What I saw was a magical land. A place that straddles modernity and antiquity, progress and tradition. On daytime excursions we’d drive through Muslim towns, where many women were covered, then minutes later pass beaches dotted with women in bikinis. We’d spend hours exploring our ancestors’ villages up in the mountains, visiting the churches where my grandparents and great-grandparents worshipped. And then we’d visit beach club parties, lavish restaurants, and sparkling shopping malls — for next to nothing.

But as I’ve grown older, and visited more, I see Lebanon more clearly: Lebanon’s immense hospitality, natural beauty, and activity help to paper over its dysfunction.

Yes, I could spend my nights dancing away among Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Druze to some of the best DJs in the world, but when we went back to the village, the lights flickered and the water didn’t run reliably. The trendy port-side strip of restaurants and boutiques I visited on my first trip was all of a sudden gone, destroyed by a massive port explosion in 2020. We didn’t bring stacks of US dollars just to buy souvenirs — we brought them for family members worried about a nearly worthless lira. And on the way to shiny tourist destinations, we’d pass rundown villages, full of refugees struggling to find homes and jobs.

Underlying all the daily dysfunction is the reality that life in Lebanon is completely dependent on whether or not Hezbollah, an illegally armed extragovernmental militia, is picking fights with Israel.

Lebanon is magical. Lebanon is a failed state.

Although Hezbollah’s recent cease-fire with Israel might stem the latest round of violence in the country, it does nothing to address the forces that dragged Lebanon into war in the first place and that keep it in a constant state of economic and political disarray. Many point at Israel for Lebanon’s problems, but the true culprit resides inside the country.

Hezbollah was formed in 1982 in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which was in pursuit of the Palestinian Liberation Organization embedded in Beirut. Hezbollah positions itself as a Lebanese organization, committed to the flourishing of Lebanon across its many religions and sects. But in reality it uses Lebanon as a launching pad for its extreme ideology.

This organization, which the United States has designated a terrorist group, is the crown jewel of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” which endeavors to spread Iranian power and to impose velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamist jurist. This is the type of government Iran has, where theocracy means women cannot live freely and adherence to jihad is a legal obligation. The Axis’ broader goals include the diminishment of the West and the destruction of Israel.

Hezbollah’s political and military grip on Lebanon has robbed the country of its sovereignty and has perpetuated a state of instability. “If the state does not hold all the reins of power and violence, it can collapse any minute, just like a house of cards,” says Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a Lebanese research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Sovereignty is not only undermined by foreign parties. It can be undermined by domestic parties as well.”

Hezbollah is sustained and empowered by funding, arming, and training from Iran. But it has also flourished because the Lebanese government cannot. Fettered by an ill-conceived “confessional” system, which allocates government positions by religious sect, the Lebanese government is prone to corruption and has critical gaps in services.

“Lebanon’s form of government, this sectarian breakdown of prime minister, president, and head of Parliament, is inherently unstable, and so you end up with three government heads. It’s like a hydra, and no one is accountable to anyone else,” Bonnie Glick, who was the deputy administrator of the United States Agency for International Development under Donald Trump, told me. Hezbollah has filled some of those gaps, catering to the social needs of a growing and increasingly underserved Shiite population. It has banks, schools, and a wide network of humanitarian assistance that helps it to maintain a modicum of legitimacy, especially among Shiites.

But it also has a huge militia, with thousands of missiles pointed straight at Israel. Hezbollah has more fighters and a more advanced arsenal than even the Lebanese Army. This creates a deep tension in the country: Is Hezbollah defending the Lebanese or just fighting for its own cause?

“Many Lebanese are really none too pleased that Hezbollah dragged the country into this war, which they refer to correctly, as far as I’m concerned, as Hezbollah’s war of choice,” Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told me. Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in September, voiced support for Hamas up until his death and opened conflict with Israel the day after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack. There are many Lebanese who deplore Israel and some who have at some points supported Hezbollah’s offensives against the Jewish state throughout the last four decades — but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want to be caught in Hezbollah’s endless wars.

As Hezbollah’s grip on the country has increased, so has Lebanon’s instability. Since its 2006 war with Israel, Hezbollah has managed to strengthen its armed presence south of the Litani River — in defiance of UN Resolution 1701 — while becoming a more powerful political force. Lebanon hasn’t had a president for two years because Hezbollah keeps blocking candidates and undermining the opposition movement. Its grip on politics has led to gross mismanagement, like allowing hazardous materials to be stored at Beirut’s main port, which led to the 2020 explosion there that killed 235 people, displaced 300,000 more, hampered shipping in an import-dependent economy, and caused over $10 billion in damage. The militia is known to have controlled the port, and necessary investigation efforts have been blocked.

Unstable politics and a failing economy go hand in hand. In 2019 Lebanon experienced one of the worst economic crises in modern history, prompting a widespread protest movement. Its real GDP shrank by 40 percent and the currency lost 98 percent of its value as the government defaulted on its debts. Government mismanagement and corruption have certainly played a role, and yet Hezbollah’s destabilizing effect on the country is a primary factor. “The reason why Lebanon was collapsing, the economy collapsed after 2019, and the state was losing its semblance of being a state was that no one wants to live in a country that might flare up and go into war any minute,” Abdul-Hussain told me.

