“Paranoids from a master race,” he calls his youthful messianic countrymen, and, indeed, what self-described master race doesn’t breed a profusion of those and eventually hands them the keys. It was therefore preordained that Israel, biblically enraptured and ruling “over another people by an apartheid-like, racist system,” would soon be ruled by a “Kakistocracy,” a cabal of the worst of its children.
And so, we, in Lebanon, watch the madness playout in Gaza, inside the Green Line, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We see it play out inside the Israeli cabinet, inside the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), among settlers.
And we wait.
We wait because Israel is just that predictable in its paranoia, its arrogance, its viciousness–and its madness. Because we know that it has to, just has to, show that it remains impregnable, that its Iron Wall is repairable, that it is still master of its destiny and everyone else’s who inconveniently shares its universe.
There is a kind of madness in this thinking. Israel perhaps imagines it might achieve against Hezbollah what it has yet to achieve against Hamas in spite of the wholesale devastation it has unleashed against Gaza and its people. Or it imagines there is strategic merit in a full-scale war with a force much more lethal than Hamas, when Israelis themselves feel unusually exposed and continue to reel from the trauma of October 7 and its fallouts. Or it imagines that a regional conflagration that pulls in Iran and the US would give it the cover it needs to rearrange a geopolitical map it no longer likes.
But then there was always madness in the Jewish state’s thinking that flatlining Arab regimes would simply flatline resistance to its century-long torment of the Palestinians; that it would somehow attain normalcy when, paradoxically, it exalts in its abnormality.
I heard through the grapevine that when French envoys joined us recently in Lebanon to warn of the hell that would descend upon us in the event of a conflict with Israel, they were shocked at how blithely we received the threats. I am not sure why it didn’t occur to these messengers of death that doom is a Lebanese specialty. It’s akin to a generational bequeathment, each time ever greater in the tragedies it leaves like wretched tokens of past sins. It’s not that we don’t have fear, but that we have learned how to make peace with it.
And the truth is that even many of us who are extremely dissatisfied with Hezbollah’s performance in our sectarian kleptocracy are more than impressed with the deterrence it managed to build against Israel. In this sense, we are excellent parsers of our predicaments. We know very well the destruction Israel is capable of inflicting on us, but we know too the carnage Hezbollah can cause in return.
When Israel readied to respond to Hamas’s October 7 assault, many Lebanese predicted that Hezbollah would be enmeshed in a full-fledged war, either because it wanted to or had to. I speculated otherwise. Hamas’s success was in many ways the Lebanese movement’s. The arrival of American aircraft carriers to the shores of the Mediterranean to deter an attack on Israel, ironically, only added to the shine of the resistance, which till this very day is content to calibrate its low-grade tit-for-tat against an increasingly aggressive IDF.
