In praise of cowardice

 

Even the keenest of observations can sometimes turn into a cliché.  Rare were those who failed to highlight the deep disconnect on Thursday between those Lebanese commemorating the assassination of Rafik Hariri and those burying Imad Mugniyah in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

 

Fine, Lebanon is a divided country, even in death. We really do get the point. Then again, many people were quite disturbed to hear the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt declare in an interview earlier this week that it was impossible to coexist with Hezbollah, and that a friendly divorce was in order. They were even more disturbed to hear him say last weekend that if the opposition wanted war, then the majority would welcome a war.

 

But then what happened? Hassan Nasrallah made a speech at the Mugniyah funeral that made Jumblatt sound like a prophet.

 

The secretary general declared that the killing of Mugniyah meant that the party’s next move would be the elimination of Israel – no less. He said that if Israel wanted an open war, then Hezbollah would give it one, implying that the scope of that war would extend beyond  Lebanon, just as Israel’s killing of Mugniyah had. And Nasrallah said Mugniyah’s death would only lead to the emergence of thousands of Mugniyahs.

 

We can understand that Hezbollah was profoundly angry with the assassination of a senior operative (one whom the party claimed for so long didn’t exist). We can accept that Nasrallah needed to rally the troops and show that Hezbollah would continue unfazed, despite its loss. But as Lebanese we have to wonder what he meant about an open war and the elimination of Israel. We really don’t care for Israel any more than others do, but are we to understand that everyone in Lebanon will now have to pay a harsh price in the upcoming apocalypse because Hezbollah has unilaterally decided to exact revenge for a murder in Damascus?

 

Actually, let us rephrase. Are we to understand that Lebanon will be in the vanguard of efforts to eliminate Israel (an activity that, we worry, might take some time), while every other Arab country sits on the sidelines and yawns? If we’re lucky, Bashar al-Assad might again call the Arab leaders “half-men” for failing to come to Lebanon’s assistance. And we’ll be too touched to remind the Syrian leader that during the summer 2006 war, his regime was secretly involved in unofficial contacts with Israel.

 

But back to Hassan Nasrallah. We intend to have more courage than Michel Aoun in defending our right to disagree with Hezbollah (the same Aoun who called the Mugniyah killing “an aggression against Syria and Lebanon and an expansion of the field of terrorism”). The fact is, Nasrallah has no authority or right to carry us into a new war of his own making. If he wants to erase Israel from the map, fine, but don’t involve us. Our reading of the balance of forces, like our experience, tells us that we’re the ones who will be deleted long before Israel feels any pain. Are we cowards? Weaklings? Darned right we are, and we have no intention of changing, especially when Hezbollah’s regional patrons are no better.

 

Nasrallah doesn’t want a national divorce, but he wants the weakest of Arab states to engage in perpetual war until Israel is no more; he wants our society to be built entirely on a scaffolding of resistance; and he wants us all to embrace his scheme in the name of unity. Thanks, but no thanks. We reject so self-centered a strategy. We’re sorry for your loss, Sayyed, but we’ve had enough of war, and enough of people clamoring for “revolution until victory.” At this point, we’re familiar with the taste of dust.