The Debate Over Victory and Defeat in Lebanon and Palestine

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Lebanese people rushed, in 2006, to reject Hezbollah’s declaration of victory, insisting Hezbollah had been defeated and that Israel was the one that won. A storm of accusations and counter-accusations began inside Israel over the war on Hezbollah’s failure, investigation committees were formed into the Israeli army’s shortcomings, while Lebanese on the other side of the colonial border shouted at Israel, telling it that it had won and that the farce of investigating the war’s outcomes must stop. Israel acknowledges its defeat, and Lebanese proclaim their own defeat. The same thing repeats itself in Palestine regarding the July 2014 war on Gaza. Israel drags the tails of disappointment, and its prime minister announces the withdrawal of his ground forces from Gaza out of fear, while Palestinians shout at him that he has won and that the Palestinian resistance is the one that was defeated. Many Palestinians busy themselves searching for defeat, prepared to engage in a broad, prolonged debate over their claims that the resistance was defeated.

The Defeat Debate

The Lebanese and Palestinians who proclaim defeat say that victory and defeat are tied to losses, and that the defeated party is the one that suffers the greater losses, while the victor does not suffer many losses. They add that the Arab side, whether Lebanese or Palestinian, suffered great losses in lives and property in the 2006 and 2014 wars, while, by comparison, the Israeli side suffered few losses in either lives or property. Palestine offered more than two thousand martyrs, more than ten thousand wounded, and homes, mosques, and schools were demolished, and thousands of Palestinians were displaced; in Lebanon, great losses occurred, and villages and enormous facilities were destroyed in the Haret Hreik quarter, and given all these losses, sorrows, and pains inflicted on the two peoples, no one has the right to claim victory. The defeat, they say, was as plain and clear as the rays of the sun, and stubbornness ultimately harms rather than helps.

This line of argument does not square with other lines of argument the same people, or those who share their view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, promoted in previous wars. For example, the announcer of Sawt al-Arab Radio in Egypt used to say that Egypt had won the 1967 war because Egyptians and Arabs generally had discovered the truth about themselves. The Damascus announcer, for his part, declared victory because the political regime had not fallen. We also “won” the October War, even though the Arab armies did not achieve the war’s objectives, namely removing the effects of the aggression. Israel penetrated deep into Egyptian and Syrian territory, and Arab forces were unable to expel it. And in the 1982 war, Palestinian fighters left Beirut raising their fingers in the victory sign. The PLO was expelled from Lebanon and Beirut, and yet it remained insistent on victory.

Losses Do Not Determine Victory or Defeat

The outcomes of wars are not necessarily measured by the human and material losses each side suffers. Losses may enter into the balance when skirmishes or exchanges of fire break out between two feuding parties, but they remain a marginal factor in major, fateful wars. History bears witness to societies or peoples that achieved victories even while their losses were many times greater than the other side’s, such as Algeria and Vietnam. It is always expected that the losses of subjugated, colonized, or occupied peoples will be large, and far greater than the losses of the colonizers and occupiers, because colonial or occupying states possess enormous military capabilities and immense destructive power, and can demolish homes on top of their owners and carry out mass killing of people. Subjugated peoples do not possess advanced combat means, nor enormous destructive capabilities, and often possess primitive combat means at an undeveloped technical level, but they possess an unyielding fighting will, and a fierce determination to persist until liberation. Peoples living under occupation usually bear losses in order to break the enemy’s will and force it to withdraw and abandon its colonization. Colonial states possess enormous destructive power, which they use to break the resistance’s back and kill its will. They use the destruction of homes and the killing of people as a means of subjugating the resistance’s will. This is why analysts usually look to the will of the warring parties rather than to the losses, even though the losses cause a great deal of pain and grief.

Achieving the war’s objectives is the true measure of victory and defeat. In both the Lebanese and Palestinian cases, it was Israel that started the war, not the resistance. The resistance, in both cases, stood defending itself and its people. Israel would set the objectives of its wars, while the resistance would declare that it would stand firm, repel the aggression, and cause the enemy to fail. This is why achieving objectives remains the fundamental criterion for judging victory or defeat. In both wars, Israel failed to achieve its objectives, and Israeli politicians and military officials quarreled among themselves over their failure. It is true the resistance did not liberate Palestine, but the overall military record indicates a great qualitative development in the resistance’s performance, and a significant decline in the level of Israeli military performance.

