A Lebanese Tragedy and Another Palestinian Nakba

The world speaks of a Lebanese tragedy brought about by Hezbollah and, behind it, Iran, and of another Palestinian Nakba caused by Hamas. What remains absent from any account of this tragedy and this Nakba are two major events: the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005.

Both withdrawals were complete. The first was carried out in execution of UN Security Council Resolution 425, adopted in 1978, and that same Council had from the outset rejected the official Lebanese narrative regarding the Shebaa Farms, a narrative that Hezbollah and its spearhead, the "president of the resistance" Emile Lahoud, had rushed to deploy. That narrative was nothing but a brazen lie, designed to justify the retention of the "resistance" weapons, weapons that were never directed at anything other than the Lebanese interior, and whose sole purpose was to keep southern Lebanon as a mailbox between Israel on one side and the Islamic Republic on the other. All of this unfolded without anyone pausing to ask, even in passing, about the fate of the people of that land, who were, and remain, the greatest absent party in this internal and regional equation. To this day, there is no rational explanation for what has befallen southern Lebanon and its people.

The events that followed the Israeli withdrawal confirmed that the preservation of arms took precedence over liberation from occupation. The proof was the determination to keep the southern front open. A Hezbollah unit, acting on direct instructions from Bashar al-Assad, whose ego Iran was intent on inflating, abducted several Israeli soldiers just a few months after the withdrawal.

Lebanon faced a choice between letting the South continue to bleed and working toward rebuilding itself. For Iran, the Israeli withdrawal was an opportunity to demonstrate the depth of its grip on Lebanon. That grip only expanded and consolidated after 2005, when members of the Hezb assassinated Rafic Hariri, an act that triggered a Syrian military withdrawal and left the Lebanese arena open before the Revolutionary Guards.

What did Lebanon build upon that Israeli withdrawal? It built, in practice, the catastrophe it suffers from today, one that has cast the entire country's future to the winds. Everyone speaks of the catastrophe, but very few point to the Lebanese failure itself, a failure that Iran systematically encouraged by obstructing any fruitful investment in the Israeli withdrawal. It would have been possible to turn that withdrawal into an opportunity for a better future, for the country, for its people, and for the South in particular, rather than allowing it to become the bridge over which occupation returned, an occupation whose eventual end, if it comes at all, remains unknown. And heavier than all of this is the scale of the ruin, the devastation, and what has rained down upon the villages of the South, along with the number of displaced persons within the Shia community, which now surpasses all imagination.

As for the other date that deserves to be recalled constantly, it is that of the complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005. It is certain that Ariel Sharon's calculations, primarily concerned with ridding himself of the Gaza Strip while consolidating control over the West Bank, drove that withdrawal. But it is equally certain that the Palestinian side as a whole, both the Authority and Hamas, did everything within its power to turn the Israeli withdrawal into yet another Palestinian catastrophe. One can naturally hold the Palestinian Authority, in the person of Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, accountable, a man who possesses no leadership qualities of any kind. Abu Mazen chose to remain outside Gaza at the very moment the Israelis withdrew, rather than being on the ground, among the people of the territory.

With time, Hamas's weapons prevailed over Gaza and its people. Rather than making the withdrawal of summer 2005 an opportunity to build a small-scale model of a viable, civilized Palestinian state, that withdrawal became an opportunity for Israel to claim that there was no Palestinian partner with whom to negotiate.

What Gaza endures today did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the result of a deliberate, calculated course of action pursued by Hamas over more than two decades, focused on retaining its weapons in order to build an "Islamic emirate" along Taliban lines, and on undermining the Palestinian national project at its very foundations. Israel did not object to this orientation, nor did it object to the rockets Hamas launched from Gaza, nor take issue with them. Its overriding concern was to confirm that the Palestinians did not deserve a state and that negotiating with them was pointless, while deepening Palestinian internal divisions at the same time.

In southern Lebanon first, and then in Gaza, the weapons served their function in Israel's interest, until the "Al-Aqsa Flood" came. On October 7, 2023, the spell was turned against the sorcerer. Israel discovered that it could no longer coexist with either Hezbollah's weapons or Hamas's arsenal. Both belong to the past, and more than that, they belong to a different world, one that was prepared to reach all manner of accommodations with Iran and its regime, which has practiced the art of extortion with unparalleled mastery since the very first day of its existence in 1979.

The two Israeli withdrawals, from southern Lebanon and from Gaza, were two missed opportunities for the Lebanese and the Palestinians. The withdrawal from the South laid the foundations for a Lebanese catastrophe that could have been avoided, and the withdrawal from Gaza laid the groundwork for a new Palestinian Nakba, at a moment when the future of the entire region and the contours of its possible reshaping are being posed, in light of developments in Iran, with unprecedented sharpness.

Opportunities pass before peoples. Some know how to seize them; others do not. What is truly reprehensible is the refusal to acknowledge that those opportunities existed, and to act as though they never were, when in fact they were more real and more tangible than was necessary.