Hail to the sheikh
By Zvi Bar'el
Haaretz, January 30, 2004
At a sensitive time for Hezbollah, against the background of increasing American pressure on Syria, the prisoner exchange deal with Israel has given Hassan Nasrallah the upper hand
At the age of 44, a dozen years after he was chosen to lead Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah could smile at Lebanese journalists this week and invite Arab leaders to give him the names of prisoners they want released. This week, Nasrallah was the don of the Arab world. With great delight he listed the names of the countries whose prisoners he will free: Syria, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, the Palestinians - and of course Lebanon. He was angry at Jordan because it withdrew, at the very last minute, the possibility of joining the list. If the negotiations had not gotten bogged down in November, and if Israel had not hastened to tell Jordan that it would release its prisoners with no connection to the exchange deal, Jordan too would have owed thanks to Hezbollah this week.
In Lebanon there were plans to celebrate the prisoner release with great pomp and circumstance. Celebrations will be held in each of the villages and cities to which the prisoners from Israel will return. Hezbollah flags will flutter everywhere and Lebanon will celebrate the organization's second victory. The first was in May 2000, when the Israel Defense Forces withdrew from Lebanon. Nasrallah makes a promise, and Nasrallah keeps it. At the end of the process, Samir Kuntar, who has become the test of Nasrallah's prestige, will also be free.
Nasrallah has hit the jackpot at a sensitive time for his organization. Last week, the secretary general of the National Security Council in Iran, Hassan Ruhani, said that after Israel withdraws from the Shaba Farms area, Hezbollah will no longer have any military role. This is not the first time that Iran has related to the organization's future in this way. A few months after the IDF withdrawal from Lebanon, it was the foreign minister of Iran who expressed a similar position. But this time it was Ruhani, the man closest to conservative Iranian leader Ali Khamenei. This is the same Ruhani who was in charge of conducting the talks about signing the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Ruhani was also the Iranian liaison with the German go-between, Ernst Erlau, who convinced Iran to exert its influence on Hezbollah to accept the new formulation of the prisoner exchange agreement, which split the deal into two stages.
Ruhani's remarks came a short while after the Hezbollah attack that killed an IDF soldier who was driving a bulldozer in Lebanese territory near Zarit, in order to clear an explosive charge that had been laid by Hezbollah members. This attack was embarrassing for both Syria and Iran. They are currently conducting intensive campaigns to improve their image in the eyes of the West and the world as a whole; not a day goes by without Syria declaring its desire to renew the peace process with Israel, and Iran is looking for mediation with the United States. And all of a sudden, there is a violent action by Hezbollah.
At home, too, Hezbollah is facing difficulties. Lebanese publicist Edmond Sa'ab wrote in the newspaper Al Nahar a few days before the deal was made public that "it is untenable that a self- respecting state allow any armed organization to defend its land in its stead. It is armies that operate according to instructions from the government." Sa'ab attacked the Lebanese government, which "grants a militia authority to supervise the border, stand against the enemy and plot against it by abducting its soldiers and killing them during the abduction."
Public criticism of Hezbollah in Lebanon has to a large extent slowed down its violent actions against Israel; it has also aroused public opinion against Syria, and for the first time in history, has led Syria to withdraw some of its forces from Lebanon.
Hezbollah's dilemma
Nasrallah needed a pubic achievement for his organization after he himself had become the official spokesman for the negotiating moves on the prisoner exchange. Since last August, he has not stopped chattering about the subject in public. The prisoner deal is indeed a great success, but it also forced him to compromise in a matter that has become almost sacred: Samir Kuntar. For Nasrallah, this was not easy to swallow.
The public criticism of Hezbollah, before the prisoner exchange deal, undoubtedly reminded Nasrallah of the difficult period in the mid-1990s. Even the president of Lebanon at the time, Elias Harawi, tried to take a tough stance vis-ý-vis the organization during the period when negotiations between Israel and Syria were still on the table. At a press conference held at the end of July 1995, Harawi said: "I was visited by British Members of Parliament and they asked me about the future of Hezbollah. I replied to them that if Hezbollah wants to engage in politics, it is most welcome; this is the people's desire. But if it works against the interest of the state, we will set limits to it. Then its status will resemble that of any body that works against the interests of the state."
