Category: Lebanon

Hizbullah head Hassan Nasrullah’s appearance before a massive crowd in south Beirut today had strong preliminary buzz to the effect that he was going to say something big. I think the new big thing was his claim that as a result of the 33-day war of summer 2006 Hizbullah holds the body parts of numerous fallen Israeli soldier:
(HaAretz agrees with this news judgment.)
Nasrullah told the mammoth crowd:

we have heads of Israeli soldiers, we have hands, and feet; we have nearly whole bodies as well. So what did the army say to the families of those soldiers? They are so weak that they left the parts of numerous bodies– not just one or two or three– on the battlefield.

This claim may well gain some importance inside Israel– and certainly in the years-long indirect negotiations between Israel and Hizbullah over the return to Israel of the mortal remains of Israeli pilot Ron Arad in return for the release of some remaining Lebanese (and perhaps also Palestinian) prisoners held by Israel for many years. Arad has been described as “missing in action” by the IDF since 1986.
The “exchange” negotiations, which are reportedly brokered– whenever they occur– by Germany, also now include the two live Israeli soldiers whose capture in July 2006 sparked the whole 33-day war.
In his speech, Nasrullah also said, “I don’t judge that Israel right now can muster the political or military leadership to wage a war against us.” That seems to be a good judgment. (Though I think he was also right to add the caveat that followed: “we must not be surprised for the future.”) Israel’s Winograd Commission is due to release its final report on the mishandling of Israel’s 2006 war effort on January 30.
HaAretz is reporting continued discord among commission members over how harsh to be in the final text on PM Ehud Olmert. But whatever the text says or refrains from saying, it cannot say anything good about Olmert’s leadership during the war.
Israel’s political-military leadership is still weak today. Partly as a result of the continuing fall-out from the 33-day war; partly because of its inability to resolve the continuing fighting with Gaza, or to stop the Gaza Palestinians from continuing to send their (primitive, but often scary and occasionally lethal) home-made rockets into southern Israel; and partly because of continuing internal discord over the “peace process” with the PA, which has already caused the rightwing Yisrael Beitenu party to flee the governing coalition.
Personally, while I think Israel’s leadership is beset by many internal weaknesses, I don’t wholly draw the conclusion that that means Olmert is on the point of changing his policy and becoming a generous-hearted, visionary peacenik… I believe it is very possible that a weak government, feeling itself beleaguered on many sides– and now openly taunted by the turbanned Sayyed from Beirut!– might lash out somewhere, perhaps somewhere quite unexpected. But that wouldn’t solve any of Olmert’s and Israel’s problems. Indeed, it would most likely only make them worse.
Another couple of points about today’s big Ashoura gathering in Beirut.
AP reminds us that this was the first time Nasrallah has been seen at a big pubic gathering since September 2006. He has very evidently been on an Israeli hit list for many years. His first predecessor as head of Hizbullah was assassinated by Israel before Nasrallah became head of the party in 1991-92., and many times over the years, especially since the 33-day war of 2006, Israeli leaders have announced their desire to target him. So today’s appearance was, on its own, an event worthy of some degree of buzz in Lebanon.
Another aspect is, of course, the sheer size of the crowd– as well as the discipline and forethought that went into planning the whole event. I have no way of gauging the size of the crowd, though it was clearly far more than the “tens of thousands” mentioned by AP. So they were certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Did they total more than the numbers of participants in those two massive street rallies of 2005: the (anti-Syrian) March 14 rally and the (largely pro-Syrian) rally of April 2005? Ot perhaps even more relevant at this point: the big anti-Siniora rally of December 2006. We’ll have to wait for the most scientific form of counting possible. (Though of course, the tally will certainly be an issue of intense political contention.)
But these matters of numbers are important. The pro-Siniora forces in Lebanon call themselves “the majority.” They do currently have a majority in Lebanon’s notably gerrymandered parliament. But Hizbullah and the rest of the opposition contest the claim that the Siniora government represents a majority of the Lebanese people. And the pro-Siniora forces have never held anything like a mass public rally at which their popular support could be demonstrated.
The country is due to have new parliamentary elections in 2009. The voting system on which those elections will be based will evidently be crucial; and there is supposed to be a new electoral law introduced before then to reform the archaic and sectarian system used until now. That electoral reform is one of the three issues currently being discussed in the “package” of Lebanese issues being negotiated by Amr Moussa and several other parties. The other two being the make-up of the new government and the identity of the new President. This latter issue has been resolved, for now. But Michel Suleiman will not be taking up his presidency until the other two issues are also resolved.
The noted expert and author on Hizbullah Amal Saad-Ghorayeb was one of several analysts quoted in The Daily Star here today as saying that actually, maybe Hizbullah and the pro-Siniora (“March 14”) forces would actually prefer for the government crisis not to get resolved right now, but to leave the presidency empty until the elections of 2009.
This concurs with the gut judgment I made when I was here last week, based partly on the impressions I’d gained and blogged about, to the effect that despite having no president and having this continuing constitutional crisis, the country seemed remarkably not poised on the brink of an explosion.
So the Arab League head Amr Moussa continues with his shuttling around the region and his attempt to find an “Arab” solution to the Lebanese crisis. Saad-Ghorayeb was notably unimpressed when we talked earlier today. “President Mubarak said that if the Lebanese could not agree among themselves then he would ‘wash his hands’ of the Lebanese problem,” she said. “When my friends and I heard about that, we fell about laughing. What on earth has the Egyptian government ever done for Lebanon?”
I digress. Let’s wait and see what further fallout today’s rally and Nasrallah’s revelation about the body parts will have.

