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Military escalations are always worrying, but as we have witnessed on and since Oct. 7 last year, the gloves in the Middle East are now well and truly off. It is like a Royal Rumble match with no referee, and with none of the wrestlers willing to end the fight when they hear the bell.
This becomes even more worrying when, as Ireland’s trade minister Simon Coveney cautioned several months ago, Israel has chosen to “behave like a monster in order to defeat a monster.”
Indeed, Israel is undeterred by any amount of global condemnation, protests or threats from the International Criminal Court. It appears not to see the contradiction between its ability to eliminate some of its targets with maximum precision and minimal collateral damage (such as Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran), and its insistence on indiscriminate airstrikes that cause maximum damage — which, as army spokesman Daniel Hagari admitted last year, was the aim in Gaza.
To protect himself, and remain in power, Netanyahu is willing to turn his country into a pariah. His coalition of far-right lunatics, who have called for nuking Gaza, are no different from Daesh (and those words are not mine, but those of a prominent Israeli journalist to whom I spoke last January in Davos).
However, responsibility for the recent deaths of at least 1,300 men, women and children in Lebanon, more than 620 of those in the past three days alone, and the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, does not lie solely with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has blood on his hands too.
That is because there is a difference here: Lebanon is not Palestine. In 2000, Israel ended its occupation of Lebanon, and Hezbollah’s role as a resistance movement should have stopped right then and there while the whole region was applauding. In contrast, despite Israel’s unilateral withdrawal of troops and settlers from Gaza in September 2005, all of the Palestinian Territories including Gaza continue to be considered occupied under international law. This of course does not justify what happened on Oct.7: any civilian life lost is one too many.
Lebanon could have charted another course, and reclaimed its title as the “Switzerland of the Middle East.” Instead, Hezbollah refused for 24 years to lay down their weapons and become a purely political party: a demand that cost former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri his life. Hariri distinguished his time in office by obtaining huge support for Lebanon from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and the international community, but that ended with his assassination in February 2005 in a bombing carried out by a Hezbollah operative.
Since then, coinciding with the rise of the Tehran-backed Hezbollah, Lebanon has been in steady decline. They dominated politics, took over Beirut by force, and dictate to the country when it goes to war and when it doesn’t.
Worse, Hezbollah ruined Lebanon’s relations with fellow Arabs by exporting drugs and meddling in their affairs. They have supported the Assad regime in Syria through 13 years of civil war, and Hezbollah commanders helped the Houthi militia in Yemen to launch missiles into Saudi Arabia — where up to 300,000 Lebanese expatriates live and work, remitting funds to their families back home. Hezbollah has pledged that its resistance will continue until the liberation of Jerusalem: but the last time I checked, the route from Beirut to Jerusalem passed through neither Damascus nor Sanaa!
In Israel’s war on Gaza, Hezbollah showed its true colors (which, ironically, are yellow). What did Nasrallah do to prevent the slaughter of more than 41,000 Palestinians in the enclave? Instead, Hezbollah’s rhetoric invariably points the finger at the axis of moderation, namely Saudi Arabia, for “betraying the cause.”
Yet, as an eternal believer in the adage that actions speak louder than words, I prefer to compare Hezbollah’s futile waffle with the diplomatic effort on behalf of the Palestinian people led by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan. These efforts have been crowned by Palestine taking a seat at the UN General Assembly and the recognition by 146 countries of a Palestinian state.
As for Lebanon, the main difference between the Saudi influence and that of the Iran-backed Hezbollah was most eloquently put in a 2018 interview with the Kingdom’s Defense Minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, who said: “We send tourists to Lebanon, Iran sends terrorists.”
• Faisal J. Abbas is the author of 'Anecdotes of an Arab Anglophile,' published by Nomad Publishing.
X: @FaisalJAbbas