If fighting stops in Lebanon, can an army that has long played 2nd fiddle to Hezbollah keep the peace?

As Lebanon endures more rounds of Israeli air and ground attacks, those peering into the distance at a gloomy horizon continue to point to the Lebanese army as one of the few state institutions capable of providing a stabilizing influence if there is a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. 

“We have to preserve our army because our army is the solution when peace will come,” retired Lebanese army general Khalil Helou told CBC News at his home in Beirut.

“Hezbollah initiated the war. Our army will be the solution for peace.” 

The Lebanese Armed Forces, outgunned not just by Israel but also by Hezbollah, have remained firmly on the sidelines of the current conflict, which Israel maintains is a war against the Iran-backed Shia militia and not Lebanon itself.

Hezbollah, from its installations in the south, began firing rockets into northern Israel in support of Hamas a day after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year. Cross-border attacks in both directions have since displaced tens of thousands of residents in Lebanon and Israel. 

Lebanese soldiers are deployed in the country’s south in non-combat roles as are more than 10,000 peacekeepers with the UN’s Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Both have come under Israeli fire since Israel began what it described as limited ground incursions into Lebanon earlier this month. 

In an interview with the AFP news agency last week, Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said in the event of any ceasefire, he would boost the number of soldiers in southern Lebanon from 4,500 to “between 7,000 and 11,000” to keep the peace. 

That follows an earlier pledge that Lebanon is ready to “fully implement” a UN Security Council resolution adopted to bring about the end of the last Israeli-Hezbollah war 18 years ago but never enforced.

Resolution 1701 was meant to create a demilitarized zone south of the Litani river in Lebanon, about 30 kilometres from the Israel-Lebanon demarcation line.

A fragile peace 

Lebanon’s population is a mosaic of more than a dozen religious sects, a number of which, through various militias, took part in a brutal civil war from 1975 to 1990. 

That conflict ended with the disarmament of all save Hezbollah, which kept its weapons to resist Israel’s ongoing occupation of the south. Israel withdrew in 2000, but Hezbollah retained its arms. 

The Lebanese army is often credited with doing much to maintain the country’s fragile peace. But in the decades since, Hezbollah, with financial and military support from Iran, has entrenched itself ever more firmly in the south while the 80,000-strong army has suffered from an aging arsenal and neglect in the wake of successive economic downturns.

A soldier’s salary is around $200 US per month, with widespread reports that soldiers often take second jobs to supplement their income.

While the army has remained popular, the irony is that its ability to navigate a country defined by deep sectarian divisions is partly down to its relatively toothless nature compared to the military might of Hezbollah’s armed wing. 

In other words, it’s not a threat to the status quo in a country where key government positions and patronage appointments are divided up along communal lines. (The constitution, for example, mandates the president be a Christian Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker a Shia Muslim.)

Helou bristles at any criticism of the army for doing little to counter Hezbollah’s growing strength over the years, blaming “schizophrenic” governments that have paid lip service to Resolution 1701 while allowing Hezbollah to remain armed in its self-proclaimed role as “the resistance” to Israel at the same time. 

“The army is keeping the national unity,” the retired general said. “You have an option between civil war or keeping stability. What would you choose?” 

Army ‘still has respect of the people’: UN official

UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti says it is clear the Lebanese army is not currently strong enough to implement Resolution 1701 and that it would need international support. 

Building the army up “will take a while, but the commitment is there,” he said. 

“The Lebanese army is a committed army … that still has the respect of the people of Lebanon,” Tenenti said. “We need to bring state authority to the south. Not only of the army, but the full state authority to the south of Lebanon.”

But that would require a robust state, or at the very least a belief in one. And many Lebanese will tell you they’ve lost faith in a country that was plagued by corruption, nepotism and political paralysis long before the current crisis.

“Our government is not intact at the moment,” said Christy Mady, a Canadian Lebanese lecturer in communications at the Notre Dame University-Louaize in Zouk Mosbeh, just north of Beirut. 

“So, if anything happens to you, as a Lebanese, you’re not going to be cared for.”

‘Kidnapped by Iran’

Lebanon has been without a president for two years. The Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by Israel last month, was blamed by many for blocking compromise candidates.

“Lebanon recently has been through also a bad economic crisis,” said Mady. “After that, there was the Beirut port explosion in 2020, you know, the collapse of the banking sector and now this. So, within the span of four to five years, a lot has happened.” 

Mady witnessed Lebanon’s civil war as a child and says she wants to see the country finally break free from the constraints of its past. 

“I grew up in war, and seeing that happen again and seeing Lebanon have to pick up the pieces again, that really hurts,” she said. 

Some Lebanese say that Israel’s evisceration of the upper echelons of the Hezbollah leadership might offer Lebanon a way of breaking the group’s hold on the south, in particular, and challenge sectarianism.

“We are kidnapped today, kidnapped by Iran,” said Alain Hakim, a former economy and trade minister for Lebanon and a member of the political bureau of the Christian Kataeb Party. 

Kataeb evolved from the Phalange Party, whose paramilitary wing was associated with Israel during Lebanon’s civil war. 

Earlier this month, the party denounced Israel’s “violation of human life and property” in Lebanon while also calling on interim Prime Minister Mikati to declare an immediate ceasefire, implement Resolution 1701 and deploy the Lebanese army along the border.

Hakim says that doesn’t mean Hezbollah has to be eradicated, but it must reintegrate into Lebanese politics and “forget about its arms and forget about the Iranian orientation that they followed during years of battle.”

Hezbollah exploited sectarian system, says historian

Nasrallah had linked any ceasefire in Lebanon to a ceasefire in Gaza. 

It’s not clear whether his successors will hold to that line, especially in the wake of Israel’s recent killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza. 

In an earlier interview with CBC News, Lebanon’s Hezbollah-backed minister for transportation and public works, Ali Hamie, said Lebanon must resist Israeli aggression “until death” while also calling on the Lebanese government to keep talking with the international community “for a ceasefire.”

Historian Makram Rabah, a lecturer at the American University of Beirut, says peace will not come to Lebanon until it deals with a sectarian system he says has thrived at the expense of the state.

“I believe that Hezbollah’s real potent weapon was not only its weapons but rather the fact that it was using the sectarian system,” he said. “I’m someone who believes that we need to reassess the whole sectarian system, which allows for monsters such as Hezbollah or other factions to emerge.” 

The Lebanese army itself splintered along sectarian lines during the civil war. Today, its forces are drawn from all communities, and its role has often been, quite literally, to act as a buffer between neighbourhoods that can sometimes still be defined by sectarian affiliation. 

That’s been especially important now with so many displaced from Hezbollah’s heartland in the south having arrived looking for shelter in Beirut and other cities in large numbers.

There is much talk of churches and mosques opening their doors to those in need, but on the streets, there is also tension, suspicion and distrust. It is a mix that combines many people grieving Nasrallah and those who blame Hezbollah for dragging Lebanon into a war not of their making. 

“We have to understand that these people will be permanently displaced until we come to a place where we say we need to reclaim Lebanon and its sovereignty by saying ‘immediate ceasefire’ and not actually just blaming the Israelis,” said Rabah, the historian. 

“We have to be very clear that we don’t want to be part of any [Iran] axis whatsoever.”

Helou, the retired general, says for now, the Lebanese army is performing the most important role that it can for the country by working to calm internal divisions “in order to avoid slipping into a civil war.”

“You don’t know the value of stability unless you lose it,” he said.