The Lebanese, or at least some of them, expect the European Union's decision to add Hezbollah to its list of terrorist organizations to disrupt their lives and their stability in the European countries of the diaspora, to which they have migrated forcibly or willingly over the past forty years. Yet this will be nothing compared to what their fellow citizens in Lebanon will have to endure, whether in terms of the decision coming into effect next week and the repercussions of close examination and hindrance it will have on their trade, their transactions, their money transfers, their business and of course their travel, or in terms of what this decision will mean with regard to exposing the situation in Lebanon to every threat, especially at the security level, if Hezbollah is not deterred. This is not the first time the Lebanese population has had to pay the price for Hezbollah's unilateral strategies or bear the burden it lays on their shoulders every time Iran decides to move some of its pawns, Hezbollah being most prominent among them, in the regional and international game of influence. Yet this new European decision in effect means lifting the last remaining element of immunity held by Lebanon and the Lebanese, after the Europeans had long hesitated to follow the example of the Americans and Arabs, who had preceded them in this. In past experiences, the most recent and most important being the July War of 2006, European diplomacy had succeeded to protect Lebanon, including Hezbollah, from the large-scale destruction which the US administration had given Israel the green light to carry out. It had been able to rein in the enemy's military machine and minimize the damage it could inflict, in exchange for keeping the South Lebanon front in check and participating in securing it through the deployment of UNIFIL troops. Today, however, Hezbollah's public and growing involvement in the war in Syria and suspicions that it might be responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in some European countries have made the Europeans realize that their protection of it has been counter-productive. Thus, instead of Hezbollah moving, after the "sealing" of the South Lebanon front, to gradually turn into a political movement and abandon its weapons within the framework of integrating its forces into the army and security services, it has begun to expand the range of its activity beyond Lebanon, so as to expend its excess power and entrench its role within the regional equation, after having succeeded to either obstruct or control Lebanon's state institutions. It is true that the Europeans have only taken the first step – having made the distinction between the "military wing" of the party and its "political wing", while being well aware that they are both one and the same in a party with a security-based structure, as well as knowing that Hezbollah would not back down on its involvement in the war in Syria, because this has taken place under orders from Iran, which it cannot go against. They have nonetheless given it one last chance before leaving it all alone in the international arena in any future confrontation with Israel – a confrontation that may not be far off, and of which the outcome will be destructive for all of Lebanon. The European decision means that Hezbollah must settle the contradiction it has gotten itself into, and determine whether it wants to continue to benefit from the protection given by Lebanese legitimacy if it decides to be part of it, or whether it wants to continue turning against this legitimacy, weakening it, obstructing the work of its institutions and overstepping its decisions, among them in particular the policy of dissociation from the civil war in Syria. In other words, Hezbollah cannot continue to play the card of Lebanon's stability and claim to be concerned for it, while it drags the country gradually, and against the will of most of its people, into the politics of regional axes, which will bring it nothing but misfortune.
