If one line explained what happened on Sunday in Lebanon, when Israeli soldiers killed 21 Lebanese civilians returning to their villages in addition to a Lebanese army soldier, it came from Hassan Fadlallah, a Hezbollah parliamentarian. Fadlallah declared, “The equation of the army, the people, and the resistance is consolidated today. The resistance fought here until the last day, the people opened the way for the Lebanese army, and together we liberated Aita al-Shaab. This historical equation is cemented by the blood of our martyrs and the determination of our people.”
In trying to revive this triptych of the army, people, and resistance, Hezbollah wants once again to impose itself as an equal with the Lebanese state and armed forces and have this placed in the next cabinet statement, an ambition many Lebanese reject. The party was evidently instrumental in encouraging the inhabitants of the south to return home last weekend, knowing this would prompt the Israelis to fire at them. Israel’s decision to delay its withdrawal from the south, alongside its shooting of unarmed Lebanese, is something Hezbollah will try to take advantage of in order to destabilize the new political order that the Americans, Saudis, and French in particular are trying to put in place. It was to preempt this, however, that Lebanon subsequently agreed to extend the ceasefire deal with Israel until February 18, while initiating talks to release Lebanese nationals detained by the Israelis.
Hezbollah’s apparent encouragement Sunday night of young men on scooters to drive through non-Shia areas of Beirut and other localities waving Hezbollah flags and honking their horns was another tactic to intimidate its adversaries. Except that in numerous places the young men were violently opposed by the inhabitants and fighting broke out. The army intervened to prevent the Hezbollah supporters from circulating, but it’s obvious that they are finding it more difficult to enter neighborhoods not controlled by the Shiite parties without being attacked.
If some people can sense impetuousness in Hezbollah’s ranks, that’s because the party is desperately trying to affirm its presence as the political horizon in Lebanon is moving solidly away from its preferences. The Lebanese in their majority are fed up with Hezbollah and its efforts to reassert hegemony. Meanwhile, the Shia community itself is showing signs of restlessness because it doesn’t know who will rebuild the villages and homes destroyed in the recent conflict with Israel, or even when or if that will happen.
This situation makes it imperative for prime minister designate Nawaf Salam to form a new government this week, and not perpetuate a vacuum that Hezbollah can exploit. Salam’s efforts to form a consensual cabinet is commendable, but at this stage it’s also wrongheaded. Hezbollah and the allied Amal Movement of the parliament speaker, Nabih Berri, have no interest in facilitating a consensus. They intend to undermine the presidential mandate and neutralize Joseph Aoun, and remain unimpressed by Salam’s promises to rebuild destroyed Shiite-majority areas. If anything, they don’t want the state to be seen as succeeding in this endeavor. Instead, they want it to secure funding for reconstruction, but then hijack the implementation themselves.
As for Berri, after being the dominant political figure in Lebanon for two years, he is now unhappy to be relegated to a supporting role in a Joseph Aoun script. What the speaker probably seeks is to generate crises in the institutions of the state, which would allow him to become the principal mediator with Hezbollah, thereby bolstering his power. While Berri’s efforts were necessary during the war with Israel, today the speaker fears that he may be circumvented by Lebanon’s new political dynamics, and will fight to avoid this.
Lebanon urgently needs a foreign minister who can travel to Washington and ensure that the Americans fulfill the conditions of the ceasefire agreement they helped negotiate, and get the Israelis out by February 18. Every day that Israeli forces remain in the south is one that revives Hezbollah’s narrative of resistance. Given that the United States gave Israel a side letter allowing it to identify violations of the agreement, and strike if the Lebanese army failed to act against them, there really is no reason for the Israelis to linger.
In this regard, Aoun and Salam have a vested interest in collaborating closely. The designated prime minister should accept that it is the president who is the central figure in the eyes of the Arab states, the United States, and France. As respected as Salam is, we are early in a presidential term, meaning that the priority of a prime minister is to ensure the presidency begins on a successful note. Moreover, the government will be in place for just over a year, until the next parliamentary elections, so that Salam’s main task will be to start implementing a broad set of policy goals with Aoun that will far transcend the electoral deadline and define the presidency for six years.
Yet Hezbollah has no intention of allowing the president to achieve what was perhaps the most significant of his promises, namely ensuring that the state has a monopoly over weapons. Proof of this was included in an article in London’s Sunday Times on January 26, in which the newspaper reported that the head of the Lebanese army’s military intelligence branch for southern Lebanon had transmitted to Hezbollah secret information from sessions of the five-member committee monitoring the ceasefire with Israel. The newspaper reported that it had seen an “intelligence report” that the officer in question, who is from the south, was “one of dozens of officers in the Lebanese army who have leaked information to Hezbollah, giving them advance warning of raids or patrols, allowing them to remove weapons and evade detection.”
If the story is true (and the Lebanese army later denied it was),* it means that Joseph Aoun will quickly have to begin a process of placing his men in the strategic posts that would allow Lebanon to implement the ceasefire agreement and Resolution 1701. From what we are hearing of the negotiations over the cabinet, the president is seeking to control both the armed forces and the domestic security institutions through his choices for defense minister and interior minister.
Aoun’s agenda, we should assume, is very much in line with that of the five-nation contact group for Lebanon. In other words, Salam’s margin of maneuver appears to be very narrow when it comes to forming a cabinet that pleases all parliamentary blocs, as he seemed to favor early last week. The president has his own vision for the cabinet, and there are unconfirmed reports that he is much less interested in reaching a consensus than in forming a cabinet that is effective, breaks with the past, and can begin working immediately, even if it means that the margin of the confidence vote is narrower than usual. Anyway, once Salam’s new cabinet is ensured of a majority of 65 votes, the number will surely increase as many blocs will vote confidence if that number is reached.
Until late last week, there appeared to be conflicting visions between Aoun and Salam. The designated prime minister’s statement of January 21 at the presidential palace that he was “not Liban Post” appeared to indicate that in his meeting with Aoun the president had made it plain that forming a national unity cabinet that placated all parties, particularly Hezbollah and Amal, was not the way to go. If Salam realizes what is at stake and that his efforts are being watched closely not only by the presidency but also by the five-nation contact group, he will grasp that he is part of a political project larger than him.
Salam is a person of high quality who is genuinely committed to reform, but it’s important that he not miss the forest for the trees. As Hezbollah desperately tries to scrape back what it lost after its defeat by Israel, any further delay in forming a government and imposing the state’s writ south of the Litani River is rubbing against the wishes of many parties, domestic and foreign. Unless the designated prime minister quickly satisfies those wishes, there are those who may succeed in seeing to it that Lebanon is denied his qualities.
*The sentence was changed to take into consideration the Lebanese armed forces’ later denial of the Sunday Times story.
