After aligning what it says are hundreds of thousands of rockets and missiles along the Lebanese-Israeli border, then using this overwhelming excess of power to cower the Lebanese Christians into submission and block the election of the Maronite president, Hezbollah has turned pacifist. Not because it suddenly sees the light of non-violence and the search for peace; religious fundamentalists never evolve out of the swamps of their dog-eat-dog world. In fact, they are cowards who religiously abide by the Lebanese saying, "Stay away from evil and sing to it" (بعود عن الشر وغنّيلو).
Hezbollah may have reason to fire its rockets into Israel in support of the Palestinian uprising against the apartheid British-American colony of Israel. But when the tea leaves say otherwise, Hezbollah has the flexibility to modify its high testosterone and phallic rockets posture and become a pacifist. Instead of lobbing rockets into the "Zionist entity", Hezbollah now installs tents in disputed territory between Israel and Lebanon.
As we have repeatedly said, the law in the case of the Shebaa Farms, Ghajar and Kfar Chouba is on the side of Israel because it captured these territories from Syria, not from Lebanon. Now, these territories are Lebanese, but Syria, which has never ceased tormenting Lebanon over the decades since independence, occupied and annexed them from Lebanon long before Israel occupied them.
At independence in 1943, Lebanon was granted these three barren plots of land by the mandatory powers France and Great Britain. Following independence in the 1940s, Syria never recognized Lebanon's right to exist as a sovereign independent country until 2008 when it was compelled to exchange embassies with Lebanon following the eviction of its occupation army by an angry Lebanese population. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Syria ceaselessly harassed Lebanon: Whenever Lebanon took decisions that the vulgar Syrian dictators (who mounted successive coup d'etats against their predecessors at the rate of once a year) didn't like, they'd close the border trying to suffocate Lebanon economically by denying it access to the Arab hinterland; Syria refuses to this day any international arbitration for a permanent delineation of the border; Instead of directly fighting off the Israelis who occupied and annexed the Golan Heights, Syria made a deal with Israel (mediated by the American war criminal Henry Kissinger) in 1974 to pacify their own border while creating a war zone across the Lebanese-Israeli border via terrorist paramilitary organizations of all kinds (Palestinian, Syrian, Communist, Syrian Socialist National Party SSNP, Iranian, and others). A non-demarcated border is a fertile opportunity to sow problemas and come up with pretexts to interfere and intervene. In 1956, Syrian forces entered the Shebaa Farms, Kfar Shouba and Ghajar in south Lebanon at the tri-border junction between Israel, Lebanon and Syria, killed two Lebanese gendarmes and seized and annexed the territory. Unfortunately, Lebanon did not complain about that seizure before international instances.
When Israel captured the Golan Heights in 1967 and 1973, it seized the Shebaa Farms, Kfar Shouba and Ghajar since they were under Syrian control. Therefore, technically, Israel has seized these territories from Syria, not Lebanon. As a result, Lebanon cannot claim these territories from Israel, it must first claim them from Syria. But Syria continues to refuse to provide any documentation to the United Nations certifying the Lebanese ownership of these lands. Why? Because by maintaining ambiguous and undefined borders, Syria has created dozens of pretexts to sow havoc in Lebanon and deploy terrorist organizations like the PLO and Hezbollah under the guise of "liberation". Syria hates Lebanon and is now in cahoots with Hezbollah to maintain Lebanon as a cesspit of instability and violence with which to indirectly harass Israel. There is nothing to prevent the Syrian dictator Assad from setting up his own Hezbollah along his own border with Israel to harass and occasionally lob rockets into Israel. But it is far more convenient for the coward Assad, the mass murderer and butcher of his own people, to pretend to fight Israel from Lebanese, not Syria, soil. Sadly, Israel and the US appear to have agreed with Assad over this strategy: That has been the history of the Lebanese war since the early 1970s ever since the vulagr Assad dynasty came to power.
When Hezbollah decides to set up tents inside the disputed territories along the Lebanese-Israeli border, it is signifying its departure from its rocket-propelled machismo. The reason behind this metamorphosis is that the Lebanese people are finally standing their ground against the Iranian Hezbollah militia's reckless adventures. Hezbollah is now in a corner. It cannot drag Lebanon into Quixotic wars like it used to do. It is under siege inside Lebanon by a united Christian front, and it cannot risk a war with Israel because it and Israel signed a maritime border agreement that allows both Lebanon and Israel to extract gas and oil on both side of the maritime border. Money-making has become a factor of rapprochement and peace between Iran-Hezbollah and Israel.
