Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Nasrallah's call to Arab world to fall on deaf ears?

As a follow-up to Amos's earlier posts I re-submit the excellent resource Memri.org, which has linked a translated and subtitled video clip of Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah calling for regional support. Thinktanker Edward Luttwack thinks his call will tank. Evidence vindicating Luttwack's viewpoint can be found on the same memri.org site: an Egyptian journalist who believes - in spite of his admiration for Nasrallah - that raising pictures of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in South Lebanon is not worth spilling Arab blood.

I wonder what it would take to bring the region over to Nasrallah's side. Based on Nasrallah's statements, it seems to me he thought (probably incorrectly) that the time was right to rally Arabs. As Amos suggested earlier, ideology (which they share with Hamas) cannot be discounted as Hizbollah's motivation for attacking Israel, nor can their desire to use the Gaza crisis as leverage for a prisoner swap. But they clearly also want to use Israeli counterviolence to achieve solidarity with Arabs who are normally ideologically opposed to the Hezbollah platform. Witness what they've done with ordinary Lebanese people, many (but by no means all) of whom now see Hezbollah as defenders of the Lebanese people instead of the instigators of their suffering. As Ari Shalit wrote in the English version of Ha'aretz the other day, Israel needs to keep its moral highground in this conflict if it wants to regain international support and keep Arab solidarity against it at bay. Easier said than done, but the bombing can't go on forever.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

who's ears would listen to such nonsense