Has Hezbollah Won the Argument?

A Lebanese perspective

You’re looking at the St George Hotel in the 1950s.

A week ago, Saturday afternoon! They stood there, in the middle of the street, posing, this young man and woman. He was in a tuxedo, she was in a backless white party dress. He held her low as if to kiss her, she grabbed on to him as her long hair fell to the cobblestones below. Their three female friends, all in chadors, merrily snapped photos as he swayed her between this arm and that.

They laughed, the rest of us shrugged as we walked on. A familiar sight in Beirut’s Saifi Village, for years now the prime location for photoshoots of newlyweds and graduates, wannabe models and actors, publicity campaigns and commercials.

Where the lovers danced

The talk everywhere was of war, but here the mood was breezy. Not a make-believe world, Saifi, but a parallel universe, no less real than any other one in this country. 

Sunday! In the wee hours of the morning, Israeli jets flew low, broke the sound barrier, and rattled the Lebanese skies with a couple of sonic booms. Many of us slept through it.

A familiar Israeli scare tactic; a familiar Lebanese reaction.

Wednesday! Israel assassinates Mohammad Naameh Nasser, a senior Hezbollah commander.

The saga in the south, though, is not entirely old.

It’s a dead zone from what we are able to see and gather. The Israeli army has destroyed villages, buildings, homes, infrastructure, laid waste to the region’s agricultural economy, used phosphorous bombs to poison fertile soil, displaced and killed scores of civilians and Hezbollah officers and soldiers.

There is nothing new about this woe. There’s everything new about the one across the border in Israel’s north. Hezbollah has hit, with extreme precision, military bases and outposts, lit up forests, damaged highways, killed Israeli soldiers, and drove away 60,000 of the area’s inhabitants.  

Pain is no longer solely a Lebanese story. And deterrence is no longer an Israeli one. A game changer, then, for us and them? A new age, a turning point. Hezbollah bleeds, it is true, but it basks in the achievement too–and so it should. The hell that Israel rained on us with nothing to fear in 2006 and umpteen times before can rain on us still but with much to fear.

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s former prime minister, has a bone to pick with Benjamin Netanyahu but there was nothing politically self-serving about his reality check in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN: “If Hezbollah will use all their powers…Israel will suffer great pain, greater than we ever suffered in the history of confrontation with our countries.”

Hezbollah’s Lebanese enemies are suddenly deer caught in the headlights; they sound like visitors from another time, another Lebanon just as unrecognizable to us as it is, no doubt, to them. The language they speak is removed, fantastical, wooden; ironically the kind of tongue they once accused the resistance movement itself of using. In a country they themselves were happy to turn into a playground for money launderers, thieves, murderers, drug kingpins, and flunkies, they drone on incomprehensibly about a strong Lebanon, a sovereign Lebanon, a thriving and free Lebanon.  

I heard that, recently, a few “independent” parliamentarians–“The Alternatives,” as they like to think of themselves–visited the US to seek empathy and support. In this trek, they perhaps thought they were wisely emulating the much older and bigger factions in their perpetual quest for foreign patrons.

Apparently, upon arrival at their meetings, they were asked in a manner of speaking: “Who are you, people?” The advice they reportedly brought back home with them was quite revealing: agree on the way forward with Hezbollah, because, well, Hezbollah is the party with which to agree on the way forward? They wouldn’t have been the only ones offered this counsel.

There’s something to be said for faux republics that have had enough of their keepers’ pretenses and wild imaginings. In years past, I thought a dead serious Hezbollah and a frivolous Lebanon were just too awkward of a match, too difficult of a relationship, made for possibly disruptive conflicts. But I think we are well beyond that point. If there is politics to be contested in earnest, it certainly isn’t between this country’s contentious sects. It hardly ever was in decades past anyway, and now they all need to do themselves a favor and wrap up the entire silly act.

Hezbollah, of course, is not innocent of what Lebanon has come to, but the costs of its pivotal role in indulging and entrenching this shamble of a state are certainly not borne by these sectarian opponents. If anything, they’re all very grateful and perfectly content to publicly bicker while they privately deal.  

The costs fall entirely on Lebanon itself and all of us Lebanese who truly aspire to one that is at a minimum functional and coherent. Alas, I have no idea what we might constitute in numbers; in strength, though, we are clearly far outmatched.

For the moment–and, I suspect, for a while longer–the only arenas worth watching, the only ones that count, are Gaza and our south. To the extent that Hezbollah has succeeded in qualitatively altering the calculus with an Israel that many of us rightly consider a mortal enemy, the resistance has our support. And with it a new nuance has been introduced into a never simple Lebanese picture.

A breach has formed in the camp that has long had a fundamental issue with the conduct of Hezbollah in the Lebanese morass. It’s not clear yet how deep and consequential this fissure is, but many are breaking for the movement’s mission and mandate as an armed resistance. That the Jewish state’s increasingly blatant messianism is further feeding its predatory character as Lebanon fast withers only adds to the urgency and firmness of this position.

Ever since Israel’s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon (bar the Shabaa’ Farms) in 2000, an argument has raged among those who have insisted that Hezbollah should retain its arms to defend Lebanon and those who have protested that its mission had ended with the end of the occupation and so, therefore, should its status as a resistance army.

The debate is settled now in any remotely informed Lebanese conversation. And Hezbollah has won it.

On Another Note

Fintan O’tool’s essay in The New York Review of Books on Biden’s “Savior Complex” is perhaps the one piece Biden should read as he ponders his path:

Biden’s motivations are infinitely more benign than Trump’s, but he has ended up in the same place: with the great delusion of “I alone.” This is a face-off that Trump will always win. His supporters really do believe in his exceptionality—as the miserable performance of Ron DeSantis in the Republican primaries showed, they do not care for Trumpism without Trump. Few of Biden’s supporters think likewise about their candidate. The valorization of the lone savior suits reactionary politics—it is not a good fit for democracy. It is the ultimate case of the anti-Trump forces operating on Trump’s terms.

The Democrats cannot defeat Trump by trying to play on a course he already owns. Those who want to stick with Biden whatever happens are engaged not in rational politics but in magical thinking, the belief that Biden’s victory in 2020 has imbued him with powers that only he can wield. But this fantasy is becoming a horror story in which the dark shadow of America’s democracy threatens to usurp its life.

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