Lebanon: ‘Constitutive’ peacebuilding and pursuit of justice after Israel’s attacks

A war does not end with the mere silence of guns. We Lebanese know that from experience. The infamous civil war didn’t have a solid closure because it disregarded accountability, truth and reconciliation, as well as the pursuit of justice. The brutal September 2024 Israeli war on Lebanon stopped with a fragile ceasefire that ignores the Lebanese need for restorative justice.

‘The day after’ in my country is a challenging period ahead, requiring a lot of work on holistic reconstruction with the utmost transparency amid an unprecedented financial crisis. This, alongside internal peace and peacebuilding, candid and open dialogue between Lebanese, long-awaited political reforms and finally, the pursuit of justice, both locally and internationally.

Photo taken by Sawssan on 2 November 2024 in one of the neighbourhoods struck by Israel in the Southern Suburb of Beirut.

Peacebuilding into peacemaking?

I ask Fadi Abi Allam, a veteran peacebuilder in both the Permanent Peace Movement (PPM) and the Green Party of Lebanon about the current status of peacebuilding. He highlights that the Israeli aggression moved Lebanon technically backward from peacebuilding to peacemaking, which takes place during conflict to guarantee ceasefire, protect civilians and ensure relief; whereas peacebuilding normally happens post-war to serve peace and enforce it via disarmament and reconstruction.

He explains that peacemaking and peacebuilding have intersections, such as the provision of social and psychological support and the fight for justice, including transitional justice. The latter is a major pre-requisite for accountability and stability, which the internationally brokered Taif agreement that ended the Lebanese civil war in 1989 ignored.

Seeking international justice

What are the prospects of peacebuilding in Lebanon in such volatile local and regional circumstances, in the aftermath of the latest Israeli aggression?

Abi Allam says that a newly pressing aspect of Lebanese peacebuilding is global advocacy, and documenting the Israeli attacks as “there is no peacebuilding without justice.”

He adds, “it is extremely important to condemn Israel at international courts, relying on whatever tools the international law offers to record Israeli violations and seek action to stop them.”

Despite the biased political support for Israel in the Global North, ending the state’s impunity is finally gaining momentum. Isreal’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is turning into “a fugitive from global justice, and that’s an unprecedented milestone for accountability,” Abi Allam notes.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, as well as Israel's former defence minister and the military commander of Hamas. Image by Nominesine on Shutterstock, The Hague, Netherlands, 28 December 2023.

The same applies to Israel’s impunity in deliberate strikes on journalists, prohibited by international law. In addition to 133 Palestinian journalists and media figures murdered in the ongoing genocide in Gaza as of 12 December 2024, Israel executed 11 Lebanese journalists in targeted attacks using US weapons since October 2023.

In his iconic book Pity the Nation (1990), the acclaimed British journalist Robert Fisk criticised Israel’s ‘getting away’ with killing Tewfiq Ghazawi and Bahij Metni, two CBS Lebanese crew members in 1985. Almost 40 years later, Israel’s ‘complete impunity’ – according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), in the ‘murder’ of Lebanese video journalist Issam Abdallah, an apparent war crime – is ongoing.

Tel Aviv has a record of escaping international justice. For instance, in the 2006 war, Israel triggered a giant oil spill dangerously polluting the Mediterranean and causing environmental destruction. Yet it still turns a blind eye to the 2014 General Assembly resolution to compensate Lebanon $850m.

However, Abi Allam believes we should resort to every possible legal procedure provided by international humanitarian law (IHL) to condemn Israel for its most recent crimes, including the use of white phosphorus in bombing Lebanese civilians and the targeted killings of journalists and medics.

In addition, as part of the Control Arms coalition and Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC), PPM joined the Global Day of Action to halt weapons transfers to Tel Aviv; an “unprecedented international civil campaign criminalising the arms trade used in Israeli war crimes violating the international law,” explains Abi Allam.

Sadly, despite all the grassroots pressure, Israel is still receiving weapons it can use to massacre civilians in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, relying on some European shipments via third-party countries. The ‘morality of the Global North and the whole international community’ is clearly in doubt.

Protest poster in Washington DC, US, calling for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza. Photo by Phil Pasquini, 30 Oct 2024.

Preventive and constitutive peacebuilding

In a parallel process, PPM and the Green Party worked on preventive peacebuilding, by assessing the risks of division among Lebanese even before the September massive Israeli attack on the country.

The “political splits are deep and could lead to sectarian clashes”; and Abi Allam accurately calls them “an unarmed civil war, a soft civil war.” Therefore, internal conflict prevention is the top priority for future peacebuilding.

Being well aware that the practice of peacebuilding in Lebanon is interrelated with local needs and obstacles, he explains that “state building is a pre-requisite for peacebuilding.” Abi Allam affirms bitterly that “the sovereignty is not only violated by hostile Israeli drones, but [also] by the feudal-sectarian system holding [a] grip of the country, undermining the rise of a viable state instead of the old failed one.”

He reiterates his firm belief that peacebuilding in Lebanon should ultimately establish good governance and respect for rule of law, which remain missing in the fragile civil peace 35 years after the end of the civil war.

“It is time to move forward from the stalemate of 1989; to have constitutive peacebuilding leading to justice, both internally and facing Israel, to implement massive reforms amending the flawed system by reverting to the rule of law and pursuit of justice,” Abi Allam says.

In addition, he calls for “the establishment of alternative non-confessional political parties, highlighting past and present common grounds between Lebanese and vividly fighting the well-rooted corruption.”

Sharing all of Abi Allam’s views, I further fear that the economic weight of the latest Israeli war combined with donors’ fatigue, will cause premature deportations of Syrian refugees after the fall of the notorious dynastic Assad regime and put additional restrictions on Palestinian refugees. That’s another challenge the local peacebuilding community should address.