Update noon-time Sunday, Beirut time: Thanks to the well-informed friend who urged corrections/clarification to a couple of the facts referred to above, which I made. Also, I just talked with a colleague close to Hizbullah who said the estimated crowd size was probably 850,000-900,000– though hard to gauge, given the side-streets etc. The CIA’s July 2007 estimate of Lebanon’s population is 3.9 million.

The following is a continuation of my record from watching Hizbullah’s
Al-Manar t.v. here in my hotel room in Beirut.  It’ds a
contiunuation from this earlier
record, which provides more background on the occasion. Lebanon’s time is two hours ahead of GMT; seven hours ahead of the timing used in our records here at JWN.

11:35.  Split-screen view of Ashoura in Kerbala and and Beirut;
later, Baalbek and Beirut.

The speaker talks about Khomeini and readiness for the long
confrontations ahead

11:40  Okay, finally– Here is Nasrallah at the podium.. In
contrast to the preceding speaker, whose voice was harsh and shrill, he
starts off in a low, reassuring voice.  He has the distinctive
inability to say his “r”s.  He grips the podium and appears quite
calm.

He says that now, as in Hssein’s day, the choice is between
“continuation or humiliation.” (Al-silla
aw al-zilla.)  The one presenting us with this choice today
is, he says, mainly George Bush who showed on his recent visit to the
region that he wants to keep the racist Zionist settler entity in place
and strong and occupying our holy places there and oppressing and
besieging our Palestinian brothers; who wants to keep the occupation
going in Iraq for decades including the occupation of our holy places;
who  threatens Iran and Syria; who sent the Israeli planes against
all of Lebanon in 2006.

(Please note that my rendering of all
this is necessarily very flawed because I’m watching it on t.v.,
listening to the sound-track, translating it in my head and writing
this down in as near real-time as I can.)

Talked about the attack of the Zionist airplanes in 2006… and with
all the help they had from the whole world they didn’t succeed, after a
battle of 33 days they didn’t succeed in wiping out our resistance..

The following is my rough rendering
of the rest of the speech:

12:25, he’s coming to an end.  He ends up greeting “the most noble
of people, the most dignified of people… ”  The broadcast stops
fairly abruptly.

I’m sitting here at 10:50 a.m. in Beirut watching Hizbullah’s t.v.
station, al-Manar, as it airs the big processions taking place in the
southern suburbs to mark Ashoura,
the anniversary of the killing of Hussein Ibn Ali in the Battle of
Kerbala (in present Iraq) in A.D. 680.  The broad streets are
completely crammed with black-clad figures, men and women, some waving
high yellow, black, or red flags.  Some wear the broad yellow
scarves of Hizbullah, some wear green scarves.  Broad chants rise
from sections of the crowd, among them: “I follow you, Hussein!… I
follow you Hizbullah!”  A few minutes ago, some organized cohorts
of men  were rhythmically striking themselves.

