Reflections on south Lebanon

I noticed that the post I put up here yesterday about my trip to south Lebanon suffered from the “amazing disappearing bottom” in some renditions. Okay, the problem is it was too long. So in case your reading of my “Refelections” section there got cut off, I am just copying it in here so that you can–I hope– read all of it.

Some reflections after the trip

One first very strong conclusion I drew from the trip concerned quite simply
the strength of the relationship between the Lebanese state and Hizbollah
at this point. I have written about this numerous times in the past,
including here on JWN. But it gave me a completely new level of understanding
to travel through the small parts of the south that I did, and see the extent
of the cooperation between these two institutions (and also, between the
state and Amal) as it manifests itself on the ground there.

For example, it looked as if Hizbollah was in charge of many aspects of the
administration of the museum at Khiam, even though a few signs there did
indicate that it was a project of the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism.
And
that Ministry, presumably, had provided the numerous road-side signs leading
to it all the way up from Saida.

The Hizbollah and Amal flags and billboards that were sturdily attached to
the street-lights going all the way from Saida to Nabatiyeh indicated close
relations between these parties and the “Council of the South” or whichever
government body it had been that administered the construction/rehabilitation
of that road. Also, I must note that many excellent new or rehabbed
roads seemed to have been built in the south in recent years. Clearly, the Shi-ites of the south are a strong enough voting bloc in the parliament that they can get good state projects built in their part of the country. (I actually was one of the first people in the US to write about the strength, history, and authenticity of the Shi-ite presence in Lebanon, which I did in a little booklet that came out in 1984 or so in DC.)

While the small billboards that hang above the median strip are all for Amal
or Hizbollah signs, the Saida-Nabatiyeh road also has many larger billboards
implanted along its sides, which are used in many cases for normal commercial
advertisements. But USAID evidently wants to make its presence/influence
felt there. I don’t know if USAID provided a lot of the financing for
the road and was therefore rewarded with scores of free or discounted slots
for its (I have to admit) extremely unimaginative and uninformative signs?
Or if it did not contribute to the roadbuiling but simply chose to
use up some budget buying advertising space on those billboards at full cost?
Either way, the result is pretty hilarious: You can see USAID’s
ponderous logo and plodding absence of graphic imagination right alonmgside
billboards for Hizbollah– and usually, quite outnumbered by them.

(If USAID did help fund some of the reconstruction in the south, which I
believe is the case, then that is, I guess, a good thing. But how much
better of a thing it would have been if the US government had been firm with
Israel all along and told the Israelis from 1978 and 1982 on that it was
unconscionable that they should seek to invade and occupy a huge chunk
of what was very evidently someone else’s country? How much better
if the US government had said that US weapons could under no circumstances
be used in Lebanon? As it was, I as a US taxpayer had to pay for the
original Israeli invasion of Lebanon–including the deaths of some 19,000
Lebanese and Palestinians people there in 1982, most of them civilians;
then I had to pay for the occupation, and for the military operations the
IDF sustained inside Lebanon for the next 18 years… And now I pay again– just
a fraction of those earlier amounts–to send a few roadbuilding bandaids
to the people of Lebanon??? What a crazy system.)

Anyway, the closeness of the relations between Hizbollah and the Lebanese
state are not surprising at all. Hizbollah has a respectably sized
bloc inside the Lebanese parliament and used to be part of the government.
It is a sizeable force–quite possibly the biggest single force–inside
the country’s Shi-ite community, which is the largest confessional group
in the whole country. 35% of the national population? Maybe more…

Actually, it’ll be good for me to catch up some more with what’s happening
to Hizbollah-state relations here. Will this history provide any kind
of an instructive model for how relations between Moqtada Sadr’s people and
the Iraqi state might be in the future? It might. Here, though
there are lots of other things going on–including the recent assassination
of a Hizbollah official called Ghaleb Awali… (Memo to self: lots
still to find out!)

I guess the other thing I wanted to reflect on here, quickly, is the unsatisfactory
way that that matters were left in south Lebanon in the wake of the unilateral
withdrawal that Ehud Barak’s government in Israel undertook in 200. (Ehud
Barak: what a blast from the past, eh? What on earth happened to him?)

I wrote above that what Hizbollah presents at the Khiam museum is a Narrative
of Suffering but without (as at Robben Island) any complementary Narrative
of Reconciliation. And I believe that the way Hizbollah presents this
is largely representative of the way the vast majority of Lebanese people–not
just Shi-ites–feel about the way Israel has treated their country for the
past 35-plus years.

In other words, if anyone expected the Lebanese people to feel “grateful”
to Israel for having undertaken the withdrawal, they would have been completely
wrong.

If there’s a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, I am sure that
we could expect the same kind of sentiments to be prevalent there as here,
after the withdrawal– but with this crucial difference: Whereas here
in Lebanon, the Israeli withdrawal of 2000 left HJizbollah and its allies
with virtually no pursuable claims outstanding against Israel–oh,
apart from the possibility of reparations for all the suffering imposed by
the occupation?? dream on, Helena!– in Gaza, even if the Israelis
were to withdraw from every single square inch of the Strip, the 1.3 million
Palestinians of Gaza would still have massive claims outstanding against
Israel, since the vast majority–more than 80%– of the Palestinians in Gaza are refugees from
1948 whose longstanding claims against Israel will still not, if Sharon gets
his way, even be on the agenda after the withdrawal.

In other words, in south Lebanon, after Israel’s withdrawal of 2000, the
people may not have been “grateful” to Israel for the withdrawal, but at
least they did have the satisfaction of being able–at last!–to get back
to their homeplaces and farms and start building something there for the
future of their children. Which most of them have been doing very busily
indeed.

But in Gaza, if Sharon withdraws as promised next year, what will
the lives of the people be like– separated as the vast majority of them
will still be from any hope of being able to build a decent and secure future
for their children, whether in their family’s homeplaces, or using money
provided in compensation for the loss of the same?

If in Lebanon, the attitudes of the people of the south are still far from
ready to start crafting a Narrative of Reconciliation with Israel–how much
further away will the people of Gaza be from doing this?

Oh well, everything I work on these days seems to come back to a couple of
very basic conclusions: War and invasion and military occupation and
unilateral decisionmaking are all processes that lead to increased suffering
and difficulties down the pike. But there is always a nonviolent, non-coercive
alternative. In most cases it takes the form of negotiations.