Once regarded as a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel is now perceived, correctly or not, as a strategic liability. Before the flotilla incident last month—an event that, yet again, earned Israel the opprobrium of the international community—there was the Gaza war in the winter of 2008 to 2009, an inconclusive battle that ended with Hamas still in control and with the Israelis ultimately having to face the Goldstone Report. In July 2006 there was the Second Lebanon War, popularly understood as a Hezbollah victory—or as its Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, describes it, a divine victory. But perhaps Israel’s largest strategic blunder was its 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon. Even while Defense Minister Ehud Barak continues to defend the decision he made as prime minister, the facts are clear: Israel abandoned its ally in the South Lebanese Army, made its citizens vulnerable to Hezbollah rockets, and effectively rewarded terrorism as a negotiating tool. Now Hezbollah has 40,000 missiles and rockets.

It is peculiar that most U.S. policymakers and bureaucrats do not believe that the United States has an interest in pushing back against an Iranian asset in the Eastern Mediterranean and going after a terrorist group that operates inside U.S. borders. But the fact is that if Israel has become a strategic liability, U.S. policymakers—from the Clinton Administration through the Bush and Obama Administrations—have helped make it one, forcing Jerusalem to accommodate terrorists and the states that support them, thereby putting our own interests and citizens under fire. Now, instead of asking how we can ensure that our ally wins its next war with the Shia militia, the question in Washington’s halls of power, its think tanks, and dining rooms is: How do we deter Israel from going to war against Hezbollah?

It seems they can’t. Perhaps the Syrians will cross another red line by sending advanced weapons across the border with Lebanon, maybe war will be in response to an Israeli attack on Hezbollah’s sponsor in Tehran, or maybe the casus belli will be another mishap in the wake of another freedom flotilla or a Hezbollah assassination of an Israel official. One likely excuse for Hezbollah’s next war against Israel is the discovery of sizable natural gas deposits off of Israel’s coast. Alongside the Tamar and Dalit fields, the recently discovered Leviathan field will make Israel a net exporter of energy. Since the fields are adjacent to Lebanon’s territorial waters, the Lebanese are already clamoring that the Israelis have stolen their resources.

“If Lebanon needed to pile up hundreds, thousands of rockets to protect our sovereignty, dignity, and hydraulic resources, then the need to protect our hydrocarbon assets motivates us to enhance the Resistance’s capacities,” says Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, head of Hezbollah’s executive council and a cousin to Secretary General Nasrallah. The idea that the United States should get Israel to relinquish its claims on the Shebaa Farms, an insignificant piece of land in the Golan Heights that the Shia militia uses as a cause to justify maintaining tens of thousands of rockets and other offensive weapons, is now off the table for the good. The natural gas fields are Shebaa on steroids, and no one can afford to fool themselves that Hezbollah will ever willingly disarm.

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s Druze clan, understands both the logic of Hezbollah’s eternal resistance and the reluctance of Washington and Europe to confront it, which is why the former hero of Lebanon’s pro-democracy movement has jumped sides. Jumblatt is certain that there will be a renewal of hostilities. He assumes that as Israel pushes into Lebanon and drives the resistance northward, his fiefdom in the Shouf Mountains will be flooded with Hezbollah fighters. And so the man whose Druze community fought the Party of God to a standstill in May 2008 while the rest of the world looked on and did nothing now says: “The arms of the Resistance are crucial for defending Lebanon’s offshore petroleum resources.”

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri is also convinced that war with Israel is inevitable. His patrons in Saudi Arabia convinced him to make his peace with Damascus, because Riyadh calculates that an Israeli attack on Iran and Hezbollah will reshuffle the deck at which time Hariri can put his house in order. The Israelis say that they will hold the Lebanese government responsible for Hezbollah’s actions and make the whole country pay, but they might as well blame Harry Potter’s magic wand, for the source of the problem is in Damascus and Tehran. Still, it is foolish for Hariri to side openly with the resistance, as he has, even as he imagines his governing partners in Hezbollah do not recognize that he is going from one Western capital to another asking the Europeans and Americans to tell the Israelis to target Hezbollah and leave the rest of Lebanon alone.

Hariri has staked the future of his country on the clarifying violence of war, a conflict waged on his behalf by an enemy state against a domestic enemy that has taken over Lebanon. But what if there is no war? After all, Hezbollah doesn’t want war right now; it can’t afford another conflict like 2006. To be sure, Nasrallah’s management of what he calls the divine victory counts as one of the most brilliant campaigns in the history of information warfare. A man bunkered for the rest of his life has convinced the world that he won while his wardens lost.

But of course, Lebanon’s Shia are like all other men—they bleed and die and know when they have been decimated. For instance, during Israel’s war with Gaza in the winter of 2008 to 2009, when a small quiver of rockets was fired against Israel from southern Lebanon, Shia left their homes in droves fearing Israeli retaliation. The Lebanese government was incapable of processing all the passport requests from southerners who wanted to leave the country and remove the targets from their heads for good. In spite of the quasi-hysterical pitch of Hezbollah’s rhetoric over the last few months, they will be careful about starting a war that may turn the Shia community of the south into permanent refugees.

As for Hezbollah’s sponsor in Tehran, the question is how the Islamic Republic conceives of its nuclear program. If a bomb is the regime’s grand prize and the historical patrimony of the Persian nation, then Tehran has no choice but to unleash Hezbollah in retaliation should the Israelis, or the United States, strike. However, if the Iranians conceive of the bomb as just one asset among others in the regime’s arsenal, then it may pause before spending Hezbollah, another expensive investment, at a moment when Israel’s response is likely to be particularly fierce.

Regardless of how Israel’s enemies game it out, sooner rather than later, Jerusalem is going to have to make war on Hezbollah, because the United States is withdrawing from the region, Israel is getting weaker, and its enemies are getting stronger. The only way to ratify or challenge a new balance of forces in the region is through war. Someone will miscalculate or decide that war serves their interests or both.

In the next round, says Nasrallah, Israeli ships will be targeted. In the next round, says Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the war will be widened and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his “family will lose power.” As the rhetoric becomes more expansive, strategic aims will shift. For instance, if Israeli ground forces cannot destroy the long-range missiles that Hezbollah has hidden under schools and hospitals in order to deter pre-emptive Israeli air strikes for fear of civilian casualties and Hezbollah fires on Israeli cities, then the rules will change.