Harawi, who was very close to Hafez Assad and consulted him about everything apart from his own considerable personal wealth, expressed the Syrian mood at that time. This was not all he had to say about the organization. At the same press conference, Harawi revealed that more than any other organization in Lebanon, Hezbollah was fragmented. "When Israel killed the secretary general of the organization, Abbas Musawi [in 1992], where were his driver and his bodyguard? When we decided to investigate the matter, the two of them fled to Israel ... We will guarantee that there will be no more shooting [on Israel] on condition that Israel withdraw unconditionally from southern Lebanon."
Harawi's words were not directed only at Israel; it was one of the most brutal statements ever made by a Lebanese leader regarding Hezbollah. And as if this were not enough, the prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik al-Hariri, accompanied the president's statement with an act of his own. In May of that same year, when he formed a new government, the possibility arose that the organization would join the Lebanese government, and not play an opposition role. From the point of view of the organization there was a significant relinquishing of its position here: willingness to cooperate with a government that had conducted and could possibly again conduct negotiations with Israel. Hariri rejected the idea.
Hezbollah is now facing a dilemma similar to the one it faced in the previous round of talks between Israel and Syria. At that time, Subhi Tufeili, who was the secretary general of the organization, declared that "the real suicide is a continuation of the peace process with the Zionist entity." When asked whether his remarks did not clash with Syria's decision to continue the peace process, he chose to answer evasively. He said that Syria was going for peace with Israel because of constraints and pressures, and therefore "I do not believe that our position embarrasses Syria. Syria is hoping that millions of Muslims and Arabs will take a strong stance against the enemy. Such a stance would remove from it the sense of constraint and pressure. Syria's choice to make an opening for peace is the choice of someone under constraint, and when a person feels constrained, does this mean that resistance to the constraint and to peace does damage to the Syrian interest? On the contrary, the interest is to increase the number of those who resist and those who complain."
Tufeili was asked whether he was presenting these ideas to the Syrians as well. "I meet with our brothers [the Syrians] infrequently," he replied, "and usually the discussion does not revolve around these issues. Within the party, too, we do not discuss this, but rather internal matters."
Nasrallah is more experienced and sharper than Tufeili. He was chosen as secretary general of Hezbollah by the Shura council of the organization precisely because he is considered moderate and practical. Nasrallah has a well-formulated history. On his Internet home page, as in his interviews with foreign and Arab newspapers, he always tells about the poor background from which he came as the son of a vegetable-monger in the Karantina quarter of southern Beirut. Nasrallah is not the son of a clerical leader or a religious scholar, and he does not come from a family of politicians. He is not a recognized scholar of religious law, but holds a minor religious title that he obtained from his studies in the city of Najaf in Iraq as the student of Abbas Masawi, the Hezbollah leader whom Israel killed. He did not complete his higher studies and fled from Iraq in fear of Saddam Hussein's persecutions. Upon his return to Lebanon he began to build himself up with his own hands; with the help of the street smarts he acquired in the alleys of Beirut in the 1960s, he demonstrated organizational and managerial ability and became the undisputed leader of Hezbollah and the replacement for Lebanese government control in the southern part of the country.
Thus far, Nasrallah has not reacted to Syria's peace feelers with Israel. As usual, he is not revealing what path the organization would take if an agreement is signed between the two countries. However, this time relations between Syria and Iran are more comfortable. The occupation of Iraq and the American threat to both Syria and Iran have brought the two states closer together. Both of them had a similar reaction to the Hezbollah's prisoner exchange agreement. In both responses there was only a dry report of the deal, without any commentary and without any stance taken. Only two days after the announcement of the details of the agreement did Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Harazi say: "This is a great achievement for Hezbollah, the Lebanese and the Palestinians, not for Iran."
When the beaming Nasrallah told journalists about the deal, Syrian television reported on President Bashar Assad's meeting with the head of the United Nations forces in Lebanon, on his meeting with the new governor of Damascus and on a gas supply agreement that was signed this week between Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The fact that official Syria ignored the agreement undoubtedly did not go unnoticed by Nasrallah.
"Nasrallah will squeeze everything he can from the deal with Israel," said a Lebanese commentator. "The question is what happens the day after. The day when Syria realizes that Nasrallah can not only release its prisoners, but also impose a veto on its policy."
