Hassan Nasrallah, the Muslim clergyman leader of the Iranian militia of Hezbollah, recently said that if the Lebanese State obtains all its demands from the ongoing maritime border negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, then there will be calm. If not, there will be escalation, i.e. war.
Now everyone knows that in successful negotiations, both sides have to make concessions. Since the Lebanese government has over the years, with Hezbollah's gun down its neck, added demand after demand, undercutting any progress made by adding new demands or maximizing its positions whenever a deal was near, it is clear that a Lebanon under the Iranian-Hezbollah occupation will NEVER make a substantive deal over the maritime borders. All those past decades, when many opportunities availed themselves for Lebanon to emulate Egypt, Jordan and even the Palestinians themselves by clinching a peace treaty, Syria, Iran and their proxies - as well as paradoxically the US itself - would undermine them, and only ceasefires or understandings or rules of engagement would be agreed to. It is as if everyone, including Israel and the US, has CONDEMNED Lebanon to remain in the purgatory it has been in for several decades.
Not to digress too far, but when the May 1983 accord was negotiated between Lebanon and Israel, it was the US, and specifically State Department Secretary George Shultz, who told President Amine Gemayel not to ratify it with his signature. One wonders why. Had that accord been signed, Lebanon would have been shielded from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, at a time when Hezbollah was still in its diapers. Lebanon would have followed in the footsteps of Egypt (1979), far ahead of Jordan (1994) and the Gulf Emirates (2020), and so much blood and torment would have been spared for the people of Lebanon. Again, the question is why does it always seem that the enemies of Hezbollah and Iran - namely the US and Israel - shy away from a definitive solution to the agony of Lebanon? Should we believe the conspiracy that Lebanon was destined, from the days of the treacherous criminal Henry Kissinger in 1974, to become the dumping ground for Palestinian (then) and Syrian (today) refugees, leading to the dismantling of Lebanon, and relieving Israel of its obligations to the Right of Return? Is it for the same reason that since 1974, Syria has never resisted Israel's occupation and annexation of the Golan Heights, just as it never responds to today's Israeli daily attacks on Syrian soil, while Syria has constantly stoked wars and instability in Lebanon, supposedly to back the Palestinian PLO then the Iranian Hezbollah in their "liberation" activities in south Lebanon?
In any case, Nasrallah's bottom line is that Israel doesn't exist and cannot exist, which is why he rarely mentions it by name except occasionally in a slip of the tongue. The "Zionist entity" or "the enemy", as he calls it, will never be accepted as a fact in the ideological tenets of the Iranian theocracy on whose leash Nasrallah runs his operations.
Therefore, how can anyone with any sense believe that Nasrallah will abide by any agreement reached between Lebanon and Israel through the offices of the US mediator (and former Israeli soldier) Amos Hockstein? While he may temporarily acquiesce to some tactical understanding in order to allow Lebanon to make some money, if any, out of its gas and oil maritime reserves, Nasrallah will on the longer term inevitably and always find a pretext for war because his ultimate objective is the destruction of the state of Israel. He and his masters in Tehran have never desisted from declaring this objective as theirs.
If precedent is any guide, when Nasrallah would be asked during the 1990s whether he will dismantle his militia once Israel withdraws from the occupied border strip, his answer was an unequivocal yes. His declared objective then was to liberate the border strip from the Israeli occupation. But when Israel did withdraw in 2000, Hezbollah invented the never-heard before Shebaa Farms pretext to claim that Israel still occupies Lebanese territory, and declared it had no intention of disarming or dismantling. The pretext of Hezbollah's "resistance" continues to be the shackle preventing any reconstruction and healing of Lebanon after 50 years of instability, first with the Palestinian resistance (PLO) in the 1960s and 1970s, then with the Iranian resistance (Hezbollah) in the 1980s and to date.
To those who continue to promote the canard that Hezbollah liberated the Lebanese south, they ought to know that Israel withdrew from the border strip not because Hezbollah "liberated" the south, but because a shady deal was secretly reached between the US, Iran and Israel in which the latter would withdraw in exchange for Hezbollah's maintaining quiet over the border, when it would have been more decent of Israel to surrender the evacuated area to the legitimate Lebanese Army (see: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/05/hezbollah-israel-collusion-big-lie-of.html.) Which explains why instead of reducing the footprint of the UNIFIL (the UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon since 1978) and/or replacing it with the Lebanese Army, these UN forces were enlarged despite their failure at fulfilling the stated objectives of all UNSCR resolutions behind UNIFIL's existence (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_resolutions_relating_to_Lebanon) for the exhaustive list of those resolutions.
Finally, in his latest verbal diarrhea on TV accompanied by his theatrical finger-wagging and raucous voice - which by the way includes his inability to roll his "r", preferring the guttural French "r" sound - Nasrallah continues to brandish the threat of his sophisticated technological and military weaponry, in both quality and number, proclaiming an Armageddon-like end of the Zionist enemy. Does anyone think that some day Nasrallah will on his own relinquish these weapons and close his shop? What will he do with all this weaponry if there is no war? Such sophisticated technological weaponry needs maintenance, otherwise it quickly becomes obsolete and is superseded by the enemy's weaponry.
Nasrallah wants nothing but war. Without war, or at least the pretexts for war, he and his 7th century vintage cabal will have no reason to remain extant. By maintaining the threat of war alive, he ensures his own existence and relevance.
Hockstein is expected soon in Beirut with the final positions of Israel on the maritime border dispute. "Final" apparently is a relative term, like Bill Clinton's definition of "is". There's been so many "final" answers and positions, reminding me of what an asymptote is. Hezbollah has temporized a bit this summer to allow the expatriates Lebanese to visit the homeland and spend much needed hard currency. Now that the summer season is coming to an end, and the September 1 - October 31 time frame to elect a new president is upon the Lebanese, one can hear the early rumblings of war in the far distance. Now that Europe is in dire need of Egyptian and Israeli gas because of the Ukraine War, any disruption in the soon-to-materialize Israeli gas production cannot be countenanced.
All indicators of impending war. But let us wait for Amos Hosckstein's "asymptotic final" trip to Beirut.
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