10:55.  Now the crowds seem to have come to a large open
space.  The camera zooms in to a portion of it where there some
commotion and with a grainy long-distance lens we see Sayeed Hassan
Nasraullah in the middle of the crowd with his bodyguards trying to
clear a space in front of him…  I imagine the Israelis are
watching this too.  Suddenly the loudspeaker shouts “I foolow you
Nasrullah!” The crowd repeats it ecstatically.  The speaker then
plays his voice, recorded, greeting people and shouting the slogan of
Ashoura: “Haihat min al-zilla” (translated by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb as
“Humiliation is unthinkable.”)

Death to America. Death to Israel.

The crowd, claimed to number a million, is being guided from nearby
streets into the square.

Last night I watched a Manar
broadcast of Nasrullah giving a fairly lengthy oration in a vast
enclosed space.  It was a lengthy religious/political allegory
talking about why Hussein entered the battle of Kerbala even though he
knew death was a possibility.  But his burning desire for justice
pushed him on. Nasrullah recounted the story in an expert mixture of
sonorous classical Arabic fus-ha and whenever he was representing what
people (including Hussein) actually said, he would render this in
Lebanese demotic and his whole body language would change to more that
of a traditional, fatherly storyteller. (You can actually see a good example of this rhetorical style of his– with English subtitles– on this months-old YouTube clip.)

The “lesson” he gave in last night’s speech was that Hussein was not seeking martyrdom and nor
was he seeking to
grab control of the regime; but he was simply taking determined action
based on his strong desire for justice, and the outcome was in God’s
hand.  (A fairly Buddhistic lesson, if I might say; certainly one
with broad human relevance.)  In talking with Amal S-G this
morning she said the main lesson there seemed to be against those who
urge pursuit of martyrdom operations for their own sake.  Or, as
she said, an anti-salafi message.

In the crowd now, families, women in cohorts. Women with and
without headscarves, but most with.  Men carrying small children.

Now the crowd has parted to provide an eight-foot clear walkway, with
stewards holding the crowd back on each side.  Now coming down
this walkway a small group of people, including many men in green
scarves…

11:15.  Well, I guess the Israelis may have been watching and even
targeting the cleared walkway but now, suddenly, there he is still in
the middle of the crowd, smiling and waving.  Unclear from the
images exactly where in the crowd he is.

Loud shouted chants with call and response.  Sung chants in which
from time to time the crowd joins.  Mixing “I follow you,
Hussein!” with “I follow you, Nasrullah!”

Notes about this.  An apparently
new level of personalization here: more Nasrullah than Hizbullah. 
An assertiveness about being Shiite.  Understandable, of course,
since this is a religious holiday for the Shiites.  But the whole
holiday from its origins to this manifestation of it has an
unmistakeable anti-Sunni cast to it?

11:20  Oh, here from one side-street comes a procession pulling
along a disabled Israeli tank.

Big shouts for Hussein.  Then Death to America; death to Israel.

Different crowds– some organized into cohorts, some just ambling
along– are still coming along different side-streets.

The camera shows us a large group of turbanned imams.

When I talked with Amal Saad-Ghorayeb
an hour ago, she noted that the Hizb has invested a lot in today’s
event/spectacle including from the media point of view.  Ive just
been thinking about the camera work involved in all this.  They
have large numbers of cameras mounted on, presumably, high buildings
around the area.  Sometimes we have four different split-screen
views but there are certainly more cameras than that.  Hizbullah
has always, as I’ve noted before, been good at circuses as well as
bread (and military shrewdness.)

11:30. Preparations still underway, including centrally the
getting-into-position of people who are still gathering from along the
side-streets. The voice on the speaker seems to be getting into a more
somber mood.

11:35.  His arrival is announced.  But we still don’t see
him.  Someone else is doing a chanted song.

