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Progress at the cease-fire talks in Doha will determine the timetable of a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, but it remains unclear how Hezbollah will behave after the summit – and whether it will agree to forgo its revenge attack for the assassination of a top commander
“Journey, we’re embarking on a journey, let’s do the whole world in a single day. To the west, to the east, perhaps there’s no difference. It doesn’t matter where we go. What matters is that we’re on a journey and we’ll do the whole world in a single day.”
The above are the words to a popular song written by one of Lebanon’s greatest musicians, Ghadi Rahbani, in 1980. It’s a song about hope and standing strong that was born of the civil war in which Lebanon was mired for 15 years. That war was the greatest and most lethal trauma the country has known since independence.
In June, as a new war is eating away at the country and threatening to become a regional war, this song was given a new arrangement by Rahbani’s son, the talented musician Omar Rahbany.
Omar Rahbany is the third generation of the Lebanese musical family. His grandfather was the musical giant Mansour Rahbani. And Mansour was the brother of Assi Rahbani, who was married to the wonderful singer who became a symbol of Lebanon, Nouhad Haddad, better known as Fairuz. She turned 89 this year.
In Omar Rahbany’s joyful video, there are no reminders of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Lebanon. There are no pictures of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah giving speeches or of bombs falling on the villages of southern Lebanon. There are no displaced people and no dead. Instead, small pleasure boats race across the blue sea, beer and arak are poured into glasses, teenaged boys and girls dance with earphones on their heads and the good life knows no borders.
The song was performed by Lebanese beauty queen Yasmina Zaytoun as part of a ceremony launching a new tourism project unveiled by Lebanese Tourism Minister Walid Nassar, with backing from Prime Minister Najib Mikati. Titled, “Journey, we’re going on a journey,” the campaign is meant to bring tourism to Lebanon, especially by its citizens living abroad.
Lebanon is used to living a double life, as if there were two states for one people. Israeli veterans of the first Lebanon War in 1982 still remember the inconceivable gap between the burning front in southern Lebanon and the cafes and restaurants in Jounieh and Beirut’s Christian Quarter.
These days, Israelis are also very familiar with the gap between the lively streets of Tel Aviv and the deserted wastelands of the Galilee and the south. And in fact, not just these days. For decades now, those parts of the country have lived under the threat of missile and rocket attack while the center of the country partied.
And just like Israelis do, the Lebanese also explain that continuing to party is essential to preserve their sanity and demonstrate the public’s ability to stand strong. Nor is this just an issue of government initiatives like the opening performance of a tourism project about the country’s “summer festivities.”
This past Sunday, an impressive musical performance took place at the Forum De Beyrouth featuring the best Lebanese artists and an enormous audience of around 7,000 people who sang and danced along with the artists until the wee hours of the morning. That same day, the Lebanese papers reported more Israeli bombings in southern villages and thousands of new displaced people joining the approximately 100,000 who have already left their homes since the war began.
One article on the website Daraj described the difficulty displaced people are having in finding housing. As in every war everywhere, piggishness makes no exceptions for the wretched. People told the reporter that since this internal migration began, rent has risen by dozens and even hundreds of percent. One said he was asked to pay $1,000 a week – an insane amount for someone who, if he has work at all, earns about $100 a month.
But even people who can afford to pay such sums are liable to run into problems. For instance, in early July, the mayor of Falougha, (correction: “Deir Koubel“) a beautiful Christian-Druze resort town in the Baabda district of Mount Lebanon, issued an order forbidding residents to rent their homes to displaced people before carefully checking their identities and getting permission from the municipality. The reason, the order said, was “to prevent anything that might harm the residents’ safety.”
What lay behind this was the fear that, along with innocent civilians, Hezbollah operatives would seek refuge in the city, and after them would come Israeli bombs. But it wasn’t not only the fear of bombs that led to this filtering process.