Maybe Saad Hariri is right—that the cancer of Hezbollah can be excised and Lebanon will survive the operation. Or perhaps Lebanon at this point is no longer a country but merely a human shield, captive to Hezbollah and its own inability to imagine the limits of its mortality. In this regard, the Lebanese responses to the Gaza incident last month have been especially poignant. The organizer of the women’s “Freedom Flotilla,” scheduled to leave from the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli this week, is the wife of one of the Lebanese generals allegedly responsible for the murder of Saad’s father, Rafik Hariri, believed to have been killed on the orders of Bashar al-Assad. In other words, the inhabitants of an entity whose public officials murder each other for the benefit of foreign powers have censured a state that protects its citizens by controlling its borders.

Natural gas deposits have also been found in Lebanese territorial waters, which while not as large as Israel’s would go a long way to building up the finances of one of the world’s most indebted states. And yet for all the talent that the Lebanese have for doing business even under the worst of circumstances, those fields will never be developed. The equipment alone is too costly, the investment too dear to hazard on a state run by a terror organization working at the behest of two foreign powers.

In the end, this is why Israel will have to go to war once again. The issue is not merely in rolling back Iranian influence and disabling a terrorist organization whose tentacles reach U.S. shores. Rather, it is a conflict pitting two worldviews against each other, a conflict that has nothing to do with any putative war between the West and Islam, but with two differing forms of social and political organization. On one hand, there is a state with its attendant institutions that embody several thousand years’ worth of the principles and ideals that led to political modernity. On the other hand, there is the primordial chaos of tribal competition throughout a region where violence and obscurantism rule, where “national interest” is a euphemism for the bloody work that security services employ against their countrymen to keep tyrants in power. The United States has an interest in that war coming out right.

With the exception of a brief suspension during the George W. Bush presidency, the notion of Syrian centrality has dominated U.S. thinking—and often Israeli thinking—about the Middle East, and the Obama Administration is no exception. The idea that it is important to appease Syria at all costs appears to be behind the lack of any notable response to recent reports indicating that Syria may have passed Scud-D ballistic missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon. This dangerous development comes after a tripartite summit in Damascus between the leaders of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in February at which the Syrian and Iranian presidents openly mocked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her comment about wanting to see Syria distance itself from Iran. Instead, Damascus and Tehran waived visa requirements between their two countries.

The model for what U.S. and Israeli policymakers hope from Syria is the Camp David accord with Egypt, which established what some refer to as the “Pax Americana” in the Middle East. The Egyptian model was and remains the premise behind approaching Syria, as was evident during Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman’s testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia in April, when Rep. Dana Rohrbacher wondered in his remarks what it would take to turn Syria around to becoming a more moderate Arab country “like Jordan or Egypt.”

While Cold War efforts to remove Syria from the Soviet orbit failed, a similar, enduring subplot has emerged regarding its 30-year-old alliance with Iran. The ubiquitous argument was summarized in a 2009 essay by Richard Haass and Martin Indyk in Foreign Affairs:

Syria is the principal conduit for Iran’s influence in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Israeli-Syrian negotiations threaten to sever these ties. Drawing Syria away from Iran would also deprive Tehran and its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies of a critical ally. Such a strategic realignment would weaken Iran’s influence in the region, reduce external support for both Hamas and Hezbollah, and improve the prospects for stability in Lebanon. A U.S.-brokered peace between Israel and Syria would remove Damascus as an enemy and, in the process, likely cause the breakup of the Iranian-Syrian alliance.

Advocates for pursuing Haass and Indyk’s recommendation include a list of revered former officials, often identified as Realists, such as former Secretary of State James Baker, former national security advisers like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a coterie of former ambassadors and peace processors, not to mention a host of policy mavens in the think-tank world.

Their argument rests on a basic linkage theory, which, incidentally, also accepts key aspects of the Syrian official line: The problems in the region are related, and they revolve around the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israel’s occupation of Arab lands.

In this conceptual universe, Syria is at the center of the conflict. A weak country, unable to match Israeli power and American penetration of the region, it struck a realist, defensive alliance with Iran as well as with non-state actors Hamas and Hezbollah in order to avoid isolation, but also to gather assets to pressure Israel and the United States to the negotiation table to recover the Golan Heights. In doing so, Syria manages to frustrate any regional deals that ignore its interests. Therefore, any deal in the region has to be “comprehensive,” i.e., involving the Syrians. After all, you cannot make peace without Syria, as the adage has it.

***

Another part of the idea that Syria is the key to regional peace, and can be won over to the West, has to do with the nature of Syria’s rulers. The Assads—who have ruled Syria since 1970—aren’t ideological, like Iran, the theory goes, but are secular and pragmatic horse traders. As former Secretary of State James Baker, one of the ardent supporters of this worldview, put it, “a deal is there to be had.”

Once the Syrians get what they want, Baker and his cohort believe, they will become more cooperative, leading to at least a reformulation of their ties to Iran and allied militant groups. Syria will ultimately embrace the West, they believe, because Iran cannot satisfy Syria’s serious economic woes. Only the West can offer Syria the investments it needs. This gives rise to other convictions about Assad himself, who is portrayed as a secular modernizer who, in the words of Brent Scowcroft, “cannot be comfortable clutched solely in the embrace of Iran.”

Secretary of State Clinton made this premise explicit at a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the heels of a trip to Damascus by William Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs: “We have laid out for the Syrians the need for a resumption of the Israeli/Syrian track on the peace process, which had been proceeding through the offices of the Turks, and generally to begin to move away from the relationship with Iran, which is so deeply troubling to the region as well as to the United States.”

Assad’s reaction was swift and unambiguous: He hosted a tripartite summit with Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah during which Assad and Ahmadinejad specifically ridiculed Clinton’s statement. Assad told reporters he and Ahmadinejad “misunderstood” Clinton’s comments, “maybe because of translation error or limited understanding.” Instead, he said, Syria and Iran signed an agreement canceling visa requirements between their countries. Ahmadinejad piled it on: “Clinton said we should maintain a distance. I say there is no distance between Iran and Syria. We have the same goals, same interests and same enemies. Our circle of cooperation is expanding day after day.”

Assad’s rhetorical slight was matched by his escalating transfer of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, namely anti-aircraft systems and long-range missiles, culminating in the recent Scud crisis.

Given the conceptual framework within which the Administration is operating, it was unsurprising that the reaction to Assad’s behavior was one of befuddled confusion. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg shrugged off the Damascus summit as “theater.” Optimists even saw it as evidence of Iranian “insecurity” and “nervousness.”

