Hezbollah may be
writing the book - at least for now - of
fourth-generation war. Hezbollah had a reputation
as an extremely disciplined, mobile guerrilla
force. Now Hezbollah has fully revealed itself as
a more than competent asymmetrical actor.
Hezbollah controls a great deal of
territory - Beirut's southern suburbs, vast areas
in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, which is
sandwiched between two mountain ranges along the
Syrian border. Hezbollah enjoys staunch popular
support running to probably one and a half million
people, almost half the population of Lebanon. And
Hezbollah has been capable of unleashing some
relatively sophisticated military operations
against Israel using both conventional and
unorthodox weapons.
It's still impossible
to assess the ramifications of Hezbollah's
prestige in the Arab street
being tremendously enhanced after its military
success for the past week - which include
delivering missiles to the heart of Israel. But
the Arab street has certainly registered the
communique by the House of Saud against Hezbollah,
as well as the thunderous
silence-cum-embarrassment displayed by the US
client regimes of Egypt and Jordan.
A
certified effect of the Israeli bombing barrage
will be to draw newer, thicker waves of moderate
Muslims toward political - and radical - Islam.
The perception in the Arab street - as well as for
most of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims - has been
reinforced: the US/Israel axis seems to hold a
license to kill Arabs with impunity. For its
part, Israel's Leviathan-run-amok tactic of trying
to turn the Lebanese as a whole against Hezbollah
seems to be doomed to failure. This is especially
because compounding Israel's trademark
collective-punishment techniques - bombing bridges
and an international airport, killing scores of
civilians indiscriminately, turning Beirut into
Gaza - shines President George W Bush's imperial
indifference, not to mention the international
community's. Just as in 1982 - when president
Ronald Reagan said it was all right for Ariel
Sharon to invade Lebanon - now Bush says it's all
right for Israel to bomb Lebanese civilians.
Israel does not listen to anybody - be it
the toothless United Nations or the even more
cowardly European Union. Beirut is in panic.
According to Hanady Salman, a journalist at
As-Safir newspaper, the population widely expects
that "as soon as the evacuation of foreigners will
be completed, the Israelis will have a freer
hand". Not by accident, all the areas bombed by
Israel - and most of the civilians killed - are
among the poorest in Lebanon.
Hezbollah is
convinced it got its overall strategy right -
factoring all the angles of the Leviathan-run-amok
response; so there's no way the Lebanese people as
a whole may blame Hezbollah for the escalation.
Moreover, Hezbollah is a key force in fractured
Lebanon. The majority of Lebanon's population is
Shi'ite: at least 45% (in south Beirut, this
correspondent was repeatedly told they may be from
55% to 60%). Christians are no more than 30%. The
majority of Shi'ites - mostly poor, with very
extended families, and a great deal of them
basically peasants - support Hezbollah.
Symbolically, fiercely independent Hezbollah
represents the revenge of the oppressed - not only
against the well off Sunni and Christians but
against the Israeli invaders.
Hezbollah is
a genuine resistance movement, such as Hamas in
Palestine. Israel's military logic rules that it
must crush any Arab resistance movement. Now
Israel seems to have found two pretexts to try to
crush simultaneously both Hezbollah and Hamas.
Israel's modus operandi is to take entire
populations hostage.
French social
scientist Alain Joxe has demonstrated how these
policies are "technical experiments" always
observed with extreme interest by the Pentagon.
The stateless Palestinians have been taken hostage
in two giant, unconnected gulags in Gaza and the
West Bank. Now the experiment - through relentless
bombing - applies to a whole sovereign country.
But Israel is also reaping - in the form of
Hezbollah's renewed fourth-generation war efforts
- what it sowed with its debasement of
Palestinians.
The absence of a level
playing field is glaring. The Israeli Defense
Forces (IDF) may kidnap a doctor and his brother -
two civilians - from their home in Gaza. But
Leviathan runs amok when Hezbollah captures
soldiers (according to Israel that's "illegitimate
and illegal"). Meanwhile, Israel's Defense
Ministry places "the head of the snake" in
Damascus, even while the IDF uses the same
questionable methods - toward civilians.
The taboo - never questioned by the bulk
of Western mainstream media - runs that Israel is
allowed to kill innocent civilians without
expecting any retaliation. The Lebanese
French-language daily L'Orient-Le Jour summed it
up: the "international community" supports Lebanon
without condemning Israel, which is reducing a
sovereign country to rubble.
Our way or
the (bombed) highway Israel's logic is
unilateral. It has blamed the Lebanese government
as a whole. Hezbollah has only a small role in the
Lebanese government; it is actually in the
opposition. Power in Beirut is in the hands of US
and Sunni Arab allies. The Hariri clan, mired in
dodgy deals, remains extremely powerful. Fouad
Siniora, a banker, the new Lebanese prime minister
- and a strong critic of Syria - defines Hezbollah
as a "legitimate resistance" group. As such, it
should not be disarmed.
Thus Israel's real
objective must be to provoke civil war in Lebanon
- just as it did everything to provoke civil war
in Palestine. The strategy is always the same.
