In the past two weeks, Lebanon has witnessed internal strife unimaginable since the end of the civil war in 1990. Lebanon’s president accused Hezbollah of betraying the country. By near unanimous decision, Lebanon’s cabinet voted to rule Hezbollah’s militia illegal. Longtime allies have turned against the Shiite Islamist group, which has dragged Lebanon into war twice in three years. Hezbollah supporters have in turn accused the government of treason for seeking to negotiate with Israel.

Popular anger has reached a boiling point, evinced in once unthinkable scenes. Christian residents of the border town of Qlayaa expelled a pro-Hezbollah local member of parliament from the funeral of a priest killed by Israel. Shiite Lebanese fleeing Israel’s bombing have been denied shelter by some communities that are afraid they’ll be targeted by Israel.

In the past two weeks, Lebanon has witnessed internal strife unimaginable since the end of the civil war in 1990. Lebanon’s president accused Hezbollah of betraying the country. By near unanimous decision, Lebanon’s cabinet voted to rule Hezbollah’s militia illegal. Longtime allies have turned against the Shiite Islamist group, which has dragged Lebanon into war twice in three years. Hezbollah supporters have in turn accused the government of treason for seeking to negotiate with Israel.

Popular anger has reached a boiling point, evinced in once unthinkable scenes. Christian residents of the border town of Qlayaa expelled a pro-Hezbollah local member of parliament from the funeral of a priest killed by Israel. Shiite Lebanese fleeing Israel’s bombing have been denied shelter by some communities that are afraid they’ll be targeted by Israel.

All this anger doesn’t augur some resolution to Lebanon’s fragmentation. It’s more likely to trigger open conflict between rivals who see no room for compromise on what they view as mutually exclusive questions of communal survival. No amount of Israeli warfare will be able to eliminate Hezbollah by force. No amount of international pressure will enable the Lebanese army to disarm Hezbollah’s militia. And no amount of Hezbollah attacks can revive the group’s shattered legitimacy or protect Lebanon from Israel, which has invaded six times since 1978.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran threatens to blow Lebanon to pieces. In a worst-case scenario that grows more plausible by the day, the spiraling conflict could provoke a new civil war. At a minimum, the war will almost certainly drive Lebanon’s barely functioning society into another generational cycle of ruin.

This terrible outcome is obviously bad for the nearly 6 million people who live in Lebanon, but it’s also an engine of wider discord. What happens in Lebanon never stays in Lebanon, and the violent pressure that Israel—and to a lesser extent, Iran—are applying to the country is sure to combust with international consequences.

The last time that outside actors put such pressure on Lebanon, in the 1970s, the fight between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization provoked a 15-year civil war and produced a generation of militants that changed the nature of war—including, first and foremost, Hezbollah.

Today, Israel has unleashed a total war against Lebanon, with the stated aim of eliminating Hezbollah and the likely consequence of destroying any slim hope for a functional Lebanese state.

Hezbollah has shown the same level of indifference to the stability and well-being of Lebanon with its kamikaze brand of resistance and its willingness to sacrifice Lebanon in order to defend Iran.

Since the civil war ended, the country has narrowly escaped a full-fledged renewal of internal conflict through a series of increasingly untenable balancing acts and fictions. Today, the last traces of restraint are gone. While it’s Israel causing the destruction, Lebanese are no longer willing to give the resistance a pass—especially since Hezbollah has proven feckless, unable to effectively defend anyone or push back against Israel. Sectarian demagogues are finding fertile ground, and normally conciliatory nationalists such as President Joseph Aoun are publicly accusing Hezbollah of working for Iran.

Aoun blames Hezbollah for sparking the war. “We believe that what happened was an ambush set for Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces,” he said, in comments that he shared on social media  He went on to say that the country was “cornered,” facing “collapse of the Lebanese state from the outside” by Israel, or collapse from within at the hands of Hezbollah.

Lebanon is caught in a trap not of its own making. The government cannot disarm Hezbollah or defend Lebanon against Israel. And none of Lebanon’s backers support an effective Lebanese army.

The only viable solution for Lebanon has remained out of reach since its independence in 1943: a genuinely sovereign strong state that has a monopoly over the use of force. No more armed groups and militias, no more sectarian fiefdoms, but a national government with real power. While most Lebanese would delight in such a project, they’re hostage to the veto of outside powers who want a weak and fragmented Lebanon with no serious government power.

