I am re-posting this writeup because it is becoming increasingly clear that Hezbollah risks losing its "resistance" pretext should Iran and the US make a deal. The tenor of Hezbollah's leadership commentary on is now extending beyond merely surviving the latest war. Like Trump, Hezbollah never admits defeat because victory for them is to survive total annihilation.
Hezbollah's discourse now has become a frontal attack on the Lebanese State hierarchy, blaming it for colluding with Israel by engaging in negotiations with it, and accusing its critics of treason.
There is no question that there is no return to the status quo ante preceding the latest two years of war. Neither the Lebanese, nor Israel, nor the international community will countenance a resumption of an endless latent war between Hezbollah and Israel. This does not necessarily mean that peace will finally arrive to the tormented small country.
Israel has clearly demonstrated its unwillingness to seize land it has invaded in the south because experience has shown it to be a very costly and unpopular option. But its leadership is standing up to Trump's demands that it ceases bombing Lebanese targets, and says that even under a ceasefire agreement, Israeli soldiers will hold on to territory they have seized and will not withdraw from south Lebanon, as Iran and Hezbollah say they are required by the Memorandum of Understanding Which means that Israel prepares to occupy the Lebanese south - a Security Zone 10 km deep - by "remote control": Minimal presence of soldiers on the ground, coupled with unceasing bombing and destruction to prevent Hezbollah from reconstituting a new front.
Hemmed in by a Sunni-led Syria that is in theory hostile to Shiite Hezbollah on the north and east of Lebanon, by Israel on the south and west, and by the majority of the Lebanese population that has explicitly rejected Hezbollah's warmongering on behalf of Iran, Hezbollah will have to face two options: Either disarm voluntarily and somehow reintegrate the mainstream Lebanese political class as a demilitarized political party; or seek to ensure its survival as a "force" to be reckoned with that combined its military capacity with the political domination of the country.
As both the Sunni Muslims and the Christians of the country continue to hang on to a united but largely failed Greater Lebanon (as of 1920), but threaten to decentralize the state structure to escape Hezbollah's domination, Hezbollah might find itself isolated but still engaged in warfare with Israel that has occupied much of the Shiite heartland in the south.
As Hezbollah claims yet another divine victory and is expressing undying gratitude to Iran for having defended Hezbollah's interests during the negotiations leading to the current agreement between the US and Iran, it seems likely that the Shiite community now high on its supposed victory will demand compensation for the sacrifices it made (thousands of dead operatives, a decimated leadership, and its villages and territories in the south and the east either occupied, destroyed or under constant bombing). It says it made those sacrifices for the "sake of Lebanon and its people" (the new slogan in Hezbollah's propaganda) when in the past its slogans were "leading the way to Jerusalem", it seems that Hezbollah has changed its focus from fighting the Israeli occupation of Palestine to demanding a bigger slice of the Lebanese pie.
This may include rejecting the National Pact that divides the Lebanese communities (18 of them) into the duality of one Christian camp and one Muslim camp, and replace it with the triad of Christian, Sunni and Shiite. From the مناصفة ( a 50-50 division of power between Muslims and Christians) the Shiites will want a مثالثة (a 33-33-33 division of power between Sunnis, Shiites and Christians). I predict even a worse scenario where Hezbollah would actually seize power by force and impose its will on the rest of the Lebanese. A Hezbollah-led Lebanon will give Iran a beachhead on the Mediterranean.
Which is why Trump has suggested to relieve Israel of its failing attempts over decades to subdue Hezbollah, and instead assign that task to the Sunni-led Syrian regime. Just as the Assad regime was assigned the task to subdue Yasser Arafat's PLO in the Lebanon of the 1960s and 1970s.
Whether a civil war ensues, as it did in 1975, remains to be seen.
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[reposted]:
Israel has, as we write these lines, taken the entirety of the Lebanese Southern District. It is razing all the Shiite villages and towns to the ground south of the Litani and Zahrani rivers, such that, given enough time, nature would have re-asserted itself and all the boundaries, markers and hallmarks between villages and houses would have disappeared. Unless of course, Israel organizes a land rush for all the Yahweh-crazy Zionist settlers and invites them to build their kibbutzim and settlements.
