Lebanon: Dignity and a Defiant People

Since October 2023, Israel has encroached on Arab territories on a scale unseen for decades. It has devastated Gaza, destroying both its people and its infrastructure. It has turned Syria into a backyard where it can do as it pleases. It has ravaged southern Lebanon, displaced its residents, and reoccupied parts of the territory. Gaza has refused to surrender. Syria has remained silent, but it has not been entirely crushed by the enemy’s pressure and inducements. In Lebanon alone, we have witnessed the collapse of long-standing national and pan-Arab principles.

A significant segment of the political, media, and economic elite has taken it upon itself to break the taboos against engaging with Israel and normalizing relations with it. When the leader of a Druze party calls on Israeli Druze to vote for Benjamin Netanyahu, a prominent media figure advocates full normalization, and a businessman enters into an economic and media partnership with Israelis despite Lebanese laws criminalizing contact with Israel or calls for peace with it, we are confronted with a Lebanon fundamentally different from the country it has been over the past century.

Calls for peace with Israel are not new in Lebanon or elsewhere in the Arab world. What is happening in Lebanon, however, is not a demand for peace founded on justice and the restoration of rights. Rather, it resembles what one politician has described as “the peace of the terrified”—a peace imposed by a complete imbalance of power, rooted in fear.

The state has all but vanished, the economy has collapsed, and a humanitarian catastrophe has unfolded. Political and economic groups have exploited this situation, in which Lebanese citizens feel lost and disoriented, to pursue a sweeping transformation of the Lebanese state’s orientation and foundations, while seeking to reshape public consciousness.

Prominent Lebanese broadcaster Marcel Ghanem has emerged as a leading figure in this new trend. He expresses his views in favor of normalization and peace with Israel not merely with boldness, but with hostility toward other components of Lebanese society. His television program, Saar al-Waqt (It Is Time), has become a key platform for those advocating the abandonment of established principles and legal constraints in favor of immediately pursuing comprehensive peace without conditions or reservations.

Ghanem is backed by major business figures, foremost among them Antoun Sehnaoui, who finances television channels and media projects in Lebanon. One platform he funds aired a joint broadcast with an Israeli platform and subsequently signed a partnership agreement with it. Sehnaoui also hosted a dinner for Netanyahu during the Israeli prime minister’s recent visit to Washington.

Yet the issue extends beyond these developments. Politicians who were once associated with the resistance and supportive of Hezbollah have begun to court Israel. Wiam Wahhab, leader of the Druze Arab Unification Party, called on Israel’s Druze community to vote for Netanyahu, arguing that he was best positioned to protect Syria’s Druze. In doing so, Wahhab effectively acknowledges Israel’s claims that it acts as a protector of the minorities of the Arab East.