If we set UN Resolution 1701 aside, its various interpretations, and all the texts around it, we could discuss a divergence in conceptions around the outcome of the “Support War” and the Israeli counter war. In the Lebanese state’s reading, there are “mutual obligations” and “reciprocal steps.” If the Israelis renege on their commitments, the Lebanese have the right to do the same. However, this reading, which might be the result of either real limited capacities, or could be an attempt to feign such limitations, seems besieged by the Israeli, and to a large extent the American, reading.
As far as Tel Aviv and Washington are concerned, one party was defeated and another was victorious; accordingly, the side that lost should simply comply with the victor’s dictates. As for talk of the two parties being equally obligated to follow through on their commitments, it is absolute nonsense that the Lebanese state cannot afford to engage with.
The Israelis have not hesitated to declare that they will do the job – disarm Hezbollah - if the Lebanese authorities do not take the initiative. Given their reading of the situation and what we know about Netanyahu and his unrestrained and undeterred brutality, it would be best to take Israel’s threats and warnings seriously.
Pushing further in this direction are Israelis’ claims, be they true or false, that Hezbollah is trying to rebuild its capabilities. Naturally, its claims are more ominous if they are untrue; making such claims mendaciously would suggest the Israelis’ uncompromising intentions can only be deterred by actually getting rid of Hezbollah’s arms.
However, the behavior of the latter and its demands that Lebanon “not submit to Israel and America”, entail nothing, in practice, but entrapment that leads to suicide. We know that such an entrapment is part and parcel of Hezbollah’s DNA and strategy. This is a party that did not stop its resistance after Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, and then kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in 2006, summoning a war to Lebanon.
Strikingly, Hezbollah, which became situated in a purely defensive posture since its defeat in the “Support War,” has ramped up the belligerence of its rhetoric, the echoes of which can be heard in Tehran, where Parliament Speaker Mohammad Qalibaf declared that “supplying the party with missiles is not impossible.” From Sanaa, Abdul Malik al-Houthi informed us that the Lebanese government “is offering services to the Israeli enemy free of charge.” The fact is, however, that neither of these two men, who recently reared their heads out from under the rubble, is in better shape than Hezbollah.
The people of Lebanon and Syria have not forgotten that slogan written on their walls taunting Hafez al-Assad as an “Assad (lion) in Lebanon and a rabbit in the Golan.” This binary is currently being replicated verbatim by Hezbollah, its patrons, and its regional allies, and just as Hafez al-Assad had been portrayed as “the Golan’s hero” despite having personally presided over the battle in which it was lost to Israel, the same irrational machine has tasked itself with making a defeated Hezbollah out to be a “party defending Lebanon” and “protecting it.”
Its latest show of force, projecting images of Hassan Nasrallah and Hashem Safieddine on the Raouche Rock, was a vivid physical embodiment of this binary split. For those who expected that - on the anniversary of its two leaders’ deaths, and over a year after the calamity it had inflicted on Lebanon and on itself - the party would grieve, reflect, and reconsider, found only indifference to such lofty sentiments. Its sole focus is on defying Lebanon’s state and society and supplementing this defiance with a long line of myths, falsifications, and a pathetic laser facetiousness.
The fact is that the resistance formations, especially their Lebanese branch, are civil war formations solely concerned with imposing their will on their societies and ensuring that subordinate authorities - or corrupt, compliant yes-men, the kinds of politicians who had “governed” Lebanon before the “Support War” - are in power. Many Lebanese did not fail to notice the symbolism of the images of Hassan Nasrallah’s index finger, which he had made a habit of raising to threaten the “delinquent” Lebanese, being projected on the rock.
As a civil war structure, however, it seeks to prevent this latent conflict from rising to the surface, as this would strip away Hezbollah of its last “resistance” fig leaf. In its latency, the war necessarily transforms the population into cheap cattle, and through its hold over the same language of irrationality, any sheep that refuses to get in line is branded a Zionist and an Israeli agent.
While it goes without saying that civil war is not something to wish for, and that the overwhelming majority of the population does not wish for it, to concede to its forces and their lust for power is to embolden them or, at the very least, to acquiesce to their blackmail.
Unfortunately, in the event of a retreat in the face of Hezbollah, it will be the Israelis, who are not concerned with such considerations, who would end the latency of this civil war, turning it into a cross-border conflict and finishing the job that the Lebanese state had failed to complete. The outcome, in this event, would be yet another case of successful entrapment that surpasses the one before it: leaving behind more death, more occupation, less of our South, and less reconstruction. As for Lebanon’s negotiating position with Israel, it would sink even further than it already has.
Accordingly, anyone seeking to tie Israel’s hands back must push for disarming Hezbollah, the party that entraps us abroad and taunts us at home, imposing a civil war on us, rather than indulging rhetoric - that even its proponents do not believe - about the balance of obligations between the victor and the vanquished who only “triumphs” in Raouche.