Israel wants Fatah to crush Hamas in Palestine,
and now it wants the government in Beirut to crush
Hezbollah. Or else ...
It was Hezbollah's
hardcore warriors - trained by Syria and Iran -
who ultimately expelled Israel from Lebanon in
2000. It's difficult for Westerners - or non-Arab
Asians - to understand how powerfully symbolic
this is in the Arab world: it means that Hezbollah
was the only Arab military force ever to defeat
Israel. Not surprisingly, even Lebanese Sunnis
approve what Hezbollah is doing - they interpret
it as solidarity with Hamas and the Palestinian
struggle (as Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader,
made it all too clear).
Moreover, Israel's
Leviathan-run-amok response has only served to
rally Sunnis behind a "Lebanon under siege"
banner.
The relationship between Iran and
Hezbollah is not unlike Moscow's with assorted
communist parties during the Cold War. There are
no directives issued from Tehran - as Washington
neo-cons see it. Hamas may be Sunni and Hezbollah
may be Shi'ite, but both parties - supported by
Syria and Iran - converge as resistance movements
based on a platform of national struggle against
foreign (Israeli) occupation.
There's
nothing sectarian about it. On the contrary,
Hezbollah shows total solidarity with Hamas. And
way beyond Israel identified as the common enemy,
both Hamas and Hezbollah clearly identify the
not-so-invisible big enemy behind, the US, for
which Israel is a kind of "militarized offshoot",
in the words of Noam Chomsky. Virtually every
Lebanese knows that the missiles currently
exterminating their compatriots were made in
Miami, Duluth and Seattle.
Whatever the
outcome, blowback will be inevitable. Osama bin
Laden, in one of his videos, told the world how he
burned with anger when he saw the Israeli bombing
of the "towers" of Lebanon during the 1982
invasion. The new Osamas in the making may be
Sunni or Shi'ite, it doesn't matter: what matters
is what they identify as the American/Israeli
license to kill (mostly poor, defenseless) Arabs.
Iran for its part may have been a full
Hezbollah supporter, but now it's as much a
staunch supporter of Hamas. As Nasrallah has
emphasized on many occasions, Hezbollah as a
resistance movement is not engaged only in the
liberation of the Sheba Farms, still occupied by
Israel; Hezbollah sees itself as a powerful actor
positioned right at the center of the Arab-Israeli
conflict.
As Lebanese-born Gilbert Achcar,
a political-science professor at the University of
Paris-VIII, puts it, "The main source of
destabilization in the region is this violent and
arrogant behavior of Israel that is in full
harmony with the equally arrogant and violent
behavior the United States displayed in Iraq." No
change is in sight, not when Bush's "Greater
Middle East" has revealed itself for what it is -
a fallacy.
When in doubt, invade
The Israeli public relations machine - in
English, thus widely monopolizing the airwaves,
unlike Hezbollah, which expresses itself in Arabic
- brags that now it's time to finish off
Hezbollah. That makes no sense - because Hezbollah
is a mass movement with roughly 1.5 million
adherents. To finish off Hezbollah means in
practice to finish off all poor Lebanese Shi'ites.
Iran and Iraq would never let it go
unpunished. Israel also conveniently forgets that
Hezbollah itself should not even exist - after
all, it was founded to fight the Israeli invasion
(in 1982) and occupation (until 2000) of southern
Lebanon.
Israel's three basic demands,
passed to Beirut by Italian Prime Minister Romano
Prodi, are the return of two captured Israeli
soldiers now under Hezbollah; a Hezbollah
withdrawal to the Litani River, which is roughly
45 kilometers north of the current
Lebanese-Israeli border; and no more rocket
attacks against Israel.
Most of this could
have happened before Israel illegally -
international law is clear about it - started
bombing a sovereign country. They could have
traded prisoners. And there would be no Hezbollah
rocket attacks because there would have been no
Israeli indiscriminate bombings. One thing is
certain: there is absolutely no chance the
Lebanese will accept retreating to the Litani
River. That would mean the establishment of a new
Israeli de facto border. The only way Israel can
annex these waters is by invading southern Lebanon
- again.
That's what the Stratfor
Intelligence Report said would happen. "The
Israeli Defense Forces is preparing for a major,
sustained assault into southern Lebanon to
eliminate the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah,"
said the report. "The assault will extend at least
to the Litani River - the first natural barrier,
roughly 20 miles into Lebanon - and possibly all
the way to areas south of Beirut ... Israel stands
on the verge of attempting to completely
annihilate Hezbollah in southern Lebanon."
Sounds like wishful thinking. And
Hezbollah will do anything to prevent it from
happening any time in the future. The key question
remains. The Lebanese government knows that if it
accedes to Israel's demands, there will be another
civil war in the country. At least for the moment,
Lebanon seems to be hanging on, engaged in passive
resistance against collective punishment.
As Israel wages war on the Palestinian
people and now the Lebanese people, Hezbollah may
be betting that Lebanon as whole will be able to
absorb the extreme limits of collective punishment
- and in the end the resistance movement will
still come out alive. Now that would be a lesson
for the ages.
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