The Sayyed”s Palestinian Scheme
In a press conference on Thursday, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, once again criticized Egypt for the closing of the Rafah crossing into the Gaza Strip. Nasrallah said that his condemnation of Egypt during the recent Gaza conflict had been "right, very, very [right]."
Not coincidentally, in the same press conference, Nasrallah brought up the issue of the Iranian diplomats kidnapped in 1982 by the Lebanese Forces, and by most accounts killed. In a prisoner deal last year between Hezbollah and Israel, the Shia group received an Israeli report on the fate of the four in which Israel noted that the Iranians had been killed by the Christian militia. Nasrallah said he doubted the report, and implied that the diplomats” fate also had to be a Lebanese government concern.
When we”ve cut through the coded messages, what do we have? We have a man far more interested in discovering what happened to Iranians who disappeared 27 years ago than he seems to be in discovering who killed Rafik Hariri, Samir Kassir, Gebran Tueni, Pierre Gemayel, and the other politicians and innocent bystanders cut low in the past four years. We also have a man willing to put the Lebanese state on notice that it must be concerned with Hezbollah”s concerns, or else. But we already knew this.
What made Nasrallah”s statement more interesting is that it came in the context of his statements on Egypt. Why is it that in the past month Hezbollah has been so keen to shape Lebanon”s relations with the Arab world, particularly a traditional regional powerhouse like Egypt? Perhaps for the same reason that Nasrallah was so keen to mention the diplomats: because Hezbollah, in many things Lebanese, is overtly a front for Tehran. Together, Iran”s and Hezbollah”s priority is now to seize control of the Palestinian cause while marginalizing the Palestinian Authority and its regional backers. However, the results of this have been tentative.
Egypt has been able to resist Nasrallah”s repeated attacks without even working up a sweat. For Hamas, there is one Arab passage to Gaza, and Egypt is it. While the Islamist movement seems united on strategy, there have been noticeable differences in statements between its spokesmen in Gaza and its leadership in Damascus, which is seen as closer to Iran. One reason for that is that the movement”s officials in Gaza know that Egypt is a passage toward their political relevance. By isolating themselves from Cairo, they cede more decision-making room to those in Damascus.
As a result of this, we have to wonder where Nasrallah intends to take Lebanon. Does the Lebanese state, in the way that it must apparently concern itself with the kidnapping of four Iranian diplomats a generation ago, also concern itself with Hezbollah”s patent desire to draw it into a confrontation with Egypt and other so-called moderate Arab states?
What we are seeing today is a disturbing trend. Iran is trying to lead a new alignment of Arab states that welcomes a new and more aggressive strategy of confrontation with Israel. Some sources close to Hezbollah have, for example, pointed to the recent (and failed) Doha conference of Arab states as the embodiment of this new alignment, against the "old Middle East" states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and others, who took the lead in the recent Arab aid summit held in Kuwait.
And who is in this supposed new regional alignment? Syria, Qatar, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and we may have forgotten one or two. Let”s look at them individually. Syria was in negotiations with Israel until recently, and hasn”t fired a bullet in anger at Israel for decades. Qatar is all duplicity when it comes to Israel, maintaining good relations until it has to put on its radical mask to implement some short-term scheme. Hamas, as we saw earlier, can play tough, but cannot really break with the Egyptians. And Iran is happy to use Lebanon”s Shia as cannon fodder to advance its own interests, but won”t fight a war for the Palestinians if it can help it.
That leaves Hezbollah as the megaphone of the region”s contradictions, and Lebanon as the party likely to grow deaf from all that noise. However, neither Iran nor Hezbollah will take hold of the Palestinian card, whatever their efforts. We”ll let Nasrallah ask about the fate of the Iranian diplomats, but Palestine will remain Arab, to win or to lose.