In July, Lebanese soldiers deployed into Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, in the Nabatieh district, after Israeli forces withdrew from it. It was the first performance of the sequence agreed in Washington on 26 June: the Israelis leave, the army enters, the weapons go, the withdrawal continues. The army arrived and did its part. It then announced that it could not search private homes, because Lebanese law does not permit it to.
That sentence deserves to be read twice. The Republic has undertaken, in a document signed at the United States Department of State, to disarm every non-state armed group everywhere on its territory. The institution charged with doing it lacks the legal authority to open a door. This is not a failure of courage, and not chiefly one of money. It is the absence of a statute — a rule nobody wrote, in a country that has spent half a century not writing it.
Lebanon explains itself to itself in the language of sects. Every crisis is decoded as a contest between communities, every failure attributed to the balance among them. The vocabulary is so familiar that its poverty goes unnoticed. It cannot explain why an army may not enter a house. It cannot explain why the country has not counted itself since 1932. It cannot explain why, on 9 March, by seventy-six votes to forty-one, parliament extended its own mandate by two years and cancelled the elections due in May.
War can justify postponement — Britain held no election from 1935 to 1945 — but states with living norms defer by rule: annual renewals, emergency clauses written in advance, terms sized to necessity. This parliament invoked no emergency framework, rejected proposals for six months or a year, and granted itself two; the ceasefire came within six weeks, and the extension runs to 2028. A chamber elected in 2009 extended itself three times and sat nine years. Article 42 of the constitution requires elections in the sixty days before a term expires. It was not amended, not replaced — simply set aside, by the body it binds.
There is a better word for the condition, and it is more than a century old. Durkheim called it anomie: not the absence of rules, but the presence of rules that no longer bind, beginning with those who write them. Merton refined it: a society holds out goals it has ceased to provide legitimate means of reaching. The young are the proof. Nearly two-thirds of Lebanese aged fifteen to twenty-four are unemployed, underemployed, or outside the labour force while wanting to be in it. Sixty-nine percent of them told the last national labour survey they wished to leave. More than two hundred thousand Lebanese departed in 2025 alone. Lebanon has become a country substantially financed by those who gave up on it.
The consequence shows in what citizens now say they want. Three-quarters told Arab Barometer in November that they would support a leader who bends the rules if it produced results. Two-thirds said it does not matter whether the country is democratic so long as there is order. Twenty-two percent trust the government. Such findings are habitually read as symptoms of the confessional disease. They are nothing of the kind. A divided society argues about whose rules should govern it; its communities pull in opposite directions, each insisting on its own law. The evidence shows every community pulling away from law itself, together and at the same speed.
One division is real, and it should not be dissolved into a thesis. Polling this spring found Shia respondents overwhelmingly opposed to a peace agreement with Israel, Christians and Druze overwhelmingly in favour, and Sunnis narrowly so. That disagreement is genuine — it concerns arms, memory and survival — and a community that has absorbed two wars and lost much of its leadership holds its position for intelligible reasons. But notice what it is about: the weapons and the border.
It is not about whether a court should decide a case, a budget should be published, a licence should be issued without an intermediary, or a vote should be held on the date the constitution names. On those matters Lebanese are not divided. They are uniformly disappointed.
Here lies the error of fifty years. The first disagreement was taken as proof of the second. A state was built on the premise that Lebanese agree about nothing, and the result is a state so stripped of authority that the one thing they genuinely disagree about can no longer be settled by any institution at all. The clock is public, and short. UNIFIL’s mandate expires on 31 December, and its withdrawal must be complete within the following year; the force is already two thousand smaller than it was.
Reconstruction in the south is costed at $11bn against conditional Gulf pledges of some seven, whose conditions remain unmet. The entire annual budget of the Lebanese state is $6bn. Whoever rebuilds Nabatieh and Bint Jbeil will govern them. That is not a sectarian proposition. It is an administrative one, and it will be decided by contractors and building permits within thirty months.
What follows is unglamorous, and almost all of it lies within Lebanese reach. Write the statute: an army that may not lawfully enter a house cannot disarm anyone, and no quantity of American funding or foreign pressure substitutes for legislation parliament has declined to pass. Count the people: a census, or at least a published and continuing household survey, is a precondition of governing rather than a reward for it — and the fear that counting would upset the balance is answered by the voter rolls themselves, which put the three large communities within three points of one another.
Hold the election — or, if war truly forbids it, defer by rule: short renewals, justified afresh, expiring on their own. Ungoverned deferral teaches the public, more persuasively than any speech, that rules are optional for those they inconvenience. And let the state rebuild the south, because the alternative is not neutrality; it is a different sovereign.
None of this requires parity with Israel, whose military spending last year exceeded Lebanon’s more than seventy times over. It requires only that Lebanese rules mean something. That is the one asset the country can rebuild without anyone’s permission: Israel cannot grant it, Washington cannot fund it, Tehran cannot veto it. A parliament that keeps its own dates and an army that may lawfully open a door would do more for Lebanese sovereignty than another decade of communiqués.
- Jamil K Mroue is Lebanese writer and previous editor of Al Hayat newspaper in London and The Daily Star in Beirut.