How a country of 10,452 km² was dragged down for half a century by the depredations of Damascus, Tehran, and their proxies. And how, finally, a Lebanese majority dared to say enough is enough.
By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published by La Razón, 3 May, 2026
I will rarely have the opportunity to write about something that affects me so deeply. In Lebanon, the Al-Assad regime murdered my father, his father-in-law, and his sister-in-law. I have Lebanese siblings; my son is married to a Lebanese woman. What follows is not the detached perspective of an analyst: it is the testimony of someone who has seen and experienced firsthand how a country is dismembered for the benefit of others.
In the recent history of the Middle East, no other country has suffered as much and for as long as Lebanon . A territory of 10,452 square kilometers, a sacred number for any Lebanese patriot, almost identical in size and shape to the Principality of Asturias, is home today to some 5.5 million people spread across eighteen officially recognized religious communities.
The hasty observer might believe that the cause of the constant civil wars is this communal division. They are mistaken. The underlying cause is not religious diversity—a unique characteristic of the Arab-Muslim world—but rather the systematic will of foreign powers to exploit it in order to deny Lebanon its own national identity, an identity that Syria tried to annihilate, but above all, the murderous regime of the Assads.
The 1926 Constitution—one of the oldest in the Arab world still in force—and the 1943 National Pact, signed by the first president, Béchara El Khoury (Maronite), and the first prime minister, Riad Solh (Sunni), were an example of managing diverse communities. Coexistence wasn’t perfect, but it existed . And it bore fruit: in the 1950s and 60s, Lebanon was the Switzerland of the East , an intellectual beacon for the entire region. Let’s not forget that contemporary Arab nationalism—Ba’athism, Pan-Arabism—has an ideological origin stemming from Christian intellectuals in Lebanon and Syria. Aflaq, Saadeh, Zureiq: all three were Christians. Anyone who doesn’t grasp this paradox understands nothing about the Middle East.
That paradise, however, was a small, objectively weak, and internally divided state: the perfect target for regional predators. After the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan in September 1970—”Black September”—for attempting to create a state within a state and hijack the Hashemite Kingdom, Lebanon became its inevitable destination.
The attack on Amman was an act of legitimate self-defense by a young kingdom led by an extraordinary king, Hussein I. The PLO and its allies established themselves in Lebanon and within a few months had seized control of everything, literally. The presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians planted the seeds of discord: a ticking time bomb that would explode in April 1975.
And here’s the first crucial clarification: what analysts mistakenly call “the Lebanese Civil War” was, in reality, an endless string of wars in Lebanon, not wars between the Lebanese themselves. The trigger was Palestinian, not Lebanese Muslim. The first conflict, which began in 1975, was between an indigenous population and a foreign force armed and financed from abroad.
Since then, every imaginable combination has played out in the successive Lebanese wars: Muslims against Christians, Druze against Christians, Palestinians against Christians and Lebanese Sunnis, Shiites against Sunnis, and even Maronite Christians against Maronite Christians. Not to mention the bloody confrontation between Lebanese Shiites: Amal—supported by Syria—against Hezbollah—supported by Iran—which ended with Amal’s complete submission in exchange for the presidency of Parliament, held by Nabih Berri since 1992. To seal that pact, Imam Khomeini legitimized the Alawite or Nusayri heresy—not to be confused with the Moroccan dynasty—through a fatwa that recognized them as Muslims and as a legitimate branch of Shiism, which they are not.
The culmination of Lebanon’s tragedies is that this small, martyred country has been and continues to be a battleground for other wars that are completely foreign to it. Israel against the PLO in 1982; Syria against the Lebanese who wanted independence and not a protectorate of the Assads. But Lebanon was also the laboratory of modern terrorism: suicide car and truck bombs were invented there (the US embassy bombing in April 1983; the double attack against French Marines and paratroopers on October 23, 1983, which left 307 dead), airplane hijacking was perfected there (TWA Flight 847, June 1985, in which my father, Pedro de Arístegui, successfully mediated), as was the mass kidnapping of Westerners to exert political pressure.
That is what Hezbollah is: a vast, bloodthirsty, efficient, insatiable, and ruthless terrorist organization, cloaked in the guise of an NGO, a state within a state, and a political party. The barbarity of Sunni jihadism—Al-Qaeda and ISIS among others—has made us forget the bloody terrorist history of Iran and its Lebanese affiliate.
