The war is here. It breathes down our necks. It taunts us with the roar of its drones and the thunderous sound of its planes. It arrives in Beirut after having seized the south for nearly a year. Where and how will it stop? What will it sweep away in its path?

We still have the luxury for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks — no one knows — of asking ourselves these questions. Israel seems determined to continue the escalation, bombing southern Lebanon with an intensity similar to that unleashed on Gaza. To prepare for a large-scale offensive or to bring Hezbollah to its knees? Both objectives are not mutually exclusive.

How long can Hezbollah stand by without reacting? If it believes total confrontation is inevitable, won’t it take the initiative? On the night of Saturday to Sunday, it launched a salvo of rockets for the first time since Oct. 8, which were almost all intercepted according to the Israeli army, targeting the Haifa region. The noose is tightening. The next hours promise to be long, exhausting, and painful.

This war confronts us with an impossible equation. We cannot suddenly forget what Hezbollah is. We cannot confuse it, as the Israeli government does, with Lebanon, even though it is part of it, whether we like it or not. We cannot pretend it wasn’t Hezbollah that opened a support front for Gaza on Oct. 8, taking Lebanon hostage to the calculations of the Iranian axis. We cannot close our eyes to all its strong-arm tactics, to all the times Hassan Nasrallah has threatened to ignite a civil war, to all the assassinations in which it is accused — quite credibly — of playing a major role, not to mention its probable involvement in the import and storage of the ammonium nitrate that exploded on Aug. 4, 2020. Nor can we forget that the fate of civilians was the least of its concerns when it committed the worst war crimes to ensure the survival of its Syrian ally.

But on the other side is Israel. Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, which has killed Palestinians by the tens of thousands, which occupies and sets fire to the West Bank, and which promises the same fate for Lebanon. We may condemn Hezbollah, but it is Lebanese people, regardless of their community, who are and will be killed by the Israeli army. It is Lebanon that will be destroyed if Hezbollah is defeated.

Hezbollah is consuming Lebanon from the inside. Israel threatens to annihilate it from the outside. Both threats can be existential, but they are not of the same nature. Equating them is an untenable position, especially in times of war. Rebuilding Lebanon with Hezbollah seems illusory. Achieving it, if half the country is in ruins, is simply impossible.

Since the beginning of this war, we have sorely lacked voices, especially on the political scene, to help us think, if not solve, this equation. From the start, we needed to oppose intelligently and firmly the opening of this support front, which serves neither Lebanon’s interest nor that of the Palestinians. But this had to be done with an open mind and an understanding of what is happening in the region. Lebanon cannot consider itself unaffected by the war in Gaza or think that a conflict in a neighboring country, with such symbolic power, will have no repercussions here. Oct. 7 and its aftermath triggered a wave of radicalization across the region, including in our country.

The fates of Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, which once constituted the heart of the Levant, are closely intertwined. This does not mean that we should have bombed northern Israel for Iran’s sake, but rather that we should have collectively thought about the role Lebanon, not Hezbollah, should play in this context.

For that, it is already too late. But to avoid total war, there may still be a glimmer of hope. This requires, on the Lebanese side, that our political leaders stop being spectators of a disaster everyone sees coming but no one is doing everything possible to prevent it. It is time for all political leaders to jointly call on Hezbollah to end this war without seeking to humiliate it. This will not be enough to convince the militia-party, which takes its orders only from Tehran, but it will show that official Lebanon did everything possible to try to prevent the worst.

At the same time, it is time for Western powers to put their full weight into forcing Israel to back down from this escalation that is leading us straight into disaster. They seem content with the weakening of Hezbollah, which most of them consider a terrorist movement. But in the case of total war, the price will be extremely heavy. For Lebanon. For Israel. And for the entire region. There is an urgent need.