Just ten days or so ago I was sitting with Nir in the lobby of the Gefinor Rotana Hotel in Beirut– and here is the piece he was crashing on finishing at that point.
It is a great and detailed piece of reporting on the whole phenomenon of the emergence, after the Syrians’ 2005 withdrawal from Lebanon, of Sunni salafist extremist groups in some Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and some other parts of Lebanon, too. That phenomenon came to a crescendo with last summer’s fighting in the Nahr al-Bared camp in the north of the country.
Nir has some fascinating new details about the involvement of Hariri-owned banks in helping the salafists– who held a number of different nationalities– bring into the country the huge amounts of dosh they apparently had at their disposal while they were here.
This is an important piece of reporting. Nir should perhaps have spelled out that Bernard Rougier, whom he quotes, is probably the world’s greatest expert on the question of militant Islamism in Lebanon’s long horrendously oppressed and besieged refugee camps. Here is a link to the recent English version of Rougier’s book on the topic, Everyday Jihad.
I would add a couple more comments here:

1. The rise of extremist groups within Lebanon after the Syrians’ departure has many intriguing analogies to what happened here after Ariel Sharon’s shock troops succeeded in chasing the PLO forces out of West Beirut in summer 1982. It was after that point that the whole of the (non-Syrian-controlled) part of the country became a safe haven for all kinds of new extremist groups.
Between 1976 and 1982, western embassies in Beirut had solid agreements with the PLO’s security forces to provide protection for their diplomats and nationals. In 1978, when my then-employers at the Sunday Times felt that my life was under threat because of the recent killing of my colleague David Holden, they contacted the British Embassy (since I was a British national), who arranged with Abu Ja’afar in the PLO’s security force to provide me with a 24-hour bodyguard. Actually, the ST wanted me to leave Beirut, but I couldn’t because I was 8.7 months pregnant. So the bodyguards came with me to the maternity hospital. Joy, rapture. (Irony alert.) That was 30 years ago this February. That was just one tiny example of what all the western embassies were doing in those days. (I should write here about my former neighbor Abu Hassan Salameh some time; his role in negotiating those agreements, his relations with the CIA, and the CIA’s unwillingness to shield him from the Israeli assassination operation that ended his life. There’s gratitude for you…)
After the PLO’s departure in 1982, there was no body able to provide security to western diplomats and nationals. That’s when Malcolm Kerr got killed; when numerous westerners were taken hostage; and when western embassies started getting blown up.
I won’t say Lebanon is quite in that state of anarchy yet. But the analogy of booting a stabilization force out of this country and then finding there’s no-one capable of providing day-to-day security is an unsettling one.
2. The Palestinian refugees trapped in their dismal hovels in Lebanon got the short end of the stick in the whole “Fateh al-Islam” story as recounted by Nir…. just as they’ve gotten the short end of the stick– from the Israelis, from many Lebanese, from others– throughout much of their whole tragic history here in Lebanon. I’d like to note, since I’ve just returned to Lebanon from Syria, that the situation of the Palestinian refugees in Syria is exponentially better than that of the Palestinian refugees here. There, they have the same social and economic rights as any Syrian citizen, and many have risen to the top of their professions. Here, there is still a list of 74 professions from which Palestinians are proscribed; they can’t own real estate; they can’t even expand their own cramped shelters without getting approval from the authorities (rarely given); and many of them have direly curtailed freedom of movement.
There was something in the Daily Star recently about some 5,000 “unregistered” Palestinians here now being offered registration. I’m note sure how much good that will do them.
If the Palestinian “state” being discussed by Abu Mazen and Co is to have any value or meaning at all, it should surely be a state that can (a) provide safe haven for beleaguered Palestinians here and everywhere else, and (b) intercede with other governments on an equal basis to ensure that the rights of its nationals are not abused.
Statelessness– that is, being in the situation of being not just a refugee but a refugee without any recognized nationality or citizenship– is a very vulnerable situation to be in. Ask the Palestinians in Lebanon…

But first of all, go read Nir’s informative, if depressing, story.

