Having spent all its career in terrorism and service to Iran, Hezbollah unexpectedly agreed - from behind the backs of its Maronite stooges, Michel Aoun and Zebran Basij - to a maritime agreement between Israel and Lebanon less than a year ago.
For those who may not know, Hezbollah has erected Israel as the one and only "enemy", a qualifier that replaces the name of the country altogether in Lebanese political discourse. When discussing issues related to Israel, politicians and dinosaur clergymen use العدو , the enemy, and everyone knows who they mean. Some Christians dare use "Israel" on occasion, but for the most part they subscribe to the terminology of the "enemy", or shut up and do not bring it up in their discourse. This terminology to describe Israel is the product of the Palestinian "resistance" (I'm being kind) during the 1960s and 1970s, then to the Iranian "resistance" (I'm also being kind) in the 1980s to date. And the Lebanese, like brainless sheep at the mercy of their sectarian shepherds, just obey and follow suit.
Now, if one wants to establish a ledger of accounts comparing Israel and Syria in the pleiotropy of harm they have done to Lebanon over the decades, Syria wins second to none in the award-winning noxious damage it has inflicted on Lebanon. But Syria is, and to many remains, the Baathist Arab "Sister" we're supposed to respect and love. Syria and Lebanon are like an incestuous big sister who never stopped abusing and raping her younger brother, out of jealousy, out of hatred of the brother's semi-alien constitution. Lebanon is that gigantic mountain rising from the Mediterranean and which sheltered the Phoenicians-turned-Christians against forced conversion to Islam, whose people look to the western sea facing them and not to the eastern desert behind the mountain and share traditions will all Mediterranean countries. Syria, in contrast, is itself that desert beyond the Lebanon mountains, with bedouin nomad traditions from before Islam, then with Muslim traditions imposed on it by the 7th century Arab Muslim conquest.
In the ledger of accounts comparing Israel and Syria in the degree of their enmity to Lebanon, there should be no doubt in the mind of reasonable and objective people that Syria is Lebanon's political enemy No. 1. For one, Syria refused to recognize Lebanon as an independent nation-state since their respective independences from the French mandate in the 1940s. And that was before the cruel and Fascist Baath party of the Assad dynasty violently seized power in Damascus in 1970. It was finally forced to open an embassy in Beirut in 2009. Sit in a history class in any school in Syria and you'll hear the most reprehensible narratives about Lebanon as the whore who went astray, the alien traitor to the Arab cause, the province that was detached from the Baathist fantasy of Greater Syria, etc. (same narrative of Putin's Russia on Ukraine). No wonder that the 2.5 million Syria illegals who have settled in Lebanon (on top of a native population of 4 million) express a deep-seated hatred and condesendence for their Lebanese hosts; they've been indoctrinated by the Baath Party to detest the Lebanese, particularly the Christians. Then there is the long list of border closings, cross-border attacks and massacres against isolated Christian villages and monasteries along the Syrian border, the theft of territory (e.g. the Shebaa Farms in the south), the dispatch of Baathist regime-created terrorist groups (Al-Saika, the Palestine Liberation Army, the Yarmuk Brigades, Al-Asifa, and in recent years all manner of radical Islamist groups), into the Lebanese interior to undermine and destabilize the country, which the Damascus regime used to convince a credulous and Arab-brownnosing West to task it with stabilizing: The Arsonist-fireman strategy. Syria to this day refuses to delineate its land and maritime borders with Lebanon: To do so would make it finally accept that Lebanon and Syria are very different and distinct nations.
Not to forget the 30-year-long military and political occupation of Lebanon by Syria, whose consequences we are living today: Corruption and degraded institutions. I lived a few of the sieges that the Syrian army placed around the Lebanese cities during the 1970s and 1980s: Just as it does today with its own cities, killing about a million of its own people and displacing up to 12 millions out of the country under the guise of combating Islamic terrorism, Syria bombed Lebanese cities for months and years on end under the guise of combating renegade Christian militias whom it accused of being friendly with the unmentionable "enemy". Nowadays, after its pied-piper occupation army soldiers were chased out like mangy rats by an angry Lebanese population in 2005, it continues in its abusive "sisterly" conduct via its Hezbollah proxy terrorist militia.
By sheer numbers, Syria's occupation and torment of Lebanon for more than half a century has caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and the disappearance of tens of thousands in its prisons where torture, identity-erasing, and killings have been amply documented. The continued degradation of the once-thriving Lebanese economy by illegal smuggling of goods and cross-border movement of terrorists and weapons is also a weapon that Syria uses against Lebanon. Its refusal to draw definitive borders - maritime and land - between the two countries allows it all the deniability it needs to appear as a civilized country: the regime in Damascus is not to blame; it has no control over all these rogue elements.
