But the choice, as it is usually presented, is a trap.
It is possible to believe that Lebanese land must be defended without pretending Hezbollah is innocent. It is possible to believe that no party should decide war and peace alone without pretending the anti-Hezbollah camp has built a state worthy of receiving those weapons. It is possible to look at Israel as the primary external threat and still see the Lebanese cartel as the internal structure that made the country so vulnerable in the first place.
The anti-resistance argument begins with one truth: no normal republic can have a private army deciding when the whole country goes to war. That is true. Hezbollah opened the Lebanese front without a national decision. It fused a real defensive need with an Iranian regional strategy. It built a state within the state, then used the weakness of the state as proof that its own parallel authority had to remain.
But then the anti-resistance camp asks us to make a jump it has not earned. It says: give the weapons to the state. Which state?
The state that has not built electricity? The state that cannot protect a judge investigating the port explosion? The state that let the banks swallow people's savings and then protected the people responsible? The state that kept the army underfunded, the courts exposed, the ministries divided, the ports captured, and every appointment trapped in sectarian bargaining?
You cannot demand that a community surrender its defensive capacity to an abstraction. You cannot tell people in the south, after decades of occupation, bombing, displacement, and abandonment, that the same state which never arrived for them will now protect them because a minister used the word sovereignty at a press conference.
That is not a plan. It is theatre.
The resistance argument also begins with one truth: Israel is not imaginary. Its invasions, occupation, and habit of turning security language into territorial control are not imaginary. The south did not invent its fear. Hezbollah did not appear because Lebanese Shia woke up one morning with a taste for militias. It grew in the vacuum left by a state that did not defend them.
But Hezbollah then turns that truth into a permanent license. Because the state failed, Hezbollah becomes necessary. Because Hezbollah is necessary, the state can never fully arrive. Because the state never arrives, Hezbollah remains necessary. The circle closes. What began as a response to abandonment becomes one of the forces preserving the conditions of abandonment.
This is the part both sides need people not to understand: they need each other.
The Lebanese Forces need Hezbollah's weapons to remain the central proof of their own politics. Without Hezbollah, they would have to answer normal questions: what is your economic program? What is your plan for schools, labor, housing, electricity, banking accountability, and the army? They do not want that conversation.
Hezbollah needs the Lebanese Forces, and the wider anti-resistance camp, to look like a foreign-backed project aimed at disarming the Shia community on Israel's behalf. Without that enemy, Hezbollah would have to answer its own normal questions: why did you spend decades inside government without building the state you say must exist before disarmament? Why did you protect the same political order that kept the army weak? Why did your weapons become a shield not only against Israel, but against accountability inside Lebanon?
Each side is the other's business model.
That does not mean they are equal. Hezbollah has weapons the others do not. Hezbollah can make decisions whose cost is measured in dead civilians and flattened villages, not only lost elections. That asymmetry is real and must not be blurred.
But underneath the asymmetry, the game is shared. Every major faction benefits from a weak state because a real state would not only absorb Hezbollah's military role. It would audit everyone. It would ask where the bank money went, who controls the port, who profits from generators, fuel, customs, quarries, contracts, schools, hospitals, charities, ministries, and municipalities. It would force parties to become political parties instead of sectarian protection rackets.
That is what they all fear.
A real state would not only take weapons. It would force politics. Real politics is not a flag, a martyr poster, a foreign patron, or a speech about sovereignty. Real politics is taxation, budgets, courts, roads, schools, electricity, army salaries, banking losses, public transport, and the basic question every faction avoids: who pays, who benefits, who is protected, who is punished?
Lebanese sectarian parties cannot survive too much real politics because each one is a vertical column through its own community: rich and poor, banker and depositor, landlord and tenant, contractor and worker, all kept under one sectarian roof. The resistance question keeps that roof from cracking. It gives every faction a sacred enemy and saves it from having to govern.
That is why the argument over Hezbollah has lasted so long. It is not only an argument about weapons. It is the machine that prevents every other argument from becoming central.
October 2019 was dangerous because it briefly escaped that machine. "All of them means all of them" did not say one sect stole the country from another. It said the country had been stolen through all of them. The system understood the threat and dragged the anger back into the familiar room: foreign conspiracy, anti-Hezbollah plot, anti-Shia plot, anti-Christian plot, anti-Sunni plot. Anything except the obvious thing: the cartel had been named.
The port explosion should have forced the same reckoning. It did not. The dead were mourned, the judges were obstructed, the files were buried, the politicians survived. Lebanon did not lack grief. It lacked consequences.
So where does that leave us?
Not neutral. Neutrality would be obscene. Israel is the external aggressor. The south has a right to be defended. The people who live under bombardment are not props in an argument about Hezbollah. They are Lebanese citizens whose fear is real, whose dead are real, whose land is real.
But defending the land does not mean surrendering the country to Hezbollah's permanent exception. And rejecting Hezbollah's exception does not mean accepting the anti-resistance fantasy that a hollow state, funded and pressured from abroad, can suddenly become sovereign by demanding disarmament it has never prepared itself to receive.
The honest position is harder than either slogan. Israel is the immediate external danger. Hezbollah is both a response to abandonment and a participant in the system that profits from abandonment. The anti-resistance camp is right that no republic can survive a private army, and fraudulent when it offers no republic capable of replacing one. The cartel is the deeper machine. The state is the missing thing.
The question is not whether Lebanon should defend itself. Of course it should.
The question is whether Lebanon will ever build a state strong enough to make defense national instead of sectarian, sovereignty real instead of theatrical, and politics something more serious than two camps keeping each other alive while the country disappears between them.
Until then, every side will keep pointing at the other side's gun, patron, corruption, hypocrisy, or betrayal.
And all of them will keep hoping nobody asks the only question that matters:
Who benefits from making sure the state never arrives?