I was planning to do a series of blog posts from the big conference I went to early this week at the Al-Waleed bin Talal al-Saud Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) at AUB, in Beirut. But I confess I got a bit busy doing a few other things– some of them nitpicky editorial things to do with finishing the manuscript of my book, some having to do with actually spending some good time with some good people. So I postponed and postponed doing that blogging… And now, Stan Katz, the former head of the American Council of Learned Societies, who was also there, has beaten me to it and done a pretty good job of blogging the conference.
He did so in these three posts on the blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education: 1, 2, 3.
As Stan noted there, it was truly international gathering– even if not yet sufficiently so. The 50 or so presenters included scholars from Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, occupied East Jerusalem, Turkey, Germany, the UK, Netherlands, France, along with roughly 25 from the US. The conference’s title was “Liberty and Justice: America and the Middle East”. It was certainly notable that it was taking place just days before His High Excellency President G.W. Bush launched on his imperial-scale tour of his Middle East outposts… Checking up, no doubt, on the state of “Liberty and Justice” in Israel, Palestine, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the other countries he’s visiting. But that was a very different kind of “east-west” interaction!
One lack at the conference that I noted was the absence of any Iraqi scholars. Iraqis have, after all, been at the receiving end of most of the US’s policy in the region over the past five years. What do they have to say on the conference’s topic? I do not know whether the conference organizers had invited any, and they failed to attend; or whether none had ever been invited. The inviting process did seem a little haphazard in some ways. But one thing that was clear was the outreach and effort the organizers had undertaken in order to secure the participation of four or five scholars from Tehran. That was an excellent thing to do. I wish I’d spent more time trying to get to know the Iranian participants.
One of the sessions that Stan Katz attended, but I didn’t, was on the challenge of teaching American studies in the Middle East. He wrote:

The speakers included the head of a new MA program at Teheran University in Iran (who seems, from his utterly colloquial language, to be an American), the director of the program at the University of Jordan in Amman, and a young graduate student from Al Quds University in East Jerusalem… In each case, though, there seemed to be considerable student interest in studying America, which in the year 2008 is both surprising and encouraging.

