Since the Iranian deputy foreign minister’s visit to Beirut two weeks ago, a group of parliamentary and media figures loyal to Iran has been leaking information claiming that the Iranian official openly announced that his country’s regime would not ask Hezbollah to respond against Israel if a new confrontation erupted between the United States and Iran.
This was accompanied by further leaks portraying the situation as though a supposed “pledge” from Hezbollah had been conveyed to the relevant parties, primarily President Nabih Berri, the party’s partner in the Shiite duopoly, and, through him, to the pillars of what the party and its media routinely call the “American-Israeli guardianship authority,” referring to the current Lebanese state leadership.
This overt and unsurprising maneuver raises questions about the party’s conditions, beginning with the timing of such maneuvers, before even addressing the necessary degree of seriousness behind any of its pledges and its commitment not to drag its own community and Lebanon into a third destructive support war in three consecutive years.
First and foremost, one cannot ignore the disclosure of a pledge of this nature, regardless of its timing, given the party’s increasingly suffocating circumstances surrounding the explosives file, even as it continues to deny the situation and refuses to accept the removal of its designation as a resistance movement. Its security and judicial handling of the explosives file amounts, at the very least, to the conduct of a militia and, more likely, that of a terrorist organization if the file is referred to the Judicial Council.
It is true that the agreements reached by the three presidencies granted the party an extension to maneuver over the explosives file. However, they will not prevent the establishment of a course of action that obliges the political, security, and judicial authorities to pursue the party on a decisive legal basis, entirely dismissing the claim of “resistance” as a justification for manipulating Lebanese national security and national interests. The party is clearly attempting to obscure and conceal this reality through its maneuver of pledging not to become involved in another regional war.
As for whether the pledge is serious, the issue opens a “historical” file burdened by similar promises, dating back not only to the recent support wars for Gaza and Iran but also to the July War of 2006. This history constitutes an extensive indictment of Hezbollah’s conduct toward its supposed partners in power and successive governments, as well as its political allies and those sharing its sectarian identity and geographical strongholds.
It is well known that the story of pledges made during the day and abandoned at night began when the late Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah gave the leading figures at the Dialogue Table, at the beginning of the summer of 2006, a firm assurance that the party would not initiate any military confrontation with Israel.
The major setback came just days later, when the party launched a surprise operation in the Shebaa Farms, capturing and killing a group of Israeli soldiers. The operation ignited the July War, which lasted a month and ended with the adoption of Resolution 1701.
The same scenario was repeated, albeit on a more limited scale, during the Gaza support war. This time, the pledge was not made to the figures at the Dialogue Table but to the party’s partners in the Shiite duopoly. It evaporated just 24 hours after the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation, when Hezbollah opened its front against Israel, beginning with the Shebaa Farms.
The scenario then repeated itself during the Iran support war, following the assassination of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, when Hezbollah fired a salvo of six missiles toward northern Israel.
The party has grown accustomed to hiding behind what it calls the “legitimacy of deception in resistance work” to abandon its pledges. How, then, can it be trusted this time if orders come to draw it into a confrontation, now that its designation as a resistance movement has become a thing of the past?