During antiquity, the city of Tyre in particular was both a friend and an enemy of the invading Hebrew nomads and their kings David and Solomon circa 800 BC. King Hiram of Tyre did help the Hebrew kings who, as nomadic desert-dwelling people, admitted to him to living in miserable goat-skin tents and being ignorant of masonry. Hiram sent cedar wood, engineers and masons to Jerusalem and built them palaces and the first Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem (modeled on the Melkart Temple of the Tyrian superpower). But when Phoenician Princess Jezebel, daughter of King Ithobaal of Tyre married King Ahab of Israel, she brought with her the worship of the Phoenician deities (Baal, Adonis, Asherah) and displaced the worship of Yahweh. The Hebrew religious conservatives of the time panicked and rebelled against her and killed her. From that point forward, ultra-powerful Tyre became a much maligned neighbor for the Hebrews and the Torah is replete with curses and hateful comments against it. It is even suggested that this breakup of the Hebrew-Phoenician alliance and the threat of the Assyrian empire invasion of the region is what prompted the Phoenicians of Tyre to create their mighty colony in Carthage in today's Tunisia.
Back to May 2026. Israel appears to have no intention of withdrawing any time soon, if at all, which means that the Lebanese Shiites who have fled north and are now sheltering among the other communities (Maronites, Sunnis, Druze...) would need to find a more "permanent" place to settle in the near future. The other communities have been welcoming them on humanitarian grounds, even though there is a deep political resentment at Hezbollah's waging wars despite the objections of these other communities.
Back in the 1980s-1990s, Israel occupied a strip along the border with the help of local residents (both Maronites and Shiites) who had been cut off from the central government by the Palestinians first, then by Hezbollah. In that situation, Shiite villages remained relatively intact and became incubators of a guerilla warfare by Hezbollah which forced the Israelis to withdraw in 2000, turning the whole charade into a victory for the Iranian terrorist militia.
This time, the Israelis seem to have learned from that bitter experience. This time, Israel is completely erasing villages and towns from the map, eliminating any hope for the Shiite villager supporters of Hezbollah to ever return, let alone wage a guerilla war against the new Israeli occupation. Israel is thus managing a minimalist occupation, leaving troops briefly on the ground only for operational purposes and relying mostly on air assaults.
The question on the minds of the Lebanese is: What is Hezbollah going to do now that it has been deprived of its most valuable asset, the Shiite villages bordering Israel?
The welcome mat of the other communities will sooner or later have to be removed. Schools, churches, official buildings... will have to be taken back. Tent camps for the refugees are typically installed on open terrain often belonging to the State or to religious orders. Residents of some neighborhoods are already contesting setting up these camps in the middle of residential neighborhoods, fearing a repeat of the Palestinian exodus of 1948 and 1967 during which refugees set up camps initially temporarily, thinking they'd be returning to their villages and towns that the Zionists ethnically cleansed. The 1975 War in Lebanon was essentially fought to prevent Yasser Arafat's PLO from taking over of the state, and the refugee camps around Beirut that he had turned into fortified and heavily armed holdouts were dislodged at great cost: Sabra, Shatila, Tel Zaatar, Jisr El-Pasha, Dbayyieh and others. No one wants a repeat of those events, and the otherwise jaded Lebanese have been adamant at preventing the creation of such camps.
Where will the Shiites go? They still have a dominating presence in the eastern Bekaa Valley and in the Hermel further north. They could conceivably end up settling there among other pro-Hezbollah Shiites.
There are rumors, mostly from radical right-wing pro-Trump Maronites in the US who vehicle Zionist-inspired ideas and who are stupid enough to think that they can clone the strictly Jewish model of the Zionists in their colony in Palestine and set up a strictly Christian Lebanon that would have to constantly live on a war footing, when they are unproductive, disorganized, disunited, lack the organizational skills of the Zionist universe, and have no "interests" whatsoever to entice the West to help them. Still, the Zionists are prodding these idiotic Maronites to fall into their trap and believe in such an illusion whose tenor seems to fit well with the Zionist bullshit plans of redrawing the maps of the region. According to their hallucinations, the pro-Trump Lebanese Maronites think that the Lebanese Shiites may be somehow "induced" to leave Lebanon altogether, perhaps settle in Shiite-friendly areas of Syria, Iraq and even further afield in Iran.
