Over the past two days, prominent Shiite figures from southern Lebanon issued two separate appeals, one in the name of Tyre and the other in the name of Nabatieh. In their statements, they called on Lebanon’s three top leaders to assume their national and historical responsibilities and take concrete steps to protect the people of the South, as well as what remains of its cities and villages, from destruction and annihilation.
The appeals urged the authorities to work through available diplomatic channels to bring the war to an end and called for the separation of southern Lebanon from regional conflicts, shielding it from the politics of competing regional axes, and asserting state sovereignty across its entire territory. They also demanded that Tyre and Nabatieh be declared safe, open cities and placed under the authority of the Lebanese Army, while ensuring that archaeological sites, fortresses, and other historical and cultural landmarks in the South are kept outside the scope of military targeting.
The signatories to the two appeals, it appeared, were not seeking to stake out a political position. Rather, they were attempting to convey a cry for help, an expression of pain and alarm intended to accelerate efforts to save southern Lebanon and its people. Their call stemmed from what they described as a sense of moral, humanitarian, and national responsibility, after being confronted by what they saw as the Israeli army’s unchecked incursion into their land.
They pointed to Israeli forces advancing beyond the Litani River toward the north, reaching the vicinity of Beaufort Castle and deploying tanks within a stone’s throw of the city of Nabatieh. They also cited the military’s positioning on the outskirts of Tyre and airstrikes targeting areas surrounding the city’s archaeological sites, warning of a potential disaster for humanity’s cultural heritage, alongside another humanitarian catastrophe, given that large numbers of displaced residents from the region are currently sheltering in Tyre.
In reality, the two appeals added little to what has long been voiced by those concerned about the interests and future of the Shiite community, and by a large segment of that community, which has been expressing these concerns privately, and only occasionally in public. They reflect a prevailing Shiite mood that can no longer bear the cost of the war, its expansion, and its increasingly diffuse objectives without a clear horizon, or rather with only one clear outcome in sight: the return of occupation.
The appeals also signal a growing inclination to place the community’s affairs in the hands of the state, in the hope that it might be able, through diplomatic channels, to protect the cities of Tyre and Nabatieh and spare them the fate that befell Bint Jbeil.
They also seek to prevent the seemingly inevitable collapse that follows devastation and to impose the ceasefire framework that shielded Beirut and its southern suburbs from Israeli attacks, after the resistance proved unable to do so and after it drew the occupation deep into the liberated territories, as developments on the ground now indicate.
The only flaw in the two appeals is that they address the state alone, when they should also be directed at Hezbollah.
Almost immediately, pressure began mounting on the signatories. Platforms aligned with Hezbollah moved quickly to portray the appeals as an attack on the resistance and its fighters while ignoring the crimes committed by Israel. As a result, some signatories withdrew their names before the ink on their signatures had barely dried. They accused the committees behind the appeals of altering the texts and claimed they had been misled into signing under the pretext of protecting archaeological sites, while the real objective was allegedly to call for the disarmament of the resistance.
The two committees, however, insisted that the texts had been circulated and published in a single, unchanged version, with no amendments made at any stage.
There is little point in blaming those who withdrew their signatures. Everyone is aware of the pressures faced by Shiite opponents of Hezbollah’s military adventures. Nor does the number of signatories ultimately matter. Even if, for the sake of argument, they represent only a small minority rather than the broader public, why then the fear, the mobilization, the counter-statements, and the barrage of insults and accusations of treason directed at them?
Shiite dissenters have never competed over numbers. They know, as the poet said, that “the noble are few.” And, according to religious tradition, calling people to prayer requires only a single muezzin.
What the two appeals have demonstrated is that opposition within the Shiite community to what their authors regard as the mistake of the support wars and their catastrophic consequences is no longer isolated or scattered. It now has an organized framework, a clear banner, recognizable names, and a collective identity. Silence and private conversations, meanwhile, have become things of the past.