After the reports of Scud missile transfers from Syria to Hezbollah, Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman offered the following commentary on the Damascus summit to the Lebanese daily An-Nahar: “First, it seems that there is a pattern, as I mentioned in the [House] hearing, that after every visit [to Syria] by a U.S. or Western official, an Iranian official visits Damascus, or a Syrian official visits Tehran. I don’t know what this pattern means, but it could signify some very important things.”

Feltman had made the same observation during a stormy hearing of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia a few days earlier, in response to a remark by Rep. Dan Burton, who described Assad’s summit with Ahmadinejad as “spit in our face.” Feltman retorted that the pattern suggests that the Iranians are worried or that something was going on behind the scenes. He neglected to mention that this same pattern has been going on for 30 years, without any real impact on the endurance of the Syrian-Iranian alliance, which seems as solid as—if not more solid than—it has ever been.

The fact that the Administration’s hopeful understanding of Syrian motivations fails to make sense of actual Syrian behavior has not been lost on U.S. policymakers, who nevertheless seem stuck in the same old box. As one official told Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin, “We do not understand Syrian intentions. No one does, and until we get to that question we can never get to the root of the problem. Until then it’s all damage control.” Why Assad behaves the way he does was dubbed “the million-dollar question” by the same official.

***

At the heart of the Administration’s flawed conceptual framework is an acceptance of the idea that Syria’s behavior is ultimately reactive, driven by grievances against Israel and the West, the occupation of the Golan Heights chief among them. By accepting the centrality of the United States and Israel, policymakers miss far more powerful local factors that motivate regime calculations.

What is often referred to as a transient “marriage of convenience” between Syria and Iran is now in its 31st year, having enjoyed its silver anniversary during the Bush Administration. In fact, the relationship between the Assad regime and Ayatollah Khomeini predates the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Hafez Assad cultivated ties with the cadres of the Iranian opposition to the shah and even offered to host Khomeini in Damascus when the Iraqi Baath regime expelled him from Najaf in 1978. One figure that played an initial role in the relationship was the Iranian-Lebanese cleric Musa al-Sadr, who had sided with the Syrians in Lebanon in order to balance Palestinian influence.

Sadr had bestowed a measure of religious legitimacy on Assad’s Alawite sect (deemed heretical by orthodox Islam), declaring Alawites to be Shiite Muslims in 1973. Sadr was also hosting a number of Iranian opposition cadres in Lebanon, where they were able to train and assist the opposition movement to the shah. These figures, who went on to assume leadership positions in Iran’s newly founded revolutionary regime in 1979-1981, would move through Syria and were offered Syrian-issued passports to facilitate their movement. One such activist, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who went on to become Iran’s foreign minister, was given a Syrian passport and cover to work in Paris as a correspondent for the Syrian government paper, al-Thawra.

The Assad court historian, Patrick Seale, reports that on a visit to Tehran in August 1979, then-Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam boasted that Syria had supported the Islamic Revolution “prior to its outbreak, during it and after its triumph.” Well before Jordan’s King Abdullah warned of a “Shiite Crescent,” Seale had already written that Assad pursued a policy “to confront the world of Camp David” through an alliance with revolutionary Iran.

Far from recoiling from a Shiite Islamist “awakening,” Assad welcomed it. The “secular” Assad congratulated Khomeini over the victory of the Islamic Revolution and dispatched his information minister with a present for the new Iranian leader in Qom: an illuminated Quran.

The current effort to lure Syria away from Iran through incentives (political and economic) is hardly the first. For example, in 1986 the Iranians were “nervous” about an attempt at rapprochement with Syria led by Jordan, whose King Hussein also attempted achieving a reconciliation between Assad and Saddam Hussein. Between 1985 and 1988, there was a concerted effort backed by Saudi Arabia, the United States, and even Syria’s Soviet patron to entice Damascus into the so-called “Arab fold.”

Much like today, Syria’s economy was in dire straits, and the country was diplomatically isolated. Western observers figured that Assad’s choice was an easy one to make. And yet to their befuddlement, Assad refused, despite serious Soviet and Saudi pressure. The Syrian-Iranian alliance not only survived, it was consolidated during the subsequent two decades. Clearly, what outside observers have been arguing was Syria’s best interest was not in sync with its leadership’s calculation.

***

There is an immense gap between Syria’s grandiose self-image and the reality of its weakness as a second-tier regional actor. Damascus has always liked to invoke grand memories of its relatively brief imperial moment when it served as the seat of the Umayyad caliphate. This was a historical exception to geographical Syria’s status as a buffer zone and invasion route for larger, neighboring empires. But illusions of grandeur persist. The latest extravagant version of this charade being peddled by Assad is one that paints Syria as the nexus of “a single, large perimeter [with Turkey, Iran and Russia] that combines five seas: the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, Black Sea, the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea,” as the Syrian president grandly proclaimed in a May 24 interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica. “We’re talking about the center of the world.”

Continue reading: “a redefining of defeat as victory.” Or view as a single page.

Two days before, on the afternoon of July 12, Nasrallah had only seen fit to hold a brief press conference where he explained that Israel’s sole hope for getting back the two soldiers who had been captured in a cross-border operation that morning was by indirectly negotiating, as it had on several prior occasions, for the release of Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jails.

In a direct nod to the growing domestic political discontent in Lebanon over the matter—as well as the widely held Western perception of Hezbollah as hostage-taking Islamic radicals bent on wanton destruction—Nasrallah also added the caveat that if there was to be further violence, it should be conducted according to the terms of the U.S.-negotiated “April Understanding” of 1996—the product of an earlier devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah that sought to prevent both sides from targeting civilians and from firing from “civilian, populated areas.”

By the evening of July 14, however, more was clearly needed to rally Hezbollah’s fighters, the Lebanese in general, and the wider Arab and Islamic communities that were, together, Nasrallah’s main target audiences.

The course of the war, the condition of Lebanon, and indeed the future of Hezbollah as a coherent movement whose constituents would have to live on in any postwar Lebanon all seemed to be in grave doubt.

Already, Israel had begun a massive bombing campaign targeting some of the country’s civilian infrastructure, suspected Hezbollah targets (including the homes and offices of various officials), and border positions where Hezbollah was firing volleys of Katyusha rockets toward Israeli military and civilian targets alike.

After delivering separate messages to his troops (with ample references to Shiite heroes), his Lebanese compatriots (in the language of Arab nationalism), and then to the Israelis (“You wanted an open war; we are going to open war and we are ready for it”), Nasrallah’s disembodied voice—he was speaking live, but off camera—turned to the subject of “Arab rulers.”

“I just want to say it briefly: We are adventurous,” he said in reference to an anonymous Saudi official who had earlier criticized Hezbollah’s capturing operation as an “adventure.”