By setting up tents inside disputed land, Hezbollah is demonstrating the limits of its own self-declared "deterrence" against Israel. It has not "resisted" since 2006 when Israel smashed the Hezbollah ghetto in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah has therefore ceased to be a resistance; it is now just like any other sectarian political party which uses its residual military power to make political gains. It is becoming increasingly clear that Hezbollah, as the representative of the Muslim Shiite community in Lebanon, wants to change the Lebanese political system - a highly choreographed distribution of political and administrative offices between the various sectarian communities. Its blocking of the political process has gradually voided the country of the major posts allocated to the Christian Maronite community (President, Governor of the Central Bank, Army Chief). But it is confronted by a virtually united Christian front, which is threatening Shiite Hezbollah, and by extension all other Muslim communities, to seek a separation between Christian Lebanon and the Muslims, ranging from a highly decentralized administration to a form of federation or confederation and all the way up to a complete partition, leading to the rebirth of the smaller but much more uniformly Christian Mount Lebanon entity that existed between 1860 and 1918 as an autonomous "sanjak" within the Ottoman Empire. For the past 100 years since the creation of a multi-sectarian Greater Lebanon, in which the Christians invited the Muslims to join them in building a modern country, the Muslims have constantly reneged on their pledges and challenged all agreements between Christians and Muslims. The National Pact - an unwritten gentelemen's agreement - compels the Christians to no longer seek European protection and compels the Muslims to no longer seek Arab-Muslim protection. Yet, the Muslims have reneged on their pledge by joining the Arab Nationalist movement of Egypt's Nasser in the 1950s, the coup d'etat of the Syrian SSNP in 1961, the Palestinian liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the Syrian occupation of the 1970s-2000s, and now the Iranian Hezbollah terror.
For the second time since 2104, Hezbollah is preventing Parliament from electing a president. In 2014-2016, it blocked the election for 2.5 years until everyone gave up and surrendered by electing the Syrian-Iranian puppet president Michel Aoun. After 6 years of the disastrous Aoun term, no one is willing this time to give up and submit to the terms of Hezbollah. Hence the current stalemate: For the past 9 months, Parliament has been unable to elect a president because Hezbollah's lackey MPs walk out of the voting session to break the quorum.
Ultimately, the Christians are now united more than they ever have been. They are facing the Hezbollah threat with a sturdy posture of respecting the constitution and abiding by the law. As much as they have no militias and refuse to resort to violence, the Christians refuse any compromise that violates the letter and the spirit of the constitution, while Hezbollah, feeling comfortable with its overwhelming military capabilities, has been advocating "dialogue", which is Iranian-theocracy Fascist code word for "let's agree on OUR candidate, then go and vote in Parliament". Hezbollah is a coward because it cannot face the fact that it has lost last May's legislative elections and no longer has a majority. It refuses to hold a voting session in Parliament because it would lose to an anti-Hezbollah. And so now it sets up tents instead of firing rockets.
We certainly hope the international community is watching carefully. We hope the international community understands and remembers that the Christians refuse to take up arms and fight Hezbollah and remain bound by the constitutional order. We urge the international community to remember that it was Hezbollah, and behind it Iran and Syria, that began since the 1970s assassinating westerners, kidnapping western hostages, blowing up western embassies (US and French 1980s), bombing western peacekeeping forces (Multi-National Force in the 1980s, and UNIFIL to date), hijacking western planes (TWA 847) and killing western hostages, not only in Lebanon but across Europe (especially in Paris in the mid-1980s), manufacturing and smuggling dangerous drugs across the Arabian Gulf countries and Europe, and recruiting money launderers in the Shiite enclaves of Latin America.
We urge the international community NOT to renew UNIFIL's mandate in the south because UNIFIL has become a passive cover for Hezbollah's nefarious activities. UNIFIL should be dealing with state actors like Lebanon and Israel; instead, it deals with a non-state actor like Hezbollah that has taken the Lebanese government hostage to its ambitions and hides behind it. Hezbollah has never been a "resistance" movement as it claims; it is merely a tool in the hands of Syria and Iran to destabilize and keep Lebanon as a crucible where violence is contained. But the small and weak country of Lebanon has been paying the price since 1978 when UNIFIL was first deployed. Hundreds of UNIFIL soldiers have died and billions of dollars have been wasted so that Hezbollah continues its cat and mouse game over the sovereignty of Lebanon and over the livelihood and security of the Lebanese people. Time for the international community to have a spine.
No comments:
Post a Comment