The postwar that never was

There is something quite odd about how the Lebanese commemorate their civil war. In April 1975, a group of Phalangists—a right-wing Christian political group—opened fire on a bus carrying Palestinian civilians. The attack sparked a conflict that would last until 1990.

Unusually, we don't commemorate the end of that war, but 13 April, its beginning. For years, I didn't understand why, until it dawned on me: the war never really ended. We are still, in effect, living under a wartime regime. 

Every April, the people of Lebanon are not simply looking back at traumatic events and declaring "never again". We are reminding ourselves that the war is not entirely behind us. When we do reach periods of renewed "wartime", as Joanne Randa Nucho describes the political temporality that sees a violent past "activated" in the present, it serves as yet another reminder that the in-between periods of "peace" are anything but.  

Instead of "postwar", the years since 1990 can more accurately be described as a period of relative stability, one never too far from collapsing back into conflict and trauma.

War in "postwar" Lebanon

As a member of the so-called "postwar" generation, I have seldom experienced a Lebanon that was not at war, or at least on the brink of one. This reality varies significantly from region to region, but it's hard to find a single year since 1990 that wasn't marked by some form of conflict. 

Throughout the 1990s, in the civil war's immediate aftermath, Israel continued to occupy large parts of southern Lebanon. The Assad regime's occupation, which also started during the civil war, endured until 2005.

Even after the Assad regime was forced to withdraw, it left a legacy of targeted assassinations—from the June 2005 assassination of the journalist Samir Kassir to the February 2021 assassination of the memory worker Lokman Slim—which were carried out by Syria or its ally Hezbollah.  

In 2006, Israel and Hezbollah went to war for 34 days. 2008 saw the outbreak of a "mini civil war", as Hezbollah clashed with other sectarian factions. From 2011, Lebanon experienced the so-called "spillover" from the Syrian civil war, in which Hezbollah backed the Assad regime.  

Most recently, the escalations between Israel and Hezbollah saw the Israelis destroy much more more of Lebanon than they did in 2006, razing entire villages in southern Lebanon and devastating large parts of Beirut's Dahieh suburb.  

Lebanon’s political paralysis

The Israeli and Syrian occupations, and Lebanon's own internal political conflicts, are best understood not as separate episodes but as part of a violent continuum that has shaped the country's "postwar" political system. 

Politics in Lebanon remains defined by a complicated power-sharing system between the country's various sectarian groups. The Taif Agreement, signed in 1989 during the final stages of the Lebanese Civil War, restructured and reinforced the sectarian power-sharing arrangement, under which key political offices are allocated by sect: Christian, Sunni, Shia, Druze, and others. Most of the political parties and actors who shaped that system were relatively new, having risen to power during the war. The resulting political configuration continues to dominate Lebanese politics today. 

In recent years, more independent candidates, not drawn from the powerful sectarian parties, have entered positions of power. But many of the same actors who dominated Lebanese politics during the 1970s and 1980s continue to do so—if not directly, it's their sons, nephews or son-in-laws. The sectarian parties, who have weaponised the identities of Lebanon’s many religious communities, remain the dominant force. 

Leaders of these parties—like the late Hassan Nasrallah, of Hezbollah or Samir Geagea of the Christian party and former militia, the Lebanese Forces—have long understood that threatening the country with civil war is an effective way of keeping independent voices in check. The only parties capable of launching a civil war are the sectarian ones already in power.  

When it becomes politically convenient, however, these parties have also found ways to work together. As Lebanese journalist Justin Salhani told me, the sectarian parties "are united in their understanding that any challenge to the sectarian system is a challenge to their own power."

In the recent Beirut elections, most sectarian parties, including archenemies Hezbollah and the Lebanese Forces, teamed up to oppose independents. Since municipalities, unlike the parliament, do not have sectarian quotas, Hezbollah and its ally Amal backed a list of candidates that was also supported by the Lebanese Forces and the Phalangists. This alliance allowed the sectarian parties to secure 23 out of the 24 seats.  

This is nothing new: in the aftermath of the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the mass uprising against the Syrian presence in Lebanon, which ultimately led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the country's sectarian parties reached a de facto understanding. They coalesced into two major rival blocs—March 8 and March 14—that opposed each other politically while remaining mutually dependent within Lebanon's power-sharing system. 

Lebanon's parties rely on having a sectarian "Other" in opposition. Hezbollah and the Lebanese Forces, for example, have built much of their support base by being each other's main opposition, only to team up when faced with an independent coalition. The "Other" can also be foreign, like Palestinians and Syrians.  

Without this "Other", Lebanese politics would have to address non-identitarian concerns, which is what most people deal with on a daily basis: a collapsed economy, virtually non-existent public services, grotesque wealth inequalities and the never-ending security crisis, to name a few.  

This system can only be sustained by maintaining Lebanon in a state of protracted—or threatened—violence, leaving the population exhausted and fearful of the future. From that perspective, the difference between Israeli war crimes and Lebanese sectarian machinations is one of degree rather than essence. In both cases, the civilian population is left with few options beyond trying to survive. 

The future is unwritten

The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 served as a reminder of how unpredictable the future is.  

In Lebanon specifically, this unpredictability can be difficult to accept, because the past five or so decades of our history, which is most of Lebanon's entire existence as a state, have been marked by so many horrors.  

It is reasonable to assume that these horrors are not over. Israel's brutality has reached new levels across the region, and Syria is still barely recovering from a regime that also occupied Lebanon.  

But unpredictability can be a good thing. We tend to be less willing to register victories than we are to register defeats, but history, both ancient and recent, is full of examples of how people can organise to change their circumstances. The fall of Assad wasn't just the result of that one week of military victories by a group of militias that united in Idlib; it was made possible by years and years of Syrians holding spaces, small and big, for one another.  

The very existence of Lebanon's sectarian system was the result of specific factors that could have turned out differently. In other words, nothing is set in stone. No one understands this better, ironically, than the sectarian elites, which is why they’re usually willing to put their differences aside when a greater enemy—the rest of us—is at the gates.