Hezbollah leader a hero to many Arabs

[AYOUB]

Hezbollah leader a hero to many Arabs

 

By HUSSEIN DAKROUB

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

Image from television shows Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah speaking on the militant group's Al-Manar television in a broadcast aired Saturday, Aug. 12, 2006. Nasrallah said on Saturday the militant organization would abide by the U.N. cease-fire resolution but would continue fighting as long as Israeli troops remained in southern Lebanon. (AP Photo/ Al-Manar television)

 

 

 

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Despite the terrible toll in death and destruction in Lebanon, even enemies and critics say the stature of Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has risen dramatically from his guerrillas fighting toe-to-toe with the Israeli army.

 

Some have even taken to comparing the radical Shiite Muslim cleric to the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, who enjoyed wide popularity in the Middle East for standing up to the West and pushing for Arab unity.

 

 

"Hassan Nasrallah has won militarily and politically and has become a new leader like Nasser," Lebanese lawmaker Walid Jumblatt, a harsh critic of Hezbollah's alliance with Iran and Syria, said in a television interview.

 

Hezbollah was already popular among Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, mainly from the armed struggle that led Israel to end an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon but also because of the group's network of social services and charities for the poor.

 

Now, Israel's ferocious bombing has rallied many more Lebanese around Hezbollah, regardless of politics or religion, said Gen. Antoine Lahd, who led a now defunct militia that helped Israeli troops police the occupation zone before they withdrew six years ago.

 

Beirut's leading newspaper, An-Nahar, has long been critical of Hezbollah - especially its harassing rocket attacks on Israel before the war began - but it urged all Lebanese to stand behind Nasrallah's group to achieve victory against the Jewish state.

 

"When we look around we find in this battle two commanders: On the battlefield Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, and on the political and diplomatic front Prime Minister Fuad Saniora," An-Nahar executive editor Edmond Saab wrote.

 

Ironically, Saniora - a staunch foe of Syria, which along with Iran is a strong supporter of Hezbollah - also has seen his fortunes rise at home, for getting Lebanon's fractious politicians to work together and for resisting U.S. pressure to accept a truce more favorable to Israel.

 

But in the wider world, it is Nasrallah's popularity that has shot up, among both his fellow Shiites and among Sunnis in the Middle East and with Muslims elsewhere.

 

Arab Americans rallied outside the White House on Saturday waving Lebanese flags and chanting "Israel get out of Lebanon now." Earlier in the week in Moscow, Muslims carried a big picture of Nasrallah and waved Hezbollah flags outside the Israeli embassy.

 

Some of the fiercest sentiment in support of the militant Shiite cleric has erupted during anti-Israel and anti-U.S. protests in predominantly Sunni countries like Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait - all key U.S. allies in the region. Demonstrators have voiced outrage at their leaders for failing to back Hezbollah and Lebanon.

 

"Arab majesties, excellencies and highnesses, we spit on you," read one banner at near daily rallies in Cairo that have lashed out at Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for what is seen as his failure to support Nasrallah and his fighters.

 

A delegation of Egyptian intellectuals, actors and artists visited Beirut last week to show solidarity with Lebanon and express support for Hezbollah. "The resistance (Hezbollah) will stay and the occupation will go," said Hussein Fahmi, one of Egypt's leading actors.

 

Protests have even broken out among the normally quiet Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia, where demonstrations are rare - though the demonstrators have been cautious not to criticize the ruling family, which initially was highly critical of Hezbollah for its July 12 raid inside Israel that killed eight soldiers and captured two.

 

In Kuwait, thousands of people have taken to the streets in several demonstrations - two in front of the U.S. Embassy - to protest the Israeli offensive. Protesters held Nasrallah posters and Hezbollah's yellow flags and burned American and Israeli flags.

 

Abdul-Mohsen Jamal, a Shiite former lawmaker and columnist, wrote in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas on Saturday that even though Nasrallah had no military training "he succeeded in making the army of Israel a 'joke' for the world to laugh at."