“We, in Hezbollah, are adventurous,” he continued. “That is very true, we have been so since 1982. In 1982, you and the world described us as insane, but we proved that we were even-minded people. As for the insane, this is another issue. I do not want to engage in an argument with anyone.” He then addressed the Arab rulers directly: “You should count on your reason. We will count on our adventure.”

At that point, the camera jerked from a static picture of Nasrallah’s face, out from Beirut and toward a darkened Mediterranean Sea. At least one missile flare was clearly discernible, speeding off toward a Sa’ar class Israeli corvette.

“The surprises I promised you will begin from now,” Nasrallah intoned.

“Now, at sea, the Israeli warship off the coast of Beirut, which attacked our infrastructure, people’s homes and civilians—look at it burning. This is only the beginning. There will be a long way until the end. Peace be upon you.”

It was, simply, a masterstroke of war, politics, and theater. Hezbollah’s power together with the impotence of Arab regimes—harkening back to the false promises of Egypt’s President Jamal Abdul Nasser and the divided Arab ranks of 1948—had been illuminated live on satellite TV for all to see.

Thirty-one days later, when a U.N.-brokered ceasefire went into effect, the “divine victory” that Nasrallah would soon declare did in fact appear to be both remarkable and compelling to many in the Middle East and beyond—even to the Israelis who shortly were compelled themselves to reshuffle their leadership and admit defeat, more or less, via the Winograd Commission.

Of course, the sense of triumph was probably never as bright (for Hezbollah’s supporters, especially) as it had been the night of July 14—before most of the estimated 1,200 Lebanese and 44 Israeli civilians were dead and before Nasrallah was forced to retreat to the confines of a bunker.

But no matter how one views the outcome of the war, the crucial fact was that 13 years after the initial promise of the Oslo Accords had faded, an unfortunate principle—an “artful balance” as one Lebanese author termed it—that Hezbollah had long relied on was forced decisively back to the center of Nasrallah’s discourse and the discourse of the region as a whole: Reason and adventure, non-violence and violence are inextricably linked when it comes to achieving justice and ending humiliation.

In fact, as Nasrallah argues further, the operation between these two sides might just be the only way left to grudgingly force a negotiated resolution of the conflict.

Surely, neither the secretary-general nor Hezbollah want to see a negotiated resolution when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. On this point, there is no dissimulation, as many critics of Islamists often charge.

The Party of God, Hezbollah, “craves” total justice, total victory. One democratic state of Palestine.

“In the next war we will triumph,” Nasrallah now promises, “and change the features of the region” decisively toward these ends.

But as he has also consistently stressed in his speeches and interviews over the years—although usually with greater clarity and emphasis than at the height of battle—the path of violent resistance cannot remain outside of, and in direct contradiction to, reason or compromise.

If it were to do so, it would only be a matter of time before a popular movement collapsed—as al-Qaeda did in Iraq—under the weight of total violence, total rejection, and an all-consuming hatred.

Indeed, this is the lesson Nasrallah took away from the fall of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent rise and fall of the Sunni “Takfiri” movements, which largely targeted Shiite “unbelievers.”

“We should all learn a lesson,” he told an audience of party supporters and cadres shortly after Baghdad was captured, “and so should the regimes in power in the Arab and Islamic countries.” The lesson to be learned from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq “is that the army and security services can protect any oppressive regime, but the army and security services of any oppressive regime will not be able to protect it if confronted by a stronger military force. What can really protect a regime,” he stressed, “are its own people and its own citizens, if they are well treated by it; if it oppresses them, none of its rallying speeches will do it any good.”

For Nasrallah, then, any popular resistance movement must act in both the short-term, material interests of the people (which is a straightforward instrumental rationality) as well as in their longer-term, spiritual interests, their divine, absolutist interests—two calculations, it should be noted, that can sometimes radically collide, especially when Nasrallah’s messianic clock begins counting down.

You rely on your version of reason, your instrumental rationality, your realpolitik, and we will rely on the dialectic between even-mindedness and (sometimes unbearable, even oppressive) adventure.

Accordingly, although the point is often overlooked or summarily dismissed by most Western analysts (as well as by some in the Arab and Islamic spheres), Nasrallah has regularly gone to great lengths in challenging Arab states to yoke his own particular logic of resistance (even-mindedness/adventure) in the service of the negotiated settlement the West and others seem to count on—even as he works tirelessly to increase his party’s military power and carefully calibrates its next military and non-military moves.

The hard question that emerges from this is how to deal forthrightly with the new reality—and this complex, dialectical approach—that Nasrallah and, to a much lesser degree, the Resistance Axis as a whole (Syria, Iran, and Hamas together with Hezbollah) have forcefully re-imposed on the peace process in the spirit, they argue, of the October 1973 War, the Intifada(s), and Hezbollah’s own success in ejecting Israel from Lebanon in May 2000.

Can the demands of the Resistance Axis really be refused, in part or full, at the negotiating table much longer?

If yes, then can it really be reasonably attacked and removed—led, as it is, on its front line by Hezbollah, backed in its strategic depth by chemical-tipped Syrian SCUDS, and supported by the evident/hidden capabilities and determination of Iran?

If it cannot, then how might the “false promise of resistance,” as the Lebanese pundit Michael Young derisively calls it, be turned into a byword for compromise instead of just mutually assured disaster? Can one actually use the Resistance Axis’s partial, but still vital, reliance on reason and compromise to radically undermine that which is indeed violent and oppressive about it?

“A peace agreement will be a victory for the rationale of resistance”

One particularly fruitful avenue to begin answering these questions, especially regarding Hezbollah, was provided 10 years ago when it seemed as though Syria and Israel would actually sign a peace agreement.

In the weeks before the final negotiating session in Geneva, even as his fighters were stepping up their attacks on the Israelis and their proxies with operations in South Lebanon, Nasrallah placidly told Egypt’s official daily, Al-Ahram, that, “as for Israel, we will join with other elements opposed to normalization. We are aware of the international efforts to obtain a settlement in the region. We are convinced that the signing of a peace agreement will be a victory for the resistance and the rationale of resistance.”

The impending “victory” was, certainly, not what Nasrallah had hoped for. But with 30,000 Syrian troops and intelligence agents in Lebanon, and a series of stern public warnings by Damascus that any Syrian-Israeli peace would obligate Lebanon and Hezbollah, Nasrallah had little choice but to comply. Syria held a preponderance of power, and Nasrallah had built up a movement and a constituency that operated on the interchange between faith and logic—long-term aspiration and immediate interest—not mere suicide (even if such tactics were occasionally, and carefully, brought to bear in the battle against various enemies).

