[lit-ideas] Hezbollah
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 09:00:01 -0700 (PDT)
http://www.newstatesman.com/200608070018
Pride at a terrible price
Cover story
Julie Flint
Monday 7th August 2006
Israel's bombing spree in Lebanon has united a
disparate country in an unlikely solidarity with
Hezbollah. And the longer the attacks go on, the more
determined the resistance will become. Julie Flint
reports from Beirut
Amyoun is a mountain village some 80 kilometres north
of Beirut. The villagers are Greek Orthodox and it is
far removed from the fighting of the largely Shia
south. The inhabitants, however, are now flying the
flags of Hezbollah. Elsewhere, in the largely Maronite
village of Baskinta, Christian youths have convinced
their elders not to pull down the Hezbollah flags that
refugees have brought with them.
A day after an Israeli air strike killed 56 unarmed
civilians in the southern town of Qana, a young Druze
nurse in Beirut said: "When Hezbollah captured those
two Israeli soldiers, on 12 July, I cursed them. I
never expected to change my mind. But today we are
fighting for Lebanon."
In the west of the capital, a businessman who is
spending $6,000 of his own money every day to help the
displaced says: "I am really proud of this country."
But pride has come at a terrible price.
Almost a million Lebanese have been forced to flee
from their homes and more than 700 civilians are dead
- many of them children killed as their parents obeyed
Israeli orders to leave southern Lebanon. Villages
along the country's southern border have been
pulverised, in the literal sense of the word, and
swathes of Beirut's southern suburbs have been
flattened. What remains says much about the nature of
Hez bollah, 20 years after it first took root in
Lebanon as a direct result of Israel's 1982 invasion
in pursuit of the PLO.
Beside a Christian bookshop in Haret Hreik -
originally a Christian village, now Hezbollah's
headquarters in Beirut - a garish advert for wedding
dresses, complete with girls with big hair and pouting
lips, hangs crazily over a sign offering "Tattoos". A
few blocks away, fires from the most recent air strike
flicker inside a gym that once promoted itself through
cardboard men with rippling muscles and acres of bare
flesh.
In the wake of the Qana massacre - the single
bloodiest attack of Israel's new war in Lebanon -
armed resistance, public anger that crosses sectarian
lines, and determined government have combined to
produce a dynamic that some Arab analysts believe
could prove a turning point not just in this war, but
in the 58-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict.
Not only has little Lebanon defied the United States,
but Israel's armed forces, which defeated the armies
of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in just six days in 1967,
have been unable to defeat a militia - Hezbollah - in
a country that is not yet fully recovered from 15
years of civil war.
The Israeli army first committed small, elite units,
and then brigades. Now it demands whole divisions, but
it has so far managed to capture - though not to hold
- only two border villages, Maroun Ras and Bint Jbeil.
Hezbollah's leadership is intact. Unable to give
Washington the military successes against "terrorists"
that it needs to justify continuing US support of this
war, Israel is sending ground forces deeper into
Lebanon, where they will be exposed to guerrilla
attacks of the sort on which Hezbollah has built its
popularity.
With every new attack, solidarity with Hezbollah
grows, even if only temporarily, in the hope that
continued resistance will make a negotiated settlement
more likely. The more the Israel Defence Forces wreck
Lebanon - its ports, airports, radars, bridges, roads
and power stations, its milk and fish factories - the
more the Lebanese align themselves with Hezbollah's
demands for the release of Lebanese prisoners held in
Israel and Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Shebaa
Farms. Hezbollah's agenda is becoming the nation's
agenda.
Heroic status
For the past 15 years, Hezbollah has, contrary to the
impression that many outside the Arab world have,
moved away from militancy, first under the leadership
of Abbas al-Musawi, who ended hostage-taking despite
internal opposition but was then killed in an Israeli
helicopter gunship attack in 1992; then under Hasan
Nasrallah, who took Hezbollah into government despite
internal opposition.
Today, Hezbollah does not seek the establishment of an
Islamic state in Lebanon and neither does it endeavour
to impose Islamic morals, even in the areas it
controls. The party is a complex, broad-based amalgam
of many tendencies and cannot be wished, or blasted,
away.
Israel and its western supporters have forgotten the
lesson of the past half-century in the Middle East:
that force resolves nothing - not in 1948, not in
1982, and not in 2006.
America's Arab allies are already running scared and
shifting from criticism of Hezbollah to support for
Lebanon - and, by extension, for Hezbollah itself.
Protracted war in Lebanon will only enhance
Hezbollah's increasingly heroic status in the region
and entrench it as a proxy through which Iran and
Syria will seek to gain regional ascendancy.
"The Israelis have put us in a position where we have
nothing to lose," a Hezbollah activist tells me. "Do
you know what 'destruction' means? We have to fight.
We cannot lose. And we are no longer alone."
This article first appeared in the New Statesman.
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