By: Hanibaal Atheos
Date: 06-May-2026
A very large majority of Lebanon’s complex social composition wants the Iranian terror militia, Hezbollah, gone or dead. Maronites and Sunnis largely are against Hezbollah’s hijacking of the country, as well as a good chunk of the Shiites (who are coerced hostages of Hezbollah).
Very few Lebanese are really complaining about Israel’s savagery, primarily because they told Hezbollah repeatedly over the past 40 years that it – and the Lebanese State – do not have the military capabilities to defeat Israel. But mostly conservative, the Lebanese think with their gonads, not their brains. That doesn’t mean there is love for Israel either. The Lebanese have always put Israel and Hezbollah on an equal footing as most detested ultra-religious, supremacist and violent behemoths. Back when Syria and Israel occupied Lebanon (1975-2005), the Lebanese also considered Israel and Syria as equally harmful to Lebanon.
For now, mostly in silence so as not to be seen as cheering violence, the Lebanese are celebrating the fact that their sworn enemies, Iran and Israel, are at each other’s throats, hoping that neither wins but that both suffer and leave Lebanon alone. When confronted with the scenario of two ugly bullies, for whom they don’t care much, fighting it out, the Lebanese repeat the saying, “خلّي الخرى يطبّش بعضو” – literally (and forgive my French) “let the shit beat the shit”.
Readers must understand that the Lebanese do not enjoy the never-ending foreign-incited violence unfolding, again and again, on their soil for some six decades. Every regional ethnic and religious barbarian around has experimented with warfare on Lebanese soil, essentially for barbaric ideologies spawned during the Stone and Bronze Ages, including notions like God’s Chosen Ones, or God’s Ultimate Message, or the arrival/return of the Messiah (Jewish, Christian) or the Mahdi (Islam) to earth from their galactic sojourns. As a result, the Lebanese have become jaded and watch the raging war like a live movie, a reality TV moment, with popcorn and beer. The “art” of war has become their “life”, and not just an imitation.
As they watch Israel erase the south of their country, with the predictable scenario of an invasion by ultra-religious neanderthal Jewish settlers followed by the subsequent Zionist annexation of that part of their country, the Lebanese present with a symptom akin to a rotating Stockholm syndrome from one kidnapper to the next. As hostages of Hezbollah and Iran, some Lebanese fall in love with the romanticism of a fin-de-siècle resistance bullshit that draws its roots back to the 1960s era of revolution for revolution’s sake, blind to realities and to reason. Similarly, as Israel bombs right and left, eradicates olive groves and kills arable land with phosphorus bombs, some Lebanese cannot help but fall for the misguided belief that the Israelis are liberators. They hope perhaps, that this one of many wars (we don’t keep count any longer) will be the last, and they are willing to see it through despite the barbarity and the loss of land.
Many Arabs have signed treaties and made pseudo- and superficial “normalization” agreements with the genocidal colonial Zionists, all without any genuine peace on the ground. Although they welcome breathers, resentment across all Arab peoples remains very deep with regard to the continued rape of Palestine by an accountable Israel, despite their governments’ cavorting to idiots like Trump who are on Netanyahu’s Zionist leash. That is why no one is seriously banking on the “new Middle East” proclaimed by the Great Don Quixote Trump and his Sancho Panza Netanyahu. They may forcibly redraw borders and impose a new Fascist order from the top down, but a pig with lipstick is still a pig. The Zionists don’t seem to realize that they can’t expect friendship the way they have settled in the neighborhood: The sinusoidal up-and-down cycle of real wars and fake peace continues, while Zionists keep pilfering land and committing mass murder and westerners secure their access to oil.