Asked what he would do when the Star of David flag was raised, in peace, over an Israeli embassy in Beirut, Nasrallah said he would not fight with violence but that his movement and supporters would not trade with the Israelis, would not interact with them, and would not welcome them in their areas as tourists or investors.

But only a few weeks after Nasrallah’s interview, the so-called “Syrian Track” collapsed.

As one of Israel’s top officials on Lebanon and Syria, General Uri Sagi, subsequently explained—and essentially reiterated in an April 2010 interview with Israel’s Maariv newspaper—President Bill Clinton “lied” to a dying Syrian President Hafez Assad about having a full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in his pocket (including up to the northeastern shoreline of Lake Tiberius), and Israeli Premier Ehud Barak got “cold feet” about giving back the last hundred meters or so of territory partially ringing Israel’s vital freshwater source.

Events had turned out just as Nasrallah had predicted weeks before, despite his stated acquiescence to what had seemed at the time like a probable deal between Israel and Syria:

When the Arabs went to Madrid [in 1991], it was said that the matter would be over in three months, that everything was settled beforehand and the only thing left was to prepare public opinion to accept what was about to be signed. We are now in the year 2000. So you see, things aren’t always as simple as they are made out to be. It is true that the Americans want a settlement. We don’t underestimate the extent of America’s influence on events. But America is not God. It can’t just will things for them to happen. American policy has failed many times and in different parts of the world. That is why we don’t believe that matters are going the way the Americans want them to. The Israelis are not prepared to accept a settlement in which they have to make concessions. They want a settlement on their terms, and not all Arabs—especially Syria—are prepared to accept that.

Two months later, in late May 2000, the Israelis abruptly withdrew from South Lebanon, without conditions or an agreement and under fire from Hezbollah.

According to top U.S. negotiator (and now National Security Council official) Dennis Ross, the effect of the withdrawal in general was that, “Suddenly there was a new model for dealing with Israel: the Hezbollah model. Don’t make concessions. Don’t negotiate. Use violence. And the Israelis will grow weary.”

The comment is particularly strange, though, coming from Ross since he had helped broker all three of the “Understandings” with Hezbollah through the 1990s, especially the 1996 April Understanding, which did entail concessions by both sides, did involve negotiations, and which ended up mitigating violence during Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon.

Moreover, Ross had been vigorously involved in the lengthy negotiations with the Syrians, who exerted effective control over Hezbollah, to a point where a deal was only a few hundred meters away.

Ross had Nasrallah publicly positioned, in Arabic and in front of his supporters and supposed masters in Tehran, to turn a cold shoulder to an Israeli ambassador in Beirut.

No matter, the lesson was lost on Ross, just as it was on many of the other officials involved in the effort. Hezbollah was not merely interested in relentlessly spoiling a perfectly neutral and just peace process through the wanton use of violence. The party was, instead, carefully and continually modifying the underlying balance of power in a stacked process (rightly or wrongly, depending on one’s view) to strengthen negotiating cards that it did not believe in, but that it recognized it had to deal with to in order to stay inside the bounds of reason and, ultimately, survivability.

It was a joint Israeli and U.S. failure, then, to meet the minimum Syrian demands in Geneva that had truly reinvigorated the “Hezbollah model” of negotiations through the occasional projection of violence, leading some observers in the United States and in Israel wondering years later if those few meters of shoreline had really been worth it. Just last month, in fact, Nasrallah hit on these sentiments, saying, “Now when the Israelis review what happened in 2000, they will weep in regret. They will say: Had we reached an agreement with Syria before 2000 and returned the Golan to it, we would have gotten rid of Lebanon, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Jihad, and everything called resistance, in addition to Iran also. Regrettably, we were stubborn and we failed to reach such a settlement.”

As long as the unfavorable balance of power between Israel and Syria and Israel and Lebanon persisted in the intervening years after the failure at Geneva, Nasrallah was able to deliver a compelling message linking his preferred message of resistance to the message of settlement: Whichever side you are on, use Israel’s declining Qualitative Military Edge (QME) over some of its adversaries and the example of Hezbollah’s asymmetrical power to the advantage of your desired end.

In the meantime, we will go on with the work of resistance.

The Unbinding

By the time the Second Lebanon War was finished, however, that military edge had eroded remarkably in the direction of Hezbollah (though Israel still holds a clear preponderance of power on this score).

The Israeli Defense Forces had performed miserably during 34 days of open war, even according to its own accounts. Hezbollah had stood its ground, inflicted casualties, and reached progressively deeper into the Israeli heartland in a sustained manner as few had ever been able to before.

And even though Nasrallah would later admit that he had miscalculated the ferocity of the Israeli response, he was deftly able to keep his movement in the realm of reason for a decisive majority of Lebanese, Arabs, and Muslims since the Israeli response to what was properly a border incident had been so seemingly wanton and unreasonable.

Bolstered by this, and with Syria having been kicked out of the country the year before—but maintaining its all-important position as the only friendly land route for supplies—Nasrallah’s motivation for linking Hezbollah’s resistance project to the settlement process began to fade.

Still, in a little-recognized section of his “Divine Victory” speech in September 2006, Nasrallah felt compelled to underline the point that he was “speaking to you about the settlement you want,” in reference to the “moderate Arab states,” including “the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas.”

“How can you obtain an honorable settlement,” he said, “while you announce day and night that you will not fight? You do not want to fight for Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, or even Jerusalem. How then can you obtain a reasonable settlement, while you announce every day that you will not use the oil weapon? In fact, even if anyone comes to speak to you about the oil weapon, you deride him, saying: This is backwardness. You do not want to fight, boycott, use the oil weapon, or even allow the people to come out in the street, or the resistance in Palestine to be equipped.”

Nasrallah then hit on the key point he had made six years earlier when peace seemed at hand (sounding remarkably like Western hawks today who argue for a more threatening approach to Iran): “How can these states secure a just and honorable settlement between quotes? Does the Israeli recognize them in the first place? I tell you: The Israelis today view the Resistance and the resistance men in Lebanon with great respect. As for all those lowly ones, they are not worth anything. Even the Arab initiative calls for a stand. It calls for men and power. If you can’t use power, you can at least threaten with it. The talk that we are weak will not do.”

“Realistic political behavior,” Nasrallah added soon after, dictates that you must “first convince the Israelis of the need to have a just and comprehensive peace before asking the resistance movement to lay down its arms.”