By sheer numbers, Israel has perhaps caused the death of a few thousand Lebanese citizens. There are no official numbers. Despite the expansionist nature of successive Israeli governments, their bull's eye is Palestine, not Lebanon. Israel has withdrawn from the Sinai; it could have kept it. Israel has reached agreements with Jordan on their border disputes. The fact that Israel has occupied and annexed the Syrian Golan Heights without any attempt by the regime in Damascus to recover it by war, resistance or negotiations demonstrates that Syria has given up on its territory. In fact, there's been peace for 50 years on the border between Israel and Syria, which proves that Syria has no intention to recuperate the occupied-and-annexed Golan. Thanks to a deal between the criminal butcher Hafez Assad and the American war criminal Henry Kissinger in 1974, Syria abandoned the Golan in exchange for an American-approved dominion over Lebanon. No wonder that Syria prohibits any Hezbollah "resistance" on the Syrian-Israeli border, while inciting it on the Lebanese-Israeli border. This also explains the treacherous policy of the United States on Lebanon over 5 decades: The US inaugurated its list of State Sponsors of Terrorism with Syria as its first entry, while at the same time telling the Lebanese that the Syrian "presence" was a "factor of stability". The US granted Syria a free hand in Lebanon and defended the Syrian regime's violations and abuses of human rights and war crimes, while the Syrians were shelling every city in Lebanon for months on end. US presidents would meet with the Damascus butcher in Geneva or dispatch to Damascus their State Department secretaries who would declare like the dumb prefidious assholes that they are that Assad is "smart", "cunning" and "keeps his word". How honorable of the Americans.
All of this explains why tiny and openly diverse Lebanon has been unable to assert its will to be a neutral country that does not believe in violence and wars: Violence has been imposed on it by regional and international actors. Unexpectedly, its maritime border with Israel has been relatively easily drawn, even though there were some serious points of contention that would "normally" lead to armed conflict: The maritime border straddles shared oil/gas fields between Israel and Lebanon. The reason? Both Israel and Lebanon (with Hezbollah like the Rasputin behind it) stand to make money out of the gas: Pardon the stereotype, but these Phoenician and Hebrew Semites found common ground in money. But the fact that Iran, Syria, the US, and Israel agreed to the deal is proof that the Lebanese are never the obstacle to peaceful resolutions; the obstacles are always Syrian, Israeli, Iranian, or American.
But Amos Hockstein, the former Israeli soldier and current US presidential special envoy on Lebanon-Israel issues, who has cinched the deal between Hezbollah and Israel on the maritime border, was back last week in Lebanon on a preliminary visit to gauge the possibility of a re-do on the land border. Mark my words: Hockstein will not succeed on the land border as he did on the maritime border. The reason(s)?
1- There is no money to be made by either side in a land border agreement, even though for decades the dumbass pro-Syrians of Lebanon claimed that Israel was after Lebanon's waters. Israel has had plenty of time in all its invasions and occupation to steal Lebanon's waterways (Litani, Hasbani, Wazzani, etc.), but it never did. So, I don't think that an agreement could be made possible by enticement over water resources.
2- The more important reason is that a land border agreement will mean that Hezbollah will lose its fake raison d'etre, i.e. the pretext to remain an armed militia and a resistance. For decades it claimed that its existence is tied to the Israeli occupation in the south. Israel withdrew in 2000, in a complicit agreement with Hezbollah in which Israel, instead of handing the south back to the Lebanese State and its army, handed it to its own enemy Hezbollah, as if Israel wanted to perpetuate its own justification for violence along its border, namely to fight terrorists - same tune as the Syrian dictator. Hezbollah in turn complemented this treacherous Israeli behavior by declaring the withdrawal "incomplete". Both Israel and Hezbollah thus maintained the potential for violence in the south instead of acting to permit the Lebanese state to recover its sovereignty in the area. To add insult to injury, the UN expanded its Interim Force in the south (UNIFIL), which further impaired the Lebanese state in asserting its legitimate control of the area.
Should a land border be miraculously delineated, Hezbollah would no longer be able to use the pretext of the supposed Israeli occupation of a few barren strips of land along the Blue Line to maintain its "resistance" lie. The Blue Line is the temporary borderline drawn after the 2000 Israeli withdrawal and which differs from the 1923 official line in these few barren strips of land. Which is why I think that Hockstein will not succeed in his land border delineation mission unless Hezbollah decides to drop its weapons and cease to be a terrorist militia beholden to Iran and holding Lebanon hostage to Iranian desiderata. That, in turn, will depend on whether the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia is genuine and not just a Saudi ploy to poke the US in the eye. In my opinion, it will be very difficult for Hezbollah and Lebanon's Shiites to relinquish the domestic gains they coercively acquired with their illegal weapons, unless they are cornered and isolated by such momentous changes in the region as the fall and collapse of the Iranian and/or Syrian regimes.
Conclusion: Hockstein will fail in getting Lebanon and Israel to agree to a definitive land border delineation. Hezbollah will never abandon its weapons. Prior to 2000, Hezbollah said it will disarm if Israel withdraws. Israel withdrew, but Hezbollah found pretexts to continue imposing its will on the Lebanese State and its people. I have never heard Hezbollah say that it will disarm if Israel withdraws to the 1923 line, because it will not. Hezbollah can only fall if Tehran and/or Damascus fall, or if it is defeated in an armed conflict. Which is why I believe that the UN's useless presence in the south contributes more harm to Lebanon than good because it protects and perpetuates the anomalous status quo which, over the long term, has taken Lebanon backward rather than forward. The Lebanese should brace themselves, not only because of Hezbollah's reluctance to disarm, but more so because the West has many times in the past backstabbed the Lebanese by making deals with its own enemies who are also Lebanon's enemies.
No comments:
Post a Comment