In another sense, the two appeals resemble the warning delivered by the Umayyad-era poet Al-Farazdaq when he encountered Hussein ibn Ali on his way to Karbala and uttered his famous words about what awaited him in Kufa: “Their hearts are with you, but their swords are against you.” The appeals serve as a warning to Hezbollah, even if not explicitly stated, against continuing the war after Tehran, in the authors’ view, failed to come to its aid over more than three years of conflict, leaving southern Lebanon to face its fate alone. At the same time, Iran did not hesitate to strike Tel Aviv directly when Israeli missiles landed on its own territory.
The two appeals also place Hezbollah before what their authors see as a historic challenge: finding the national courage to withdraw from southern Lebanon, hand the area over to the Lebanese Army, and place its weapons under state authority in order to preserve what remains of the community’s young men, safeguard the Shiite community itself, and protect the South.
According to this view, the realities on the ground are not working in Hezbollah’s favor, and its insistence on continuing the fight amounts to little more than further self-destructive sacrifice of Shiites and their urban centers. The resistance, the authors argue, has so far achieved little beyond drawing the enemy deeper into the heart of southern Lebanon. The imbalance of power between the two sides is both clear and substantial. While folk tales may speak of an eye resisting an awl, the battlefield speaks only the language of iron and fire.
Whether the two appeals came too late or arrived at the right moment is ultimately beside the point. What matters is that, despite the sensitivity of the moment, a group of Shiites chose to speak out publicly and call for an end to what they view as a path of collective self-destruction. In doing so, they took a stand that the authors believe history will remember as an act of courage against the continuation of this bloodshed.
Martyrdom is not a Shiite destiny. “Work for this world as though you will live forever,” said Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first Imam of the community. Moreover, taqiyya has long been a Shiite doctrine, practiced by Shiite communities throughout history as a means of preserving their existence and protecting themselves from extinction.
Perhaps Hezbollah understands that minorities do not typically wage large-scale wars. More often, they gravitate toward truces and alliances. The strategy of “not clinging to geography,” which the authors argue is guiding the conduct of the current war, amounts to a loss of history itself. For geography, as history has repeatedly shown, is what ultimately protects minorities.
Meanwhile, the enemy continues to advance rapidly across southern Lebanon, occupying more territory and intensifying what the authors describe as a campaign of destruction and killing backed by overwhelming technological superiority. Displaced residents, for their part, endure humiliation and hardship, caught between exploitative rents, the indignity of life in tents, and the loss of livelihoods.
For this reason, those concerned for the South issued these two appeals. If the enemy’s stated justification is the presence of Iranian weapons, then the authors argue, Hezbollah should demonstrate genuine courage by handing those weapons over to the state and withdrawing its fighters from southern Lebanon. Declaring the South’s cities open and demilitarized, they contend, is an act of courage, not betrayal. The real betrayal, in their view, would be to leave those cities vulnerable to Israeli destruction, allowing them to be burned, devastated, and ultimately rendered uninhabitable.
Throughout its history, Hezbollah has, in the author’s view, repeatedly built idols out of snow only to lament their melting. When its late leader Hassan Nasrallah described the May 7 takeover of Beirut as a “glorious day,” he retreated from that characterization the following day. After the devastation of the July 2006 war, he famously declared, “Had I known.” Following the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the author argues, Hezbollah officials began distancing themselves from their support for it. The day may yet come, the author writes, when the party recognizes that the fate it has led the Shiite community to amounts to a full-fledged catastrophe, with the hope that such a realization arrives before it is too late.
“We, the undersigned…” The phrase that opened the two appeals is among the most powerful expressions of the courage shown by a group of southern Shiites at this difficult moment. The two statements may also mark both beginnings and endings for many paths: the beginning and the end of the long process of placing the Shiite community under Iranian tutelage; the beginning of the Shiites’ return to their national state, and the end of their estrangement from it.
They may also mark the beginning of the Shiite community’s recovery of its independent cultural identity and the end of its dependency; the end of an era that reduced Shiite political and social presence to the language of arms, turning the community into little more than a force moving its rifle from one battlefield to another as circumstances demanded; and the beginning of a return to its civic sphere, the rebuilding of its social fabric, and the revival of its distinctive sense of place and history.
