Three years after October 7, the region faces a question more difficult than deciding who won: what happens when admitting that a strategy failed feels like admitting that people died for nothing? Across devastated communities, political judgment carries the weight of mourning. A decision about the future can feel like a verdict on the dead.

The Hamas-led killings and hostage-taking, Israel’s devastation of Gaza, and the wars that reached Lebanon have left people confronting losses that cannot be reversed. The region’s military landscape has changed dramatically. Whether its political actors can revise the ideas that guided them is a different question. Destruction can discredit a strategy while making its defenders more determined to preserve it.

Naim Qassem expressed that possibility with unusual clarity on September 27. “In the wake of these immense sacrifices, we have no choice but to persevere,” he said. The sentence deserves attention because it makes past suffering a reason to continue. The scale of the losses becomes an argument against reconsidering the choices that preceded them.

That reasoning reverses the relationship between sacrifice and accountability. The greater the cost of a strategy, the stronger the obligation to examine whether it can achieve its stated purpose. When sacrifice itself becomes the justification, leaders can ask their supporters to measure loyalty through endurance while postponing any judgment about results.

Political psychology offers one explanation through escalation of commitment: people sometimes invest further in a failing course of action because withdrawing would force them to confront earlier decisions. In politics, the investment includes reputation, belonging and moral conviction. Changing direction may threaten the story through which people understand themselves and their place in a community.

Research by Rebecca Schaumberg and Scott Wiltermuth found that participants were more likely to persist with failing initiatives when those initiatives were presented as serving others. Protecting a positive moral view of themselves helped explain the effect. These experiments cannot diagnose a wartime population. They identify a possibility worth examining: a commitment can become harder to question precisely because people understand it as morally good.

War raises the stakes of that difficulty. A supporter reconsidering a movement may also be reconsidering the language used at a relative’s funeral, the promises made to children, or years spent defending its decisions. Those connections can make a strategic disagreement feel like personal disloyalty. Political arguments enter lives already burdened by grief.

Research on identity fusion, the feeling that oneself and one’s group are deeply bound together, offers another relevant insight. Studies associate shared painful experiences with stronger group bonds and willingness to sacrifice. Suffering can therefore reinforce the attachments an outside observer expects it to dissolve. Yet solidarity can also support care, reconstruction and demands for justice; its political direction remains open.

That openness matters. Bereaved people do not respond uniformly, and grief does not establish consent. Some demand accountability; others withdraw, remain loyal or fear the available alternatives. Treating an entire constituency as trapped in denial would reproduce the assumption that its leadership speaks for everyone.

The more consequential question concerns those claiming authority over that grief. A family may need recognition, protection and somewhere to live. A leadership may need to defend its record, retain control and avoid admitting that its strategic judgment failed. Those interests can diverge even while both speak the language of dignity and remembrance.

When criticism of a decision is recast as disrespect for the dead, the leadership benefits from that confusion. Its choices acquire the moral protection owed to people who suffered. Accountability becomes socially dangerous because asking whether another course was possible can be presented as an accusation against one’s own community.

Qassem’s October 6 remarks also included readiness to cooperate over the state’s monopoly on arms, while rejecting external dictates. That opening deserves examination. It appeared alongside renewed confidence that sacrifice would ultimately yield victory. The relevant test is whether cooperation permits a strategy to change, including when doing so requires acknowledging the limits of the previous one.

The standard should be prospective. What can a course of action plausibly achieve now? What risks does it impose, and who has consented to carry them? Previous losses belong in the historical record and the demand for accountability. They cannot, by themselves, establish that further losses will produce a better outcome.

This question extends beyond Hezbollah. In Israel, the memory of October 7 must coexist with scrutiny of government decisions before and after the attack. Anniversary reporting describes demands for an independent investigation and anger at Benjamin Netanyahu’s resistance to one. Those demands demonstrate that remembering victims can strengthen the case for accountability rather than close it.

Palestinians, too, must remain able to judge Hamas’s decisions without having their rights or suffering placed on trial. Condemning the killing of civilians and hostage-taking leaves Israel responsible for its own conduct. Responsibility does not transfer between adversaries, and civilian protection cannot depend on agreeing with the politics of those under attack.

The language of sacrifice itself requires care. Many people killed, displaced or impoverished never chose the risks imposed on them. Describing every loss as a contribution to a collective cause can erase that absence of consent. A political organisation has no automatic right to decide what another person’s suffering means.

In Lebanon, however, changing strategy also requires confronting genuine insecurity. Israeli occupation and attacks are material threats. Distrust of the state cannot be reduced to attachment to Hezbollah. Someone may reject the movement’s decisions while doubting that surrendering its weapons would make their family safer. A credible alternative must answer that fear through protection people can experience.

This brings the debate back to the state we have been discussing: an authority capable of governing disagreement, enforcing commitments and securing cooperation from abroad. Its legitimacy must become tangible through safe return, dependable services and reconstruction distributed according to need. Citizens need ways to claim their rights without proving loyalty to a party or disavowing their community’s history.

There is a political obligation here for Hezbollah’s opponents as well. Demanding that people celebrate a movement’s losses as the price of joining the national community makes reconsideration harder. The state should protect their equal standing while requiring every organisation to accept common rules. Accountability must reach those who exercised power without turning collective belonging into a charge.

That means requiring leaders to state attainable objectives, explain the alternatives they rejected and identify what evidence would make them reconsider. It also means allowing families to remember their dead outside an organisation’s preferred narrative. Public mourning should leave room for disagreement about the decisions taken in the name of the mourned.

An anniversary can renew a claim to obedience or reopen a question of responsibility. Three years after October 7, Lebanon needs room for people to mourn, challenge decisions and change their minds without forfeiting dignity or protection. That freedom belongs within any serious account of sovereignty.

The worth of a life does not depend on whether the strategy invoked to explain its loss eventually succeeds. Recognising that would loosen one of the strongest restraints on political change. Those who have already lost so much deserve a future whose terms they can help decide. Their dead should never become someone else’s permanent authority over the living.