Lebanon’s Best Defense: A Non Sectarian State

An interview conducted by journalist Lorenzo Trombetta with Hadi Hosni, a member of Citizens in a State movement, published in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto:

Lebanon’s defense against Israel today depends first and foremost on building a state capable of mobilizing internal resources and confronting any external threat. This is the argument of Hadi Hosni, 35, a leader in “Citizens in a State” (Muwatinun wa Muwatinat fi Dawle, Mmfd), a Lebanese party founded ten years ago by economist and social anthropologist Charbel Nahhas, former Minister of Labor. Mmfd claims a composition that cuts across communal affiliations and seeks to prepare the construction of a civil state as the only alternative to the current communal system, which is increasingly in crisis yet incapable of escaping the deadlock worsened by Israel’s new devastating war.
“In the immediate term, what is needed is a real, stable, and prolonged truce with Israel.” In Hosni’s reading, this truce must serve to move from a resistance delegated to Hezbollah toward a national defense based on the productive, fiscal, and military capacity of the state. “States can negotiate with other states only when they have something to offer,” he says. “When they produce something. Not when they only consume and become a sort of appendage of other states.”
TO ACHIEVE this objective, however, Lebanon’s political architecture must be revolutionized. “The system is not a group of individuals holding power with a stick in hand and repressing the rest of society. The system,” he says, “exists in all the relationships within society, between individuals and groups, at every level. The system is the logic that dominates all of society.” Instead of living in a country founded on the shared belonging of citizens to a state project, Lebanon has, for at least thirty years, floated in what Hosni calls a “truce between communities,” within a structure that “like stalks of wheat, bends according to external forces.”
Many observers call this ability “resilience.” For Hosni, however, it is organized dependence on external actors, lacking any internal productive autonomy. “This flexibility has no internal driving force. It exists to absorb crises. Yet when storms like the ones we are experiencing strike, the wheat risks breaking.” Lebanon, he continues, is the only country with a system that simultaneously attracts funds from both the United States and Iran.
“One side leans on Washington and the other on Tehran, yet both sides sit together in the same government. Meanwhile the state renounces governing society while the sectarian bosses, each within their own communal pillar, limit themselves to distributing money, strengthened by foreign aid and foreign protection.”
This state of affairs is now in crisis. Since the financial default that emerged in 2019, followed by the October protest movement and then the pandemic, up to the regional war opened on October 7, 2023 and still ongoing, the Lebanese system has undergone unprecedented shocks. Most significant is the exodus of young people: according to figures from Lebanese General Security cited by Hosni, 800,000 Lebanese have left the country since 2022.
“EMIGRATION sweeps everything away, including the popular base of these leaders,” he says. The sectarian political leaders understand the depth of the crisis: “We speak with them constantly. They are anguished, terrified. They know the system is blocked, but they cannot change it. They fear being crushed, even physically, if they try to oppose its internal logic.”
From this comes the current paralysis: the sectarian boss buys time, fuels anxiety and fear, and shifts blame onto the other community. The specter of internal conflict, the historical reality of Lebanon between 1975 and 1990, remains one of the last tools still available to sectarian political leaders. “We find ourselves in a zero sum deadlock.” The two camps, the sovereigntist camp backed by the United States and the resistance camp backed by Iran, remain facing each other “like in a permanent tug of war,” while “people slide deeper into despair.”
It is within this crisis that Israel is doing everything it can to push Lebanon toward internal collapse. According to Hosni, Israel’s advance is not measured so much in kilometers occupied or houses destroyed, but in the political impact its strategy is having among the Lebanese themselves. In 2006, he says, Israel struck infrastructure across all of Lebanon. Today it operates differently: it seeks to amplify the idea that there are safe zones and exposed zones, protected communities and sacrificial communities, Christian villages such as Rmeish to be presented as salvageable, while other territories are left to destruction.
“They are working on internal division,” Hosni says, “and so far they are succeeding.” The objective is to push every group to seek protection outside the state, inside vertical, separate, communal affiliations, each hanging onto its own leader, its own sponsor, its own fear, until the specter of civil war is reopened.
At this point, the question becomes inevitable: what is the alternative? “First of all, this war must stop. What is needed with Israel is a prolonged truce.” Then, he says, “three paths must be launched simultaneously: a census, which Lebanon has lacked for almost one hundred years; mandatory military and civil service for male and female citizens; and the mobilization of resources through a fair and well organized tax system, something entirely absent in Lebanon.”
THE CENSUS would serve to break the automatic link between the individual and the community. “Today, you are born and in your family registry they place a label on you: it is as if they take your blood test and your blood turns out to be Shiite, Druze, Maronite, or Sunni.” Instead, individuals should be registered according to their place of residence, not according to communal affiliation. But how can a census be organized quickly in a country portrayed as lacking resources? “If organized properly, a 24 to 48 hour curfew would be enough, with the army going house to house and registering individuals.”
The resources, he says, do exist: in 2025 Lebanon imported goods worth 21 billion dollars and exported only around 3 billion. The deficit was compensated mostly through remittances and diaspora spending. “In Lebanon, resources are not lacking. What is lacking is a state that knows how to mobilize them through a legitimate fiscal policy.”
At the same time, mandatory military and civil service for both women and men would gradually strengthen the army, while also absorbing young people who today are enlisted in Hezbollah’s ranks, and rebuilding the civil administrations that have been further weakened by the financial crisis. For Hosni, it is necessary to “turn the page on the Taif paradigm,” the agreement that formally ended the civil war and legitimized the coexistence between the national army and a parallel armed resistance.
“It is not a question of getting rid of Hezbollah,” he says, “but of rejecting the idea that there should be a resistance separate from the army,” and therefore a society divided between those who fight and those who think about something else. State sovereignty, Hosni adds, cannot emerge from the defeat or exclusion of one or more communities. Yet today the dynamic is moving in the opposite direction. “The army withdrew, as if it were none of its business, while Hezbollah remained in the south.” This deepens the internal fracture and reinforces among the inhabitants of the south the idea that the state protects other Lebanese, not them.
BUT IN A LEBANON that, since its creation a hundred years ago, has always had an army with clipped wings and hostage to foreign wills, how can armed forces worthy of the name be built? “Since I was born, I have never heard either the sovereigntists or the supporters of the resistance speak about financing the army,” Hosni replies. Budget laws never specify the internal resources necessary for such a project.
And yet, even without being able to achieve parity with Israel, “one has to begin somewhere”: to stop begging for donor conferences, funds from the United States and its allies, Iranian financing for Hezbollah, or outsourced stability through international forces such as UNIFIL. The path forward, for him, is the mobilization of internal resources through “a fair, transparent, and organized fiscal policy,” capable of creating among people “a feeling of belonging to the state” and the idea that “there is something we are building together.”
Why does nobody propose such a formula? Because the vertical and communal system makes it almost impossible. Hosni cites New York mayor Zohran Mamdani: a politician can tax high value apartments knowing he may lose a minority of very wealthy property owners while gaining the support of a majority of renters. For a Lebanese sectarian boss, that would amount to political suicide.
His communal enclosure contains contradictory interests: landlords and tenants, those who pay for generators and those who own them, those who import fuel and those who suffer from the cost of electricity. Any fiscal choice would hurt part of his own base without guaranteeing him support elsewhere. That is why, Hosni says, they prefer to change nothing. For Hosni and Muwatinun, it is precisely from dismantling this vertical structure that change must begin: Lebanon’s defense against Israel passes, first and foremost, through the construction of the state.