Hezbollah, the Resistance That Summons Occupation

In an interview broadcast on one of Lebanon’s satellite channels, following Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 and amid what had afflicted some with a certain “national indigestion”, former Lebanese Defence Minister Albert Mansour took aim at the inhabitants of the occupied Syrian Golan, who numbered at the time no more than twenty thousand souls and had chosen the path of peaceful resistance against the Israeli occupation, asking with derision: “Why don’t these people resist the Israeli occupation?”

Many of Hezbollah’s mouthpieces and loyalists did the same, sparing the Golan’s inhabitants none of their repeated barbs over what they called a deviation from the principle “where there is occupation, there is resistance”, as though resistance could only manifest itself through rockets and projectiles, oblivious to the fact that the highest form of patriotism and resistance lies in clinging to the land, in refusing to surrender it as easy prey to the occupiers, and in preserving a heritage, a culture and an identity. This is precisely what the Golanis accomplished, within the limits of their modest and limited means, and in the most exemplary fashion. It was this state of affairs that compelled the author of these lines to publish, in January 2001, two detailed consecutive studies in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir under the title “And They Ask You: When Will You Fight Israel?”, then to follow them with another article in “Qadaya An-Nahar” on 29 November 2005, entitled “A Letter to Hezbollah from the Occupied Golan”, in which he invited the organisation unreservedly to neutralise Lebanon and relieve its front from the burden of the conflict with Israel, now that the Lebanese had paid their share of the price.

Yet, in a comedy of the darkest hue and by a reversal of a most singular kind, it was Hezbollah itself that, alongside Hamas in Gaza, proceeded to enshrine another conception of “resistance”, so strange that it would not have occurred to anyone, even in the most confused of dreams, and whose substance reduces to this: where resistance exists, occupation is summoned. A posture that goes far beyond the notion of national betrayal born of collaboration with the occupier, venturing into territory that is graver and more profound still. What Hezbollah has done to the Lebanese, and to the Shia in particular, has now reached the point of requiring the Arabic Language Academy to convene an emergency session and forge a new term that would leave the words crime and betrayal light-years behind.

Hezbollah was never a national liberation movement, nor did it ever deserve that honour to begin with; quite to the contrary, it has invariably been the armed and auxiliary appendage of a foreign state that occupies Arab lands, the Greater and Lesser Tunb and Abu Musa, before extending its grip entirely over Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. It was this Hezbollah that harvested the fruits of liberation in southern Lebanon in 2000, after having proceeded, in concert with its ally the Assad regime, to liquidate the cadres of the national resistance and monopolise armed struggle for itself. The voice of Georges Hawi, whom Hezbollah would subsequently assassinate, still resonates in memory: when he appeared in 2005, during the Independence Intifada, on a Lebanese satellite channel, to remind Hezbollah that after the Taif Agreement, Communist Party militants would slip clandestinely into the occupied border zone to carry out operations against the occupation and its agents, at the risk of being hunted down by them, and that Hezbollah’s own operatives had in fact liquidated many of them on their way back.

In light of all the foregoing, even the comparison with Antoine Lahad’s mini-state and his disbanded army, which Hezbollah MP Hassan Yaaqoub warned the President of the Republic might be recreated, and which had been entrusted by the Israeli occupation forces with no more than the surveillance of a strip accounting for ten percent of Lebanese territory in the South, even that comparison no longer holds against Hezbollah, which enabled Iran to extend its grip over the entirety of Lebanese territory, in addition to the decades of death, devastation and ruin it has sown among its own entourage and the Lebanese at large, to say nothing of its implication in the assassination of Lebanon’s finest sons and the countless pieces of evidence pointing to its responsibility for the explosion of Beirut’s port.

In any case, it would seem that this is the last war Hezbollah is drawing down upon the Lebanese, after having laid waste to their homes for decades. What the Party called Operation “Al-’Aasf al-Ma’koul”, the Lebanese will be left to swallow, and the Shia above all. The most likely outcome is that this adventure will end nowhere but in Hezbollah’s definitive removal from the scene, and perhaps in the installation of a “friendly” regime in Tehran or the clipping of its arms, eventualities that Hezbollah seems not to have factored into its esoteric calculations, namely the loss of its Iranian patron, as it persists in this gamble down to the last Lebanese Shia.

Turning the page on Hezbollah in Lebanon will bring relief to the Lebanese and the Syrians alike. For breaking the backbone of the “Shia Crescent” and severing Iran’s Lebanese arm once and for all would strip any functional value from the regime of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani in Syria and might well hasten its demise. The disarmament of Hezbollah is therefore a Lebanese interest in the first, second and third instance, before it is an Israeli one, and it is a necessity that brooks no delay. As for the continuation of direct Lebanese-Israeli negotiations toward a peace agreement, contrary to what many believe, and even though negotiating with Israel or making peace with it could not be described as a comfortable stroll, there is considerable exaggeration in claims that belittle Lebanon’s capacity to compete with Israel on multiple levels and fronts, beginning with the dynamism of the Lebanese people and the wealth of their skills, energies and expertise, and extending to tourism, cultural diversity and a free economy.

All wars are followed by others or by negotiations that lead either to a peace treaty or to surrender, with the sole exception of the October War on the Syrian front and the Lebanon War of 1982, after each of which the state of “enmity” with Israel was exploited as a profitable ‘national business’ to consolidate the equation of eternal occupation over there against eternal tyranny and despotism over here.

In an earlier article in Al-Modon newspaper under the title “17 May”, former Socialist minister Ghazi al-Aridi quoted former Lebanese President Amine Gemayel as saying, on the programme “Witness to an Era” on Al-Jazeera: “It was Israel that signed, and I who did not”. Why? “I asked the American envoy, who came to me applying great pressure to accelerate the signing, to convey a message to President Reagan to the effect that: I want a personal letter from him affirming that he will continue to honour his commitment to playing the role of mediator. If Israel upholds its obligations, so much the better; and if it does not, there will be an American commitment to standing by Lebanon and protecting its sovereignty and unity...” He went on to say: “The letter came, but Israel withdrew from the agreement.” Why? “It emerged that Israel had signed not as a commitment to the agreement, but because it wanted something from the Americans, and what it wanted was the lifting of the sanctions imposed because Israel had exceeded the agreement limiting its army’s advance to 40 kilometres in the South only. Which means that Israel never actually wanted the agreement as it stood, despite everything it had extracted from it.”

In the light of all this, what is required is not merely a rereading of that agreement, but a painstaking scrutiny of every element of that period. For President Amine Gemayel’s testimony does not merely shake the walls of the narrative that has prevailed about the “May 17 Agreement” for more than four decades; it may well bring the whole edifice crashing down.

The most probable hypothesis, however, remains that all the catastrophes, the horrors and the wars that were waged and continue to be waged against the Syrians and the Lebanese are nothing but overdue instalments and long-deferred bills, the price for the Assad regime’s signing of that “disengagement of forces” agreement with Israel and the annulment of the “17 May” agreement in Lebanon in March 1984, without any future path having been charted as to how the conflict with Israel might one day be resolved.