Tomorrow, we will read and hear the same words. Hence, those who liberated South Lebanon from the Israeli occupation will be saluted. The infallible will be glorified. Every detractor or anyone with a different opinion will be threatened and the enemy will be informed about our total readiness to face its malicious ambitions and eternal callousness. We will watch television shows prepared without the least amount of imagination or talent about the thirteenth anniversary of the ousting of the Israeli occupation from our untainted land, and listen to testimonies reiterated for the thirteenth time about the sins of the violating enemy and the pureness of the resistance fighters and the populations of the occupied regions. The moulds are ready, and so is the audience. All of this remains acceptable, considering that the Israeli occupation was a dark page in Lebanon's history, and we should not forget the disasters which accompanied it. However, the indoctrination facet in recollecting this memory goes beyond the direct drawing of the lessons from the occupation and its resistance, even beyond its political exploitation by the side which controlled the resistance. Thirteen years after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces, the picture in Lebanon appears to be very bleak. This is due to the fact that the liberation stripped the Lebanese of the last pretext they used to justify their failure to build their state and society, while publically displaying their internal flaws. Part of the Lebanese believed – due to their extreme naïveté – that the Israeli withdrawal will liberate Lebanon from its task as a regional bargaining card and an arena for the settlement of external scores. And the Maronite bishops' statement in September 2000 points in that direction. But as usual, the Lebanese people's imagination fell short of grasping what had been prepared for their country. The Shebaa Farms cause was thus flicked and Lebanon found itself mobilized at the service of another project, whose importance extended beyond the Syrian regime's negotiations with Israel. Ever since the Israeli pullout, we have entered the direct Iranian calculations which doubly held the Lebanese card, via the Syrian security services and Hezbollah. Consequently, we were forced to link our country's fate to that of the Iranian nuclear reactors and the uranium enrichment levels in the Natanz facility. More importantly, the liberation put back on the table the impossible rebuilding of the country, thus eliminating the ambiguity of the illusions which accompanied the reconstruction phase in the 1990s and placed the Lebanese before the bitter truth, i.e. that there is no national consensus over anything, from the definition of the state to that of the enemy, reaching national interest, independence, sovereignty and foreign relations. The liberation revealed that Israel's occupation of parts of the Lebanese territories was the least of the Lebanese people's problems, and the Israeli pullout exposed the fake settlements they had reached at the end of their wars in 1990. The assassination of Rafik al-Hariri in 2005, then the July 2006 war, both confirmed that the building of an independent Lebanon is still pending and that the local powers are much too weak to assume real political responsibilities, thus favoring the system of loyalty to foreign powers, regardless of the consequences on the Lebanese. In other words, and far away from any maneuvering or misleading, the liberation marked the beginning of a journey to discover the depth of Lebanese dependency, the frailty of the state project and the absence of citizenship in this part of the world. And the dramatic rise of sectarian sensitivities, along with the prevalence of half-demented people on the overall political scene in Lebanon, is a mere side effect for the collapse of Lebanese society on the political and civil levels. Far away from the praising of a resistance which goes wherever its leaders order it to, there is a question about the meaning of independence, the nation and the state, as long as we are unable to exit the shell of the sect, the tribe and the denomination, as long as we prefer to live in a state of illusions, and as long as our future is a series of endless funerals.
