On Monday, Nawaf Salam—currently the president of the International Court of Justice—was selected to be Lebanon’s new prime minister. Like the new president Joseph Aoun, Salam was not Hizballah’s first choice; at the same time, the Iran-backed terrorist group finds him palatable enough to go along with the nomination. David Wurmser observes that reports that Aoun pledged to “disarm” Hizballah have turned out to be false. Rather, Aoun
was careful in his words and suggested it would be subsumed into the state rather than outright eliminated. Such an integration of Hizballah into the Lebanese Armed Forces is one of Israel’s greatest fears, because it could put Israel into a war not with a militia but with a sovereign country on its own border. . . .
Lebanon likely is far from out of the woods, far from adequately executing its obligations under the ceasefire plan, and certainly far from emerging as a calm state at peace with Israel.
In Wurmser’s view, the very “foundations of the Lebanese state” make it vulnerable to exploitation by external forces, whether Iran-backed Hizballah or others. He looks to the country’s origins following the battle of Ayn Dera in 1711—in which an alliance of Christian and Druze clans defeated local Ottoman forces—to understand the current predicament, and concludes:
Any current Lebanese government is likely to view an energetic push to confront what remains of Hizballah as a prescription for civil war and an invasion by the new Syrians and their Turkish overlords. This would be tantamount to willfully inviting the apocalypse. As a result, it is unlikely that the Lebanese government—an artificial institution anchored to a false equilibrium—will risk its existence by trying to rearrange the power structures.
For Israel, an alliance with Lebanon may be the most effective way to secure its northern border. And for the West, Lebanon offers an opportunity to preserve the oldest churches in the cradle of Christianity. But that would involve an upheaval that the Lebanese people now appear unwilling to entertain. After decades of civil war, even a bad equilibrium may appear better than intercommunal strife.
More about: Hizballah, Lebanon, Ottoman Empire