Only the Shia Can Save the Shia

Among the most priceless comments I have recently heard was one made by a mouthpiece of the so-called "Resistance" appearing on a Lebanese satellite channel, who claimed that "Hezbollah is defending its land" against Israel. It would be hard to find a more brazen distortion of reality — one perpetrated by a Sunni figure who has spent several years serving as a front for the party in exchange for regular remuneration.

Not a single word uttered by this "Sunni Resistance" figure contains a grain of truth. He conflates the defense of a land — which is not Hezbollah's land — with the active consolidation of Israeli occupation. The truth is straightforward: the party reopened the southern Lebanon front, once again, on direct Iranian orders that have nothing whatsoever to do with the interests of Lebanon or its people.

In Lebanon, the chapters of a farce are unfolding that will have to be brought to an end, sooner or later. It might have provoked laughter were it not for its transformation into a genuine human tragedy. Nothing captures the scale of that tragedy more starkly than the fact that the number of displaced persons — from villages in the South, the Bekaa, and the southern suburbs of Beirut — has exceeded one million in a country of approximately six million citizens.

Two factors explain Hezbollah's decision to reopen the southern Lebanon front, under the pretext of avenging the assassination, by the United States and Israel, of Iranian "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei. The first is the party's total subjugation to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps: it was an IRGC officer who gave the order to fire the six rockets that marked the beginning of the renewed war. The second concerns the very nature of Hezbollah and its ideology, which is built on the exploitation of Israeli occupation. There is no Hezbollah without occupation, and no Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory without Hezbollah.

When Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000, the party insisted the withdrawal was incomplete — even as the United Nations Security Council confirmed that Israel had implemented Resolution 425, adopted by the Council in 1978, to the letter, withdrawing to the "Blue Line," the ceasefire line between Lebanon and Israel, which is, with negligible differences, the border between the two countries.

The party invented the issue of the Shebaa Farms and the Seven Hills in order to justify retaining its weapons. It became unmistakably clear, in the year 2000, that the existence of occupation was the very reason for the party's existence, and that this arsenal constituted the backbone of an organization whose sole ambition is to turn Lebanon into an Iranian colony, nothing more.

Amid everything unfolding on Lebanese soil today, Hezbollah appears willing to set the country ablaze and reduce it to ashes in order to seize control of it. This explains its pursuit of a war that is lost before it begins, a war that will bring nothing to Lebanon but ruin — as the country spins in a closed circle, revolving upon itself.

If the party — and Iran behind it — has achieved anything over nearly forty-five years, that achievement, negative in nature, consists in transforming the character of Lebanon's Shia community, in its majority at least. There remains in the country a Shia elite that resists the Iranian expansionist project in every Lebanese region — the southern suburbs, the South, the Beqaa. A Shia elite that understands what Lebanon represents and what it means to belong to it, rather than being a "soldier in the army of the wali al-faqih," as Hassan Nasrallah used to say. In a moment of truth, Nasrallah acknowledged on camera, with his own voice, that Hezbollah was a creation of the "Islamic Republic"…

Who will break the closed circle in which Lebanon is trapped? The positions adopted by President of the Republic Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam are undoubtedly of great importance. But more urgently than ever, what is needed is an internal Shia uprising that shatters this circle rather than continuing to revolve within it. The impetus for such an uprising cannot come from outside the "Shia duopoly," which has proven itself to have been nothing more than a cover for Hezbollah's weapons — that is, for the use of those weapons to pressure the Lebanese state and spread terror among the other communities: Sunnis, Christians, and Druze.

Who will lead this internal Lebanese uprising? Where is the role of Nabih Berri, president of the Amal movement and Speaker of Parliament, who employs a wooden rhetoric entirely in service of the Iranian position on Lebanon?

In the end, the Revolutionary Guards carried out in Lebanon what they had carried out in Iran itself: a coup d'état. They placed their hands fully on Hezbollah in order to bind Lebanon's fate to that of the "Islamic Republic" and the culture of death it proclaims.

Lebanon has no alternative but to return to the language of reason and logic, rather than brandishing the slogan of "battlefield resolution by force of arms." The consequences of such a slogan are well known: it will bring a Nakba upon Lebanon, and upon the Shia community in particular. It is the duty of the Shia to save the Shia, rather than remaining captive to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards… or lending an ear to this or that "Resistance" figure, whether Shia or Sunni. These are hypocrites, in the manner of the Revolutionary Guards, who appear determined to commit suicide. There is no reason for Lebanon's Shia to follow them into that suicide — especially given that the Shia of Lebanon have a point of reference, which is the Lebanese state, or at least which ought to be…