I don’t know why he finds this surprising? The US is the dominant power in this region, and members of subordinated or “challenger” nations always have an intense need to understand the inner workings of the big imperial power. It is often a matter of sheer survival to be able to do so. I have always found that any random group of non-Americans, anywhere in the world, knows a lot more about the internal workings of US politics and society than any random group of US citizens knows about the internal workings of any other society, including neighboring Canada or Mexico. It is not just a question of the near-saturation of the world’s public media with US-made cultural products, though that is one factor. But even more concretely, it is dictated by the intense need that members of weaker nations have to be able to understand the imperial power so they can optimize their chances of surviving under its domination…
And then, I’m not sure that Stan or anyone should easily jump to the conclusion that the desire of Middle Easterners to study America is “encouraging”, as such– except inasmuch as it indicates that there exists a large desire to understand other people across even some extremely thorny political divides. But if, as presenter Scott Lucas said– and I agree– we should be trying to decenter America within the global discourse, then we should applaud efforts by Middle Easterners to study Chinese society, or Indian society, or the cultures of Latin America or Europe as being equally “encouraging.” Perhaps, above all, we should consider the efforts of academics anywhere to look objectively at– and do something about– the situation of their own societies to be the most encouraging step of all?
From this perspective, I think maybe one of the biggest and most lasting outcomes the conferences might have been the participation in it of around two dozen US scholars. These were mainly not scholars of the Middle East, but scholars in one or another portion of “American studies”. So by coming to Lebanon– a country that throughout the past decades of US hegemony in the Middle East has been buffeted around by the political forces loosed on the region by that hegemony– these American Americanists probably had a bigger chance to learn something about their (our) country’s real role in the world than they would have from consuming thousands of hours of CNN or other parts of the MSM. They had the chance, in Beirut, to meet as colleagues with peers from Iran, Palestine, and other “exotic” and demonized countries. They had the chance to go and witness at first hand some of the effects that the US’s strong support (and heavy mid-war military re-supply) of Israel’s 2006 assault had on the people and country of Lebanon… What an excellent way for them to learn some more about America’s role in the world.
“Liberty” and “justice”, indeed.
I wish the conferences organizers had put the words in scare-quotes like that in the conference title? But I suppose the multiple ironies embedded within the title as it stood were plain enough to see.
Many of the American Americanists were interesting people. In his introductory remarks, CASAR director Patrick McGreevey did an effective job of underlining the ironies embedded in the “Liberty and Justice” title. Including, he reminded us of George W. Bush’s fall 2001 vow that he would “bring Osama bin Laden to justice– or bring justice to him,” which always struck me as a classic example of the misuse of the discourse of (true) justice.
First of all, what kind of justice would it be, that we would seek to bring OBL to? Would it look anything like the form of (miscarriage of) justice to which Saddam Hussein was brought? A hastily convened, US-dominated kangaroo court, which issues a death sentence and then carries it out in an extremely inflammatory manner?
I’m reminded of the words of ANC leader Rejoyce Mabudhafasi when I asked her what she wished had been done to the authors and upholders of the apartheid system– and she said something like, “We could never be the kind of people who do to them what they did to us, and nor would we want to be. So I think only the Almighty can decide what to do to ‘bring justice’ to them.” I do feel that way about OBL– though I am of course also strongly of the opinion that the man’s capacity for doing harm and violence, which he retains to this day, urgently needs to be incapacitated, a goal that can be achieved in any number of ways…
And then, what sort of justice might it be, that we would seek to bring to OBL? I don’t imagine that GWB was thinking of assembling a traveling courtroom and then parachuting the whole thing in, black robes and lawyers and lawbooks and all, once the US military had found OBL, wherever he might be by that point. I rather strongly suspect that the “justice” GWB was thinking of bringing to him instead was a targeted assassination– such as the US and Israel have made something of a habit of carrying out against suspected adversaries over recent years.
But that is, it seems to me, a profound abuse of the whole concept of justice. And not one that we should just slyly wink at, or go along with.
… Anyway, I realize I’m getting off the topic a little here. I just want to say I really appreciated the opportunity to be at the conference. I met some really interesting people and heard some great discussions. It also felt really good to be able to re-connect a little with some of my friends in Beirut, though sadly I didn’t have nearly enough time to re-connect with everyone I wanted to.
Oh, I did learn something very interesting indeed about the cluster bombs issue while I was there. This was from Timur Goksel, the wise and well-informed Turkish diplomat who was head of UNIFIL’s info operations from 1978 through 2002 or so. He said that one explanation he had heard for the Israelis stunningly large scale of use of cluster bombs was that the bombs were out of date and needed to be disposed of. So since disposal of any kinds of bombs is a not-cheap and sometimes risky business, the relevant decisionmakers in the IDF had thought why not lob all of those out-of-date cluster bombs into Lebanon and force Lebanon and the UN pay the price?
And as we all know, the price in human lives and livelihoods lost, as well as in $$$, has been huge– and it continues to be exacted to this day. I don’t have the figures easily to hand, but this late 2006 report from Haaretz says that the battalion commander of an IDF rocket unit “stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets. By 30 August, 2006– just 16 days after the ceasefire went into effect– UN clearance experts had found “100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets at 359 separate sites” in south Lebanon.
The “dud rate” of the bomblets was reported at the time to be extremely high, and I do recall that some reports also noted that many of the cluster bombs that had been fired into Lebanon had had a production date of “1974” on them… So yes, the idea that the IDF might need to dispose of them seems to make a lot of sense.
Also, a large proportion of the cluster bombs that were fired were fired in the very last days of the war– during that strange and terrifying three-day period during after the terms of the ceasefire had already been agreed, but before it went into effect.