The Taif Agreement, signed in October 1989, formally but effectively ended the civil wars and included a firm commitment to disarm all militias and return the monopoly on force to the Lebanese Army. Hezbollah is the only group that has not complied. Moreover, the more the current president, General Joseph Aoun, and the Sunni prime minister, Nawaf Salam—president of the International Court of Justice until January 2025—insist on disarming Hezbollah, the more brutal and direct the Iranian threats become against “those who insist on disarming Hezbollah.”
It’s not an abstract threat: the Iran-Assad-Hezbollah trio has assassinated two presidents —Bashir Gemayel (1982) and René Moawad (1989, seventeen days after his election)—and three prime ministers: Rachid Karamé, Omar Karamé, and Rafic Hariri. All three were personal friends of my father. Rafic Hariri told Mariano Rajoy and me, in his suite at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid, that he had been threatened by the bloodthirsty Syrian “viceroy” in Lebanon, Rustum Ghazaleh. A month later, he was assassinated with a bomb containing more than a ton of TNT under his car.
Hezbollah’s terrorist militants are not Lebanese patriots: they don’t teach the national anthem to their children, they only wave the yellow flag with the green AK-47 of their organization. They are loyal exclusively to the oligarchic-jihadist regime of Iran—which is what it is: a dictatorial and mafia-like oligarchy, not a theocracy—and they receive one billion dollars a year from Tehran, compared to the seven hundred million dollar budget of the Lebanese Armed Forces. To that figure must be added the organization’s mafia-like income: “taxes” (extortion), arms and drug trafficking (opium, hashish, Captagon), smuggling, and human trafficking.
And here’s the truly novel part.
The Lebanese are fed up. Fed up with the Shiites loyal to Hezbollah, with their cruelty and mafia-like violence, with their arrogance, with having dragged them into countless conflicts. This is demonstrated by the latest major Gallup poll, conducted in June and July of 2025: 79% of Lebanese believe that only the Lebanese Army should carry weapons; 86% reject a new conflict with Israel in support of the Palestinian cause; and 81% approve of President Aoun’s performance, the highest approval rating ever recorded by Gallup for a Lebanese leader.
The same is true of the prestigious, brilliant, and honest Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, a former ambassador to the UN and a renowned jurist. He served for 10 years as a member of the International Criminal Court, eventually becoming its president. His administration enjoys widespread support in a country where the political class had been repudiated, as even the Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh had lined his pockets while the country was bleeding dry.
There is a growing number of Lebanese—Christians, Sunnis, Druze, and quite a few Shiites—who speak openly about a possible partition of the country : “Let Hezbollah keep the south of the country and leave us in peace.” Terrorist militants hiding in Sunni or Christian neighborhoods have been literally kicked out. That some Western media outlets—the BBC among the most prominent—continue to call Hezbollah a “militia,” a “militia group,” or a “political party” is not only biased and inaccurate, but also profoundly immoral.
Now, the last and most thorny issue. Israel’s right to defend itself against this brutal terrorist organization is not in question; but it cannot be at the expense of Lebanese civilians, who are Hezbollah’s primary victims, not its accomplices. To demand that Lebanon disarm Hezbollah without reopening the brutal Pandora’s box of civil war, its president, prime minister, and people must be supported with weapons, training, and funding.
Israel must cease its attacks on Lebanese civilian areas and abandon any long-term occupation of the territory between the border and the Litani River —precisely where General Lahad’s sinister FSA (South Lebanon Army) militia operated. It must act strategically, not with operational tactics or the political opportunism of the moment. Subordinating the long term to immediate impulses is a gift to Hezbollah, which thrives on the “rally around the flag,” the reflexive act of rallying around a flag when the country is bombed.
There will be no true peace in the Middle East without Lebanon regaining its full sovereignty and without Hezbollah being disarmed to permanently remove the brutal Iranian yoke from the small Levantine nation. The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 has changed the game: for the first time in half a century, Hezbollah has lost its Syrian rearguard, its logistical corridor with its Iranian patron, and its sanctuary. The strategic window of opportunity is historic. To squander it would be unforgivable.
Lebanon is a martyred state, but not a failed state. The difference is essential. Failed states are the result of weak institutions; Lebanon has been a victim of its neighbors’ predatory power for a century. A small country, great in martyrdom. Cradle of the first letters of the alphabet, home to the biblical cedars, beacon of Arab intellectualism. It will survive, as it always has, because its character is indestructible. But it deserves, at last, to live, not just survive.