Hezbollah, the Unsinkable Titanic? Think again!

Dr. Joseph Hitti - 6/13/2006

Two events over the past two weeks have caused the unsinkable Hezbollah to begin taking water in what may be the beginning of the end for this dinosaur of Lebanese politics. The “Party of God” has hit the iceberg laying beneath the surface while cruising for many years on the pretense of its invincibility and the superiority and coherence of its ideology with its practices on the ground. The pretense of having liberated the South of Lebanon from Israeli occupation (when Israel never claimed any ambition over Lebanese territory and entered Lebanon repeatedly after provocations and threats to its northern border). The pretense of having provided the southern Shiite community with social services that the State did not provide (because, obviously, of Hezbollah’s eviction of the State from the region). The pretense of being a Lebanese patriotic movement (albeit generously funded and armed by Iran and Syria).

The iceberg is in fact polyvalent: For one, the Lebanese people are simply tired and exhausted of the liberationist BS of 1960s vintage which, to boot, is Islamic in genesis, and which continues to drag the country into the mud of a war that no else wants to fight. No one minded in 2000 that Israel got out of the south. While everyone knew that Israel’s occupation was not really the issue, Israel’s occupation did add a factor of complexity to the seemingly endless and chronic Lebanese crisis. But everyone knew that the Syrian occupation is much more dangerous, and as events subsequently proved, the assassination of Hariri turned things upside down on the 30-year old status quo in Lebanon. So everyone in Lebanon cheered Hezbollah when Israel withdrew in 2000, not as much in genuine belief that Hezbollah “liberated” the south, but more so because everyone thought that with Israel gone, they were also getting rid of Hezbollah. But then came the Shebaa lie, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But the iceberg was still there: The Lebanese people are sick and tired of Hezbollah and its objective of liberating stuff that does not even exist. Obviously, Hezbollah needs stuff to liberate just to keep the justification of its existence. But Hezbollah is a dinosaur, because it is an extinct species by the very definition of its ideological premise in the Lebanese environment in which it came to existence. Any radical monopolistic religious movement in the diverse constitution of Lebanese society is a non sequitur, irrespective of whether it arises from the ranks of the Moslem communities or from those of the Christian communities that constitute Lebanon.

Just to illustrate the point safely outside of the “controversial” debate over Islam’s compatibility with democracy, Christian nationalism as espoused by the Lebanese Forces, for example, is a dead end for a number of reasons: The trend of the world we live in, dominated by a secularization vector and the recess of organized political religion from public life into the domain of private life, is to not embrace exclusionary movements in general, let alone if they are of a religious brand. The example of Israel, just south of the Lebanese border, is a case in point: The exclusively Jewish identity of the State of Israel, albeit borne out of a moment in history when such exclusion seemed to make sense, remains today the fundamental problem for that State’s identity and survival, what with the building of walls of separation and the forced de-Arabization of historic Palestine. So the advocates of Christian nationalism in Lebanon who believe in separating from their fellow Moslem Lebanese should realize that no one in the West today will support another Israel with the failures of that model staring at us in the face every day.

Similarly, the aspiration to either cantonize Lebanon into self-ruling Christian and Moslem enclaves, or to have one group, as Hezbollah used to argue, run the country according to its own beliefs (Islamic Shiite, a la Iran’s Islamic Republic model) and “gently” convince the other communities of the soundness of the idea, is naïve at best.

Last week, “unidentified” Palestinian gunmen fired rockets from Lebanese territory into the north of Israel, apparently in retaliation to the assassination of two leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Lebanese city of Sidon. Even though Hezbollah claims to have been dragged into this – they did not started it, but they had to respond after Israel violated Lebanese sovereignty by retaliating against the “unidentified” attackers – the “unidentified” gunmen were operating from territory that Hezbollah has controlled exclusively for decades, and the “unidentified” Palestinians could not have ridden a mule in that area without Hezbollah’s foreknowledge and acquiescence. The confrontation that ensued drove the Lebanese people back to the brink of the madness that has brought nothing but war, exile, displacement, and mayhem to the south for 35 years. In other words, the iceberg of discontent emerged among the Lebanese people who can no longer tolerate this anomaly to jeopardize their lives and threaten them with the fear and the nightmare of the past 35 years. Hezbollah the invincible is now the problem. It has to sink.

Also last week, after parodying for years every other Lebanese politician, Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) television station’s “Basmat Watan” comedy show poked clean and honest fun at Hassan Nasrallah, the supreme mullah who rules over the Hezbollah empire. Like the riots in the Islamic world in protest against the Danish cartoons earlier this year, mobs of Hezbollah rioters descended in the streets, supposedly spontaneously but suspiciously programmed by the Hezbollah leadership – who could neither contain them, nor explain them – and attacked all the Christian neighborhoods abutting the Shiite neighborhoods in the city of Beirut. The reaction, unjustifiable to begin with in the generally very liberal press and media environment of Lebanon, and worthy of a peaceful demonstration at best in front of the television station, in fact degenerated into a blind and raging religious war led by Hezbollah against innocent Lebanese who simply happened to be of the Christian faith. That too brought to surface to another submerged part of the iceberg of Lebanese discontent against Hezbollah. Gone are the labels of “honest”, “patriotic”, “clean and unblemished” hands of Hezbollah, and in came the essential premise of the Party of God: its desire to create the Islamic Republic of Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s end is near. The Shiite dinosaur Titanic is sinking. One way or another, it has to go, fold, or re-invent itself. Now that the Lebanese people have put behind them the bloody militias of the 1970s and 1980s, now that the sisterly Syrian occupation is gone, now that the Palestinian Authority has agreed to negotiate with the Lebanese State the modalities of the disarming of the Palestinian camps, only Hezbollah remains on the scene to remind the Lebanese of the nightmare, to strike fear into their hearts, and to threaten to take them back into the night of war, fanaticism, and backwardness. Hezbollah has lost the aura of its invincibility as well as the aura of its integrity. It is now the only private, sectarian, foreign-funded and armed militia that wants to kill the Lebanese dream by challenging the Lebanese State and the diversity of Lebanese society.