Lebanon does not have a president, and has only a caretaker government. The deadlock over how the next ruling coalition (president plus PM plus cabinet) is to be composed continues… There have been a couple of incidents in the south of the country– one in which a UN peacekeeping patrol was targeted, and one in which a couple of Katyushas were fired over the border into Israel… Many parts of the broader Middle East are tense because of President Bush’s imminent visit to the region and the near-clash between US and Iranian naval forces yesterday in the Persian Gulf. Normally, any such regional tensions could be expected to lead to a rise in tensions inside Lebanon.
But here’s the thing: the little part of Ras Beirut where I’ve been staying since Friday seems remarkably calm and free of tensions or fears of imminent escalations of violence. And so, as far as I can see, do the major Lebanese media.
I’d expected that talk about the political crisis here and the fears of descent into renewed civil strife might dominate the conversations of Lebanese friends and colleagues. They really haven’t. People seem, in general, to be sullenly habituated to the idea that the present uneasy status quo might continue for quite a while. It’s not that things are great here; everyone seems to recognize that. But there is not the degree of fear, and of concomitant political and physical mobilizations for fighting that I thought I might find.
I guess the big confrontations among internal forces came in 2005: the big Hariri memorial march of March 14; and then the equally big pro-Hizbullah and FPM march of the month that followed. Since then there has been, basically, a stand-off between these two huge blocs within the Lebanese body politic. The M14 people won some gains, of course, with the Syrian withdrawal and other developments at that time. But the Hizbullah-led bloc made some gains with the political outcome of the 33-day war in mid-2006. Neither of those shifts was decisive.
In December ’06, Hizbullah and FPM launched their big “sit-in around the Serail” to try to force the M14’s PM, Fuad Suiniora, out of office. But that didn’t work– and neither were the government forces able to end the sit-in by force and open up the Hariri-created New Downtown for (Saudi shopping-led) “business as usual.” So the stalemate between the two sides became routinized. The large forests of the protesters’ tents still stand in many open areas of the downtown– but they are largely empty.
Not having a president or a government continues the routinization of the stalemate. The atmosphere, in general, seems to be, “It’s not wonderful, but we can live with it. And it sure is better than doing anything that could risk another war.”
I’d like to note the wisdom and maturity with which all those legitimately involved in internal Lebanese politics have worked to prevent any resumption of (or slide into) outright civil war over the past three years. Of course the country hasn’t been violence-free in these years: there have been 14 or is it 15 ghastly car-bomb attacks against pro-M14 figures; between them, these have killed scores of people. There was also the really inhumane fighting in and around the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp over this summer, which was provoked by salafi jihadists who had congregated there from many parts of the Muslim world. They were then answered with a massive use of force on the part of the Lebanese army, accompanied by many horrendous atrocities against the residents of the camp…
Once again, the poor Palestinian civilians there, who have no protection against either the implantation of the salafists or the depradations of the Lebanese Army, were showing that being stateless in today’s world is to exist in a situation of extreme vulnerability.Once again, they were the punching bags of Lebanese political forces who sought to use violence against them for their own political ends. (In this case, the anti-Palestinian battles served to unite Lebanese from many factions around Army Commander Michel Suleiman, as the next President… The streets here are now plastered with posters hailing him as “The saviour.”)
So it is not that there is no political violence here. There is. But still, it feels very different from I was here when the country was poised on a knife-edge, in April 1975.
I am willing to admit I could be completely wrong! I have only been here four days, much of it doing things other than doing reportorial investigations. Maybe somewhere just out of my current (necessarily constricted) line of sight, some political forces or small dedicated networks are working hard to produce some kind of massive crisis that could embroil the whole country– and maybe, a large enough proportion of Lebanese would become jolted by that into resuming their civil war. But somehow, things just don’t feel that way…