[AYOUB]

Nobody's victory, but in the end Israel could not defeat Hizbollah

 

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor

Sunday August 13, 2006

The Observer

 

A month of fighting, more than 1,000 dead, upwards of 800,000 Lebanese displaced and $2bn worth of damage - for what? Who wins in this bloody debacle, assuming it is coming to an end? Given the continued fighting, that is still a big assumption. Not Israel, certainly. Even while the authors of this military adventure continue to try to carve out some notion of victory to sell the Israeli public, increasingly fewer people are buying it.

The likes of deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres have tried to promote the notion that Israel has got everything it wants out of the war - and from Friday's disgracefully late UN resolution calling for an immediate cessation of violence (on which Israel is still being permitted by the US to drag its feet) - but the reality is that the prosecutors of this war have lost more than they have won.

 

Whatever Israel does now, it is seriously diminished. In military terms it has been confronted successfully for a second time by the guerillas of Hizbollah. Again and again, its heavily-armoured Merkava tanks have been rocketed to a standstill. All its technology and its large army have been shown lacking the deftness and determination of a vastly smaller force lacking armoured vehicles, bombers and aircraft. Most seriously, its vulnerability to missile attack has been amply demonstrated to any enemy, despite its possession of US anti-missile batteries. Israel has lost one of its most powerful weapons - the psychological sense of its military invulnerability.

 

It is something for which Israelis are unlikely to forgive those behind a war which evidence now suggests was being planned long before the kidnap of two Israeli soldiers. Even before the UN resolution was agreed, support for the conflict, though still substantial, was steadily beginning to erode, confronted by a constant stream of casualties from the fighting for little geographical and strategic gain. Indeed, Israel's only major victory thus far was the 'capture' of the largely Christian town of Marjayoun - peopled with its former collaborators with Israel's allies from the South Lebanese Army - a few kilometres across the border.

 

Instead, in the past two weeks both the Israeli military and its political masters have come under attack for their prosecution of the war. And if one figure now appears most at risk it is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a cold fish who tried and failed to be tougher than his mentor, Ariel Sharon. For what Israelis have not been slow to notice is that Olmert has signally failed to achieve what he set out to do: destroy Hizbollah. The victory being claimed is diffuse and very partial: in securing a UN resolution sort-of-on-its-terms and by reducing (by who knows what amount) Hizbollah's capability. Beyond that Hizbollah has survived largely intact, but pushed back a little further from Israel's border.

 

Then there are the imponderables. The nature of the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, with its scorched-earth policy designed to drive out local populations, its mendacious claim that it had allowed humanitarian corridors when it had not, its lack of concern for the killing of civilians (and callous explanation that dead civilians should have fled when threatened) has amplified the increasing sense abroad that this is a country which does not care about international law.

 

Though the world has long demonstrated a habit of forgetting Israel's misdemeanours, this war has dramatised the urgent need for a return to a proper Middle East peace plan, a negotiated process that will be less generous to Israel than its own unilaterally-applied 'convergence' plan. There is a danger too that if America's unconditional support for Israel in this affair damages its wider policy in the Middle East - in Shia-majority Iraq, where there are tens of thousands of US troops, and over Iran - Israel may feel that it squandered a high point in its relationship with Washington for little real advantage.

 

So who has won? Not Israel. Certainly not Lebanon or its fragile democracy, the development of both of which will have been pushed back half a decade and more. But what about Hizbollah? What can be said is that, on its own terms, it has not lost. Not yet. It has resisted Israel and thus far at least has survived, which was all it had to achieve. If it continues to survive until an international force is deployed - which seems likely - then the issue of its disarmament will have disappeared again into some vague future. In psychological terms, it can claim that its few fighters have inflicted disproportionate damage on the Israelis for a second time, and put the issue of the Shebaa farms on the negotiating table.

 

But the real test for Hizbollah will be applied not by the international community but by Lebanon itself, which must decide if the price it paid for Hizbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to claim bragging rights was far, far too high.