Practically, as Hezbollah would explain some months later in its revised manifesto, this means that, “the resistance option constitutes a fundamental need and an objective factor in stiffening the Arab stand and weakening the enemy, separate from the nature of the strategies of the political wagers that have been made. On the basis of the above, the resistance has no objection to spreading the benefits of adopting it as an option whereby the benefits reach the various Arab positions.”

Departing from the prepared text, Nasrallah then looked directly at the camera and said, “Even those who have opted for a settlement have a need for this resistance. Indeed, we want them [the Arab states] to benefit from the resistance.”

Rocket teleology

Four months after releasing the party’s updated platform, Nasrallah gained an unlikely backer for his logic linking the military power of Hezbollah to a settlement: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In a late April 2010 speech to AIPAC, Clinton warned:

We must recognize that the ever-evolving technology of war is making it harder to guarantee Israel’s security. For six decades, Israelis have guarded their borders vigilantly. But advances in rocket technology mean that Israeli families are now at risk far from those borders. Despite efforts at containment, rockets with better guidance systems, longer range, and more destructive power are spreading across the region. These challenges cannot be ignored or wished away. Only by choosing a new path can Israel make the progress it deserves to ensure that their children are able to see a future of peace, and only by having a partner willing to participate with them will the Palestinians be able to see the same future.

Perhaps not surprisingly, shortly after her remarks were delivered, news reports citing unnamed U.S. officials surfaced charging that Hezbollah had acquired the infamous SCUD missile via Syria. Whether true or not, the SCUD magnified the underlying point implied by Clinton and wholly endorsed by Nasrallah: Hezbollah is growing militarily stronger by the day, and Israel is inexorably losing its qualitative military advantage over its enemies.

The next war, if it comes, will therefore be very different from the last, all the more so since Hezbollah has learned from the last conflict; it has had its own internal Winograd Commission, devising new technological and human “surprises” in the process and ensuring that old mistakes are not made anew.

Plainly put by the party: Hezbollah will not relocate to Tunis like Yasser Arafat and his PLO did following the Israeli strangulation of Beirut in 1982. They will fight to win a total victory they believe is now coming “in the next few years,” as Nasrallah recently promised.

Seen in this vein, then, the SCUD report, originally circulated by unnamed U.S. officials, was perhaps as much a warning to Syria and Hezbollah as it was to Israel.

It is time, Clinton and Nasrallah are both saying—though from diametrically opposed ends—for Israel to change the “hardware” and “software” of its negotiating positions.

For if Israel does not—if the change is not decisive enough vis-à-vis the underlying grievances to put the Resistance Axis, especially Hezbollah, definitively outside the vital realm of reason (and therefore on a path to isolation and implosion should it continue to violently resist)—the war that the Party of God has said it “does not want” but that it nevertheless “craves” will draw ever closer until, by miscalculation or one small decision by one party, great or small, war is upon us.

In his speech late last month to mark the 10-year anniversary of the liberation of South Lebanon, Nasrallah went so far as to quote Clinton’s AIPAC speech at length, exhorting, “This is Mrs. Clinton, and this is the U.S. State Department, and this is the evaluation of the U.S. stand. This is not the evaluation of President Ahmadinejad or anyone in Palestine or in Lebanon.”

“Now,” he continued, “the Americans are telling the Jews, openly and frankly: If you do not help us; if you do help Obama to reach a settlement, then there will be no purely Jewish state. This state is threatened. Everything in it will be threatened. Now you might find someone to reach a settlement with you but you will not find anyone in the future. This means that you are heading toward the abyss, to ruination.”

Of course, the winner of this contest is anything but certain—despite those who still believe in the unchallenged military hegemony of Israel and the United States and those, on the opposite side, like Nasrallah, who believe the State of Israel is facing immediate ruination.

Two things, however, are certain: First, that in the absence of a credible settlement process, Nasrallah’s dialectic, which should be radically unstable, is only growing in strength—gaining the party allies who no longer see any other option and who no longer view Hezbollah as the only “insane” party in the Middle East.

And second: that the losers in this whole awful gamble will surely be counted on both sides—great and small, far and near.

Nicholas Noe is the editor of Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah and the 2008 Century Foundation white paper, “Re-Imaging the Lebanon Track: Towards a New US Policy.”

Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that the biggest threat to America’s national security comes not from Iran but al-Qaida. “Most of us believe the greater threats are the trans-national non-state networks,” Clinton said, referring to “the fundamentalist Islamic extremists who are connected to al-Qaida.”

What Clinton meant certainly seems straightforward enough. Transnational, nonstate Sunni jihadi networks like al-Qaida are responsible for not only 9/11 but also attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have dispatched at least one suicide attacker, the Detroit Christmas bomber Omar Faruq Abdulmuttalab, and apparently have plans to send more. While it is arguable whether a shadowy network of terrorists led by a man who may or may not be alive is more dangerous than an Iranian regime with terrorist assets throughout the Middle East and a nascent nuclear program, Clinton’s assertion is hardly ridiculous. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that we could still sit down and strike a Grand Bargain with the Islamic Republic, whereas we don’t even have a working phone number for al-Qaida.

For the interpretive community that forms itself around the products disseminated by the American media—that is, for New York Times readers, Washington Post readers, and the CNN audience—Washington’s apparent about-face is due to the desire of the current White House to do the exact opposite of its unpopular predecessor. But a Middle Easterner hears something else.

For the interpretive communities of the Middle East, who watch Al Jazeera and are acutely sensitive to sectarian language that may well affect their lives and the fate of their communities, “al-Qaida” is shorthand for Saudi Arabia and the Sunnis. So, when Hillary Clinton talks about the dangers posed by al-Qaida being greater than the dangers posed by Iran, a Middle Easterner hears that the Americans are dropping the Sunnis and siding with the Shia. That is to say, what a Middle Easterner hears is the beginning of a new chapter in the grand narrative of strategic realignment—the epic poem of today’s Middle East.

The real question in the region, as Middle Easterners understand it, isn’t on the daily agenda of Washington policy chatter about whether to engage Iran or talk to terrorists. Rather, it’s the very practical and immediate question of how the Americans will use their power to tilt the regional order. Will the United States stick with the Saudis or throw its weight behind Iran?

The Sunni-Shia split goes back 1,400 years, and the conflict pitting the Saudis against the Islamic Republic of Iran dates to the 1979 revolution. But the campaign for strategic realignment began in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. With the Americans angry at the Sunnis, and Riyadh in particular, over the attacks, the Iranians saw a window of opportunity to push their case that, despite their recent differences, they were America’s logical strategic partner in the region. U.S. policymakers who wanted rapprochement with Tehran agreed.

