“All of us Americans currently posted at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut,” Sison said two months ago, “feel privileged to be serving in Lebanon during this particular time. We pass the stone memorial, engraved with the names of those no longer with us, every day. It reminds us that they came here to contribute to a strong and positive relationship between Lebanon and the United States.”
Anti-Americanism in South Lebanon
Sison was in southern Lebanon today, visiting with Abdullah Bitar, a municipal councilman in the town of Nabatiyeh. As she got ready to leave, her convoy was surrounded by about 200 villagers, including women and children, who pelted Sison’s car with stones. She was unharmed and the car, helped by an added dose of Lebanese police escort, made it back to Beirut, but not before Sison heard the crowd shout “Death to Israel” and “We don’t want you in South Lebanon.”
While Nabatiyeh is in Hezbollah country, villagers there have reason to be angry at the United States and Israel: American-made cluster bombs dropped by Israel are still maiming and killing civilians two years after the 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli war. Still, the incident might not have been be particularly remarkable if it hadn’t happened just three days after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s parachuting visit to Lebanon , where she met with the new Lebanese president, Michele Suleiman, and publicly endorsed Israel’s overture to Lebanon to talk peace. Peace is, after all, what southern Lebanese want most—or it should be.
Then again, maybe not.
Lebanon’s Rejection
“Lebanon’s position is clear to all and there is no place for bilateral negotiations between Lebanon and Israel,” Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s office said in a statement late Wednesday. Siniora’s office pointed to two United Nations resolutions requiring Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory as the only way to peace.
But Israel did withdraw from Lebanon in 2000.
Not, unfortunately, in Lebanon’s official view. There remains the matter of Shebaa Farms, a chunk of some dozen square miles where Lebanon’s border and Syria’s meet—the Golan Heights part of Syria, that is, under Israeli occupation. Israel still occupies Shebaa Farms. Lebanon says Shebaa Farms belongs to Lebanon. The United Nations disagrees. The U.N. certified that Israel had complied with the withdrawal provisions of U.N. resolutions. In the U.N.’s view, Shebaa Farms is part of Syria, and therefore a different matter.
Who Owns Shebaa Farms?
It’s not that clear-cut. Lebanese landholders claim to own the land at Shebaa Farms. But it’s also true that the land around Shebaa Farms was never properly demarcated—not by the French when they held the Lebanon Mandate, not by Lebanon and Syria following Lebanese independence (which Syria, incidentally, never recognized).
History as defined by international convention may be on the U.N.’s side, not on Lebanon’s side. But when Lebanon claimed Shebaa Farms for itself in 2000, Syria didn’t raise a peep. That, in essence, was a tacit concession by Syria that Shebaa Farms was Lebanese land. But Syria didn’t do it because it felt in a generous mood. Syria knew that as long as Shebaa Farms was perceived to be Lebanese land, and that it was under Israeli occupation in Lebanon, rather than in Syria, it gave Hezbollah its justification to keep portraying itself as a “resistance” organization fighting for the liberation of all of Lebanon. It also gave Hezbollah the self-serving justification to keep its weapons, in contravention to U.N. resolutions requiring that all Lebanese factions disarm.
Israel’s Concession Over Shebaa Farms, Hezbollah’s “Resistance”
The irony is this: Despite Lebanon’s insistence that Shebaa Farms is Lebanese territory, Israel said it was willing to put the disputed land on the table as part of its peace offer. Still, Lebanon rejected it. That tells you who holds the cards in Lebanon: Hezbollah, far more than the Lebanese government. Hezbollah doesn’t want to disarm. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t want to deal with Israel. Doesn’t want peace. A real peace in south Lebanon means an end to Hezbollah and its supposed “resistance” movement.
But there is no resistance anymore. The only thing Hezbollah is resisting is the risk of suddenly finding itself irrelevant as a supposed defender of Lebanese sovereignty, but quite relevant as the overriding thing it’s been all along: a tribal militia squarely in the tradition of Lebanon’s tribalism, out to protect its turf, its power, its image. Belligerence toward Israel is its means. Peace isn’t. Otherwise Hezbollah and Lebanon would be jumping at the opportunity finally to put an end to wars that have reduced South Lebanon to a bombing range since the 1970s.
