“Foreign Policy” Report Highlights Half of the Lebanese Reject Hezbollah Disarmament due to Government Failure

The study found that the sectarian considerations, the services Hezbollah provides, and fear of the Israeli barbarism are among the main explanations of this rejection, but that moral grievances against the Lebanese government itself is the most important factor behind supporting the Resistance in Lebanon.

“Those who most categorically rejected the notion of disarmament were not Hezbollah’s most devoted partisans but those who were most convinced that the state had failed them.”

Political favoritism, absence of accountability, and pervasive corruption comprise the essence of the Lebanese Government failure, according to the report which underlined the Port explosion probe and the collapse of the banking system as main example for the grievances.

“Another telling example can be found at the opposite end of the country. In the north, near Akkar, where people are predominantly Sunni or Maronite, political loyalty to Hezbollah is negligible (5 percent), yet 41 percent oppose the group’s disarmament. Sectarianism cannot explain this, nor can Hezbollah’s service provision, which is largely absent there. What Akkar does have is a record of state abandonment. The governorate consistently ranks as Lebanon’s most deprived, trailing the rest of the country on poverty, infrastructure, healthcare, and education. For communities that have seen so little from the central government, the demand to trust that same state with a monopoly on force rings hollow.”

“But the nearly half of Lebanese who resist disarmament are not driven by what military or economic pressure could achieve. They watched their government preside over repeated crises and concluded that a state so badly broken cannot be trusted. No military operation or sanctions package will substitute for the one thing that might actually work: a unified vision of a Lebanese state worth disarming for,” FP concluded.