A British politician said, after the 2006 war, that Arabs win every defeat inflicted on them, yet refuse to accept their one true victory in 2006. This is a strange Arab debate. Are Arabs searching for defeats? Do they love defeat, such that no Arab party is permitted to speak of even a limited victory? The Lebanese and Palestinians could at least speak of steadfastness and bravery in fighting, and of standing firm against the Israeli army, yet they pay no attention to the resistance’s accomplishments and insist that defeat was their lot. Or they could speak of the Israeli army’s failure and its inability to achieve any of its objectives, yet they insist on its victory. Why this strange behavior, and these lines of argument that carry grudges and resentments within them? Answering this question requires intensive research by a team of specialized researchers. The answer is certainly neither easy nor simple, and it is important for research centers to address this matter, since it relates to the educational and psychological makeup of the Arab human being, and answering it would help the Arab decision-maker, if genuinely concerned, in setting the cultural and educational programs necessary for seeing things not as one wishes but as they actually are. In this article, however, I attempt only to touch on some points that may be part of an answer:

Internalizing Defeat

The Arab human being has, thanks to the Arab regimes, been exposed to repeated defeats in various fields of life, rarely witnessing success in military, security, or economic activities, and so on. The Arab’s life is so filled with defeats that defeat has become an inseparable trait of his life at its various stages. Since the Arab was born, his life has been steeped in retreat, backwardness, and the domination of others who lord over him. Arabs have failed repeatedly before Israel and before British and American colonial domination, failed to escape economic and social backwardness and illiteracy, failed to achieve social cohesion or establish a shared identity uniting them all, and failed to establish a shared moral value system constituting a standard for committed, belonging Arab conduct. I am one of these Arabs who did not catch the scent of victory until recently, at the hands of the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance fighters. Our lives are crowded with defeats, failures, and frustrations, and Arab leaders have entrenched all of this through their irresponsible conduct, their domestic policies, and their subservience to their Western masters in their foreign policies.

Over time, defeat has become part of the educational and psychological makeup of the Arab human being. He was born in defeat and lived in defeat, so that the ordinary taste of life came to carry the flavor of defeat — indeed, life itself became defeat. The Arab has come to believe that life is defeat, and that victory is the anomaly within it, and if defeat is absent and does not occur, he feels something important in his life is missing, and it must be recovered so that life returns to its monotony and to what he is accustomed to. This is exactly like someone accustomed to a boot on his neck who suddenly loses it, and begins searching for the boot instead of setting off in search of a new life. Defeat has become part of our psychological and educational makeup because companions and friends usually advise the rebellious not to rebel, since he will not be able to do anything or change anything. They advise the rebel that he “will not establish religion in Malta,” and that he must not carry the ladder crosswise. The educational meaning of this is that one should not even try, because defeat will be his lot. Defeat is now transmitted, educationally, from elders to the young, from the experienced to the inexperienced, from father to son, so that the person internalizes defeat as an unchanging way of life. And if it happens that someone says he has won, this provokes astonishment, mockery, and derision, and efforts must be made to bring him back to his senses. It means Hezbollah went senile in 2006, and so did the Palestinian resistance in Gaza in 2014.

Internal Hostilities

Perhaps the Arab’s hostility toward his internal enemy or rival is far greater than his hostility toward an external enemy, especially once some relationship has crystallized between him and the external enemy. If we speak of the Lebanese opposition to Hezbollah, we find that this opposition’s hostility toward the party is far greater than its hostility toward Israel, and the best evidence of this is the political, social, and partisan educational material this opposition adopts. And if we look at the Palestinian forces opposed to the resistance, we find them more hostile to the resistance than to Israel, and there is much evidence of this, including partisan education and cooperation with the enemy. Security coordination between Palestinians and Israel continues uninterrupted during the war, while bickering, insinuation, and jabs against the resistance continue as well.

The problem in the Arab arena is that the external enemy dominates everyone equally — everyone is equal in humiliation and degraded standing — but internal rivalries carry a different weight. The Arab may accept external domination, yet be prepared to fight his internal tribal or sectarian rival for years, and we have plenty of evidence of this in the wars of pre-Islamic tribalism that we have witnessed repeat themselves in a number of Arab countries in the modern era. There is no objection to the foreigner sometimes prevailing, but the prevailing of a rival son of the people is rejected, because this shakes the standing of internal rivals and diminishes their worth. What matters in our internal conflicts is that rivals not achieve accomplishments they are praised for, or that history records for them. This is why we busy ourselves so much with efforts to thwart and bring down local parties who wish to stand taller and hold higher status. This applies even at the level of a village council in most Arab villages. A rival tribe in the village works to thwart the council head because he belongs to another tribe, and that tribe must not be allowed to achieve successes credited to it. Everyone must fail, so that we are all equally satisfied and on the same level. Perhaps matters are not quite this harsh, but the pattern exists.

Accordingly, it is difficult for Hezbollah’s opposition in Lebanon to bear its victory. Its victory is a defeat for them, and the same applies to the Gaza Strip’s resistance for the resistance’s opponents. This is why the opposition always works to trivialize the military accomplishment, and to search for justifications to alter the features of the accomplishment and turn it into a defeat. Lebanese “geniuses” theorized the 2006 defeat, just as “Palestinian” geniuses now theorize the philosophy of the resistance’s defeat in Gaza.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “جدل النصر والهزيمة في لبنان وفلسطين” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.