Unless one is very pro- or anti-Israel, it is difficult to understand the bloody game that Israel and Hezbollah are playing in Lebanon. Their four-decade-long standoff has intensified since Hamas’ brutal terrorist attack a year ago and the Lebanese militia’s declared willingness to back its Palestinian allies in Gaza. Yet neither Israel nor Hezbollah have any say in the matter. only democratic state Neither the Middle East nor the powerful Shiite political-military group in the neighbouring country are in a position to achieve their objective. Even so, they do not seem to care about the hundreds of dead and the destruction of the very battered Lebanon.
Despite its persistent bombardment of northern Israel, Hezbollah has failed to reduce military pressure on Gaza or force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a ceasefire. It is now clear that without the direct support of Iran, its sponsor, it will be unable to go any further in its confrontation with Israel. And that is a trap that the Islamic Republic wants to avoid, as veteran Iranian diplomat Javad Zarif (now serving as foreign policy adviser to the new president) has pointed out, if not so much because of a lack of desire on the part of its hawks as because of the internal situation and the fear of confronting the US directly.
For its part, the Netanyahu government has used Hezbollah attacks and the forced displacement of civilians to justify the end of the militia. The explosion of thousands of searches and rescues walkie-talkies (in a spectacular operation that Israel has refused to claim responsibility for and that, had it had any other origin, would have been described as terrorist) has given way to an air offensive unprecedented since 2006 and some expect a ground incursion. But as in the case of Hamas, decimating its militants and destroying weapons and infrastructure will not break them.
Both sides are fighting over a fragile, almost failed state. In fact, the absence of the state, which Hezbollah replaces in southern Lebanon and in many of its institutions, has been used by an Israeli minister, Amichai Chikli, to defend the occupation of a strip of that country. This is pure cynicism. First, because Israel – like Iran and, to a lesser extent, other neighbours and also the US and France – bears a large part of the responsibility for the weakness of the Lebanese state. Secondly, because Israel already occupied southern Lebanon between 1985 and 2000, aggravating the inter-communal fracture and contributing to the popularity of a then nascent Hezbollah.
I arrived in Beirut as a correspondent at the end of 1987, in the midst of the Lebanese civil war. The conflict had broken out 12 years earlier, when Christian militias – allies of Israel – wanted to put a stop to the state within a state that had become the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and other Palestinian groups, with the support of Lebanese leftists and pan-Arabists. It was already a fragile state due to the confessional nature of its political system, which encouraged the distribution of privileges within each community (Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze, etc.). The hopes that the end of the civil war in 1990 might have raised were buried by the 34 days of Israeli bombing in 2006.
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“Every 15 years we have a war,” declared a Lebanese man, half incredulous and half resigned, interviewed by a Western television channel these days. Does it have to be like this? Is there no one who can stop it? Poor Lebanon, poor Lebanese.
