And now, Hezbollah, are you satisfied?

This country—ours, after all—deserves better than your “resistance”! But what curse hangs over us, in this Orient given over to the whims of warmongers and would-be martyrs? Every time Arab leaders indulged in incendiary rhetoric and were swept into wars, we were headed for disaster.

Thus, on the eve of June 1967, the provocations of the Syrian Baath regime in Damascus dragged Egypt and Jordan into a six-day war. On one side, Egypt lost the Sinai, control of the Gaza Strip, and mastery of the Suez Canal; on the other, Syria lost the Golan, while the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was stripped of the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem (1). To this day, neither Damascus nor Amman has recovered from that misstep; the territories Israel had “taken” from them were never to be regained.

Only Lebanon, which had kept its distance, escaped the debacle and managed to preserve the entirety of its 10,452 km². But neither the Palestinians, nor the Haraqa al-Wataniya, nor the Iranians—who arrived last—saw it that way. They were determined, at all costs, to drag us into a conflict lost in advance, in order to demonstrate Arab and Islamic solidarity. That same Haraqa al-Wataniya, relying on the PLO, believed it could achieve its aims in 1975 by storming the “Lebanist” and legalist strongholds. Misled by its own insurrectionary rhetoric, it rejected the “isolationist” policy of the regime in place—a policy that had nevertheless preserved southern Lebanon from an Israeli invasion.

But what could we do? It was written that sooner or later we would be occupied by foreign forces. With this difference: today we are in a state of belligerency not out of Arab solidarity, but to avenge the martyrdom of the Iranian Supreme Leader.

Bravo—“twenty years later”

Being in the eye of the storm, let the numbers speak for themselves, and let us admit that Hezbollah has surpassed its 2006 score. During the 33-day war, 1,200 deaths were recorded; today, over the same span of time, there are already 1,400 victims (2). Bravo, Hezb! Let us continue: if twenty years ago more than 100,000 housing units were destroyed, this time systematic destruction has pulverized entire neighborhoods, and border villages have been wiped off the map (3). And to complete the comparison, note that while the one million displaced in 2006 were able, as soon as the fighting stopped, to return to their homes, they will not be able to do so under the current circumstances: the displacement, since last month, of 1.2 million people risks becoming irreversible.

We must now expect, as one observer puts it, a lasting transformation of the territory and a spatial reshaping—a geographic reconfiguration of the South aimed at “disarticulating Shiite areas” by cutting lines of communication. The idea is to establish a buffer zone, a prelude maybe to a creeping annexation. Bravo again, Hezb!

The West, our mihrab!

From independence, Lebanon chose to set itself apart and to detach from the neighboring countries mired in their anachronisms and nationalist rhetoric. Without denying our Eastern origins, and even less our Arab brotherhood, we looked—boldly—toward the West, which we took as our model and our mihrab. Our state distrusted disruptive ideologues as much as it did overexcited tribunes and warmongers. It was this gap between us and the neighboring Arab countries that defined us, and ensured on our soil the flourishing of formal freedoms and free enterprise—things strictly banned under Nasser, under the Assads (father and son), and under Saddam Hussein. Yet this Lebanese idiosyncrasy was seen as high treason by certain political parties and a good part of our people. In 1956, President Chamoun could refuse to sever diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom and France, which had gone astray in the Suez expedition. But from 1990 onward, we no longer had the means to resist: we would align ourselves definitively with Damascus…

And since then, despite the fall of the Baathist regime, we have been struggling to get out of the rut. And to tell you the truth, we are not yet done with Hezb. From one confrontation to another, it outdoes itself—it hurtles from catastrophe to catastrophe!

1—Moreover, Golda Meir did not fail to tell King Hussein: all this would still be yours had you not intervened on June 6!
2—As of today, we have surpassed two thousand dead, not to mention the wounded and those permanently disabled.
3—There will be plenty of time to take stock.