A new role for Palestinians Michael Young

Opinion, August 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

A new role for Palestinians

Michael Young

The Daily Star, 8/30/03

Funny how it’s during those noisier moments of conflict, as people head for the shelters, that the most far-reaching deals are concluded. No sooner had Hizbullah and Israel finished blazing away at one other in the Shebaa Farms two weeks ago, that those of us still squatting in our cellars heard that the two were close to an agreement on a prisoner exchange.
According to a source cited by the daily Al-Hayat on Wednesday, Israel and Hizbullah are moving toward a deal that would include Israel’s handing over both Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners. Reportedly, the two sides were close to an agreement three months ago, but talks broke down when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to delay a decision while he negotiated prisoner releases with his Palestinian counterpart, Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.
The Al-Hayat story brought out an apparent paradox in the relationship between Hizbullah and the Palestinians. On the one hand, the party has insisted on a release of Palestinian prisoners to enhance its regional bona fides and prove it is not a parochial Lebanese party concerned solely with the well-being of its countrymen. On the other, it has gradually become a leitmotif of Lebanese officials that Hizbullah is a source of security in the border area, mainly because it protects Israel from cross-border Palestinian attacks.
The reasoning behind this is simple. With no sensible explanation for why the Lebanese Army is not deployed in the South or at least not one they would publicly share officials have fallen back on justifying what is already in place, and situating their argument in the context of recent Lebanese history. How so? By harking back to the pre-1982 period when Palestinian armed groups ruled South Lebanon, and assuring interlocutors that Hizbullah will never allow this to happen again.
The seeds of such an argument were planted years ago, but in a different context. At the time Israel still occupied southern Lebanon, and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began toying with the idea of a withdrawal. The Syrians were alarmed. Without Israelis to be fired upon (and the Shebaa Farms not yet discovered as a casus belli), Syria feared that its military leverage in the South was on the brink of termination.
According to reports, the deputy speaker of Parliament, Elie Ferzli, was told to transmit an informal message to the US ambassador in Beirut. The message, according to a source, went roughly like this: “If Israel withdraws, we, the Lebanese, might be able to control Hizbullah
attacks, but not those of Palestinian groups in Lebanon who, after all, wish to liberate their land from Israeli occupation.”
What was being said, in a nutshell, was that if the Israelis left the South, they would continue to face military pressures from across the border. As it turned out, the Syrians and Lebanese had their cake sort of and ate it too: Hizbullah pursued military operations after 2000, albeit in the nether world of the Shebaa Farms; and in March 2002, unidentified gunmen, widely
suspected of being armed Palestinian refugees, carried out cross-border attacks, including one on March 12 against an Israeli bus that killed six passengers.
It is an open secret in Beirut that the March 2002 attacks were most probably conducted with Hizbullah’s collaboration, if not more at least if one believes the murmured assurances of politicians, journalists and international civil servants. Indeed, the ambiguities in the attacks were part of Hizbullah’s deterrence posture in the South, since the party has always liked to inject a lack of predictability and accountability into its military operations against Israel.
One can’t help but wonder how Hizbullah feels when officials portray it as an efficient guardian of Israel’s borders. The party has an image to preserve. That is one reason why Hizbullah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah was so keen to include Palestinians in any prisoner exchange with Israel. Appearing to protect Palestinian interests is the flip side of a Hizbullah approach that, in the past seven months (with the exception of the shooting in mid-August), has been premised on keeping the Shebaa Farms front quiet.
So, 20 years after the last remnants of a sizable Palestinian military force departed from Lebanon under Syrian prodding in Tripoli, not Israeli prodding in Beirut the Palestinians have found a new role in Lebanon’s political discourse: They had been the bogeyman whose presence once made South Lebanon an Eden for myriad militias. Now they are
the bogeyman that makes South Lebanon an Eden for just one.
Michael Young writes a regular column for THE DAILY STAR. His weblog is www.beirutcalling.blogspot.com

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).