Hizbollah and Israel’s border

There was a well-conceived piece by Nick Blanford in yesterday’s Daily Star, looking at the security situation along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. He was examining in particular the fears some people have that Palestinians in S. Lebanon, upset or enraged or whatever after Arafat’s death, may launch attacks across the border, against Israel.
He noted that,

    Ironically, Hizbullah and Israel have a joint interest in maintaining the status quo along the United Nations-delineated Blue Line.
    Hizbullah is careful to protect its tactical control of the Blue Line, aware that the finely-tuned rules that govern border clashes can easily be upset by unauthorized attacks. Hizbullah’s militants are deployed along the length of the 110-kilometer border, some at small observation posts, others armed and in military uniforms staking out the remoter stretches of the frontier. The fighters have been known to stop armed Palestinians on their way to the frontier and hand them over to the Lebanese authorities. Israel is aware of the occasionally useful role its arch foe plays in helping maintain calm along the border, hence the willingness to play down last week’s Katyusha attack.

But things are different with regard to Palestinian militants operating here in Lebanon:

    While Hizbullah’s anti-Israel actions along the border are kept within a certain limit, the Palestinians have no such constraints and represent a source of dangerous unpredictability. Cross-border attacks involving Palestinians have been rare since Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000. Most of them involved members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, an Iran-backed group comprised of Lebanese as well as Palestinians which coordinates closely with Hizbullah.

Meanwhile, Hizbollah’s website today announced that the party’s military wing for the first time sent a drone airplane into Israel’s airspace… and it reached as far as Nahariya.
No word (as far as I could see) about what kind of communications and sensors were on the drone… which would of course be the crucial factor.
Hizbollah said it was doing this in response to Israel’s many, many incursions–by drones as well as manned aircraft–into Lebanon’s airspace.
See, for example, this short UN report of an appeal that Kofi Annan’s special rep in Lebanon, Staffan de Mistura, issued Thursday, that Israel cease that practice.
It noted that de Mistura issued his statement,

    in response to eight flights involving 11 aircraft and three drones across the Blue Line, as the line of withdrawal is known.

Practically every day there are reports of such overflights.

13 thoughts on “Hizbollah and Israel’s border”

  2. One might as well ask, Wesley, whether Europe should be outsourcing its security to the USA (via NATO). In each case the defense agreement is only apparently consensual but in actuality coerced.
    The reason for Lebanon’s own position lies in the divide-and-rule tactics of France as evidenced in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which created Lebanon as a Maronite Christian feifdom, and in the cultivation of Alawite clan power in Syria, which eventually led to the overthrow of the Shishakli pan-Arabist government in 1954. The use of divide-and-rule tactics by the USA has been no different from that of the British and French before them. The West therefore has no grounds to complain about the results of this process, which it encouraged originally as a means of destabilising the Ottoman system.

  3. Wesley,
    cc: Rowan
    Are both of you unaware of the fact that Hizbollah is not a foreign group, but a Lebanese organization originated in Lebanon by Lebanese?

  6. Shirin, the soldiers of NATO ‘allies’ are nationals of the allies, not of the USA, but it is the USA which holds the balance of power in NATO. This incidentally is why I would like to see NATO disbanded in favour of a truly European-owned and European-controlled force.
    Of course, I am not comparing Syria to the USA, nor am I condemning Syria for exercising the balance of power in this tiny ex-province, which as I explained is historically part of Syria anyway. Lebanon’s citizens can never really be anything other than someone else’s proxies. This is not to insult them, it is just to be accurate about the puppet nature of the Lebanese state.
    An important element in this is the supply of arms, and much is made in Western circles of the argument that Hizbollah’s arms come, via Syria, from Iran : a sort of Shi’a solidarity is supposedly behind this.
    Actually, one of the saddest things about the situation in Iraq is that the Badrists (though not the Sadrists) are fighting alongside the US and its puppet regime. I would like to think this is a subtle infiltration tactic ; but whatever it is, the Qutbists are now shooting and blowing up the Badrist ‘collaborators’, as well as the US troops. Sadr was unable to get the SCIRI leaders to boycott the occupation army : so much for Shi’a solidarity. On the other hand, this has not stopped the occupiers from claiming that Iranians are stoking the resistance, which means the Shi’a are getting the worst of both worlds politically, if not at this stage militarily.
    If I’m wrong about any of this, do correct me. I am not under the illusion that I am omniscient.

  7. yes, Rowan has it right that Iran is Hezbollah’s arms supplier…not to mention patron, spiritual guide and enabler…but my original question was not whether Hezbollah is Lebanese, but whether outsourcing its security to this largely unaccountable group with its Qassam rockets and drones serves the interest of LEBANON?

  8. Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by outsourcing. I understood you to mean placing it in the hands of a foreign organization. That is why I felt a need to point out that Hizbollah is not a foreign organization as many people seem to think. It is a home grown Lebanese organization which was started by Lebanese as a resistance group against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.
    If I misunderstood your meaning, then I am sorry for the diversion.
    By the way, I know a few Israelis who were in Lebanon as part of their forced military service, and who insist that Hizbollah is not a terrorist organization, but a legitimate resistance group. One of them once took an Arab-American to task in a discussion for referring to them as terrorists.

  9. Whether they can be said to be a terrorist group or not – and, yes, they are listed here in America as a terrorist organization – I was merely addressing the issue of whether giving them unfettered ability to serve as a tripwire in Southern Lebanon serves the interests of the people of Lebanon.
    (as you apparently now recognize, I was using the term “outsource” in the sense of devolving a critical state function to a largely unaccountable private group.)

  10. Wesley, you express yourself as if there was a ‘democratic authority’ in Lebanon which could stand above the real balance of power and make abstract judgments about national issues. This is what the Marxists would call “a bourgeois illusion”. There is no such transcendent authority in Lebanon or indeed anywhere else. If you want to engage in serious political analysis you have to start from existing balances of power which more or less successfully cloak themselves in ‘democratic norms’. This applies to the USA as well, which is the point of my comparison. Consider your term, ‘unaccountable’. What on earth is ‘accountable’, in your terms? Nothing : the idea is fictitious (or as the Marxists would put it, “purely ideological”).

  11. Wesley, whether the U.S. does or does not declare a group as “terrorist” (or a state as a terrorist state or a terrorist-harboring state) has far more to do with politics than with reality.

  12. At least Hizbollah were effective in driving the Israeli army and its proxies out of Lebanon. I would even go as far as to suggest that without Hizbollah, Israel and her proxies would still be occupying southern Lebanon to the much greater detriment of Lebanon.
    By the way, the reason that the U.S. is so keen to get Syria out of Lebanon is not for the democratic benefit of the Lebanese, it is solely for the benefit of Israel.

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