can only come at the expense of the country itself.

This approach helps explain, for example, some of the campaigns of criticism and accusations of treason directed at officials who visit the south to assess the damage and stand with residents. Some of this criticism stems from an implicit assumption that solidarity with citizens must necessarily entail acquiescence to Hezbollah’s political choices, as though this were a mandatory prerequisite for expressing sympathy. This is how President Joseph Aoun’s visit was demonized. At the same time, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam was openly called upon to recognize the “legitimacy of the weapons” as a condition for setting foot in a devastated Lebanese village reduced to rubble.

This intersects with criticism of any position that does not support Hezbollah’s weapons, not based on their effectiveness. Still, through an absolute rejection of any alternative that Hezbollah does not approve of or that does not provide political cover for its arms. In this way, any alternative political choice is erased, and any position that does not embrace Hezbollah’s conduct, or the use of weapons to confront the occupation, is effectively criminalized.

Opposition to Hezbollah’s choices in Lebanon did not emerge in a vacuum. It is the natural outcome of a deep and fundamental crisis of trust, accumulated through bitter experiences since 2005, through the events of 2008, Hezbollah’s full-scale military involvement in the Syrian war, and, most recently, the “support front” wars imposed on the country.

Throughout this trajectory, Hezbollah has acted as a transnational faction, wielding overwhelming power and influence. It has never offered a reckoning or an apology to the victims of its policies across Lebanon, regardless of the futile debate over responsibility. Nor has it offered such a reckoning or apology to the Syrian people, or even to the people of southern Lebanon.

An apology, in this context, is not a luxury. It is a starting point for reconciliation, something Hezbollah has resisted, lest it undermine the image of itself as a “pure” party that it has cultivated among its supporters. Rather than reassessing its choices, it has continued to tie its strategic decision-making entirely to Tehran, sacrificing southern Lebanon and its people in the service of protecting the Iranian regime and its regional interests.

These concerns deepen among some Lebanese when considering Hezbollah’s actions in Syria under the banner of “protecting the shrines” and securing weapons supply routes. Its involvement went beyond military combat to direct participation in the Syrian regime’s policies and campaigns of ethnic cleansing and demographic engineering.

Numerous testimonies and reports document, at the very least, Hezbollah’s silence or complicity with the Syrian regime in the expulsion of local populations and the facilitation of the settlement of foreign fighters brought from Afghanistan and Pakistan, along with their families, in Damascus and its surrounding areas. This took place within a religious narrative resembling that of the “Temple,” aimed at altering the area’s identity, expanding zones of Iranian influence, and connecting them geographically.

Revisiting this is not an attempt to reopen old wounds, but to describe how Hezbollah is perceived within some Lebanese and regional circles and, in doing so, better understand the fraught relationships among different communities, particularly in light of rhetoric targeting certain segments of Lebanese society.

The reality is that the fear seen in some Lebanese areas, reflected, for example, in disputes over housing and rentals, is not necessarily a fear of Shiite citizens as a social community as a whole. Rather, it is rooted in a political and security context involving Hezbollah and the way its presence has translated into indiscriminate Israeli strikes affecting everyone, under the pretext of targeting a security facility or an individual affiliated with the party.

This does not justify Israel’s crimes. But it does reflect a genuine fear among broad segments of Lebanese society that they could themselves become targets under such pretexts, alongside a fear of Hezbollah itself. This anxiety therefore cannot simply be reduced to an isolated issue of racism, even if some reactions have indeed included racist remarks.

Nor can the basic right to safe housing and human dignity, under any circumstances, be turned into an instrument of political discrimination or collective punishment. At the same time, it is unhelpful to deny that fear is a fundamental factor shaping relations among Lebanon’s different communities. Such concerns cannot be dismissed with emotionally charged moral arguments, nor reduced to a left-versus-right divide like that seen in Europe.

In another context, a different moral argument is used as a form of intimidation, invoking “Netanyahu” to insist that the priority today must be national unity against the region’s leading perpetrator of violence. While confronting Israeli crimes is undeniably central, Hezbollah exploits this argument to force everyone into one of two camps: either with Hezbollah or with Israel.

This exclusionary binary eliminates any national space in which one can reject Israeli crimes without being compelled to support Hezbollah and its alliances. More dangerously, indiscriminate accusations of treason may in practice push some groups toward dangerous projects, including calls for partition or even toward Israel itself. Israel has demonstrated an understanding of the region’s historical sensitivities, from Mount Lebanon in the 1980s to Suwayda and, more recently, eastern Syria. It has sought to exploit them to undermine the national fabric.

In this context, some also argue that engaging with Hezbollah is an essential and unavoidable path to preserving “national unity,” because it is the sole legitimate representative of a broad segment of the population. This argument may appear valid on the surface, but not because of Hezbollah’s representative capacity. Rather, the party’s weapons themselves pose a direct threat to internal stability and national unity. This, in turn, imposes another dangerous equation: accepting Hezbollah’s weapons as a condition for safeguarding national unity.

Today’s calls to “extend a hand to Hezbollah” in the name of civil peace amount to little more than a repackaging of earlier approaches, such as Bahia Hariri’s rhetoric in 2005 or Fouad Siniora’s proposals in 2013 and 2014. Once again, these approaches risk reproducing the post-Taif system as implemented by the Assad regime in Lebanon: turning powerful political parties, rather than sectarian communities themselves, into “permanent partners,” granting them an absolute monopoly over the representation of their communities, and crushing any dissenting voices within them.

Against this backdrop, the structural question resurfaces: Can Lebanon embrace its Shiite community independently of Hezbollah and its political and ideological positions?

What is certain is that the Shiite community is an integral and fundamental component of Lebanon and its national fabric. Hezbollah, by contrast, is a political and ideological phenomenon that emerged later, even if it has temporarily dominated Shiite political life through overwhelming power and the illusion of protection, much like other political and even ideological movements that have emerged within other Lebanese communities and ultimately proved transient.

From this perspective, separating Hezbollah from Lebanon’s Shiites becomes an urgent national necessity if what remains of Lebanon is to be saved.

Ultimately, the genuinely national principle that must be upheld is not the embrace of one sect, but the right to citizenship for all, and the vision of a just state to whose authority everyone is subject, without impossible conditions or equivocation. A state that embraces all its people as equal citizens under the rule of law and legitimate institutions, from the far reaches of Akkar and Hermel to the country’s southernmost parts, rather than treating them as hostages to partisan power-sharing.

A state that everyone takes part in building, and whose failures no one invokes to legitimize parallel state structures or alternatives. Even the worst state remains better than the best alternative, particularly in times of disintegration. History has taught us as much.

What is needed is not for the Lebanese to “embrace” the Shiites, but for the Lebanese political system to stop treating them, like all other communities, as the exclusive subjects of a political party or sect.