If these ideas have any currency, it is in the hope by these Zionizing Maronites that a Lebanon emptied or truncated of its Shiites would by default revert to the Maronite-dominated Lebanon that existed between WWI and 1975. Just like an Israel voided of its Palestinians would by default become a purely "Jewish" state. An amputated Greater Lebanon that would shrink back to the majority Maronite, semi-independent, Mount Lebanon Governorate , a.k.a. "Smaller Lebanon", that existed between 1860 and 1914 is something many Christians in Lebanon seem to be longing for after decades of bitter and coerced coexistence with the Muslims.
To begin with, the latter wanted to be part of Syria and never wanted to be part of that Maronite-dominated Lebanon. They spent most of the post-1943 independence decades betraying and undermining the agreed-upon coexistence formula - neutrality, no East-no West - by shoving Lebanon into "Arab nationalist" causes that were given precedence over the agreed upon neutrality: Nasser of Egypt's revolution (the US landed 10,000 US Marines in 1958 in Beirut to protect Lebanon against Nasser), the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP) of Syria that mounted a coup in 1961, the Baath Party of Syria's Assad regime that struck a deal with Kissinger in 1974 to protect Israel's seizure of the Golan and destabilize Lebanon, the Palestinian Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat that waged a war against the Lebanese state (1973), and finally the Iranian terror militia of Hezbollah (beginning in 1982) that continues to this day to dislocate Lebanon into a dysfunctional degraded State.
It is understandable that the Maronite Catholics of Lebanon want to separate from the Muslims, given the failure of integrating the latter into the Greater Lebanon monstrosity created by the Maronite Church in 1919. But separation does not need to be done a-la-Zionism, i.e. with brutality and violence. What the Maronites of Lebanon must do to survive free is to unify their positions, cease their chronic internecine infighting, abandon their feudal-tribal-sectarian socio-political organization, agree on a common objective, speak with international stakeholders with one voice, and politically negotiate their separation with the Muslims. The dysfunctional Greater Lebanon that created a state but failed to create a nation must be abandoned in favor of a decentralized confederation or federation in which the districts (some Christian, some Muslim), would become self-ruling, an idea that is gaining ground.
For now, the bigger question is what will Hezbollah do "politically" now that it is deprived of its territorial asset? It is the only sectarian militia that is openly operational in the country. Neither the Sunni Muslims, nor the Maronite Catholics, nor the Druze exhibit signs of militarization: As far as one can tell, no one has a militia other than Shiite Hezbollah. But everyone fears Hezbollah. So, a civil war between the communities is possible but unlikely.
What is more likely is that Hezbollah might seize power by toppling the Lebanese government of Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam, split the army by calling on the Shiite soldiers of the regular army to quit and join its ranks, something the Sunni Muslims, then allied with the PLO against their own government, did in 1976 when a Sunni Lieutenant by the name of Ahmed Khatib led a sedition, created the Arab Army of Lebanon allied with the PLO and Syria, and proceeded to attack regular army barracks across the country.
The Lebanese army is poorly equipped, even though the Americans have been bragging for the last two decades about gifting it useless scrap and junk leftovers of ancient wars' vintage. So any resistance or opposition by the State and its army to a Hezbollah takeover is unlikely to turn things around. Hezbollah's existence rests upon its anointing itself as a "resistance" movement. By seizing power, it would re-constitute for itself a new resistance front against Israel's new and improved occupation, this time across the new "border" along the Litani and Zahrani rivers, assuming the Israelis stop their advance there.
But without its own Shiite "territory", community and villages, Hezbollah can only launch this new front if it has sole power over the country. Sunni, Maronite or Druze villages and towns would not willingly welcome a Hezbollah resistance from within their districts.
One thing is certain: Israel will not abandon the Lebanese south this time; it may even annex it as it has done with the Syrian Golan. There will have to be a rearrangement of the pawns inside the Lebanese chessboard. For now, the Lebanese wait and see.
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