Stripping Ghazza from its ideological extremes

The July–August 2006 war against the Hezbollah is widely perceived to have been a total failure: poorly prepared and improvised as a reaction to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, the war has been subjected to lots of criticisms inside Israel, in addition to several internal army investigations, all of which made the now-exiting prime minister Ehud Olmert widely unpopular. Yet, since the end of that ill-fated war, and since beefing up the UN forces (known as UNIFIL) on the Lebanese–Israeli border, the border has been relatively quiet. Not only there hasn't been much “resistance” activity, but better still, the Hezbollah has been denying any “involvement” or wrongdoing whenever a rocket or two would hit the north of Israel. A sign perhaps that the 2006 war may not have been a futile failure after all. But the main question that lurks is the following: is the Hezbollah getting domesticated in internal Lebanese, regional, and international politics? The question is important for several reasons. First of all, since 1982 Israel has been fighting mini-wars without a clear win or lose situation. In 1982 Israel forced the PLO out of Lebanon, then had to go through two successive intifadas in its own occupied territories, and by the early 1990s, when the Lebanese civil war was technically over, the Hezbollah had by that time matured into a formidable foe, forcing the Israelis to withdraw humiliated in the early summer of 2000. In all such events Israel was far from the neat wars it fought with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria since its existence as an independent nation-state, subjecting Arab states and armies to clear defeats in 1948–49, 1956, 1967, and 1973. The so-called extremist groups and organizations à la Hamas and Hezbollah have lots of popular support at home and across the Muslim world, are financially backed by the Iranian mullahs, and benefit from the unpopularity of the Arab states and their dismal policies and economies. Can they be sucked into “war” situations and “defeated”? Or is their evolution purely “internal,” that is exclusively bound in the final analysis to their home constituencies? In the latter situation one has to expect a slow evolution of such groups to internally contain their violence, amid failures of the modern nation-state across the eastern Mediterranean (and elsewhere).

Such questions have resurfaced in the last two weeks amid the massive Israeli operation against Hamas in the Ghazza strip: could Hamas be defeated? Can such nonstate micro–jihadic groups be defeated?

All societies have to domesticate their own violence in order to survive. In many ways, politics is a process of violence distribution, which in the modern world implies empowering the state through its monopoly over violence. If violence has to be channelled through the agency of the state, then all groups and factions in society have to subdue to that kind of channelling, refraining from anything on their own. When, for instance, the Hezbollah decides unilaterally on its own to kidnap soldiers on the Israeli border, it broke that sacrosanct rule of violence channelled through the agency of the state. In effect, Israel’s problem is that it has to periodically endure that violence on its borders precisely because its neighbors are unable to control it internally.

To understand such a phenomenon, simply go through some of the statements of the Hezbollah leadership and some of their Palestinian and Iranian friends in the last week. In his speech celebrating the martyrdom of Ashura, the Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah claimed that “all possibilities remain open.” Now that the Hezbollah has been—at least temporarily, if not permanently—disabled as a war machine on the Israeli border, in spite of successfully recovering from the 2006 war, it has to keep up the ante through speech and immaculate conception. Thus, we’re told in that same speech by Nasrallah that among the “possibilities” is to “never let the armed struggle of the resistance die down.” In case you’ve wondered why the Hezbollah has been rich in discourse in the last two weeks, but inactive militarily, here is an encouraging answer: “We still do not know the size of the project and its prospects, as well as the size of those involved in it.” The “project” in question must be the assault on Ghazza: is it only a facade to something much “deeper,” like an imperialistic plan for the region as a whole? The Hezbollah while procrastinating on such an ontological issue is keeping its options open. Addressing himself directly to Olmert, Nasrallah said that “the July 2006 war would look like a promenade compared to what we’ve been preparing for the Israelis in the near future.” Which should de facto imply that such a “new war,” assuming it ever concretizes, would be even more destructive and costlier than the previous ones, for both Israelis and Lebanese, one has to assume. But do the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah think in terms of economic costs at all? Is there an economic rationale that would reason in terms of the economic prosperity of their “base”? One thing about such extremist groups is that they tend to operate through a double “base”: one that is internal, for instance, the majority of the Shia in Lebanon, or the Palestinians of the Ghazza strip, while the other is universal and cosmopolitan. In the end, it’s the internal one that matters, even as the two do resonate in tandem most of the time. The other aspect is that of religious ideology: “Faced with all such provocations, we need to receive our inspiration from the spirit of Hussein...and his love for martyrdom. We’re ready to give ourselves and our spirits...and our our brothers, sons, and our beloved ones the martyrs for the sake of what we believe in.” And Nasrallah added in that same martyrdom speech: “We’re not afraid of your planes and threats…We’re ready for all possibilities and ready for every attack.” Now that it’s all about rhetoric, and rhetoric is by definition cheap, Nasrallah is “amazed” that among Lebanese officials there wasn’t much that matched his own rhetoric: “I would have liked among all the voices from Lebanon which served to appease the Israelis, or the intermediaries with Israel, regarding the borders with Israel, to have heard one single voice responding to Israeli threats against Lebanon and the Hezbollah.” Notice how Lebanon and the Hezbollah are two separate entities, the former protected by its national army, while the latter by its own militia. But the question that begs itself here is why did the Hezbollah, in the last two weeks, opt for rhetoric—and only rhetoric? Why that kind of rhetorical language when, as Nasrallah himself stated in that very same speech that “the Zionists are slaughtering our people (ahl) in Ghazza and threatening our people in Lebanon”? Why not go into action, since Nasrallah is so much adamant about the fate of his “people”? Notice how people is used as a generic term for “ahl,” rather than society or culture. But since we’re into rhetoric let’s go even further. We’re now into a full critique of “the Arab governments,” understood as separate entities from their “people,” due to a lack of cohesiveness between “people” and “leadership” (both Hamas and the Hezbollah provide counter-examples to the Arab anomalies), and to “the ruler of Egypt” in particular for remaining idle all that time, and for sewing relationships and normalizing relations with the Zionist state. All that must be stopped, shouts Nasrallah to the crowd of the martyrdom of Hussein.

Similar revolutionary calls for “liberation” came from other sources all over the Arab and Islamic worlds. The Palestinian Ahmad Jibril, known for his radical stance within “the popular front for the liberation of Palestine—general command,” urged for “the opening of all fronts, beginning with the Golan Heights.” When questioned on the missiles that were fired from Lebanon, with fingers pointing at the “general command” (with a Hezbollah benediction?), Jibril retorted that “we, Iran, and Syria are all in the same trench.” The ex-leader of the Iranian “revolutionary guards” urged Syria to mass its troops on the Golan to force Israel withdraw its forces from Ghazza, speculating at the same time that “if Hamas manages to take as hostage 20 Israeli soldiers victory would be on its side.” Others spoke of “cloning” the Lebanese 2006 experience into Ghazza right now.

Where does this language of perpetual never-ending trenches, martyrdom, hostages, provocation, and revolution to victory come from? That would need a long détour, for which I’m not yet prepared. What we know for sure is revolutionaries and their semantics of affection for the “people” have still a long way to go.