Why no one's turning against Hezbollah

It was a reminder that no part of Lebanon is beyond the long arm of Israel, but also a confirmation of Israel's strategy for countering the Hezbollah challenge.

By submitting the entire country to military pressure, it seeks to make the Lebanese people blame Hezbollah for their suffering, so that they will support its suppression. It is the approach being used against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, under siege since a group of militants raided an Israeli military post, killing two soldiers and taking one prisoner, following weeks of cross-border fire.

A similar approach was used between 1967 and 1974 against Jordan and Lebanon, when the enemy was the Palestinian guerrilla movement. In those days, the pretence was maintained that the Israeli attacks — always justified as "retaliation" and "self-defence" — were directed solely against targets such as "terrorist training camps", but the toll in civilian lives and economic infrastructure argued otherwise.

Air attacks and shellfire drove out most of the population of the eastern side of the Jordan valley for three years and they were only able to return after the Jordanian army suppressed the Palestinian armed groups in 1970-71.

It was probably the high-handed behaviour of some of the Palestinians that did most to alienate parts of the local Jordanian population; the areas that suffered most from Israeli attacks generally supported the guerrilla movement strongly.

Responding to similar pressures, the Lebanese government attempted to put down the Palestinian movement in 1969, but failed in the face of Palestinian resistance and opposition from half of its own population.

It was the Palestinian refugee camps and the villages of the southern border area of Lebanon that bore the brunt of the conflict in the following years. Thousands of those who fled from the impoverished and bombed region, mainly Shia in its population, found refuge in the southern suburbs of Beirut, near the international airport. This is now one of Hezbollah's chief strongholds, where its television station and major social institutions are based.

As in the past, pressure on the civilian population of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip is unlikely to convert supporters of the militant groups into their opponents, and may make them more determined in their views.

It might push into more active opposition those already hostile to them, at least in Lebanon, but having seen the beginnings of a return of prosperity, no one wants the country to go back to a reliving of the nightmare of the 17 years of civil war that only ended in 1990.

Even those in the middle classes, who are seeing their livelihoods going up in smoke, or in the well-established elites of the various Lebanese communities, who regard Hezbollah as a troublesome upstart, are likely to be wary of sponsoring actions that would make them appear to be doing Israel's bidding or capitulating to its intimidatory tactics, especially against an organisation that displayed courage, skill and imagination in freeing the occupied south.

These days, the Israeli government hardly bothers with the pretence that it is only waging war on those it regards as terrorists. The bombing of civil institutions, destruction of power stations and killing of civilians constitutes warfare against the unarmed and everyone knows it, even if the attempt is made to justify it as being directed at inducing action against Hezbollah and Hamas. The specific attacks that they carried out, which led to the Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, seem very discriminating by contrast: They were directed at military units.

This is the kind of fact that is likely to be noted in Tripoli and many other cities across the Arab world. It will also be noted yet again how an American administration displays far more solicitude for Israeli casualties, military and civilian, than it ever does for the much more numerous Arab victims, and how ready it is to consider justifiable a strategy it would regard as abhorrent if the roles of the two parties were reversed. - TODAY/sh

John Gee is a Singapore-based writer and Middle East expert.

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