The question of arms and disarmament has, in the cases of Hamas and Hezbollah, taken a trajectory that does not align with the population’s suffering, nor the ethical obligations dictated by the population’s living conditions and the need to end that suffering. From the very beginning, the possession of these arms was never bound to measures that reflect concern for the population, such as building shelters for them or digging militants’ tunnels far from their homes, let alone a sociopolitical vision for how to improve people’s lives and living conditions after the promised victory is attained.
However, the armament question is also taking a track that diverges from politics and viable objectives. That is, harming Israel with the use of these weapons - to say nothing of defeating it militarily - has, as our lived experiences show, become entirely beside the point. As for future horizons, they are riddled with signs of Israel carrying on and of completing its victory, with not a single sign of a war against Israel.
Such things are not said to “generate despair” or “push a narrative of defeat.” Indeed, the despair and defeat are more than glaring enough as it is. And, contrary to the ludicrous propaganda pushed by those who want us to blindly go along with and repeat the lies and blatant hyperboles promoted by their armed forces, these things are certainly not said out of love or sympathy for Israel either.
There is no prudent position - no position which builds a pertinent assessment of the situation and the paths to change - that does not entail disarmament and stopping this defeat in its tracks after it had already gone very far, as well as preventing the Jewish state from killing more civilians, starving them, expanding its occupation and territorial encroachments, and obstructing reconstruction efforts.
The fact is that, because of the sharp severance between arms and their celebrated nominal functions, and because these arms have become a cause for greater suffering and more death, myths have come to play an increasingly prominent role in defending armament and the hopes built on arms. Accordingly, we have recently come across people who tell us that these arms will only be handed over to the Mahdi once he returns, or that Hezbollah’s leadership is contemplating the liberation of the Galilee in northern Israel...
Implicitly, appealing to superstition finds a lot of outside material to work with. We know that since the end of World War II, arms have become the basis of claims to legitimacy that rivals the legitimacy of elected institutions. In 1945, for example, Ahmad Sukarno became the president of Indonesia, and maintained his position until 1967, not because he was elected but because he had “fought” Dutch colonialism and driven the Dutch out. Other “national liberation movements” subsequently followed in Sukarno’s footsteps, with some taking shade under Mao Zedong’s famous maxim that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” That is how, after Bolshevism and fascism created ruptures with the notion of legitimacy that colonialism took to the colonies, anti-colonial movements achieved a third rupture, and that was before Khomeini integrated the divine into this substitution process.
Nonetheless, one does not need extraordinary mental capacities to notice that the primary reason for clinging to these arms is their domestic function. It is no secret that broad swathes of the population, in Lebanon but also in Gaza, oppose these weapons and mock the supposed protection they offer. It is likely that the fighters’ tensions with the local population and both militias’ apprehensions about how the people would react to their disarmament only reinforce their determination to keep their arms.
Here, we find ourselves before a dazzling case of exploiting grand causes - like justice, liberation, and the correct ideological stance - and turning them into a pretext for carrying arms. In previous eras, we repeatedly saw weapons and “causes” work hand in hand to support one so-called “national liberation movement” in its battle against another force that had also been recognized as a “liberation movement.”
That is how, for example, Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumediene managed to defeat the “provisional government” of Benyoucef Benkhedda in Algeria. In South Yemen, Qahtan al-Shaabi and later Salim Rubaya Ali were overthrown by Abdel Fattah Ismail and his comrades in the same manner, and the “Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola” also succeeded in crushing two rival movements through this approach.
The difference between those cases and the experiences of Hamas and Hezbollah, however, is that the former contributed to the success of their countries’ struggle for independence - the goal that they had presented as their raison d’etre. Neither Hezbollah nor Hamas, on the other hand, has achieved any victory that could justify their continued existence. On top of that, the weapons they are clinging to cannot become a path to the kind of political power that the victors had attained in Algeria, Yemen, Angola, or anywhere else.
Hezbollah and Hamas are distinguished by their intention to do the opposite, to cling to defeated weapons amid a continuous and escalating defeat. This unique stance sets them apart from even the Iraqi model known as the “Popular Mobilization Forces;” the Iraqi army’s collapse before ISIS was an implicit condition for their emergence and their image as the alternative savior that would accelerate the course of the disguised civil war.
In general, we are facing an inherent essence with these two, whereby society is a single, inseparable whole composed of interconnected organs that cannot be understood in isolation from the others. As for arms, they alone explain everything else rather than everything else explaining them. What explains everything else, in the case at hand, also destroys everything and is now moving forward with the destruction of everything.
