I’ve had two different pieces about Lebanon and “what does it all mean?” come out in recent days.
I wrote this one, Decoding Lebanon, for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the organization that lobbies in Washington around the concerns of US Quakers (and our friends in the peace-and-justice movement.)
This one, Lebanon’s fine example– so far, is in today’s Christian Science Monitor.
The FCNL piece is longer. It is more tightly focused on Lebanon than the CSM one, and gives much more detail about the nature of Hizbullah, Lebanon’s quirky electoral system, etc. I think a person might handily download it and print it to share with friends in your congregation or other community group who are slightly intrigued by what’s been going on in Lebanon but don’t know much at all about the country.
Tell me what you think.
(I’m doing another one for FCNL on broader issues of democratization in the Middle East.)
10 thoughts on “Two articles on Lebanon”
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The longer piece was pleasantly devoid of editorializing re Nasrullah and informative. Why don’t you submit it to National Review Online (who recently described Hezbollah’s “lethally dedicated membership” that “advocates the killing of Americans.” :)) There’s a good story about Nasrullah by Sami Mubayed in the February 26 Asia Times.
Hezbollah’s track record toward Americans in Lebanon in the early 1980s (kidnappings, American University outrages, suicide bombing of sleeping American and French peacekeepers, etc.) will not make keeping the only armed militia in Lebanon an easier sell for Fadlallah no matter how many Shiite social agencies he can point to…Does he see himself as some sort of privileged Warlord?…Why were his demonstrators waving Syrian flags?…Has the presence of Syrian military and intelligence forces promoted Lebanese freedom and self government?…Doesn’t Harari’s murder trouble Fadlallah?…Does he believe Americans have forgotten the terror directed at Americans by Hezbullah a generation ago?
Ham, hi.
Hizbullah was not established until mid-late 1984. There were precursor groups that were responsible for some of the acts you allude to, as I mention in the FCNL piece and describe in greater detail in the Boston Review piece coming out in a couple of weeks.
By the time the “peacekeeping” troops were killed, their presence in Lebanon had become fatally compromised by the fact that the US Navy was sitting off the coast of Lebanon hurling massive munitions into populated parts of the country, while other US military “advisors” were on the ground in the country, coaching the Maronitist fighters on how to pursue/reignite the civil war. The “peacekeeping” troops meanwhile were hunkered down in their barracks not keeping any peace at all.
There was one terrible act at AUB: the murder of Malcolm Kerr. His widow (a dear friend of mine) has written an achingly poignant memoir of the killing and their life together.
The two most serious anti-American acts of terrorism (a category that does not include killing armed soldiers, tragic though those killings were) undertaken by the pre-Hizbullah networks were the bombings of the US Embassy and the Embassy Annex.
Yes, there is plenty of blame to go around. We have to keep in the balance-sheet, however, the much greater number of Lebanese noncombatants killed by Israel and by Lebanese parties allied to Israel and the US during the 1982-85 period. That was what provided the context and the claimed rationale for the acts of the pre-Hizbullah networks– though in my judgment absolutely nothing can excuse lethal acts taken against noncombatants by anyone, anywhere.
By the way, the head of Hizbullah is Hassan Nasrallah, not Muhammad Fadlullah… I realize all the “Allah/Ullah/Ollah” names can be confusing, but Ayatollah Fadlullah is a quite distinct personality.
Helena many thanks for your informative postings and weblog. You are one of very few commentators who correctly state that the right wing violence committed during the Lebanese civil war was in the cummulative more lethal and brutal than that committed by the other parties. Two quick reasons come to mind. One is that during the first phase of the civil war the lefitist and Palestinian factions were multisectarian and bound to a nominally secular agenda. Hence they were with significant exceptions (the Damour massacar being one) less likely to (though nevertheless did) indulge in ethnic cleansing and death squad activities as a deliberate policy as compared to the right wing militias. The second reason is that there is continued profession of very bigoted and racist ideology (anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinain and Syrian even if Christian) that runs through the right wing professed agenda from pre 1975 to the present. The racist anti-syrian sloganeering in the last demonstrations is a case in point. Less well remembered is the delibrate policy of kiddnaping and killing innocent civilians that was perfected by the right wing death squads since the early phases of the Lebanese civil war. It is no chance occurrence that everytime my fellow Lebanese talk about how smart and civilized they are I become physically nauseated.
As to Fadllalah, he is in my opinion the preeminent Muslim scholar of this period; and this judgmnent is coming from some one who is not a Shiite.
yes, Helena, I did mean Hassan Nasrallah…you know far more about these matters than I do…Wasn’t there a shady masterorganizer Imad Mughnieh who links up present day Hizbollah with its “percusor group?”
Btw Umkahlil, thanks for your kinds words. Do you by chance have a URL for that Asia Times piece?
It seems on balance that while Hizbullah was eventually a reason for Israel to leave Lebanon, it was, for a long time, one of the reasons Israel stayed.
Your entire piece in FCNL reeks of Hizbullah sympathy, and even tries to downplay the importance of the huge anti-Syria rally that slapped the face of Hizbullah and Syria both. Gratitude indeed!
The PLO bears responsibility for a great deal of the violence of the last 30 years in Lebanon, yet your FCNL piece lets them off scot free.
Helena, it’s time to face the fact that you haven’t been pro-peace for a long, long time.
“It seems on balance that while Hizbullah was eventually a reason for Israel to leave Lebanon, it was, for a long time, one of the reasons Israel stayed.”
Warren W: Thank you for providing us the pure, unvarnished Likud, Sharonista version of history. Who cares about the fact that Israel invaded Lebanon twice before a Hizbollah even existed? Who wants to count the hundreds of military raids against the palestinians in Lebanon while Nasrallah was still a teenager?
I love all the talk of Syrian crimes and Hizbollah “terrorism” which ignores the context of 40+ years of Israeli imperialism in Lebanon which included the old British divide and rule tactic of empowering and arming to the teeth local quislings (the phalange). It’s like listing Mandela’s misdeeds and ANC “terrorism” during the 1990’s without mentioning apartheid.
Jose:
Israel’s previous military action (pre-Hizbollah) in Lebanon was against the PLO.
Imperialism in the modern era is a word that describes economically motivated penetration. The Israeli actions in Lebanon were motivated by military concerns: The instability/vacuum created by the Lebanese Civil War provided a place for the PLO to launch military actions against Israel, which retaliated.
It is still true that one of the big reasons Israel stayed was to suppress Hizbullah military action. The other reason was to suppress Palestinian military action from Lebanon.
Israel did not create the Phalange, Maronites or other Christian communities. Israel allied itself with the Lebanese sector least connected to the PLO.
None of this is really controversial. What part do you disagree with?
Oh my….. what a convenient neocon definition of imperialism…. and there are more than a few Israeli strategists who were quite lustful of Lebanese water resources…. Anyway, regarding the link between Israel’s invasion and Hezbollah’s creation and actions, recall it was no less than Y Rabin who lamented that it was Israel’s actions that had “let the Shia genie out of the bottle.” Law of unintended consequences…. which ideologues prefer not to consider