Granted that Hezbollah and Iran’s Ayatollahs have given the Zionists ample pretexts to wage their wars, and the two Shiite Fascist organizations are to blame. As you can tell, the Lebanese are caught between two devils, and hard as they try to maintain a semblance of normal life amidst the horror, the movie goes on with a vicious circular plot that is exactly like the snake eating its own tail: Israel raped Palestine. Arabs countries tried to restore their “honor” but failed. So, they have finally begun to bend down, kiss the ring and sign. Not really convinced, but what choice do they have when fighting Israel amounts to fighting the American bully father of the bastard child? Then, Iran stepped in in lieu of the Arabs and has been trying to recover that same honor and land, and as we call can see, they are, again, failing because, again, they fight with their gonads not their brains.
If Israel does – and it’s a big if – eliminate Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Lebanese know there is a dear price to pay. You see, Zionists and their American poodles are not known to freely give: They will exact a price. And if Hezbollah wins by simply not losing, it will exact an equally dear price off Lebanon.
To those Lebanese who are still stupid enough to believe that Israel and/or the US are doing them a favor: Beware. For the six decades of Lebanon’s agony, the country has been the cheapest chip on the table, and after each confrontation between the big guys around it, Lebanon inevitably ended up being the bargaining chip. Every US administration since Eisenhower has fucked the Lebanese in order to remain cordial with, its bastard child Israel of course, but also its Saudi, Kuwaiti, Libyan, Egyptian, Syrian … oily and superficially Israel-friendly clients. Lebanon does not have oil, and even if it has oil in the waters across its shoreline, it would be too late and in puny quantities that do not amount to “an interest” others might invest in.
This is what the Lebanese have never really understood. They live in a world of pseudo-liberal fiction, and are still deeply religious, just like their Jewish and Muslim neighbors. It’s just that they are so small and weak that their warmongering always goes awry. De Gaulle once said, “countries don’t have friends, they have interests”. But the Lebanese continue to believe that Saudi Arabia and Iran are, respectively, the friends of Lebanon’s Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and that the US and Europe are the friends of Lebanon’s Christians, even though all of these “friends” have traded them in the bazaar when necessary and/or convenient.
The bottom line of the ongoing war – the umpteenth one in six decades – is that Lebanon is being driven to suicide by everyone else. And suicide, the Lebanese have proven themselves capable of it many times in the past. It’s just that they suck at suicide, which makes living more depressing because they even fail at it. The US is pushing Lebanese President Joseph Aoun to wage a war against Hezbollah with a divided and badly armed army, and then sign literally anything with Israel, just so Trump can have his “peacemaker photo op”).
The Lebanese have been there many times before: With Eisenhower who dispatched 10,000 US Marines to Beirut in 1958; with Nixon and Kissinger who assured Israel’s safety by making a deal with the Syrian dictator in 1974: Abandon the Golan to Israel and take Lebanon instead (which Assad immediately did in 1975; with George Bush Sr. who literally tasked the Stalinist regime in Damascus with putting down a rebellion by the freedom-minded Lebanese against the Kissinger-instigated Syrian occupation; with George Bush Jr. who decided to ask the Syrians to leave Lebanon (because they were not helping him with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein) but re-installed the criminal Lebanese warlords to the helm; and now Trump who, I think will again, sell Lebanon and “pacify” it by giving his new friend in Damascus, Al-Sharaa, and the old Tel Aviv friend, Netanyahu, “shares” in his new investments in Lebanon.
Not once did the Americans or the Europeans really try to shield this tiny country from the bullies. They did it for Bosnia. They did it for East Timor. They did it for Kuwait. But never for interest-free Lebanon.
For now, all the Lebanese can do is watch Israel battle it out with Hezbollah, perhaps maybe “liberate” Lebanon from Hezbollah and Iran, but steal the southern third of the puny country as a payola. Jaded the Lebanese are. They don’t give a damn anymore and urge the Muslims and Jews to finish off their 60-year-old masturbatory exercises and let Lebanon move on, perhaps amputated but at last as a peaceful country.
The big question in my mind is: When will the Lebanese learn De Gaulle’s lesson?
Oftentimes, triggers for civil wars are over non-political disputes between different segments of a tense society. Israel and the US are pushing the Lebanese into a civil war by creating untenable conditions as a result of the ethnic cleansing Israel is perpetrating in the south of the country.
