Hezbollah’s dominant power is completely unaffected by folkloric performances like Lebanon’s parliamentary elections

Lebanon is a hall of mirrors. Activists, analysts, and U.S. government officials use words like “state institutions,” “elections,” “reform process,” and so on, but all they do is warp one’s brain.

One of the most characteristic beliefs of Washington elites these days is that the true “meaning” of any particular event is always derived from large-scale “narratives” about headline topics like democracy, race, women’s rights, climate change, or criminal justice, which the particular case is supposed to illustrate. When the “narrative” contradicts the facts, it is the facts that are naturally expected to give way. What importance can a few stray facts possibly have next to the majesty and importance of a narrative that promises to end racism and war and save the planet?

In this way, even the most idiotic narrative, founded on the most absurd theories, can be gifted with a retrospective gloss of reality, as long as you don’t look hard at the facts. That is, until the entire house of cards collapses, as it did recently in Afghanistan.

Nowhere on the planet today is the gap between narrative and reality wider, and therefore under more constant pressure from elites in a wide range of countries, than in Lebanon, where the substitution of “narratives” for unpleasant realities may soon become the single largest component of the country’s GDP.

Take the recent Lebanese elections, for example. The official results of the May 15 parliamentary elections had not yet been announced when English-language media reports declared the outcome to be a “major blow” to Hezbollah, the group that dominates that country.

Why? Because the fact-proof narrative in which there is a “country” called Lebanon that is separate from the control of Hezbollah naturally requires that result. The election, the storyline went, showed that gains by reformist civil society and independent candidates. These anti-Hezbollah forces handed a stinging defeat both to Hezbollah and to the established parties. And in so doing these new representatives of the people manifestly weakened the terror group by stripping it of the majority it had held in parliament, which—in the narrative, at least—is a real institution through which power is distributed and exercised.

It’s a nice story, to be sure. It even makes internal logical sense. Unfortunately, it’s not real. In reality, which can be an unpleasant place to live, Lebanon is an Iranian-run satrapy which provides a forward operating base for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran, which directs Hezbollah. That’s reality.

But it’s not just that all these words and categories like “parliament” and “elections” and “political parties” are meaningless in the Lebanese context—even on its own terms, the story is untrue. There was no such election result, either before or after the votes were counted.

Israel cannot afford to treat any part of the Lebanese circus as though it were reality. For most of the past decade, Israel has gone out of its way to avoid action in Lebanon —the policy, which has some dangerous flaws.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/name-lebanese-play-artistocrats