[News] Robert Fisk - A Victory for Hizbollah, Syria and Iran

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk08152006.html

August 15, 2006


A Victory for Hizbollah, Syria and Iran


Israel Wasn't Hoping for This

By ROBERT FISK

Beirut.

You have to be down here with the Hizbollah amid this terrifying 
destruction--way south of the Litani river, in the territory from 
which Israel once vowed to expel them--to realise the nature of the 
past month of war and of its enormous political significance to the 
Middle East. Israel's mighty army has already retreated from the 
neighbouring village of Ghandoutiya after losing 40 men in just over 
36 hours of fighting. It has not even managed to penetrate the 
smashed town of Khiam where the Hizbollah were celebrating yesterday 
afternoon. In Srifa, I stood with Hizbollah men looking at the empty 
roads to the south and could see all the way to Israel and the 
settlement of Mizgav Am on the other side of the frontier. This is 
not the way the war was supposed to have ended for Israel.

Far from humiliating Iran and Syria--which was the Israeli-American 
plan--these two supposedly pariah states have been left untouched and 
the Hizbollah's reputation lionized across the Arab world. The 
"opportunity" which President George Bush and his Secretary of State, 
Condoleezza Rice, apparently saw in the Lebanon war has turned out to 
be an opportunity for America's enemies to show the weakness of 
Israel's army. Indeed, last night, scarcely any Israeli armor was to 
be seen inside Lebanon--just one solitary tank could be glimpsed 
outside Bint Jbeil and the Israelis had retreated even from the 
"safe" Christian town of Marjayoun. It is now clear that the 
30,000-strong Israeli army reported to be racing north to the Litani 
river never existed. In fact, it is unlikely that there were 
yesterday more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers left in all of southern 
Lebanon, although they did become involved in two fire-fights during 
the morning, hours after the UN-ceasefire went into effect.

Down the coast road from Beirut, meanwhile, came a massive exodus of 
tens of thousands of Shia families, bedding piled on the roofs of 
their cars , many of them sporting Hizbollah flags and pictures of 
Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's chairman, on their windscreens. 
At the massive traffic jams around the broken motorway bridges and 
craters which litter the landscape, the Hizbollah was even handing 
out yellow and green "victory" flags, along with official notices 
urging parents not to allow children to play with the thousands of 
unexploded bombs that now lie across the landscape. At least one 
Lebanese child was killed by unexploded ordnance and another 15 were 
wounded yesterday.

But to what are these people returning? Haj Ali Dakroub, a 42-year 
old construction manager, lost part of his home in Israel's 1996 
bombardment of Srifa. Now his entire house has been flattened. "What 
is here that Israel should destroy all this?" he asked. "We don't 
deny that the resistance was in Srifa. It was here before and it will 
be here in the future. But in this house lived only my family. So why 
would Israel bomb it?"

Well, I did happen to notice what appeared to be the casing of a 
missile hanging from the balcony of a much-damaged house facing the 
rubble of Ali Dakroub's home. And a group of Hizbollah militiamen, 
one of them with a pistol tucked into his trousers, walked past us 
nonchalantly and disappeared into an orchard. Was this, perhaps, 
where they kept some of their rockets? Mr Dakroub wasn't saying.

"I am going to rebuild my home with my two sons," he insisted. 
"Israel may come back in 10 years and destroy it all over again and 
then I'll just rebuild it all over again. This was a Hizbollah 
victory. The Israelis were able to defeat all the Arab countries in 
six days in 1967 but here they could not defeat the resistance in a 
month. These resistance men would come out of the ground and shoot 
back. They are still here."

"Come out of the ground" is an expression I have heard several times 
these past four weeks and I am beginning to suspect that many of the 
thousands of guerrillas did indeed shelter in caves and basements and 
tunnels, only to emerge to fire their missiles or to use their 
rockets on the Israeli army once it made the mistake of sending 
troops into Lebanon on the ground.

And does anyone believe that the Hizbollah will submit to their own 
disarmament by a new international force of UN and Lebanese troops 
once--if--it arrives? There was a symbolic moment yesterday when 
Lebanese soldiers already based in southern Lebanon joined Hizbollah 
men in Srifa to clear the rubble of a house in which the bodies of an 
entire family were believed buried. Lebanese Red Cross and civil 
defense personnel--representatives of the civil power which is 
supposed to claw back its sovereignty from the Hizbollah--joined in 
the search. The mukhtar, who so blatantly regarded the Hizbollah as 
heroes, is also a government representative. And at the entrance to 
this shattered village still stands a poster of Nasrallah and the 
Iranian President Ali Khamenei.

Far from driving the Hizbollah north across the Litani river, Israel 
has entrenched them in their Lebanese villages as never before.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560254424/counterpunchmaga>Pity 
the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's collection, 
<http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Bookshop.html>The 
Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk's newest book is 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400041511/counterpunchmaga>The 
Conquest of the Middle East.


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