At the end of Lebanon’s civil war, all the country’s militias dissolved—except Hezbollah, which kept its weapons to resist the Israeli occupation of the country’s south. The group had close ties with Iran but presented itself an independent Lebanese organization, focused primarily on protecting Lebanon’s long-suffering Shiite community.

In 2000, under fire from Hezbollah, Israel ended its occupation of Lebanon. But Hezbollah didn’t surrender its weapons then, either, claiming that it was fighting to liberate a sliver of territory still occupied by Israel. But Hezbollah was already revealing itself to be authoritarian, extremist, and more Iranian proxy than Lebanese resistance organization. Hezbollah assassinated dozens of Lebanese politicians, officials, and intellectuals who criticized it. In 2006, a Hezbollah attack on Israel prompted a war that was catastrophic for Lebanon. Hezbollah thwarted an attempt to limit its power by occupying central Beirut for nearly two years. Facing the threat of a new civil war that Hezbollah was likely to win, Lebanon’s other factions backed down.

The group’s appeal was already wearing thin when it intervened in Syria’s civil war in 2011, on behalf of the Assad regime and against a popular revolution. Hezbollah’s legitimacy plummeted even further over the course of the decade that followed as it joined forces with the rest of Lebanon’s corrupt warlords and sectarian faction bosses to beat back widespread demands for reform.

Hezbollah branded itself as different from Lebanon’s other factions: effective in battle, incorruptible, and dedicated to the national interest. Its record showed the opposite—Hezbollah was just as corrupt and incompetent as the other Lebanese bosses. Far from deterring Israel, it has invited repeated Israeli invasions of Lebanon. Far from defending the downtrodden, it has sided with authoritarians across the Middle East to kill Arab citizens demanding democracy.

After Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hezbollah chose to enter the war, firing a steady barrage of rockets into Israel that forced Israelis to evacuate much of the country’s north. Over the following years, Hezbollah fired more than 10,000 projectiles into Israel, although it never delivered on its threat to cause so much damage that Israel would retreat from Lebanon. Israel eventually turned its focus to Lebanon, killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and degraded its fighting capacity. A cease-fire was reached in November 2024, but Israel repeatedly violated the truce and Hezbollah escalated with direct strikes on Israel earlier this month. Since then, more than 800,000 people have been displaced—or 1 in every 7 people across the country.

In many ways, the war is a replay of previous conflicts, with Israel bombing indiscriminately while Hezbollah fires a few rockets a day. What’s new this time is the willingness of the Lebanese state to confront Hezbollah, backed by an angry public—and the rising likelihood of a civil conflict.

Tiny as it is, Lebanon has long served as a harbinger of things to come in the wider Middle East, a sort of war lab on the Mediterranean. Events in Lebanon presaged a brief golden age for the Middle East in the 1950s, modern guerilla warfare and terrorism in the 1970s, and modern-day Israeli and U.S. imperial overreach starting in the 1980s.

Today, to the grief of its endlessly suffering population, Lebanon is playing host to two terrible experiments: Israel’s theory of total war and Hezbollah’s theory of nihilistic power. Israeli officials have threatened to make Lebanon look like Gaza. They’ve also demonstrated the futility of trying to eradicate Hezbollah by force. In its 2024 offensive, Israel succeeded in killing most of Hezbollah’s leadership and maiming thousands of its rank and file. But the group was able to rebuild its missile network even under close surveillance and weekly strikes by Israel.

Like its sponsors in Iran, Hezbollah won’t slink away from the scene. Though the group has lost much of the power and reputation that it had 20 years ago, it remains a formidable guerilla organization with passionate support from its core constituents. If it can’t control Lebanon, Hezbollah can still act as a spoiler, attacking Lebanese officials who negotiate with Israel.

Still, there are reasons to hope that Lebanon can avoid the worst. Iran is less able than it has been at any time since the founding of the Islamic Republic to provide military and economic aid to Hezbollah. Syria, long Hezbollah’s strategic backyard, is now ruled by a nationalist, anti-Iranian, and anti-Hezbollah leadership, which is closely coordinating with Lebanon’s official government to limit Hezbollah’s freedom of maneuver in the borderlands.

Hawks in Lebanon and Washington have always been cavalier about pushing the Lebanese government or army to confront Hezbollah, even when the prospects of success were limited. Hezbollah’s Lebanese rivals should beware of a headlong clash that they cannot win.