For the second time in 20 years, those whom the deceased silverback of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, called "vile bastards", "Zionist agents", "US embassy-paid traitors".... are now providing food, shelter and medical assistance to his Shiite crowds who used to fill stadiums to chant and cheer him as he spewed virulent hatred against the Christians of Lebanon.
TV channels which, day in and day out, criticized Hezbollah and Nasrallah are now in mourning, showing footage after footage of the silverback against a background of sad music. After daring for years to use the name "Israel" when talking about the colony south of the border, they now constantly use "the enemy" (العدو) or the "Zionist entity" (الكيان الصهيوني) in compliance with Hezbollah's and its allies' diktat.
Those who had to fight Hezbollah's incursions into Christian neighborhoods and threats in places like Tayouneh and Ayn Remmaneh are now those who are opening their schools and community centers to their displaced Shiite 'enemies'.
Why? Because Lebanon is the only country on earth where Christians and Muslims have historically chosen the path of painstaking but worthy "accommodation" rather than the path of easy but brutal "exclusion" eloquently practiced by the Muslims and Jews of Palestine-Israel.
For one, decency and civility dictate that they do not kick the Shiites when they are down.
Two, they fear that, not showing unity and friendship, albeit fake, at a time of utter defeat for the Shiites, might be interpreted as further treason and sympathy with the "enemy" down south, and hence a potential pretext for civil unrest and war. Zionists go to bed at night dreaming of a civil war between Christians and Shiites in Lebanon. But unlike in the Palestinian-Lebanese war of the 1970s, the Christians now are unarmed and have no militias, and constantly demand the protection of the State and the legitimate Lebanese Armed Forced against assassinations, incursions and threats by Hezbollah. They have no desire to start another internecine conflict.
Third, while probably cheering secretly at the decapitation of Hezbollah, the Christians of Lebanon do not want by the same token to encourage and expresss gratitude to Israel. They were tested by the Israeli invasion of 1982 when the Israelis "liberated" Lebanon from Yasser Arafat's PLO only to demand subservience to Israel in return, turn Christian against Druze in the Shouf district, then occupy a buffer zone along the border which they gracefully negotiated with Iran and handed back to Hezbollah when they withdrew in 2000. The Israelis could have instead handed the area back to the Lebanese state and army and the United Nations force (UNIFIL), and thus solve the problem for good.
Instead, the Israelis expected that the election of President Bashir Gemayel in the aftermath of their invasion would turn Lebanon into a vassal or sattelite state of Israel. But no sooner than his first speech in which he invited the Muslims to join him in rebuilding a Lebanon free from both Syria and Israel, Gemayel was killed in a bomb explosion that seemingly was Syrian-planned but that many interpreted as Israel's retaliation for Gemayel's "ingratitude". Who knows? Maybe Syria and Israel invested together in preventing Lebanon from exiting their bloody murderous circus. They were the main foreign occupiers of the country at the time, and to this day they benefit from keeping Lebanon a crucible for their violence while maintaing peace and quiet on their own borders.
It is very difficult for the Christian Lebanese minority to navigate these distressing and uncertain times. Lebanon's Christians hate both Arabs and Israelis. When, in their heyday of the 1940s-1960s, they had built Lebanon into a jewel of a small country with prosperity, democracy, openness to the world and liberalism, both Israel and the Arabs began tormenting Lebanon which did not fit into the drab Jewish ultra-religious totalitarianism of an oxymoronic "Jewish-only democracy", nor did it fit the ultra-religious "Muslim-only" Arab monarchies, fake republics and dictatorships around.
Though they retain some residual moral and political power and are considered to represent the last free Christian community across the entire East, Lebanon's Christians have seen what befell the other Christian communities in Iraq, Israel and Syria (decimated and vanished) or those who still reel like an enslaved community of dhimmis (tolerated and intolerated) in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
No one knows what they'll do this time if Israel escalates its savagery and pilfers Lebanon's resources like it did in 1982 under the guise of the same "self-defense" pretext, or if the incompetent Muslims decide to seek revenge against the Jews by bashing the other non-Muslim aliens (after the Jews) on the Muslim scale of alterity, the Christians.
The Christians keep appealing to the UN and the international community to intervene with strong, forceful and enforceable diplomacy, to establish investigation bodies into atrocities committed by both Jews (war crimes, assassinations, occupation) and Muslims (Beirut harbor explosion, assassinations, sinister terrorist alliances with Stalinist Syria theocratic Iran). They have proposed official, internationally-recognized neutrality as a pillar of the ethos of the Lebanese State, a neutrality that already exists informally by virtue of the National Pact of 1943 to which both Christians and Muslims subscribed and which states that Lebanon is neither Arab (Muslims) nor Western (Christians), and will not get involved or take sides in regional wars.
Unfortunately the slide down the 50-year long abyss was the making of fanatic Muslim Arab nationalists who espoused every Arab and Muslim cause at the expense of a neutral, small and vulnerable Lebanon. It was also the making of fanatic foreign Jewish colonial settlers, a.k.a. Israelis, who sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees (1948, 1967, 1973) into Lebanon, refused to comply with several UN resolutions requiring them to allow back the refugees to their native land of Palestine, and used the legitimate desire of these refugees to fight back as a pretext to launch murderous campaigns to eliminate these Palestinians on Lebanese soil.
So the Christians of Lebanon are walking a fine line between maintaining good relations with their Muslim countrymen while at the same time refusing to cede more of Lebanon's sovereignty to those Muslims who keep losing Quixotic testosterone-driven wars and taking Lebanon down with them.
They pretend to regret Nasrallah's death in the hope of inciting more reason into the religiously-blinded minds of the Muslims. They pretend to hate Israel when in fact they are at best indifferent about all the vicious lies and totalitarian religious ambitions of both Muslims and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis, Zionists and Arabs alike. They pretend to support the Palestinian cause when in fact they are at best indifferent and are pretty much satisfied now that the Palestinians are finally fighting their wars of liberation on their own soil, and not in Lebanon as they did in the 1970s.
Lebanon used to be called, absolutely inaccurately, the Switzerland of the Near East. While very far from the substance of that analogy, Lebanon was at least on its way to achieving something that has yet to exist in the entire East: Diversity with democracy, individual liberties within a sectarian system. Now that it is on the ground, demoralized and in a coma, the only hope that the country has going forward is for the international community to intervene to put some substance into the analogy above. In its DNA, Lebanon embodies all that the international community has strived for since WWII: Tolerance, peaceful coexistence, human rights, etc. Why has the world abandoned it to Muslim and Jewish religious fanaticism?
Lebanon is a tiny country; alone it cannot face the virulent hostility of its neighbors and survive; and it is small enough to be amenable to pacification. Just as it did for other small countries - East Timor, Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo...- the international community is required to inject some testosterone into its many many otherwise useless resolutions, and intervene with boots on the ground to preserve this dying model of tolerance at a time of heightened religious and nationalist intolerance.
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