{"id":20335,"date":"2026-05-26T00:46:45","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T21:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmfidawla.com\/2026\/05\/26\/lebanons-best-defense-a-non-sectarian-state\/"},"modified":"2026-05-26T01:36:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T22:36:02","slug":"lebanons-best-defense-a-non-sectarian-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmfidawla.com\/en\/2026\/05\/26\/lebanons-best-defense-a-non-sectarian-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Lebanon\u2019s Best Defense: A Non Sectarian State"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lebanon\u2019s Best Defense: A Non Sectarian State<\/b><\/h1>\n<\/div><\/section>
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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:<\/p>\n

Lebanon\u2019s 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 \u201cCitizens in a State\u201d (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\u2019s new devastating war.
\n\u201cIn the immediate term, what is needed is a real, stable, and prolonged truce with Israel.\u201d In Hosni\u2019s 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. \u201cStates can negotiate with other states only when they have something to offer,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen they produce something. Not when they only consume and become a sort of appendage of other states.\u201d
\nTO ACHIEVE this objective, however, Lebanon\u2019s political architecture must be revolutionized. \u201cThe system is not a group of individuals holding power with a stick in hand and repressing the rest of society. The system,\u201d he says, \u201cexists in all the relationships within society, between individuals and groups, at every level. The system is the logic that dominates all of society.\u201d 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 \u201ctruce between communities,\u201d within a structure that \u201clike stalks of wheat, bends according to external forces.\u201d
\nMany observers call this ability \u201cresilience.\u201d For Hosni, however, it is organized dependence on external actors, lacking any internal productive autonomy. \u201cThis 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.\u201d Lebanon, he continues, is the only country with a system that simultaneously attracts funds from both the United States and Iran.
\n\u201cOne 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.\u201d
\nThis 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.
\n\u201cEMIGRATION sweeps everything away, including the popular base of these leaders,\u201d he says. The sectarian political leaders understand the depth of the crisis: \u201cWe 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.\u201d
\nFrom 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. \u201cWe find ourselves in a zero sum deadlock.\u201d The two camps, the sovereigntist camp backed by the United States and the resistance camp backed by Iran, remain facing each other \u201clike in a permanent tug of war,\u201d while \u201cpeople slide deeper into despair.\u201d
\nIt is within this crisis that Israel is doing everything it can to push Lebanon toward internal collapse. According to Hosni, Israel\u2019s 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.
\n\u201cThey are working on internal division,\u201d Hosni says, \u201cand so far they are succeeding.\u201d 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.
\nAt this point, the question becomes inevitable: what is the alternative? \u201cFirst of all, this war must stop. What is needed with Israel is a prolonged truce.\u201d Then, he says, \u201cthree 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.\u201d
\nTHE CENSUS would serve to break the automatic link between the individual and the community. \u201cToday, 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.\u201d 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? \u201cIf organized properly, a 24 to 48 hour curfew would be enough, with the army going house to house and registering individuals.\u201d
\nThe 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. \u201cIn Lebanon, resources are not lacking. What is lacking is a state that knows how to mobilize them through a legitimate fiscal policy.\u201d
\nAt 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\u2019s ranks, and rebuilding the civil administrations that have been further weakened by the financial crisis. For Hosni, it is necessary to \u201cturn the page on the Taif paradigm,\u201d the agreement that formally ended the civil war and legitimized the coexistence between the national army and a parallel armed resistance.
\n\u201cIt is not a question of getting rid of Hezbollah,\u201d he says, \u201cbut of rejecting the idea that there should be a resistance separate from the army,\u201d 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. \u201cThe army withdrew, as if it were none of its business, while Hezbollah remained in the south.\u201d This deepens the internal fracture and reinforces among the inhabitants of the south the idea that the state protects other Lebanese, not them.
\nBUT 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? \u201cSince I was born, I have never heard either the sovereigntists or the supporters of the resistance speak about financing the army,\u201d Hosni replies. Budget laws never specify the internal resources necessary for such a project.
\nAnd yet, even without being able to achieve parity with Israel, \u201cone has to begin somewhere\u201d: 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 \u201ca fair, transparent, and organized fiscal policy,\u201d capable of creating among people \u201ca feeling of belonging to the state\u201d and the idea that \u201cthere is something we are building together.\u201d
\nWhy 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.
\nHis 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\u2019s defense against Israel passes, first and foremost, through the construction of the state.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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