The Lebanese Rejectionists in Their Loneliness

In the most recently broadcast speech of new Hezbollah Secretary General, Sheikh Naim Qassem, and in Resistance Axis supporters’ comments on the ongoing catastrophe, there is a loneliness that induces pity but also induces fear. This loneliness is not just a matter of isolation, as their rhetoric disregards everything else happening around us- and above and below us. We only find rocket barrages fired at Israel and hits on a group of enemy soldiers, a tank or a bulldozer; there are also Israelis forced into shelters, and, of course, we have the strange “field” that has been “between us and them” since the late Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah uttered this phrase. This is not to say that this military activity has no utility at all, but to say that it should be measured against the immense challenges posed by the security arrangements that will likely be imposed on Lebanon now that its border region has become scorched earth.
Because the Resistance Axis’s (five or six) catchphrases are concerned only with themselves and their tendency for self-adulation impedes comparison and quantified evaluation, the number of those giving these catchphrases any attention is dwindling, while they leave everyone else yawning.
At best, such phrases (increasingly) tell us very little about the broad direction the war is taking and covers and shows us less and less of the entire picture, which is dominated by Israel’s indescribably savage rampage. Along with the extensive death and destruction, which includes the damage done to Hezbollah itself, the very foundations of Lebanon’s nationhood have begun to crack and perhaps even to be ripped out. The Israelis, regardless of how far they take their evil, could not dream of inflicting greater harm than this on those they intend to harm.
If the theory that Benjamin Netanyahu will become more brutal in the two months between now and Donald Trump’s inauguration, we can expect episodes even more horrifying than the extreme horrors we have been living through for just over a year, and we can also anticipate their depressing political implications.
However, there are other sides to this loneliness that are made more apparent with the introduction of an external factor like the US presidential elections.
Going against the global consensus, which spans the entire spectrum of opinion about it, on the significance and immense implications of this development Sheikh Qassem deemed it a non-issue that he couldn’t care less about. Mind you, one scenario that could follow in the near future is a maximum pressure campaign on Iran, whereby the only way it could avoid an attack within its borders is to retreat back into them. That is why it is becoming noticeable that Iranian political officials do not have the luxury of exhibiting the same loneliness and indecision as their followers. And so, we now see them coupling their familiar rhetoric about "the resistance’s certain victory" with increasingly nuanced assertions in response to current events. The latest example of this is Ali Larijani, an advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, stating that "Israel wants to take the conflict to Iran" and thus, "we must act wisely to avoid its trap and not react instinctively."
The fact is that the only pulse of the Resistance Axis’s weak and repetitive resistance catchphrases- the less than five or six of them- are shallow arguments meant to convince us that the corpse is alive and that, on top of that, it is armed with coherent reasoning that explains its presence and role. However, the reason they are swiftly overlooked might be that they do not, in fact, constitute a solid ideological position and narrative- even when it opens the door to squabbles, a monologue is never a prelude to real debate.
For instance, as soon as an argument blaming the army for having failed to safeguard Lebanon’s sovereignty began to make the rounds following the incident in Batroun, it was met with a torrent of mockery and ridicule on social media. Indeed, those echoing this reproach were not held back by the collapse of Lebanon's sovereignty across the country because of Hezbollah’s decisions and actions.
Moreover, the claim that Israel does not need a pretext to attack Lebanon ignores the fact that the very existence of Hezbollah, with its arms and its explicit desire to annihilate Israel, is the ultimate pretext.
We should also note that, historically, the absence of a pretext had spared Lebanon, allowing it to avoid being dragged into the wars of 1967 and 1973; the policies of Hezbollah's predecessors, on the other hand, did nothing but create pretexts: this was true of the 1969 Cairo Agreement, which effectively nullified the 1949 armistice, and the successful effort to kill the “treasonous” May 17 Agreement. What if we applied this inane argument to Iraq and said that Israel will strike it regardless of pretexts, at a time when various Iraqi, Arab, and international actors are making futile attempts to remove the pretext, the rockets launched by the "Jihadist factions?”
The truth is that the things we are seeing and hearing today, some samples of which were mentioned here, are the kinds of hallucinations that loneliness could engender. Hallucination cannot lead a country, any country, and determine its fate.