Hezbollah acted for Palestine

A woman, an immigrant from Russia, throws herself on the ground in total despair in front of her home that has been hit by a missile, crying in broken Hebrew: "My son! My son!" believing him dead.

In fact he was only wounded and had been taken to hospital.

Lebanese children, covered with wounds, in Beirut hospitals. The funeral of the victims of a missile in Haifa. The ruins of a whole devastated quarter in Beirut. Inhabitants of the north of Israel fleeing south from the Katyushas. Inhabitants of the south of Lebanon fleeing north from the Israeli Air Force. Death, destruction. Unimaginable human suffering.

And the most disgusting sight: George W. Bush in a playful mood sitting on his chair in St Petersburg, with his loyal servant Tony Blair leaning over him, and solving the problem: "See? What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing that s***, and it's over."

Syria? But only a few months ago it was Bush - yes, the same Bush - who induced the Lebanese to drive the Syrians out of their country. Now he wants them to intervene in Lebanon and impose order?

Thirty one years ago, when the Lebanese civil war was at its height, the Syrians sent their army into Lebanon (invited, of all people, by the Christians).

At the time, the then Minister of Defence Shimon Peres and his associates created hysteria in Israel.

They demanded that Israel deliver an ultimatum to the Syrians, to prevent them from reaching the Israeli border.

Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister, told me then that that was sheer nonsense, because the best that could happen to Israel was for the Syrian army to spread out along the border.

Only thus could calm be assured, the same calm that reigned along our border with Syria.

But, Rabin gave in to the hysteria of the media and stopped the Syrians far from the border. The vacuum thus created was filled by the PLO. In 1982, Ariel Sharon pushed the PLO out, and the vacuum was filled by Hezbollah.

All that has happened there since then would not have happened if we had allowed the Syrians to occupy the border from the beginning. The Syrians are cautious, they do not act recklessly.

What was Hassan Nasrallah thinking of, when he decided to cross the border and carry out the guerrilla action that started the current crisis? Why did he do it? And why at this time?

Everybody agrees that Nasrallah is a clever person. He is also prudent. For years he has been assembling a huge stockpile of missiles of all kinds to establish a balance of terror.

He knew that the Israeli army was only waiting for an opportunity to destroy them. In spite of that, he carried out a provocation that provided the Israeli government with a perfect pretext to attack Lebanon with the full approval of the world. Why?

There is the possibility he was asked by Iran and Syria, who had supplied him with the missiles, to do something to divert American pressure from them. And indeed, the sudden crisis has shifted attention away the Iranian nuclear effort, and it seems that Bush's attitude towards Syria has also changed.

But Nasrallah is far from being a marionette of Iran or Syria. He heads an authentic Lebanese movement, and calculates his own balance sheet of pros and cons. If he had been asked by Iran and/or Syria to do something and he saw that it was contrary to the aims of his movement, he would not have done it.

Real reason

Perhaps he acted because of domestic Lebanese concerns. The Lebanese political system was becoming more stable and it was becoming more difficult to justify the military wing of Hezbollah.

A new armed incident could have helped. But all this does not explain the timing.

After all, Nasrallah could have acted a month before or a month later, a year before or a year later. There must have been a much stronger reason to convince him to enter upon such an adventure at precisely this time. And indeed there was: Palestine.

Two weeks before, the Israeli army had started a war against the population of the Gaza Strip. There, too, the pretext was provided by a guerrilla action, in which an Israeli soldier was captured.

The Israeli government used the opportunity to carry out a plan prepared long before: to break the Palestinians' will to resist and to destroy the newly elected Palestinian government, dominated by Hamas. And, of course, to stop the Qassams.

The operation in Gaza is an especially brutal one, and that is how it looks on the world's TV screens. Terrible pictures from Gaza appear daily and hourly in the Arab media.

The Arab regimes, which are all dependent on America, did nothing to help. Since they are also threatened by Islamic opposition movements, they looked at what was happening to Hamas with some Schadenfreude.

But tens of millions of Arabs, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gulf, saw, got excited and angry with their government, crying out for a leader who would bring succour to their besieged, heroic brothers.

Fifty years ago, Jamal Abdul Nasser, the new Egyptian leader, wrote that there was a role waiting for a hero.

He decided to be that hero himself. For several years, he was the idol of the Arab world, symbol of Arab unity. But Israel used an opportunity that presented itself and broke him in the Six Day War. After that, the star of Saddam Hussain rose in the firmament.

He dared to stand up to mighty America and to launch missiles at Israel, and became the hero of the Arab masses. But he was routed in a humiliating way by the Americans, spurred on by Israel.

A week ago, Nasrallah faced the same temptation. The Arab world was crying out for a hero, and he said: Here am I! He challenged Israel, and indirectly the United States and the entire West.

He started the attack without allies, knowing that neither Iran nor Syria could risk helping him. Perhaps he got carried away, like Abdul Nasser and Saddam before him. Perhaps he misjudged the force of the counter-attack he could expect. Perhaps he really believed that under the weight of his rockets the Israeli rear would collapse.

One thing is clear: Nasrallah would not have started this vicious circle of violence, if the Palestinians had not called for help. Either from cool calculation, or from true moral outrage, or from both - Nasrallah rushed to the rescue of beleaguered Palestine.
The Israeli reaction could have been expected.

For years, the army commanders had yearned for an opportunity to eliminate the missile arsenal of Hezbollah and destroy that organisation, or at least disarm it and push it far, far from the border.

They are trying to do this the only way they know: by causing so much devastation, that the Lebanese population will stand up and compel its government to fulfil Israel's demands.

Will these aims be achieved? Hezbollah is the authentic representative of the Shiite community, which makes up 40 per cent of the Lebanese population.

Together with the other Muslims, they are the majority in the country. The idea that the weakling Lebanese government would be able to liquidate the organisation is ludicrous.

The Israeli government demands that the Lebanese army be deployed along the border. This has by now become a mantra. It reveals total ignorance.

The Shiites occupy important positions in the Lebanese army, and there is no chance at all that it would start a fratricidal war against them.

No real solution will be achieved, as there is no treatment of the root of the matter: the Palestinian problem.

Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli journalist and peace activist.