Miscalculating Hezbollah?

If Israel plans to annihilate Hezbollah, it will annihilate Lebanon.

Rasha, in an email to Open Source, July 22, 2006.

Rasha has been emailing us from a suburb outside Beirut. We first found her on 3 Quarks Daily. Last week, she described for us how another Beirut has emerged from this war. More recently, she’s been railing against the way Israel understands the relationship between Lebanon and Hezbollah:

The most gross miscalculation Israeli strategists are making is based on the assumption that Hezbollah a) is not a legitimate political entity in this country, b) its base is made up of extremists and c) its “elimination” would leave the Lebanese construct unscathed. In point of fact, pushing the Lebanese population to “rise up” against Hezbollah [would be] the worst case scenario for all regional “parties,” because the country would then become the jungle of violence and killing that Iraq is today.

Because I am a staunch secular democrat, I have never endorsed Hezbollah, but I do not question their legitimacy as a political actor on the Lebanese scene, I believe they are just as much a product of Lebanon’s contemporary history, its war and postwar as are all other parties. If one were to evaluate the situation in vulgar sectarian terms, when it comes to representing the interests of their constituency they certainly do a better job than all the political representatives presently and in the past.

It would be utter folly (in fact it would be murderous folly) to regard Hezbollah as another radical Islamist terrorist organization, at least in the ideological and idiomatic vein of the American intelligentsia and punditry….Lebanon is not Iraq and the Lebanese are not and will not be Iraqi and will not be manipulated into the barbaric sectarian horror. We’ve tried that before and it does not work, and we are tired of fighting each other.

Rasha, in an email to Open Source, July 22, 2006.

These “siege notes” have been receiving a number of reponses from Israelis. I have to say that most are of the annoying sort. First, they always begin by noting that I am intelligent and I get commended for my intelligence like Colin Powell gets commended for his English language speaking skills and you wonder what those making these observations expect from you and the world in the first place. Second, they systematically mistake expression of dissent and critique with Arab regimes and official discourse as some sort of a favorable disposition towards Israel. In other words there is, falsely, a tautology between regarding Israel as an enemy country and endorsing radical ideologies of Islamic fundamentalism or rabid nationalism…. And so heartened by my ambivalence towards this war they recommend that more conversations should take place between Israelis and I. Off course most propose that I make the effort to seek those Israeli interlocutors out. This extreme form of Habermas-mania, that assumes that deep conflicts can be “talked through” is the sumum of hubris.

Rasha, in an email to Open Source, July 22, 2006.