31 May - 6 June 2001
Issue No.536
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 31 May - 6 June 2001 Issue No.536 |
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The lessons of Hizbullah
It has been one year since the Israeli army left Lebanon and eight months since Lebanon came to Israel and the occupied territories. Graham Usher reports from Ramallah
There were few conventional ceremonies in the occupied territories marking the first anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon. Instead, a truck and its driver exploded near an Israeli army outpost in Gaza, The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas claimed the deed and sent "congratulations to our brothers in Hizbullah on the first anniversary of the liberation." In another homage to their mentors, Hamas released a video showing the truck going up in flames.
That same day, 26 May, a car blew up beside a bus in the northern Israeli town of Hadera, leaving its two occupants dead and over 60 Israeli civilians injured. This was the work of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, announced Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV channel. The two bombers also had themselves immortalised on video. "The message to my people is 'Jihad against the Jews,'" said one, Alaa Sabeh, 19, from Jenin.
These were followed by lesser blasts in West Jerusalem on 27 May, which left two civilians injured. The first was claimed by the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Jihad claimed the second, proffering it to the "heroic Lebanese people and leadership and Mujahideen of Hizbullah on the occasion of victory and liberation." "More bombs and martyrs are on the way," the statement added.
All came a week after a Palestinian suicide bomber left five Israelis dead in the Israeli town of Netanya and Israel launched F-16 fighters on Palestinian towns in the West Bank, killing 13 Palestinians in a crazy, Lebanon-style revenge.
There was no need for commemorations: Lebanon, "the last militarily active front of the Israeli-Arab conflict," has come home, to Israel and the occupied territories. It arrives in the van of the second Palestinian national revolt in less than a decade. "The experience of Hizbullah's fight in south Lebanon proved to us that negotiations alone with Israel won't work. There has to be pressure. There has to be resistance," says Marwan Barghouti, a leader of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.
Anti Israeli rally held at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza
(photo: AFP)
Hizbullah's triumph has served the Intifada not only as inspiration, as the "spirit that kindled it," but also as model.
Israel uses everything from fighter planes to booby-trapped trenches to bring the revolt to heel. Forswearing the mass, civilian protests that characterised their first revolt, Palestinians use guerrilla ambushes on roads in the West Bank, mortars on settlements in Gaza and suicide bombers amongst civilians in Israel.
"We know we can't hurt Israel as much as it can hurt us. But we hit them so they know the occupation will continue to hurt them also. This is the lesson of south Lebanon, the lesson of Hizbullah," says Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader in Gaza. He admits the resemblance should not be pushed too far. "Hizbullah is a trained guerrilla force. We are a bunch of amateurs. We are still learning." But remember, he adds, "Hizbullah in 1985 was also not Hizbullah in 2000."
Hizbullah's example has also been cultural, drenching the Intifada in its own national-religious ambience and imagery, and, for many Palestinians, slowly transforming the terms of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This, too, distinguishes the present uprising from its 1987 vintage. Palestinians often described the first revolt as a "letter." The message was that peace was possible, on condition Israel withdrew from the territories it occupied in the 1967 war: Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The audience, mainly, was Israeli public opinion. And the principal accomplishment, after seven years of stalemate and attrition, was Israel's recognition of the PLO as "representative" of the Palestinian people and the PLO's commitment to negotiations as the "only way" to solve the conflict.
This Intifada is different. It was born not of hope but of despair, fought by people for whom words like "peace process" are euphemisms for Israel's policies of land confiscation and settlement construction and where the PLO was "recognised" solely to put those who resisted this dispensation in jail.
This view is not yet universal. It is not the reading of a large chunk of the Palestinian leadership, who want and are ready to steer the Intifada back to safer, Oslo-like channels in exchange for the relatively small fry of a freeze on Israel's settlement construction. For them, the principal allies remain the moderate Arab regimes, Europe, the Israeli "peace camp" and, above all, the US, whom they urge to "impose international legitimacy" on Israel.
But the leaders' calls have less and less resonance with their people, especially the young and wretched. They are not looking West but East, and to powers like Iran and Iraq, and resistance movements like Hizbullah, whose vision often blurs the borders between whether the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a national struggle over land, sovereignty and justice or an ethnic-religious struggle over civilisation, culture and, ultimately, existence.
They find their mirror image in Israel. Like Hamas and Hizbullah, Ariel Sharon believes the most Arabs and Israeli Jews can ever achieve is a "state of non-belligerency." Unlike them, who are prepared to trade a truce for Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories, Sharon wants a "cease-fire" in return for Israel's permanent control of the West Bank and Gaza and permanent "deterrence" on the borders that imprison them.
One year on from Lebanon's liberation, the outcome is the reverse of what many had hoped. It was not the "breakthrough" to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights, followed by a comprehensive peace in the region. Rather, it threw the conflict into rewind, historically and ideologically.
After his election in February, Sharon said Israel was still in the throes of its "war of independence." Since then, his generals and ministers have publicly wondered, given the collapse of the Oslo process, whether the time has not come to "reoccupy" the Palestinian areas, ditch the Palestinian Authority and exile (or worse) Yasser Arafat. And some have taken concrete actions to accelerate these ends.
Palestinians have gone into their process of reversal hankering after the "traditional way of fighting Israel," pre-Oslo, indeed pre-the 1987 Intifada. "If Israel decided to destroy Arafat and the PA, then we should respond with a full-scale guerrilla war, in Israel as well as in the occupied territories," says one prominent Fatah leader in Nablus. "How else could we achieve a balance of terror?"
"Balance of terror." This was the phrase coined by Hizbullah to describe their use of Katyusha rockets in reprisal for Israel's attacks on Lebanese civilians during its 17-year war of liberation. It explains why its guerrillas remain on Lebanon's "artificial" border with Israel today, like a "sword on the throat of the enemy," says Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.
It is a legitimate strategy, whether for a people under occupation or threatened by a hostile neighbour. Faced with an Israel led by a Sharon, it may be the only strategy left. But it has nothing to do with peace. It is not even a "cease-fire." It is a trip-wire in a region where one stumble can plunge you into war.
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