Money and Resistance

As long as money was not in the picture, "resistance" was the modus operandi of Hezbollah. Suddenly, money appeared on the horizon, and Hezbollah's resistance fell by the wayside. With the possibility of extracting gas and making money - despite the fact that the "enemy" too stands to make money out of its own gas fields - who cares about a resistance that was going nowhere anyway.

Other than the monopoly that Hezbollah exercises over the term by calling itself "The Resistance", the term itself conjures up a broader meaning in the Lebanese psyche. In Lebanon's political jargon, "resistance" is a constitutive posture, a built-in state of mind the Lebanese inherited from the Syrian occupation which is the real master in the discipline. Over the decades of its pseudo-"struggle" against imperialism, colonialism and zionism, the Syrian Baath regime of the Assad dynasty has expanded the vocabulary of the discipline by dedicating specific terms to the fight against specific enemies. If the enemy is Israel, then "resistance" is the term. If the enemy is America, the applicable term is "rejection" (رفض), and so on and so forth.

Some of the Baathist terms that percolated into Lebanon during the Syrian occupation include steadfastness (صمود Sumood), confrontation (تصدي Tassaddi), reactance (ممانعة Mumana'a), rejection (رفض Rafd) etc. You resist and confront anything, everything, at all times, for no reason whatsoever. It is a permanent posture which makes you doubt even the best intentions of not only your enemies, but also your friends. Hence the pathological proclivity of the Lebanese to always see a conspiracy in any event or development that may in fact be a solution to their chronic problems. With this denial of the possibility of goodness in the world, you immediately attribute ill-intention to any interlocutor that approaches you. That is why the Lebanese love their saints and their supposed miracles. Even Muslims flock in large numbers to Christian shrines where relics are exposed, in the hope of curing suspiciously cryptic and scientifically un-testable diseases. "Trust no Human" should be the motto of the Lebanese people who are thus Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist disciples, because they unknowingly abide by his famous line, "L'enfer c'est les autres" (Hell is other people).

This posture instills in you and your followers a sense that everyone is your enemy, everyone is out to get you. No one is to be trusted. Indicative of a Lebanese (and Syrian) populations that have been so abused by their systems and their rulers for such a long time that they have become like a wounded animal that refuses even a helping hand. Welcome to the culture of victimhood. You are always a victim of everyone else, of some conspiracy or plot. 

Instead of a psychological posture of "let me trust first, then see", it fosters a permanent attitude of suspicion toward others. Instead of "let me first analyze the proposition and see if it has merits", my constant state of alert makes me immediately doubt the proposition without even analyzing it.

Something happened in the "Hochstein" maritime border agreement between Israel and Hezbollah, whereby Hezbollah suddenly abandoned its resistance posture and adopted a more conciliatory stance, which led to the agreement. For decades, Israel was never named by its name. It was such an alien entity that it had no name, like G-d for Orthodox Jews. It was referred to as "the enemy" (العدو), the "Zionist entity (الكيان الصهيوني), the "usurper" (المغتصب), etc. So much so that it was a shocking surprise to see Hezbollah agree to a deal with Israel. Of course, it will claim that the deal is between the Lebanese State and Israel, not between Hezbollah and Israel, but we all know that Hezbollah with a militia stronger than the Lebanese army is the actual ruler of the country, having placed a puppet president by the name of Michel Aoun as a shiny storefront in the top office. 

It may be that the circumstances in Iran, which is hovering between civil unrest at best and regime change in a worst case scenario, enlightened Hezbollah to the dangers ahead should its boss in Tehran be seriously weakened, and so it sought to compromise before it is too late.

Of course, Hezbollah will keep its weapons, for now at least. It's like old clothes that one keeps wearing out of habit and attachment, even though they are falling apart. Hezbollah's weapons are like the "stash" of the addict who is in rehab. 

The following is the ever-changing statement of purpose of Hezbollah over the decades since its inception. It started out in the late 1970s-early 1980s as a radical Shiite Muslim organization whose objective was to turn Lebanon into another Islamic Republic, copy-pasted on Iran. It didn't want to be a political party, only an armed militia. 

Then it rallied the traditional mantra of all Shiites around the world: Victimhood. Like the Jewish people, Shiites thrive on being victims, oppressed, dispossessed, etc. Hezbollah tagged its Islamic Theocracy plans with a claim of being the dispossessed community of Lebanon (المحرومين).

Then it realized that turning Lebanon into another Iran was a silly far-fetched unreachable objective, so it morphed itself into a "resistance" movement against the Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon. When the Israelis withdrew in 2000, pulling the rug from under Hezbollah's claims of resistance against the Israeli occupation (never mind that it wasn't bothered by the parallel and longer Syrian occupation), it adapted itself by inventing the Shebaa Farms fallacy. 

After the 2006 destructive war, which Hassan Nasrallah admitted "he didn't mean to happen by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers", Hezbollah again saw that it couldn't "resist" without causing enormous harm to itself and to Lebanon, so it drastically reduced its military imprint (not one cross-border attack since 2006; what kind of resistance is this that takes a 16-year long break) to flying a few harmless drones and became a political party, running in elections and serving in governments. 

Now that it subscribed to the non-agression pact with Israel that is implied in the Maritime Border Agreement, and to try and remain relevant, Hezbollah has changed its tune and is saying that it will keep its old, probably deteriorating, weapons to "protect Lebanon's oil and gas platforms" against the very hypothetical, yet eternal, Israeli aggression. The semantics could not be clearer: Hezbollah is committed now, per the Hochstein agreement, to maintain peace and security along the Lebanese-Israeli maritime border, which obviously extends to the Lebanese-Israeli land border. In other words, forget the verbal diarrhea over the liberation of the Shebaa Farms! Hezbollah is now the guarantor of Israel's security on it northern borders, as agreed with the Americans and the Israelis.

But why would it want to keep its weapons? Since it has used them for three decades to terrorize the corrupt political establishment into submission, why not keep them? Hezbollah is like the only thug in a gang of hoodlums that has a gun.

But there is yet a better explanation for Hezbollah's sudden metamorphosis into a protector of Israel's oil and gas industry along the Israeli-Lebanese maritime border: MONEY. With its guns, Hezbollah hopes to forcibly embezzle whatever profits Lebanon stands to make out of its gas and oil.

The Lebanese, regardless of their religious or political creeds, worship money. I've often felt that the average Lebanese loves money so much that he would sell his own mother if she fetches a good price. For Hezbollah's politburo, the possibility of extracting gas and making money by far outweighs any of its pleiotropy of ideological posturings like resistance, confrontation, reactance, opposition, etc. Just pay a visit to the southern regions of Lebanon under Hezbollah's control and you'll see castles and villas with grandiose architectures. From its diaspora in Africa (where it illegally trades in diamonds) to their manufactures of Captagon in the Bekaa Valley (which they export to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, among other places), the Shiites of Lebanon are very well-to-do these days. But the tatoo of impoverished, dispossessed victims is hard to wash off, especially if it generates sympathy from an idiotic left in the West and provides cover to generate, you guessed, lots of MONEY.