JEDDAH, 15 August 2006 — The Lebanese resistance’s month-long stand against the region’s mightiest army has earned it praise in the Arab world and raised hopes of a possible change in pro-Israeli Western policies. It has energized the Arab street and is being viewed as a cause for celebration despite the incredible toll the war has taken on Lebanon.
“An army that was freely supplied by the United States with Apache gunship helicopters, armored personnel carriers and laser-guided missiles still couldn’t vanquish Hezbollah,” wrote an Egyptian newspaper in its editorial yesterday. “None of the Israeli war aims were achieved,” pointed out a Saudi newspaper. “The soldiers that Hezbollah captured last month are still in Hezbollah hands,” it said.
“Hezbollah still retains the capability to fire as many Katyushas as they want into northern Israel (it fired more than 250 rockets on Sunday, the highest since the fighting started July 12). Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief, whom Israel had publicly threatened to liquidate, is alive and kicking and appears regularly on his Al-Manar TV channel mocking the Israelis. This is nothing short of a miracle. Naturally the Arab street is energized,” said the newspaper.
“From Indonesia to Morocco, people stood behind Lebanon and Hezbollah fighters in their fight against Israeli aggression,” said a top Saudi journalist. “There is a lesson here for the United States — that it cannot win against the will of the people,” he said. “Israel can and did bomb Lebanon to smithereens, but that will not stop the struggle for freedom. Hezbollah has demonstrated that Israel is not invincible despite all the support it gets from the world’s only superpower.”
The Israelis, say Saudi liberals, must learn from history and not be blinded by arrogance. “Hong Kong was ceded to China after 150 years of colonial rule. The day came when apartheid was cast out of South Africa. India won its freedom after a heroic struggle and the Berlin Wall did come down,” said a Jeddah-based Saudi columnist. “The Israelis have created their own apartheid. They have built a wall and made conditions for Palestinians and the Lebanese as bad or worse as any that existed under colonialism anywhere in the world. There is no way they can win. The occupation has to end.”
As writer Ahmed S. Al-Shatea pointed out nobody in the Arab world expected Hezbollah to win the war. “After all, it is a local militia with the support of one section of one community in Lebanon. It was pitted against the regional superpower that has full military and political support of the world’s only superpower. And the United States, by delaying the UN cease-fire resolution, gave one full month to Israel to finish off Hezbollah. Still Israel could not win, nor could Hezbollah be defeated,” Al-Shatea said.
Longtime Jeddah resident Manzar J. Siddiqui said if the Lebanon war was a dress rehearsal, as so many here believe, for an American-Israeli strike on Iran, any such adventure is doomed to fail unless the United States and Israel use the weapons of last resort. “Nobody here believes that either of the two will be restrained by moral or humanitarian considerations from using such weapons,” he said.
In Lebanon itself the political landscape may have changed unalterably. This is the least Israeli-hostile and the most democratic Middle Eastern country and also one with sizable and influential Christian population. “If the US would not lift a finger to save human life in Lebanon or to stop the physical destruction of the country, this means that the US has lost the last residue of Arab support in the Middle East,” said one analyst.
On the Web too there was fulsome praise for Hezbollah and the Lebanese people. “The victory of Hezbollah is worth applauding. It has exploded the myth that Israel is an invincible force,” said Muhammad S. Nimr in his post on an Arabic website. “It’s the victory of faith and truth,” said another writer on another website.
According to one blogger, “the Hezbollah-Israel fight has exposed the West, especially the US and the UK, as being one-sided and has shown that the War on Terror is a War on Islam.” “Are the so-called Muslim/Arab fanatics really out to deny the West their freedoms? Seeing a puny militia group such as Hezbollah hold off one of the world’s most brutal armies gives hope to all justice-loving people across the world.” In response, a visitor to the blog wrote: “The United States and the West in general need to realize that in order to defeat terrorism, they need to address the root causes of terror.”
Yet another blogger quoted well-known columnist M.J. Akbar, who wrote on his blog on The Washington Post website, that “Israel’s military action has turned Lebanon’s infrastructure into rubble while reducing (US President) George W. Bush to an even more fragile state. Architects will likely rebuild Lebanon in time, but do any of them have a coherent idea about how to fix the White House rubble?”