The “ethnic demon,” which sparked the civil war, wasn’t buried when the Taif Accords ended it officially in 1989 and de facto a year later. Residents of Shi’ite villages in southern Lebanon are once again discovering that they are unwanted in Christian towns and villages, and they are better off seeking shelter in public buildings in major cities like Tyre and Sidon.
“They’re taking revenge on us, the civilians, for what Hezbollah is doing, as if we were all members of the organization and responsible for the war,” complained one Shi’ite who lost his entire harvest in a fire caused by Israeli bombs.
On top of their existential fears, the Lebanese are suffering from another woe – the GPS disruptions for which Israel is responsible. The Lebanese government has complained to the United Nations about this, saying it causes harm to air traffic, ships and even ambulances and fire trucks, which have trouble quickly reaching the places that need their services because of these disruptions.
There’s almost no profession that isn’t harmed by them. Fisherman, for instance, say they can’t get to fishing areas because their navigation systems depend on GPS. Taxi drivers are finding themselves in bizarre places. Restaurant delivery people spend hours trying to find the customer’s address. And perhaps worst of all, apps like Tinder and Grinder give Lebanese users potential matches in cities overseas.
As in northern Israel, so too in southern Lebanon, hopes for a solution anytime soon depend on a terrible government. In Lebanon, “government” is actually only a theoretical term. Mikati has been serving as acting prime minister since September 2021. And as long as there is no agreement on a new president to replace Michel Aoun, who resigned (correction: whose mandate ended) in October 2022, there is no one to appoint a permanent prime minister or call new elections.
Parliament is led by Speaker Nabih Berri of the Amal party, an ally of Hezbollah. He is currently considered the most powerful person in the government because of his close ties with Nasrallah. He is also the person who represents Nasrallah in official talks with foreign countries. Berri, more than Mikati, is the person running the important meetings with envoys from Western countries, like the one he held this week with U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein – a “superfluous” meeting that “ought to be postponed,” in Berri’s words.
Hochstein issued warnings and threats about the grave consequences of not finding a solution. But he has long since accepted Hezbollah’s dictate that only a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip will lead to a cease-fire in Lebanon. He is also aware that any such cease-fire will merely be the start of a long journey toward a longer-term diplomatic arrangement between Israel and Lebanon.
As a gesture in advance of Hochstein’s visit, Mikati unveiled a plan to recruit 2,000 volunteers to join the Lebanese army and get trained in preparation for the day when the army takes control of the border after Hezbollah’s forces withdraw from it. This is supposed to be the first stage of a recruitment drive that is slated to enlist another 4,000 people later and eventually produce a total of 15,000 new recruits.
But even before these new volunteers can start training, someone will have to pay for this training, as well as the weapons and vehicles they will receive, at a time when even the salaries of the army’s regular troops are being paid for by Qatari and U.S. aid. The aid money is paid into a special account managed by the army’s chief of staff, Joseph Aoun.
Moreover, nobody in Lebanon, America or France – whose foreign minister Stephane Sejourne arrived in Lebanon on Thursday and met, naturally, with Berri in addition to his Lebanese counterpart, Abdallah Bou Habib – can currently predict when it will be possible to implement this plan to deploy the army in southern Lebanon. Sejourne, like Hochstein, arrived with no real news for Lebanon, because the truly important news is expected to emerge from the Gaza cease-fire talks in Doha. That is what will determine the timetable for implementing a cease-fire in Lebanon.
Yet the latter now depends not only on Gaza, but also on Hezbollah’s plans to avenge the assassination of its senior official Fouad Shukr in Beirut and Iran’s plans to avenge the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
For now, Hezbollah and Iran seem to be coordinated at least on their willingness to postpone their attacks on Israel until after the meeting in Doha. But nobody knows how they will act after that meeting, regardless of whether or not a cease-fire is reached there. And above all, nobody knows whether Hezbollah, which continues to threaten vociferously that its response to Shukr’s assassination will surely come, will adhere to the linkage it creates between Gaza and Lebanon and agree to forgo its retaliation if a cease-fire is achieved.