Another benefit of being here in Lebanon is being able to watch Hizbullah’s TV station, al-Manar. I have only watched a little of it on this trip– certainly, nothing like a “representative sample” of their programing. (Oh, I just saw on the crawl at the bottom there just now that Israel’s Winograd Commission has announced it will delay publication of the weighty second portion of its report into the failings of the 33-day war until January 30. Could that possibly be, um, a slightly politicized decision?)
Anyway, I did want to blog about a fascinating children’s program I saw on the channel on Friday afternoon. I’d been working rather hard for some hours by then, doing some close editing/revision work on my Re-engage book, and by late afternoon I just wanted a break. So I was flipping channels on the t.v. in the hotel room and came to Manar, in the middle of a kid’s program called, I think, “Bayt al-Boyout.” (“House of many homes”). The very able main presenter was a young-ish woman dressed in hijab in different shades of blue, who was sitting in a set like a beautiful big children’s playroom– with a sign-language interpreter sitting beside her. The presenter (I never did catch her name) was conducting a conversation with a group of some four or five cute-looking kids of around 5-7 years old, all of whom were either blind, severely visually impaired, or deaf; and the presenter was conducting normal kindergarten-type activities with them, including reading then a story and asking them questions.
What was excellent about this program in my view was the light but intentionally educational way in which the presenter showed viewers that these are full, normal, human children who happen to be differently abled. When she conversed with the two deaf kids, she did so “through” the sign-language interpreter. There was even a little cartouche in the bottom-left of the screen where the signer’s work was constantly on display for viewers with hearing disabilities.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything on kids-with-disabilities in many hours of watching children’s programing in the US that was as well done as this. (But that was a long time ago, I guess.) Also, this program was thankfully not interrupted by any ads– for gross sugary drinks or foods, or anything else.
Toward the end, the presenter developed one of the topics mentioned in the children’s book she had just read to the kids, and asked two or three of the children if they had ever argued with their younger siblings. The kids she asked said “Yes,” and said the arguments had been over toys or the t.v. “And what did you do?” she asked. Both the kids said, “I hit my little brother [or sister}.” The presenter continued by asking: “And then what happened? Did that solve the problem?” Each kid in turn said No, that the little sib just became peskier yet… So then the presenter said that it would be probably be more productive for the kids to talk about their disagreements/ concerns/ complaints to the sibling, rather than hitting them, and in that way they could work out how to take turns with the toy in question or the t.v. program, and still stay good friends with them.
Doesn’t this seem like a good lesson for any children’s show, anywahere, to leave with its viewers?
Isn’t it interesting that the kids’ show produced by Hizbullah is promulgating this message?
Now, Hizbullah’s political leadership has never publicly expressed any desire to solve its problems with Israel through discussion rather than force. But– and this is a big caveat– it has always been eager to be included in indirect negotiations with Israel and other parties over the terms for a ceasefire in the hostilities between them; and once ceasefires have been agreed, it has generally stuck to their terms quite carefully. Its observance of previously agreed ceasefires– in 1993, 1996, and 2006– has not been total. But its infractions have been considerably less serious and numerous than those of Israel.
And meantime, the US– and Israel– both steadfastly stick to and repeatedly proclaim their political stance of refusing to sit down and deal with their grievances against Hizbullah through discussions rather than through force. (Though, as we have seen, when they have found themselves in an impossibly tight corner they have been prepared, in practice, to sit down and negotiate an indirect ceasefire with them.)
So maybe the political leaderships on all these sides would benefit from sitting down– separately, if they prefer this– to watch this educational episode of “Bayt al-Boyout”, so they can learn some lessons about how talking through differences is better than simply lashing out with violence and intimidation against the other party?
But it occurs to me that Israel and the US are both physically far, far stronger than Hizbullah, and both have used violence on a far grander scale than anything Hizbullah has ever used. So perhaps they both need to learn the program’s lesson about not hitting your younger siblings even more than anyone else?

I’ve been reading quite a lot about Lebanon (and Syria) recently, because that’s where I’m headed, for a short-ish trip, later this week.
This piece in today’s HaAretz caught my eye. It’s a report by Barak Ravid on the ongoing work of the NATO-dominated UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon. It includes this:

Israeli military officials express great satisfaction with UNIFIL’s activities. A senior Jerusalem official singled out the European units of UNIFIL, particularly the Italian, French and Spanish contingents, for their professional manner of conduct. “They do their job and cause significant discomfort to Hezbollah,” he said. “They have had quite a few successes.”

Oh, what fun it must be for the militaries of these three formerly colonial European nations to be able to strut their stuff once again in the hills and valleys of formerly colonized (by France) Lebanon.
But the anonymous Israeli official quoted by Ravid expresses concern that the continuation of the political crisis may lead to increasing Hizbullah’s room for maneuver. And then we have this:

UN officials point an accusatory finger regarding Lebanon’s political crisis toward Syria, claiming that “Syria defeats every attempt at an agreement and pushes Hezbollah and its other allies in Lebanon to increase their demands all the time.” They say that Syria’s President Bashar Assad wants to demonstrate at any price that “nothing moves in Lebanon without him” and predict that as a result the crisis in Lebanon will continue for months to come.
The main problem, as the UN officials see it, is that not enough pressure is being placed on Assad. “He will only move if he senses a threat to the stability of his regime,” they said. “If the Americans were, for example, to send ships close to Lebanon’s beaches, that would send a clear message to Assad, but they’re not doing that.”

Okay, let’s stop right there. What we have in the above paragraphs are direct quotes attributed to a collectivity of un-named UN officials. Tell me, how does that work? Was there a chorus of two or more of these UN officials speaking in complete unison there?
So, some extremely sloppy and mendacious journalism is one thing we have.
But what we also have is the report of these same un-named “UN officials”– perhaps, more realistically, actually one UN official– apparently inciting the US to adopt a more belligerent stance toward Syria.
Is this part of UNIFIL’s mandate, I wonder? I sure don’t see it there…