Nausea and the Jdeideh incident

I realize that Hezbollah tends to provoke strange reactions in people, but somehow found myself ill prepared for the statement of the Aounist parliamentarian Nabil Nicolas last Monday at a commemoration held at the St. Joseph school in Jdeideh for three assassinated Hezbollah officials – Imad Mugniyah, Ragheb Harb and Abbas al-Moussawi.

In his speech Nicolas opined, after mentioning Hezbollah’s dead, that Christians considered the “first martyr against the Jews to be Jesus Christ.” He then compared what had motivated Hezbollah’s martyrs with the Christian impulse to sacrifice, “especially as the Maronites have begun Lent, which is considered the month of resistance by Christians.” His colleague, Camille Habib, Michel Aoun’s spokesman, sounded a similar note, declaring that he hoped that St. Maroun would ensure that “we can get to Jerusalem and beyond, and beyond Haifa,” echoing a statement by Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, during the 2006 war.

Nicolas’ theology was off, as was Habib’s geography, but the real question is whether the Aounists, when they speak in this way, expect us to take them seriously. Indeed, do they expect Hezbollah to take them seriously? In wanting to sound even more like Hezbollah than Hezbollah itself, the Aounists come across as members of a frightened minority, keen to curry favor with the more powerful than they by adopting their rhetoric.

The Jdeideh incident provoked consternation among Christians. It shouldn’t have, at least for the reasons it did. The reaction of many people was that Hezbollah should organize its political gatherings in Shia areas, not in predominantly Christian ones (though there is a more solid case to be made that the party should not do so in Christian religious schools, or in any schools for that matter). A former parliamentarian, Fares Soueid, expressed this logic by asking whether “the Kataeb or the Lebanese Forces could hold a ceremony to honor the martyred president, Bachir Gemayel, at [the] Rawdat al-Shahidayn [mosque] in the southern suburbs.”

Unfortunately, that’s precisely the logic that has allowed Hezbollah to consolidate its mini-state in the past 15 years. Where there is recognition of enclosed sectarian areas, there is also implicit legitimization of Hezbollah’s exclusive domination of Shia-majority areas. They’re there, we’re here, the argument goes, and by staying that way everyone is happy. If Lebanon is ever to become a real state, such thinking must end.

But since we won’t resolve that problem just yet, let’s focus on the rationale of those like Nicolas and Habib, and their Aounist followers, who have in recent years embraced Hezbollah in the most uncritical of ways. When Michel Aoun and Nasrallah signed their “understanding” at the Mar Mikhail Church in Chiyyah in February 2006, Aounists defended the document as an agreement between equal parties. There was some reason to accept the interpretation. Aoun headed a large bloc in parliament, and while Hezbollah had the weapons, it was dependent at the time on its new Christian partner to break out of its isolation.

But then things began to change. Although Aoun continued to portray himself as a prime defender of the Lebanese state, he endorsed Hezbollah’s behavior during the 2006 war, which the party provoked without consulting the Lebanese government or its own partners. Aoun also upheld the party’s right to retain its weapons, linking disarmament to an end of the Mideast conflict, even though he had provoked a devastating inter-Christian war in 1989-1990 to disarm the Lebanese Forces.

Aoun also retreated from what he had earlier said about the assassination of the former prime minister, Rafik al-Hariri. Where the general had repeatedly blamed Syria in 2005, in an interview with Marcel Ghanem in March 2006, soon after signing his understanding with Hezbollah, he shifted the blame onto “fundamentalists”, by which he meant Sunni fundamentalists, drawing attention away from the more likely culprits.

And when Hezbollah began its protest in the downtown area in December 2006 to forcibly remove a constitutionally legitimate government, Aoun, the erstwhile defender of the state, went down with the party. Worse, during the 18-month crisis that followed, when Aoun sought to impose himself as president to succeed Emile Lahoud, Hezbollah supported his efforts, but never once formally endorsed him as its candidate. In the end it was the party’s acceptance of Michel Sleiman during the Doha Conference of June 2007 that shattered Aoun’s presidential dreams.

In other words, at every stage Hezbollah set the agenda and Aoun followed, even when doing so meant undermining his declared principles or ambitions. So to watch as the Aounists now bend their religious symbolism out of shape to make it more compatible with Hezbollah’s political symbolism is truly nauseating. Michel Aoun has obliterated any semblance of an independent personality in his interaction with the party.

What Soueid should have asked is not whether Hezbollah would allow a ceremony in the southern suburbs to honor Bachir Gemayel; but rather whether Hassan Nasrallah would have paid tribute to Bachir (whose takeover of the presidency Michel Aoun helped engineer) in the same way that the Aounists did to Mugniyah. In its leaders’ oratory Hezbollah never concedes anything on its worldview, even to its allies.

When Nicolas compared Imad Mugniyah to Jesus Christ, the party faithful in the audience must have felt contempt for the Aounist parliamentarian. After all, even Hezbollah does not consider Mugniyah a prophet. What fools we’re friends with, they must have gleefully thought.