Hezbollah’s crisis

Nadim Koteich
Now Lebanon
01 February '10

For a resistance movement, bravado is not a substitute for actually fighting.

Hezbollah is no exception to this rule, and this is at the heart of the crisis within the party.

More than three years after the 2006 war with Israel and two years after the assassination of its top commander, Imad Mugniyah, in a heavily secured zone in Damascus, Hezbollah hasn’t launched one resistance operation. On the contrary, South Lebanon is enjoying the calmest period it’s had since 1978, according to UNIFIL’s recent assessment.

Even on the five or so occasions when Katyusha rockets were fired into Israel from South Lebanon since the July War, Hezbollah was always among the first parties to deny any involvement and has sometimes gone as far as to condemn the attacks.

Hezbollah’s leadership can't miss the signs their community sends during such incidents. Images of southern villagers fleeing in packed cars with their possessions strapped on top flutter across Lebanese TV screens every time attacks are launched from the Hezbollah-dominated South into northern Israel.

It is a normal reaction, given that the memory of the 2006 war is still fresh in southerners’ minds, something Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has noted in his speeches.

Yet in a recent address he called upon his audience "to withstand and fight" as Shia Imam Hussein and his followers did in the battle of Karbala back in the 7th century, should Israel impose the fight "upon us."

It is hardly an appealing invitation. The "Husseinis", as Nasrallah may recall, perished in the battle of Karbala, and their school of fighting, which Nasrallah is promising to imitate, ended with a crushing military defeat in which humiliated prisoners of war were forced to walk from the battlefield in Iraq to Damascus. It is a fight that goes down in military history as an example of how not to go to war.

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