Showdown!
You’re looking at the border between Lebanon and Israel, the so-called Blue Line.
As I write this Saturday morning, we still do not have confirmation if Hassan Nassrallah, General Secretary of Hezbollah, was assassinated in yesterday’s massive Israeli attack on the Southern Suburbs. But we do know that, so far, 300 people were killed and tens of thousands terrorized.
Over the past two weeks, there has been a back and forth between those who read Iran’s faint reaction and Hezbollah’s seemingly weak response to Israel’s escalation as strategic patience, and those who read them as signs of a weirdly disengaged Iran that has forfeited a besieged Hezbollah.
I won’t venture into this debate yet because, frankly, very few of us have enough information to walk us through a very murky geopolitical picture. What is very clear, however, is that within two very short weeks Hezbollah has suffered a series of puzzling backbreaking blows. I dread the ramifications. We have now a cornered resistance movement known for its fierceness and an orphaned, very frightened community of followers. The scenarios are countless and they are the stuff of nightmares. But for us Lebanese there is nothing unfamiliar about this heartbreak.
Kamel Mrowa issued this rebuke and forewarning on May 3, 1948:
“I direct my words to those with yellow smiles when they hear of the Zionist threat against Lebanon, and those who feel that Palestine is in China. Did you, gentlemen, read yesterday about the [Zionist] attack on Bleeda?…
An extraordinary military effort is required to confront the danger hanging over the head of the South. If we are content to show national sentiment by sleeping on silk, while the son of the South sleeps on fire and iron, then we are signing both our and Lebanon’s suicide.”
His editorial led exactly 11 days before the state of Israel was born. He was the very influential editor-in-chief and publisher of the Lebanese al-Hayat, for decades one of the Arab world’s leading dailies.
Mrowa is long gone, the target of an assassin’s bullet in 1965, and so is his newspaper. But his words have a remarkable quality to them. They at once evoke a historical moment and an enduring Lebanese quandary: a small, congenitally fragile state contending with a new predatory Israeli neighbor in a region redrawn and reshaped to suit this newcomer and serve its Western creators.
It’s very tedious to keep repeating it, but repeat we clearly must: modern Levantine history is essentially the history of our struggle with Israel: first and foremost as Palestinians, and then as Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians… This struggle is not the source of all our ills, it goes without saying; national life is never that clean and tidy. But as you witness Israel unleash today on Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Southern Lebanon, the Bekaa, Beirut… understand that you are just catching the latest iteration of a story that began a few years before the Jewish state was established in 1948. Our dilemmas then are our dilemmas now but with all the signs of age at its unkindest.
You can love Israel to the moon and back and you would still have to agree with this fact. Yet remarkably, few of its people seem to have learned the lessons of this endless war, glaring though they are.
There is no salvation for you in pounding us to death.
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On Another Note
Is there another note worth mentioning this week?
When I am under severe stress, I typically reach out for Robert Harrison’s Entitled Opinions. Harrison’s is often a somber note, but always appropriately so.
Here he is with Brian Pines on “the creative peak of Nietzsche and van Gogh in 1888.”
And who better than Jack Nicholson to remind us of the absurdities of this existence?