The rearming of Hezbollah
Islamic fundamentalist thinking behind a hudna
by Charles Strohmer
A
time-out, everyone? For what purpose? UN Security Council Resolution
1701, unanimously passed on August 11, has cleverly engineered yet
another ceasefire, and some news coverage surrounding it has made it
seem as if that region may finally be on its way to “a lasting
peace,” as it is still affectionately called. Don’t be
misled.
In
the minds of most level-headed people, a ceasefire indicates that two
warring parties have had the fight knocked out of them and now want to
work toward rapprochement leading to peaceable relations. But that may
not be how the Islamic fundamentalist Hezbollah, or Hamas for that
matter,
reads a ceasefire.
In
their minds, a ceasefire is hudna, an Arabic term for a truce meant to
produce a period of calm with an enemy in order to regroup, rearm, and
re-attack at an appropriate time. This, some critics contend, has been
its purpose throughout
Muslim history. Based on Islam’s understanding of
Muhammad’s use of it, a hudna could last as long as ten years.
Arafat relied on the term when he spoke about his commitment in 1994 to
the Oslo Peace Accords. Hamas agreed to several ceasefires between 1993
and
2003. And according to scholar Rashid Khalidi, some senior leaders of
Hamas, including its former spiritual leader, Ahmed Yassin, who was
killed in an Israeli helicopter attack in 2004, have called for a
multi-decade "truce" with Israel (The Iron Cage, p. xxiii). Israel recognizes these offers as tactical maneuvers to allow the militant groups time to live to
fight another day. At root, the current ceasefire between
Israel and Hezbollah will eventually fail because, like all hudnas to
date, this one contains no recognition of the state of Israel.
Do
not expect to see from this Resolution a Lebanon made free of
Hezbollah. Do not even expect a disarmed Hezbollah, though UNSCR 1701
calls for that. There may be signs that Hezbollah is being gradually
disarmed, but that may be masking an underlying process in which
Hezbollah militants are simply being absorbed into the Lebanese
military, which is partly Syrian trained and sympathetic to Syrian
interests. How many of these members of Hezbollah will soon constitute
the Lebanese military force in southern Lebanon?
Signs
may also appear that Hezbollah is becoming somewhat more peacefully
integrated into the Lebanese government. But just the opposite could be
occurring. It has been said many times that Hezbollah has become a
state within the state of Lebanon. An already weak Lebanese government
was weakened even more, politically, by the recent border war, while
Hezbollah, already strong, was politically strengthened by the
conflict. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that
Hezbollah’s public strength could increase over the next year or
two alongside a continued decline of the current Lebanese government.
At the end such a process, of increasing Hezbollah integration into the
government, Israel could see a stunning replication of a Hamas-run
Palestinian government: a Hezbollah-run Lebanon. The world one day
might even see the state of Hezbollah alongside, or in lieu of, the
state of Lebanon.
