If war hits Lebanon, it will be especially hard for the country to pick up the pieces

A rocket is fired into an apartment building during the Lebanon Civil War. Getty Images

The Maronite Patriarchate hosted a “spiritual summit” last week, to which it invited the religious leaders of Lebanon’s different communities. Notably absent, however, were representatives of the Shiite community, who boycotted the session.

The leading Shiite cleric, Ahmad Qabalan, who is close to Hezbollah, took the Maronite patriarch, Bechara Al Rai, to task because he had called for Lebanon’s neutrality, and has warned against the country’s transformation into a “launching pad for terrorist actions that threaten regional security and stability”. For Mr Qabalan, such statements “served the interests of Zionist terrorism and global criminality”.

The episode reaffirmed the growing rift between a number of Lebanon’s Maronite Christian and Shiite community leaders, which has been widening in recent years. For many Maronites, Hezbollah’s hegemony over Lebanon, its determination to bring in a Maronite president of its own choosing, and its ability to provoke a conflict with Israel without bothering to consult with the Lebanese state or its sectarian counterparts, have all provoked a questioning of their country’s sectarian social contract.

Maronite patriarch Bechara Al Rai. The rift between Lebanon’s Maronite Christian and Shiite communities has been widening in recent years. AP

A not insignificant number of Lebanese Christians consider the post-civil war sectarian social contract dead, and are looking for ways to replace it. Some have favoured a federal system, others administrative decentralisation, and yet others outright partition. All this poses a more fundamental question: if a destructive war breaks out with Israel in the coming weeks, would the contentious sectarian atmosphere allow Lebanon to remain one country afterwards?

Certainly, a major conflict will further weaken the already shaky edifice of the country’s sectarian compact. While Hezbollah is powerful, if it decisively loses the Christians, this will have an impact on its control over national affairs. It is likely that in the event Lebanon emerges from a war in ruins, Christians will look for ways to use this as leverage to push for a more decentralised system, arguing that if Hezbollah wants to fight Israel every few years and as a consequence destroy the country, then it can do so on its own.

If war breaks out with Israel, would the contentious sectarian atmosphere allow Lebanon to remain one country?

It’s difficult to imagine that Lebanon will fully break after a war, however, as there is no formal mechanism for such a thing to happen. But for all intents and purposes, the mood in the Christian community is already hostile enough to the present sectarian imbalance that communal leaders will use a war as an opportunity to better organise support among resentful Christians for a profound overhauling of the political system. With time, the language of separation will become a central fixture in Christian rhetoric on Lebanon.

For there to be a transformation of the political system, all communities need to reach a consensus on an alternative. That is far from easy. The Shiite community, which is controlled by Hezbollah and its allies, does not want to give up on a state that it dominates. As for the Sunni community, the post-war Constitution gave considerable power to the Sunni prime minister, so it, too, is reluctant to surrender this.

However, the country’s delicate sectarian balance would be thrown out of whack if Christians were to remain alienated from the present socio-political system. This may be sustainable for as long as the Sunni community remains without a clear leader and in large part directionless, but if Christian and Sunni dissatisfaction were to grow with Hezbollah’s hold on the state, leading to a unification of efforts, it could isolate the Shiite community.

Already in recent years, there have been several incidents that have shown an increased willingness to contest Hezbollah’s power.

An ambush on Shiite mourners, in Khaldeh, Lebanon, on August 1, 2021. Reuters

In Khaldeh in August 2021, members of a Sunni tribe fired at Hezbollah members during a funeral, killing three of them. While the incident was contained by the Lebanese army, it did show a willingness among a portion of the Sunni community not to be intimidated. Shortly thereafter, Druze villagers forcibly prevented a Hezbollah unit from firing rockets at the occupied Shebaa Farms area, leading to sectarian tensions.

Just over a year later, Hezbollah gunmen and members of the allied Amal movement entered the Christian Tayouneh neighbourhood to try to derail an investigation into the huge explosion at the Beirut port in August 2020. The investigation had strong Christian support, as most of the victims were Christians. Instead of being browbeaten, however, the inhabitants fired at the gunmen, killing at least one of them.

Most recently, clashes occurred in the Christian village of Kahaleh, after a Hezbollah truck carrying weapons accidentally turned over. When the residents of the village came to help the driver, Hezbollah militiamen pointed their guns at them to keep them away. This led to an exchange of gunfire in which one Hezbollah member and one person from the village were killed.

On their own, such episodes do not mean Lebanon is on the verge of a new civil war. However, they do reflect growing anger with the way Hezbollah and its allies are behaving, and the arrogant way in which they have ignored sectarian sensitivities. In this fraught environment, a sectarian divorce is much more palatable than a resort to civil war to resolve the problem of Lebanon’s dysfunctional social contract.

A war with Israel, if it occurs, will almost certainly sharpen Christian bitterness across the board, and a sense that Christians no longer feel at home in Lebanon. This mood was recently reflected in a tweet by Nadim Gemayel, a parliamentarian and the son of Bashir Gemayel, a prominent Maronite leader assassinated in 1982. Mr Gemayel called for a “new Lebanese formula for a new Lebanon that resembles us”. That one phrase encapsulated a widespread yearning in the broader Christian community.