Provoking Hezbollah Is a Red Line

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Until now, Hezbollah has borne a great deal of overreach against it, and unbecoming treatment of its leaders — at times entirely outside the bounds of the decorum needed to prevent internecine fighting among the Lebanese. This party, which has defeated Israel twice so far, has received from many Lebanese, encouraged by certain Arab regimes, nothing but slander, insults, and heaped accusations. And despite this, the Party has preserved the honor and purity of its weapons, never once using them in an internal confrontation, and has refused even to brandish them as a threat against internal rivals. The Party has remained committed to the ethics of arms, and to the ethics that should govern dealings among the sons of one people and one nation.

They have tried to drag the Party into internal fighting, in the hope that this might ease things for American and Israeli policy in the region, but the Party has stood firm, refusing every provocation, including bloody assaults, and has thwarted the wishes of the Israelis and the Americans. My assessment had been that the Party would keep the internal front entirely calm, so long as the campaigns of the Lebanese opposition — represented by the Siniora government and its leading figures, Geagea and Jumblatt — remained within the bounds of daily needling, bickering, harassment, defamation, and scaremongering. But its patience may not last long if developments begin to touch the strategic dimensions of the Party’s confrontation with Israel. Recently, Walid Jumblatt crossed the red lines and spoke of matters the resistance considers forbidden ground, matters that expose its security and its performance to danger. Jumblatt spoke about the Party’s communications network, placing a vital security matter before public discussion and internal controversy, and began inciting the government and the Lebanese against the Party on the grounds that it was establishing a state within a state. The Lebanese government responded to his call and declared Hezbollah’s communications network illegitimate. This means the government may ask the Lebanese internal security services and the army to move against this network — a step that would carry serious and bloody internal Lebanese consequences.

…[a security] matter. Hezbollah is certainly monitoring movement, whether at Beirut airport or elsewhere, because it is targeted intensively and with malice by numerous intelligence agencies — American, Arab, Israeli, French, British, and so on. And Jumblatt has revealed things that could prove useful to hostile security services.

My assessment is that Hezbollah will issue a warning this time, but will not escalate the situation to the point of armed confrontation. The various Lebanese parties ought to appreciate that Hezbollah will not deploy the strike force it holds in reserve to face Israel, should it decide to confront them. Hezbollah will instead use a secondary force capable of settling matters quickly, before Israel is able to come to anyone’s rescue. In other words, if the Lebanese government, Jumblatt, and Geagea are working to wear Hezbollah down militarily and give Israel, the Arab regimes, and the United States some relief, their effort will not succeed. My estimate is that Hezbollah has arranged matters with its allies in a way that will disappoint everyone betting on the Party’s internal defeat.

Perhaps Hezbollah’s internal opponents ought to be certain that the Party will not give up its weapons — this was proven in 2006, and it will certainly not bow now to internal voices. The Lebanese interior ought to have realized by now that the Party is no longer merely a Lebanese party, but rather a party sympathized with and supported by vast crowds across the Arab and Islamic arenas. And although the Party always repeats its justification for existing as an armed party on the basis of the Shebaa Farms, my own conviction is that it does not confine itself to a narrowly national logic. It is a party more Arab than the Arabs, more Palestinian than the Palestinians, more Sudanese than the Sudanese. All the Lebanese ought to have realized by now that the Party now carries the burden of the whole nation, in the manner it deems fitting, without letting that reflect onto internal Lebanese relations. As a Palestinian, I wish we had Palestinian factions that knew how to distinguish between jihad against the enemies and the ordinary civilian daily life of the people.

Perhaps Jumblatt ought to reconsider everything he is doing. If a civil war broke out, America and Israel would think of nothing but settling the Lebanese internal front according to their own whims, and would not care in the least who kills whom in Lebanon, nor would they defend the wives and children of their own friends. These two states think of nothing but their own interests, and the blood of all the Arabs, in their eyes, is not worth a handful of oil from the land of the Gulf. What does it matter to America and Israel if Lebanese children are orphaned, their women widowed, their houses demolished, their trees uprooted? They would push every act of killing and destruction to its limit, if that were what it took to ignite the fires of strife, hatred, and enmity among the Lebanese themselves.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “احمرار المسّ بحزب الله” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.