Millions of refugees have swarmed the rest of the country and are settling in schools, government buildings, residential buildings, churches, along large uninhabited avenues, and other public and semi-public spaces. This initially does not cause problems as people try to help as best as they can. But the outlook of this current war is a permanent displacement of refugees: In prior wars, they ultimately returned to their homes and villages, but it is unlikely to be the case this time around. And that “permanence” is driving the hosts who at first welcomed their guests to panic.
The Lebanese have been through this before with the influx of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in 1948 after the Zionist rape of Palestine. The terror the Zionists unleashed on Palestinian villages and towns – just like what they are doing now in the West Bank and in south Lebanon – drove terrorized villagers and town dwellers out of their country across the borders with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. In Lebanon, the Palestinian refugees initially settled in tent camps near the border. But as the months and years went by, they moved to urban areas into improvised but permanent camps wherever there were empty lots of land (usually belonging to religious orders or to the government). These camps literally became small towns crammed between neighborhoods.
When the war erupted in 1975 between the Lebanese and the Palestinians, these camps became fortified military bastions loaded with weapons and from which the Palestinians began terrorizing the local population with sniping, kidnapping, setting up checkpoints and occasionally killing passers-by. The Lebanese people revolted in the face of a paralyzed government, created their own militias and besieged the camps and ultimately overran them and chased the Palestinians out of their neighborhoods.
The present is looking, strangely, like the past. This time the refugees, driven from the south by a very skillful Israeli ethnic cleansing, are mostly Shiite Muslims backers of Hezbollah who have found shelter all over the place. The government is again paralyzed between US pressure and fear of civil unrest. As time goes by, the local residents who initially welcomed their fellow citizens will begin to feel the weight of that permanence. Just like the Palestinian refugees were owned by the heavily armed PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), the Shiite refugees from the south are in the hands of heavily armed Hezbollah. A dispute over anything – a school, a park, a parking space, an apartment in a building… could become the match that lights up the fire.
The Israelis are terrified of putting soldiers on the ground, wary as they are of such a high-casualty scenario. They keep bombing every which way from the air, but this never really solves the problem. And so, both Israel and the US are pushing the Lebanese government into shoving its army (majority Shiite Muslim, mind you) into an impossible confrontation with Shiite Muslim Hezbollah. But the government is resisting, so far at least, because it doesn’t want to, and also because it does not have the military capability to defeat Hezbollah. If such a confrontation were to occur, the army would immediately split along sectarian lines – all it takes is for Hezbollah to order the Shiite soldiers of the Lebanese army to jump ship and join its ranks, with their weapons!
This is exactly what happened in 1975 when the Lebanese Sunni Muslims were the seditious allies of the Palestinians against their own Lebanese government. Lieutenant Ahmad Al-Khatib, a Sunni Muslim of the Lebanese army and operating on behalf of Syria, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab countries allied with the PLO, deserted and created his own Arab Army of Lebanon. He called on Sunni soldiers to desert the regular army and join him, which they did and proceeded to attack regular army barracks across the country.
In addition, local residents abutting the Palestinian camps saw their lives upended by these camps now operating as military bases. It took one heavily armed Palestinian bus driving through a Christian neighborhood of Beirut, two hours after an assassination attempt against a Christian leader inaugurating a church in that neighborhood, and the war erupted in April 1975. I refuse to call that 1975 war a “civil” war because it was primarily between the Lebanese and the Palestinians, the latter supported financially and militarily by every other Sunni Arab country (Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt, etc.) and also by an implicit western and American indifference that did not want to upset these oil-embargophile Arab states.
We are at a very similar inflexion point with the difference that the Sunnis in Lebanon and across the Middle East are US allies now, and they oppose Iran and its Shiite militia Hezbollah. All that is needed is a match, and that match could be a dispute over a school, a parking spot, a right of way, etc. (See for example: https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/03/1167231.) Will the Lebanese learn from 1975? No one knows. I suspect not.
