In Victory Or Defeat
You’re looking at just one of countless vistas of return to the south.
It begins! The recrimination here and the chest pounding there in the aftermath of this latest war on Lebanon. The devastation is massive enough to announce Hezbollah’s defeat, but the movement’s stubborn steadfastness is credible enough to trumpet its victory.
In full view of the actual tally, such psychology may seem preposterous. But it shouldn’t be. It’s never been in struggles between very powerful actors who seek to overwhelm with superior force and underdogs who bear it, stand their ground, land their own painful punches, and emerge to plan for another day.
Most frustrating for the big guy in such combat is the paradoxical effect of lethal force on the little fellow’s sense of achievement: the more brutal the whacking, the greater the sense of vindication upon surviving it. Of course, Israel, in its arrogance, always sets the bar so high, it ends up undershooting. Its obsessive pursuit of the intoxication of the 1967 wipeout is akin to the heroin addict’s desperation to recapture the exhilaration of that first high.
Besides, as former Ambassador Ryan Crocker, one of the US’s most astute diplomats, told Politico recently, “…the concept of the defeat of an adversary only has meaning in the mind of that adversary. If that adversary feels defeated, he is defeated. If he doesn’t, he’s not.”
But if the psychology is uncomplicated, the politics is baroque in its complexity. Hezbollah has come a long way since its days in the 1980s and early ‘90s as purely a resistance movement. In size, power, and influence it has held extraordinary sway in Lebanon, dominating the Shiite community and overshadowing the Lebanese state and army, even as it established a strong presence in both. Increasingly, since the late 1990s, under its legendary leader Hassan Nassrallah, it had also taken on audacious regional assignments, none more so than defending Syria’s Bashar Assad.
Hezbollah’s rhetoric and demeanor have long matched its impressive rise. Judged by its own words and posture alone, especially in the last few years, it boasted that it had reached enough strength to deny Israel its deterrence. Nassrallah called it the Tel Aviv-Dahyieh (southern suburbs) equation. If that was debatable, its utter command of Lebanese politics was not.
So, the claim that Hezbollah is David to Israel’s Goliath had long been eroded by none other than the party itself. That carries, especially with its own community after this latest ruinous conflagration. Many of them already casualties of the 2019 economic meltdown, they have been dragged to the very bottom of the pyramid, dispersed and in great need of shelter and support.
The displaced returning to their south are shocked at the decimation of home and land and town and olive groves and church and mosque. The returnees surveying the ruins of Dahyieh mourn the destruction that disfigures their lives and neighborhoods. The Bekaa is no less disheartening a sight to its townsmen. Confused and wrestling with furious emotions, they bemoan their enormous sacrifice, wondering if they would have willingly offered it for Gaza but very certain they wouldn’t have for Iran.
This victory, hence, comes only with huge caveats. Outside of the party’s circle of diehards it just may stick if Hezbollah, in post-2006 war mode, moves swiftly to compensate and rebuild. To what degree it can, in a very prickly moment, mobilize resources and channel aid and funds to its own social and professional establishments like Jihad al Bina’, its construction arm, has never been more critical to its cachet and clout.
So far, the signs are not promising.
The Lebanese fault line itself is not one between two camps as is often simplistically described. It’s many. Among the detractors of Hezbollah are those who go so far as to call Israel a friend, and those who decry it as a mortal enemy; those who are avid opponents of the party’s politics but supporters of its resistance on Lebanese soil, and those who reject both–– and the Jewish state.
Among the movement’s supporters are those who wholeheartedly embrace everything Hezbollah, those who reject its politics but enthusiastically champion the resistance in the name of Palestine and Lebanon, and those within the Shiite constituency who could care less about either, but are loyal because they have no other choice.
Nor is our disposition towards the party uniformly sectarian, nor is it insensitive to class divides, nor do motivations for supporting or opposing it necessarily flag positions for or against Palestine, for or against the West, for or against Lebanon itself.
Badia Fahas returns to Nabatieyh
Neat labels never ever did Lebanese politics justice.
All of which shouldn’t obscure the looming realities for Hezbollah and Lebanon. This is a weakened group that has to tend to very serious blows in a shambles of a country. Although it remains formidable and intimidating to any Lebanese faction that entertains toying with it, its leadership ranks are thin and mediocre, enemies smell blood, and so do fair-weather allies. The regional geopolitics is at best unfavorable, the reconstruction burden is daunting, the financial costs are forbidding, the resources so far seem modest, and access to funds is less than straightforward.
Worse, the state, which Hezbollah over decades actively partook in hollowing out, is being called upon to manage the recovery effort. It’s very safe to forecast resounding failure in this pivotal task, when practically every nook and cranny of the bureaucracy is controlled by a venal ruling mafia, some of them intimately connected with the Party of God.
The myriad implications are not hard to decipher. The pressures on Hezbollah to jettison its ambitious dossier of identities and regional missions are immense. The profile of its leadership, the hard hits it has taken, the challenges at home, and Israel’s hovering menace make for a very persuasive argument to focus inward, lie low, and play along. That means at least acquiescence in the cosmetic but rather meaningless reforms dear to its adversaries, inside and out; say, a new president and a new cabinet in the immediate future. That means as well very strict adherence to a ceasefire largely favoring an uncontrollable enemy that interprets even the cries of men in solemn funerals as a violation of its terms.
Compromise on the more superficial demands should be relatively easy for Hezbollah. It will be much harder, though, on others, foremost among them a leading role in the rebuilding program, which potential donors have no intention of offering.
All this at a time when the knives are out everywhere and the decision making is entirely Iranian.
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On Another Note
Since ours is the age of discontent, here’s The Nation’s Cole Stangler on the king of malaise and other perilous realms, French novelist Michel Houellebecq:
A visionary of the commonplace, he can find both meaning and its absence in something as banal as an aisle in a local Monoprix or a gas pump at a Shell station. Contrary to his self-cultivated image as a literary celebrity—reinforced by his penchant for chain smoking at his few public appearances—Houellebecq is not a misanthrope; he is a humanist who has become disappointed by all that humanity currently has to offer. His novels, in the end, always seem to ask: Do we not deserve better?…
or years, Houellebecq’s novels were seen as providing genuine insights into contemporary France —and at times they did. The Map and the Territory revealed a country grappling with its loss of economic and cultural power and the overlapping spheres of influence inhabited by its trendsetting elites. For all its excess, Submission shined a light on the anxieties produced by the visible expansion of Islam in a deeply secular nation, a challenge few people in France would deny. And with its sympathetic depiction of farmers struggling to make ends meet in a hypercompetitive globalized market, Serotonin echoed aspects of the Yellow Vest movement…
I am thankful to Robin Wiliamson’s “Loftus Jones” for keeping me company for the duration of the war.