The State Department Policy Planning staff drafted a recommendation to the president for an opening to Iran in response to Sept. 11, says Steven Rosen, director of the Washington Program at the Middle East Forum. “Richard Haass and Flynt Leverett stayed up all night to write it on Sept. 11, and the next morning Secretary Powell walked it over to the White House. While the rest of the country was reeling from the attacks, they saw in 9/11 an opportunity for engagement with Iran. They assumed the Iranians would of necessity be opposed to a Sunni organization like al-Qaida, and here was a way for Iran to prove its bona fides with the U.S. President Bush accepted the idea of testing the Iranians’ intentions, but the White House was much less hopeful about Iran’s response than Leverett and Haass.”

A number of stories surfaced to explain why U.S.-Iranian rapprochement hit a wall. “It seems there has been a debate inside the [U.S.] government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, then a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and now an adviser to top U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, told The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh in 2007. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.”

While this perspective dovetails nicely with the struggle over strategic realignment narrative, it is an inaccurate appraisal of what really happened. The previous Bush administration did not view the issue in terms of Sunnis vs. Shia or Saudi vs. Iran. Rather, it believed that the most serious strategic threats to U.S. interests could be found in places where state sponsors of terror intersected with transnational terrorist groups. In theory, Tehran and Riyadh were equally problematic. In practice, however, the Iranians and their Syrian allies were fighting the United States in Iraq while their assets, like Hezbollah and Hamas, were challenging American allies in the Palestinian territories, Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt. Meanwhile the Saudis, the world’s swing producer of oil, were at least nominally on our side. Indeed, in May 2003, an operation against Saudi Arabia that was planned and directed by al-Qaida leadership in Iran killed eight Americans.

If Vali Nasr was correct, Hillary Clinton’s statement is evidence of a major victory for the Iranian line—and Nasr, the Iranian-American author of The Shia Revival, seems like one of the messengers. As an advocate of U.S. realignment with Iran, he has a personal stake in such an outcome—and as a Holbrooke aide in the State Department he’s also well placed to shape the secretary of State’s message to the world. Game and set—if not yet the entire match—to Iran.

But Clinton meant nothing like that. In plain American-speak, she was simply saying that the Obama administration has accepted the inevitability of an Iranian nuclear program and is now hard at work getting American citizens and U.S. allies comfortable with that unpleasant fact. The Middle Eastern interpretation of her remarks is simply wrong.

But, in a sense, it doesn’t matter what Clinton meant to say: The meaning of a text is not up to its author alone; rather, its meaning is the product of an open-ended communal process. Reading like a Middle Easterner means believing that every story in the U.S. press about the Middle East is the fruit of a long campaign involving competing interests who operate in a conspiratorial way, whether those interests are different branches of the U.S. government, agents of foreign governments, or both. For instance, a 2007 Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times arguing that Iran’s history and culture make it a much more likely U.S. ally than obscurantist Saudi Arabia signals that Tehran is winning the case in Washington for strategic realignment. A column his colleague Maureen Dowd wrote earlier this month, praising the Saudis for their liberal reforms, shows that Riyadh is fighting back and has powerful bureaucratic allies on its side, too.

We know that columnists like Friedman and Dowd are merely private citizens whose arguments are not being crafted in the State Department or the Pentagon. However, it is precisely our certainty that U.S. journalists are working within the norms of American media that makes us vulnerable to information operations—instruments of political subterfuge employed by all Middle Eastern regimes and intended to shape perceptions, and, therefore, real events.

Reading like a Middle Easterner requires a discriminating taste for conspiracy that enables the reader to separate the real conspiracies from the false ones. A corollary of this fact is that sometimes the paranoid style of the Middle East is much more suitable than the American faith in transparency for understanding what we read.

A few weeks ago, for example, I got a call from pro-government friends in Lebanon who wanted to know when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gave his most recent interview to Seymour Hersh. The date, they believed, would indicate whether or not one of Assad’s statements in that interview was a threat to destabilize Lebanon. Clearly the Hersh interview was not the final straw that broke the will of Lebanon’s pro-democracy movement and compelled them to make amends with Damascus, but it was part of a long and successful information operations campaign waged by Syria against U.S. allies—a campaign that included Hersh’s interview with Assad, which appeared on the The New Yorker’s website.

“I love Seymour Hersh,” a friend told me one night in Beirut. “It doesn’t matter if what he writes is nonsense, I love the storytelling.” Hersh, perhaps only half consciously, has been the main chronicler of the struggle for strategic realignment, its bard, over the better part of the last decade. It’s well known in Washington that his New Yorker stories serve as an instrument for those on the losing side of the Beltway’s bureaucratic wars. What’s less obvious is that Hersh’s hostility toward the Bush administration signaled to publicists in the Middle East that he was a likely channel for a pro-Iran narrative about a dim-witted American president who was steering the United States toward disaster through his poor taste in regional allies.

As is the case with other Western journalists who write about Iran’s allies and assets in the Eastern Mediterranean, Hersh’s access to high-profile figures like Assad and Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah is controlled by Lebanon’s former minister of information, the pro-Iranian, pro-Syrian, and pro-Hezbollah apparatchik Michel Samaha. This leverage gives Samaha, as it would for any celebrity publicist, a significant role in shaping Hersh’s stories. In 2004, Samaha told Hersh that Israel had “programmed” the Kurds to do “commando operations” throughout the region. At the time, this well-placed piece of gossip was useful to Samaha’s clients. The same was true of the message that al-Qaida is equivalent to Saudi Arabia, which Hersh has also transmitted. Think of Hersh as a celebrity profile artist for Vanity Fair and Samaha as a powerful Hollywood publicist like Pat Kingsley, except one whose associates assassinate rivals.

The dark power behind Samaha’s PR operation is Jamil al-Sayyid, a former Lebanese security chief who is believed to be involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. Accordingly, part of the Samaha group’s message is to suggest that Hariri’s son Saad, Lebanon’s current prime minister, funds al-Qaida affiliates, another campaign helpfully conveyed by the prize-winning reporter. Hersh has even internalized the slogans of his handlers, excitedly explaining to CNN that the Bush administration and the Saudis were backing al-Qaida via the Lebanese government. Four months after the interview on CNN, Hersh’s account was exposed as a fabrication when Lebanon’s Sunni prime minister ordered the army to take down a Sunni jihadi group in a bloody battle that was won thanks in part to generous U.S. arms shipments to the Lebanese Army.

