Love of the Land: Prolonging the deadlock

Prolonging the deadlock

Elie Fawaz
NowLebanon.com
04 December 09

Since the May liberation of 2000, the Lebanese have pondered the fate of Hezbollah’s weapons, as many people thought that, with the goal of the weapons having been achieved, the party lost the justification for its military presence inside Lebanon.

However, to the surprise of those who believed as such, it became apparent in the party’s literature that Hezbollah did not want to hand over its weapons to the state. The party gradually transformed the mission behind its weapons from that of liberation, to that of resistance, to deterrence, with arms to defend arms, making their weapons sacrosanct whereby debate on the issue was unacceptable. The Resistance, according to its theorists, became “not an armed group which wants to liberate a strip of land nor an instrument of circumstance, the role of which ends when [its] pretext ends.”

The role of the party and its weapons was manifested first with the occupation of downtown Beirut, taken over after destructive aggression by Israel in 2006—against the whole of Lebanon—and then with the party’s continual obstruction of the works of the Council of Ministers and the government; its prevention of a new president from being elected; and subsequently its invasion of west Beirut, bringing us to Qatar where obstruction [of power] came to be imposed by an obscure clause within the Doha Agreement.

This dispute between the state and Hezbollah erupted into the open after the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri and the subsequent withdrawal of Syria—a country which until then had been balancing the fragile coexistence between the two—from Lebanon.

Clearly today, Hezbollah, via its alliances on the one hand and the force of its weapons to impose its viewpoints on the other, is trying to bring back the coexistence between the state of and the Resistance as it had existed until then.

However, in the absence of Syrian control and the security and intelligence apparatuses that accompanied it, is it possible to combine the two contradictory concepts of the state and the Resistance without the danger of slipping into civil war?

How is it possible to reconcile a state which assumes that “the people are the source of power and the bearers of [its] sovereignty” with a party which finds its origins in the Iranian theory of the Wilayat al-Faqih – a theory which claims that this post “is based on the direct law of God; not the people” and that orders which come from the Wali al-Faqih, the highest authority in the Islamic Republic of Iran, are to be considered binding law; or rather they are given precedence over any other law or constitution were those ever to contradict the supreme leader.

How do we reconcile a state which deems among its prerogatives to be decisions of war and peace with a party which purports that the Wali al-Faqih is “the one who has the authority to make decisions of war and peace?”

(Continue article)

Love of the Land: Prolonging the deadlock