The state between Hezbollah’s choices and public expectations

Hezbollah has steadily entrenched a political discourse built on evasion, one that shifts full responsibility onto the Lebanese state. After every Israeli strike targeting one of its members or military facilities, its leaders reappear with a familiar refrain, delivered as though it were a constitutional principle rather than a rhetorical device: Where is the state in protecting Lebanon?

By this logic, the instigator becomes the inquisitor. The party that decides to open a “support front,” and that refuses to place its weapons under state authority, recasts itself as a critic of state failure. It positions the state as the perpetual defendant, accused of weakness and negligence, while sidestepping any reckoning with its own military decisions and their consequences for Lebanon’s fragile domestic landscape. Instead of reassessing the costs of its strategic choices, Hezbollah addresses its constituency from a posture of innocence, assigning the financial, political, and human toll of its wars entirely to state institutions.

The pattern resurfaces in the reconstruction file. Promises were made and expectations deliberately raised. Many still recall Hassan Nasrallah’s pledge that the party would rebuild destroyed homes “as they were, and even more beautiful.” Yet when the war ended and the time came to honor those commitments, the narrative shifted. Responsibility for delay and shortfalls in compensation was placed squarely on the state.

In doing so, Hezbollah redirects the anger of those affected toward public institutions already weakened by structural fragility and a suffocating financial crisis, conditions to which the party’s own strategic alignments have significantly contributed. Lebanon’s entanglement in the so-called “axis of resistance,” the protection of entrenched corruption, the facilitation of smuggling and waste, the nurturing of a parallel economy outside legal frameworks, the flight of investors, and the collapse of tourism and productive sectors have all deepened the state’s paralysis. Yet the party presents itself as external to this reality, as though it were merely an observer of the wreckage rather than a central actor in its making.

The same logic prevails in the issue of prisoners and in the file of Israel’s withdrawal from the five occupied hills. Once again, the state is accused of inaction. Lost in this accusation is a simple fact: it was Hezbollah that unilaterally decided to open a front in support of Gaza, without deference to constitutional authority or state institutions.

The prisoners in question are members of its own ranks, captured as a direct result of their participation in the party’s military apparatus.

If Hezbollah claims today that it has restored its strength and replenished its arsenal, why does it refrain from acting on the maxim so often invoked by Nasrallah: “We are a people who do not abandon our prisoners”? Why does it not undertake the military initiative it once framed as a moral imperative? Instead, the burden is transferred yet again to the state, which neither authorized the confrontation nor commanded the fighters involved. The decision-maker is shielded from political and ethical accountability, while the state is summoned to absorb the consequences.

At the heart of this crisis lies not merely a dispute over blame, but a fundamental question about the nature of the state itself. In constitutional and sovereign terms, the state alone holds the legitimate authority to decide matters of war and peace. When that authority is exercised elsewhere, holding the state accountable for the results becomes, at best, a political confusion and, at worst, a deliberate injustice.

The equation admits no ambiguity. Either weapons are placed under state control, making the decision of war and peace an exclusive prerogative of legitimate institutions, thereby rendering the state fully accountable to its citizens for protection, liberation, reconstruction, and compensation, or that decision remains outside its authority, in the hands of Hezbollah, effectively hollowing out the state’s sovereignty and reducing it to a complaints office where the consequences of others’ choices are deposited.

State responsibility begins the day after weapons are surrendered and decision-making authority is unified under constitutional legitimacy. Only then can the state be fairly judged, praised for safeguarding the nation or held accountable for failing to do so. Until that day, the principle remains straightforward: those who decide on war must bear its consequences. Those who open the gates of confrontation must assume responsibility for the destruction, displacement, human losses, and social tragedies that inevitably follow.