Lebanon’s economy is largely based on foreign direct investment, diasporal remittances, and tourism — not exactly a recipe for resilience.

In an effort to rein in inflation over the last year, the central bank has stopped using reserves to fund the government, whose coffers were also bolstered by summer tourism. But for the first time since war broke out with Israel, Lebanon’s reserves are dropping as the bank has had to start lending to the government again. Roy Tohmé, a former central bank employee, told me that if the government’s plan is “to spend money to calm the people, then we can be right back at our original problem, which is rampant inflation.”

This creates an impossible situation: The World Bank estimates that Hezbollah’s war has cost the country $8.5 billion — on top of its ongoing debts and financial crises. And then even as Lebanon continues to struggle to deal with the Syrian refugee crisis, a new refugee crisis looms as displaced southerners look for homes and jobs.

Impossible without foreign aid, that is. But foreign entities are understandably wary of lending money to a government that has little control over its own country. For example, in the immediate aftermath of Lebanon’s economic crisis, the International Monetary Fund conditioned aid on government reform. The only reform coming from Lebanon’s corrupt politicians has been performative at best. But that’s also because of Hezbollah’s veto on the presidency and the sheer inability of a country to rebuild itself with a terrorist organization steering the ship.

That much was made clear at the recent Gulf Cooperation Council summit. True to form, the council condemned Israel. More telling was what the council said about Hezbollah. It called on Lebanon to adopt the 2022 Kuwaiti Initiative, which tied financial bailouts to the country’s ability to disarm Hezbollah.

The West should be equally demanding. “The thought of fixing the Lebanese government without first addressing Hezbollah is irresponsible,” Glick told me. Reform will take courage from Lebanon’s leaders — especially the opposition — who too often default to blaming Israel for all of Lebanon’s problems. Levitt believes that the West will “have to demand the kind of political reform no one was willing to do before.”

If the West or the Gulf states don’t step in, Iran will only establish its foothold more securely. With its help, Hezbollah continues to cater to the humanitarian needs of people in southern Lebanon, even after the substantial hit Hezbollah has taken from Israel. Tohmé, who’s currently the director of the Lebanese emergency-response organization Clinic Baytna Baytak, told me that Hezbollah is “alive and kicking,” despite being diminished by Israel’s pager explosion attack and its invasion of the south.

Tohmé noticed that Hezbollah is helping to rehouse displaced Shiites in the south. Videos of aid packages from Hezbollah’s affiliated organizations often include Iranian flags stamped on the boxes. A better alternative would be for a strong Lebanese government to serve its citizens’ needs, with support from the Gulf states and the West.

Last week, Hezbollah pledged up to $14,000 to families displaced in the south, no doubt funded with the help of Iran. Other bad actors may step in too. “China would be only too happy to have a port in Sidon, to have the Lebanese coastline, and to have the ability to spy on Israel even more closely,” Glick told me.

The truth is that Hezbollah — not Israel — is Lebanon’s greatest barrier to sovereignty. Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, might tell his Lebanese subjects that he’s working to make Lebanon “more beautiful than it was” and to “build a unified Lebanon” across its various sects, but he’s lying. In his own writings, Qassem has revealed the organization’s ultimate goal is to push Lebanese of various sects to succumb to Iranian theocracy and to fight against Israel and the West.

The Lebanese continue to dwell on minor border disputes with Israel, past invasions, and the fact that Israel has indeed trespassed in Lebanese airspace with spy drones and military jets. But Lebanon has to look inward as well. The country, through Hezbollah, is controlled almost entirely by Iran. Are Israel’s transgressions on Lebanese sovereignty of the same magnitude as Iran’s?

Lebanese leaders know the answer to this question, but they’ve been too scared to say it— Hezbollah, after all, has a knack for whacking its political opponents. And the war-weary Lebanese are understandably frustrated with Israel. But even without war with Israel, Lebanon would still be on its current trajectory of political and economic ruin.

With the recent toppling of the Assad regime in Syria, the conditions are potentially more favorable for the Lebanese to finally disarm and disempower Hezbollah. Without Assad in power, the land bridge between Tehran and Beirut is cut off, impairing the Islamic Republic’s ability to send arms and aid. “It’s going to make it very difficult for Iran, who’s pulling out of Syria, to some degree, being able to transfer weapons in,” US envoy Amos Hochstein said Saturday. Abdul-Hussain believes that now there’s less political leverage for the militia than ever. The events in Syria just add “weakness to weakness,” he said.

The Lebanese have made the impossible possible. Even in wartime, planning has been underway for Christmas festivals, restaurants remain open, and Beirut natives go out, looking for a distraction.

But in the most recent round of fighting, more cracks have been showing. Nightclubs have been nearly empty — or used for shelter. Beirut’s iconic Hamra Street, once buzzing with cafes and shops, has become a home for those displaced from the south. Many in the diaspora have canceled their holiday visits back home.

The Lebanese deserve their country back. And that starts with ousting Hezbollah.