Gullible New Yorker readers and CNN viewers were never the primary audience for the message Hersh carried. Rather, when the pro-Iran media turned and quoted Hersh on a story fed to him by the pro-Iran camp, the point of the operation was to get two of the U.S. media’s flagship organizations to whitewash a disinformation campaign intended for internal consumption in the Middle East, a operation whose goal was to convince swing states in the region to move away from the United States and its allies.

In recent weeks, the Iranian narrative of strategic realignment has hit the mainstream again, in a Washington Post op-ed by Robert Malley and a long analytical article from Stratfor’s George Friedman. Savvy American readers are likely to regard the apparent coincidence as another media trend. But if you’re a Middle Easterner seeking to make sense of the statements of American public officials and editorialists, the resurgence of the Iranian line is a clear sign that the Obama administration’s regional policy is a mess and that the grand narrative of realignment is once again in play.

For my grandmother, there is no real difference between a Jew and an Israeli. There are no distinctions to be drawn among the Israelis themselves. “They all despise us, and all they want is to see us powerless and defenseless,” she has told me since I was 6 years old.

My grandmother does not like questions and arguments that would challenge her comforting bubble of stereotypes. It is very simple for her: Jews are evil; Hezbollah is good. Black-and-white reasoning is the easiest way to live in the south of Lebanon, under constant threat of another war between Hezbollah and Israel. Either you question Hezbollah and its divine power, and thus face fears of what another war could bring, or you believe blindly in the “wisdom and power of the Party of God.”

All her life my grandmother struggled to raise her seven children and create a home for herself and her family—a home that is at risk of being demolished each time a military conflict erupts. Yet she cannot tolerate arguments related to Hezbollah and its credibility. “Hezbollah is defending our land. They know what they are doing,” she tells me with the confidence of an elder who knows better. “The Iranians are helping us and we can only thank them for their support.”

She believes strongly in wilayat al-faqih, the doctrine that the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran embodies the will of God. You cannot doubt the sacred.

And yet despite invocations of the sacred and the ancient, the mood that prevails among the Shia in Lebanon today is new, formed by the Israeli withdrawal of 2000—what is known as the “liberation of the South”—and the war with Israel of 2006, known as the “divine victory.” These two events gave my grandmother and many other Shia a strong sense of identity that shields their inner fears of war, destruction, and death.

“Hezbollah made us proud when they liberated the South in 2000 and then defeated the Israeli army in 2006,” Walid, a cell-phone shop owner in my village told me. “And be assured, the Sayyed”—an honorific referring to Nasrallah—“made it very clear to the Israelis that they can never instigate another war on Lebanon.”

I love my grandmother. But every time I go to the South, a sense of sadness fills me. It is not the South that I know. It is not the South where I lived as a child. Slogans of death and martyrdom fill the streets, and people stopped laughing long ago.

Black is everywhere. More women are draped in abayas, and segregation between the sexes is almost a rule in public ceremonies. Colors have faded inside houses, where pictures of Khomeini and Nasrallah prevail. If you’re not religious, you’d better hide it; otherwise, you will not be regarded as a decent person. People drink in private, dance in private, and scorn Hezbollah in private.

My village is not small. It is a coastal town near Saida, a port city about 25 miles south of Beirut. The village’s population is close to 50,000, but the heavy weight of war and Hezbollah’s arms keep personal plans on hold. Hezbollah controls the only public spaces for young people or families to meet. People tend to stay indoors, leaving the streets bereft of life.

I left the village at the beginning of the 1990s to pursue my undergraduate studies in Beirut. I was fleeing to a new life. Two wars with Israel have happened since I left, and with each one, I felt more distant from my people and my family, not for lack of love. The increased infatuation with Hezbollah, the repeated justification of its violence, pushed me away. I feel that I am open to other opinions, but it is difficult to communicate with people who have been imprisoned, who have imprisoned themselves. The rhetoric and reasoning of the Party of God have turned them into different people.

How fast can people and their individual and collective memories change? The question fascinates me. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of the South, I was 8 years old. I remember one scene from the beginning of the invasion vividly. I was on my grandmother’s balcony with all my aunts and uncles, watching the Israeli tanks force themselves through the narrow streets of my village. All the neighbors’ balconies were full of people throwing rose petals and rice at the Israeli tanks.

I remember my mother telling me that people were happy because the Israelis were helping us remove the Palestinians. It was not that people no longer believed in the right to resist or the validity of the Palestinian cause. It was that the Palestinians failed to integrate into the Shia community. After the Israelis, too, began to overstay their welcome, Hezbollah convinced the Shia that resistance was essential to their political and social empowerment. That is why the 2006 war was endurable. My village was bombed, and many people died. But destruction and death are endurable if they are perceived to be necessary costs of achieving a common cause.

The people of my village say they are not afraid anymore. “Because Israel will never dare to start another war with Hezbollah after its defeat in 2006,” my grandmother, uncle, and cousin attest. All three generations live in denial of the defeat that we, as Lebanese, as people of the South, suffered.

Who lost more lives? Whose houses and infrastructure were destroyed? The facts don’t lie. Yet they refuse to see the reality, because Hezbollah has convinced them over the past two decades that “dignity is above all.” Slogans of dignity and honor flood their everyday lives through Hezbollah’s media channels, Nasrallah’s speeches, and street slogans.

But who can blame them? Without the conviction that they won, the pain of loss and the fear of more agony would be too much to bear.

Yet the rhetoric of fearlessness, so often heard in the South, vanishes the moment a security incident happens. A single rocket launched toward Israel could cause a traffic jam of people trying to flee from the South to Beirut. “We cannot tolerate another war,” Rasha, my childhood neighbor said. “Look around you. We haven’t finished reconstructing our houses yet. But what we think does not count.”

Hezbollah’s “divine victory” in the summer of 2006 provided a sense of closure to the years of grief the people of my village suffered; but Hezbollah cannot afford another “divine victory.” “I feel that because of the resistance, we are risking our land, houses, and lives,” Rasha tells me, adding that she doesn’t express her feelings out loud.

My grandmother loves Hezbollah, but she also loves peace. She hates Israel, but she also hates war, death, and destruction. The collective dignity of the community makes her proud. She knows that it is not enough to be proud, because she had to suffer the humiliation of fleeing under bombs in 2006. However, the closure of the “divine victory,” mixed with dignity and pride, offer her a way to go on living a life in which she feels comfortable and, in a strange way, secure.

Hanin Ghaddar is a Lebanese journalist based in Beirut.