As much as the cause defended by the Palestinian Authority (at least when its almost nonagenarian president for life does not make denialist or defamatory speeches at the Ramallah headquarters) is just, legitimate and legal in international law, that defended by Hezbollah is unjust, morally illegitimate and illegal. A sovereign Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel and not in place of it remains the perspective advocated by the UN and the spirit of the Oslo Accords, the Israeli left, moderate Palestinians, statesmen and women and ordinary peace-loving citizens throughout the world, as well as by the author of these lines.
Created ex nihilo by the fanatic Islamic Republic of Iran in 1982, the Party of God has never stopped advocating the destruction of Israel. Not only does it not recognize its right to exist (nor even, simply, the existence of the Jewish people, the supreme mark of rabid anti-Semites), but it wages war against it under two fallacious grounds. The first is the Shebaa Farms, this uninhabited acre of land that belonged to Syria before the Six Day War in 1967 and the conquest of the Golan Heights by Tsahal, and which therefore only Damascus could claim, which it is careful not to do…
Second Sabra and Chatila Massacre
The second pretext is the Palestinian cause to which he conveniently converted. In fact, the Islamic Republic of Iran does not even recognize the Sunni religion on its soil (all Palestinians are Sunnis), and its loyalist Hezbollah instrumentalizes the “cause” of those it massacred by the hundreds in Sabra and Chatila in 1985, three years after the 1982 massacre perpetrated by the Christian Phalangists in the Israeli zone.
Alas, we remember the second infinitely less than the first… Since the terrible pogrom of October 7, 2023 perpetrated by Hamas in Israel, Hezbollah has been carrying out daily harassment under the pretext of supporting Gaza here, and the “liberation of Al-Quds” (Jerusalem) there. That Hassan Nasrallah, its leader, is ready to sacrifice his thugs for the Palestinians is very touching but poorly conceals its double total contradiction: even during the best of the Oslo process, from 1993-1996, and after Israel’s total withdrawal from the security zone in May 2000, the call for collective murder remained, the Jewish state having to disappear.
This obsessively anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic stance – the Argentine justice system this year designated the Party of God as the perpetrator of the massacre of a hundred Jews in Buenos Aires in July 1994 – should allow several inconvenient realities to be concealed. First, it has never respected the Taif Agreement, signed in 1989 under the aegis of Saudi Arabia to end the Lebanese civil war that began in April 1975. This agreement required all factions and parties to disarm: all complied except Hezbollah and, a third of a century later, it has tens of thousands of missiles, thousands of seasoned soldiers, many of whom saved the power of the bloodthirsty pro-Iranian Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad in extremis, as well as a large quantity of modern drones. Then, he never respected UN Resolution 1701 requiring him, following the conflict of the summer of 2007, to maintain his forces north of the Litani River. Many Lebanese accuse him of unduly importing the war to serve his own positions and interests.
Besides, does he at least represent Lebanon? No, he is sucking its life out of it, through his internal and external trafficking and, not content with favoring his own community (like other parties, alas), he is imposing his predominance in the port and airport areas of Beirut, making the socio-economic life of millions of Lebanese people even more bloodless, who are still waiting for the investigation into the explosion in the port of Beirut in August 2020, as well as the death or disappearance of hundreds of elected officials and ordinary citizens.
The same goes for institutional life. Although it claims to represent most of Lebanon’s Shiites, they are only a minority among others: Hezbollah holds only 41 of the 128 seats in the Lebanese Chamber of Deputies. With a lot of blackmail and threats, it is thus obstructing the holding of a presidential election that would undoubtedly not be favorable to it (only a Maronite can become president, many of them rejecting subservience to the armed Shiite movement). Finally, we can never recall enough its responsibility in the assassination of 58 French soldiers who came to protect Lebanese civilians in 1983. The universal enemy…
PS: We will read with profit by Christophe Ayad Geopolitics of HezbollahPUF (coll. “Geopolitics”), 2023.
Frederic Encelessayist and geopolitical scientist, is a professor at the Paris School of Business and a lecturer at Sciences Po.
.