There is an ugly little theatre trick Hezbollah has been playing for years. Act one, they make sure the audience is petrified. Act two, when their stunt collapses, they step forward with a wet hand to the chest and expect applause. The trick relies on two things. First, the party’s monopoly of force inside Lebanon. Second, people’s habit of folding when power demands it. Now the trick has a new punchline. They start a war alone. It goes badly. Really badly. They make Hamas look like a titan in comparison to how quickly it all collapsed under the weight of their own failures and internal betrayals. Then they ask everyone else to pay for it and to mourn them and allow them to stay the sole entity calling the shots. And most importantly, to not face any form of accountability. That is not leadership. That is extortion. And we’ve had enough.

Hezbollah got where it is by turning politics into a racket. They keep weapons and networks that answer one central authority in Tehran, never the Lebanese State. They trade alleged safety for coerced silence. They deliver services in areas where the state can barely show up, but those services come with conditions. Ask a politician or a journalist to push back and you see how the system closes around you. Or how a car bomb t-bones your car when Nasrallah ordered the hit. The message is constant and simple. Shut up, or you will be charred pieces, a message to anyone thinking of anything but kneeling at the feet of the Iranian commanded group.

This is not theory. It is daily life in Lebanon. You hear it in cancelled meetings, in the sudden absence of a candidate, in a neighborhood that once had multitudes of ideas, but now has only empty slogans of obedience. You see it in the informal taxes, the jobs that only go to people who know which side to kneel to, the threats that arrive by silenced guns or by tire slashed at night. The vocabulary is not only violence. It is control. It is power exercised in the smallest interactions so you learn to preempt the risk of public friction. You force someone who dared speak out against injustice, to go on TV and apologize and grovel for forgiveness after the dreaded “sa7soo7”.

When Hezbollah took its model across the border into Syria, it did not bring a different version of itself. It brought the same blueprint. Proximity to the state was used to justify intervention. Loyalty to an axis was used to excuse brutality. What looked like solidarity on paper translated into checkpoints, patrols, and forced displacement on the ground. The same ethic that says, “We defend the people” too often read as, “We decide what happens to people.”

So now consider the recent episode. A decision is made, not by the state, not after debate, not with any clear mandate, but by a single actor who holds enough muscle to make choices for everyone when their handler in Iran wants a better bargaining chip with the West. That actor opens a front. The consequences are immediate and national. Homes are destroyed. Lives are shredded. Borders shift. The economy, already reduced to a husk under Hezbollah’s hegemony, takes another massive blow. Civilians bear the largest cost. Lebanon, already hollowed by corruption and mismanagement, takes another gut punch while it was already down.

And then the rhetoric flips. The sounds you hear change from orders to laments. Suddenly the same people who shut down debate call for national unity. They claim victimhood. They ask to be exalted and refuse any self reflection or criticism by supposed partners. They expect the country to put aside the logic of accountability and reach for a shared blanket called solidarity. They do this while the country is still paying for the chaos they created.

There are several angles to unpack here, and none of them are flattering to the party asking for sympathy. First, there is the ethical problem. If you impose catastrophe on people who never agreed to it, you owe them more than rhetoric. You owe them restitution. You owe them explanation and a political process that makes future unilateral choices impossible. Asking for sympathy without offering reparations is a moral failure.

Second, there is the political problem. Forgiveness without change is permission. If the state and society make a habit of absolving destructive unilateralism, then we fossilize the pattern. That’s what got us in the mess we’re currently in. The next time the calculus tips toward confrontation, the incentives are there. The apparatus that produced this war will be free to try again because the political cost is low and the social price is manageable for them. That is the opposite of deterrence.

Third, there is the practical problem. Who carries the bill? The families who must move. The farmers who cannot get their crops to market. The small business that counted on a summer season and lost it. The country’s public finances, already fragile, will be called upon to rebuild roads, fix electricity, and support displaced people. The social contract is being taxed to pay for decisions not made collectively. That is not solidarity. It is socialization of a private militia’s failure.

Now the group layers on performative grief. You see the speeches. You see the tents. You see appeals to identity and ancient wounds. There is a grammar to this performance. It translates failure into martyrdom, error into sacrifice. The old tactic works on audiences that lack the luxury of distance. When your neighbor is sleeping on a mattress in a hall because their house is gone, compassion is immediate and necessary. But compassion should not be confused with political amnesty.

We have to be precise about what we ask of society. Compassion is an individual choice, private and immediate. Political responsibility is public and durable. If Lebanese society is to rebuild, it must do both things without confusing them. We must care for victims and we must demand changes to the structures that created the victims. We must rebuild neighborhoods and we must dismantle the conditions that allowed a single armed group to impose disaster on millions.

There is a more uncomfortable point here that must be addressed. The party asking for sympathy is not a monolith of pure evil. It remains a social and political actor with clients, with municipal reach, with people who depended on it when the state was absent. That makes the problem harder. People will say, “But we cannot simply cut them off. Doing so risks civil conflict.” True. That is why blunt calls for eradication are naive. But the proper answer is not to accept unilateralism. The proper answer is to rebuild political institutions so that no group can choose war by itself, and so that the social dependencies that make people tolerate coercion are reduced.

Policy must do the things politics cannot. The Lebanese state, and the international actors that care about this country, must knit together a set of guarantees. End the parallel command. Strengthen institutions. Offer economic alternatives where patronage once ruled. Protect free speech. Make political life livable without a Hezbollah car bomb exploding whenever their leader feels inconvenienced. That means the state must be capable of defending its citizens, not least from factions that claim to defend them as well as Israeli aggression.

Meanwhile, the moral grammar of blame has to be clear. Accountability is not vengeance. Accountability is the mechanism by which societies learn what is permissible. Call it justice. Call it responsibility. Call it necessary pain. If you bomb a bridge and the people who used it lose their livelihoods, you should not be on your knees asking to be forgiven while the people who suffered fix the bridge out of their pockets, and you complain that your smuggling routes from Iran are being intercepted.

The trick of asking for fear and for empathy at the same time can only work if we allow it to work. We have let it work for too long. The choice now is whether Lebanon will continue to absorb the private bets of armed actors or whether it will make a different bargain. The bargain we need is simple. You can be part of the political community. You can hold power. You cannot be both a state inside the state and a national savior. If you choose to act like an army without public authorization, you accept the costs along with the consequences, like an army that lost a war would.

Hezbollah wants both fear and grace. That is a convenient posture for them and an unsustainable one for Lebanon. We can keep making their bill our bill. Or we can insist that those who decide for everyone else also carry the price. Sympathy does not have to be withheld from anybody, but forgiveness cannot be cheap. If we want resilience and a future for this country, the path is to care for victims, to insist on accountability, and to make sure that the people who decide wars do not get to decide the terms of the aftermath by fiat.

And here is where many will jump in with the usual “but Israel!” deflection. Fine. Let’s actually look at Hezbollah’s track record there. The last two major wars were triggered by Nasrallah, acting on Iran’s timetable, not Lebanon’s. After 2006 he said, “if I had known, I wouldn’t have done it.” Well, this time he did know. He knew exactly what Israel would do, and he still went ahead. The militia he leads is no longer the disciplined force it once claimed to be. Years of fighting for Bashar al-Assad and participating in atrocities hollowed it out from the inside. That rot showed. They crumbled faster than the bargain-bin drones they bragged would “liberate Palestine.”

So let’s be honest. Hezbollah’s only consistent talent is provoking Israeli brutality, not deterring it, and definitely not protecting Lebanon from it. You can see that in the surrender terms they accepted once it became obvious they had no way out. And no...