Amid the turmoil in the Middle East, one could wonder once again: Where is Lebanon heading? Will the Lebanese formula, the oldest political system in the region, continue? Or, will this societal federation, which guarantees territorial unity and upon which the first Lebanese entity was established in 1861, followed by the establishment of "Greater Lebanon" in 1920, collapse?
There is no doubt that the region and Lebanon are today at a major crossroads. The question arises: To what extent has the Lebanese formula, over more than a century and a half, been able to unite its various communities within a single national melting pot? It must be concluded that neither the Lebanese formula nor the other political systems in the Levant that followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 were able to transition from a society of groups to a society of individual citizens within an independent state.
Instead, we witness today how the power of sectarian, denominational, ethnic, tribal, and regional groups has grown stronger, and their conflicts have emerged everywhere. Returning to the "Land of the Cedars," there is no doubt that its balanced formula did not allow for the emergence of factional dictatorships in which one group has absolute dominance over another, within a dynamic of the oppressor and the oppressed.
However, the nature of the Lebanese national project, which aims to escape from the dominance of the surrounding environment towards a different horizon, have made the history of the Lebanese entity from the beginning to the present day governed by the following main contradiction: the constant confrontation between the Lebanese project, which aims to escape from the system of the surrounding environment towards openness, modernity, and the quality of human life, and the regional project, which aims to reintegrate Lebanon into the systems of the surrounding environment, which have always been unilateral and authoritarian.
The Lebanese national aspirations have always remained alive domestically, and the immense sacrifices the country has made over time have enabled the Lebanese project to endure and continue to this day, benefiting from major regional and international transformations which have served its interests each time, in 1861, 1918, 2005, and 2024. Thus, in the face of storms, Lebanon has been able to preserve its entity and unity in the face of various regional projects: the Ottomans, the Syrian unionists, the international Marxist project, the Ba'athist and Nasserist unionists, and finally, the Iranian Islamic project.
There is no doubt that the Iranian regional plan, among all previous regional projects, was the most dangerous and most impactful on Lebanon. Over 43 years of organization, financing, armament, and religious "jihadist" advocacy, this plan was able to build, on the territory of the group to which it belongs—from the borders of Syria to the borders of Palestine—a parallel state within the state of "Greater Lebanon," one even more powerful than it. It was able to infiltrate all aspects of the state of "Greater Lebanon" with the aim of completely dominating it. It was able to spread secretly, organizationally, militarily, and security-wise, across all its regions. For the first time in history, thanks to the temptations of interests and gains, it was able to attract a significant group of supporters of the Lebanese project itself.
While the Iranian project has recently suffered painful blows in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and the region, it remains capable of exerting significant pressure on the Lebanese project. At a time when whispers of "partition plans" in the region are rampant, the following indicators in the Lebanese context must be highlighted:
It is worth recalling that the Lebanese actual entity and the Lebanese formula emerged in 1861, as a result of the Act of Partition, under effective international sponsorship. The true adepts of the Partition today are not the supporters of federalism and confederation, who only advocate for unity, not division. In reality, they are the ones who built factually the Iranian regional project state within "Greater Lebanon."
It is impossible for Lebanon to continue with two states and two armies, both ideologically and existentially contradictory. Hezbollah refusal to hand over its weapons to the Lebanese state and dismantle its military infrastructure poses major risks. It is entirely understandable that the state would not disarm by force, as the country cannot bear up such a clash. Despite the adherence of the vast majority of the people to Lebanon's unity, including advocates of federalism or confederation, there is a great fear that the reality of two contradictory states on Lebanese soil could turn into a territorial rupture, ready to be assimilated by the present unpredictable transformations in the Middle East.