Hizbullah walks a delicate line   (Daily Star 62/2/2000)
by Michael Young
At the end of a week when three members of the Japanese Red Army converted to Islam ­ after years spent in the service of dialectical materialism ­ it is fitting that we speak of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his disciples. The secretary-general of Hizbullah was a transient darling of the press these past days. He was given a full page in Al-Hayat to communicate his thoughts on the peace negotiations and south Lebanon. And he even saw his name in the Washington Post, which reproduced excerpts from a soon-to-be-published interview in Middle East Insight, which in the 1980s gave the American public a frequent, useful taste of Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. Nasrallah sounds, by and large, triumphant. And he has reason to do so: The Israelis are bewildered by how to respond to attacks against their forces in the south, and the public is clamoring for a unilateral withdrawal. Ehud Barak prefers a negotiated pullout, but the Syrians will only give him that once their principal demands on future relations with Israel are met.
With all this going on, then, why is it time to put Hizbullah's successes in some sort of perspective? Perhaps because the Israelis have the firepower and Lebanon does not. The various utterances describing a nation united in resistance are quaint, but they will neither bring Lebanon economic advantage, nor enhance an international presence that registers, even on the most modest of political seismographs, as comatose. Hizbullah’s leaders understand that perception is everything. That is why Nasrallah has gone to great lengths to peddle three myths sustaining Hizbullah’s reputation. The first is that the fighting in the south is unrelated to the negotiations between Syria and Israel. The second is that there is a national consensus behind the resistance. And the third is that Israel will never be accepted by the Arab peoples, even if it concludes formal settlements with Arab states.
The first claim is easy to dismiss. If Hizbullah’s activities were really unrelated to the Syrian-Israeli negotiations, Katyushas would have cruised over northern Israel after the bombings of the electricity stations. That they did not suggested Syrian intervention. This also confronted Hizbullah with a conceptual problem: without a retaliatory strike, the party disregarded usual practice in implementation of the April Understanding, weakening the document’s import further.
More interesting is how Hizbullah’s policies will affect a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. In the Al-Hayat interview, Nasrallah made a fine case that it was in the logic of the resistance to force the Israelis out of Lebanon without an agreement. Indeed, but would the Syrians agree? That is not to say that Hizbullah and Syria are on a collision course. However, too great a success by the resistance, leading to an unconditional and precipitated Israeli departure, is hardly what the Syrians want.
Nasrallah’s second contention, that there is national consensus behind the resistance, is impudent. Archbishop Maroun Sader’s presence at Aql Hashem’s funeral, though ill-advised, revealed an absence of unanimity. Nor should one assume that an abstract notion of resistance is synonymous, in everybody’s mind, with Hizbullah: sympathy with the concept of resistance has often been accompanied by antipathy toward its practitioners. Nasrallah’s third assertion, that Israel will never be accepted by the Arab peoples after peace settlements are signed, is more difficult to dispute. There will undoubtedly be psychological obstacles to normalization with Israel. The contrary would be extraordinary. However it is unclear just how such an attitude will blend in with what Nasrallah claims is an existential rejection of Israel.
That is precisely Hizbullah’s quandary. The party claims that it has a post-settlement strategy to peacefully fight normalization with Israel. At the same time, Nasrallah has noted, Hizbullah can never accept Israel’s legitimacy, therefore its right to exist. While the two attitudes are not necessarily contradictory, they are fundamentally at odds: when animosity becomes existential, the outcome is usually, and not unreasonably, violence.
Nasrallah exposed this dualism in the different tones he adopted in the Al-Hayat and Washington Post interviews. To the American readers he remarked that if the Lebanese government signed a peace treaty with Israel Hizbullah would disapprove, but “would not make any turmoil out of it.” In Al-Hayat the timbre was more severe, as were the words: Nasrallah ended the interview not with a promise to disarm, but with an ambiguous statement vowing continued support for the Palestinian people. The Hizbullah leadership is walking a delicate line, and Nasrallah’s demeanor is a major ingredient in the party’s post-settlement strategy. Only by claiming for itself total victory, unqualified endorsement, and absolute independence can Hizbullah advance a serious claim for political consequence in the future. Yet while one may comprehend why Nasrallah is saying what he is, it is best for the public to be a trifle more skeptical.
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