Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Hezbollah in crisi

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/99746/hezbollahs-newest-threat?print=1
 
 
Hezbollah’s goal, in the words of its senior officials, has always
been to create a society of resistance [1] among Lebanese Shiite
Muslims—one that would share in the setbacks as well as the victories
of the militia’s fighters. So, why is Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah
now complaining that Israel committed war crimes against civilians? In
a culture of total resistance, surely no one is an innocent bystander.
 
Yet at a celebration this past Friday for the rebuilding of portions
of Beirut’s southern suburbs destroyed in the 2006 war with Israel,
Nasrallah asked [2] his followers: “Why wasn’t [Israel] content with
the killings in the battlefield, or with bombing military bases? Why
did it expand its aggression to destroy homes and schools?”
 
Nasrallah apparently wants it both ways. He runs a guerrilla
organization that stores its arms in homes and schools and hides among
a civilian population that supports Hezbollah’s brand of asymmetric
warfare. At the same time, he seeks to prick the conscience of the
international community in order to have Israel sanctioned for crimes
against the same population that his group uses as human shields.
 
But there’s something else behind his Friday remarks: Nasrallah is
more sensitive than ever to the devastation to which he has exposed
the Shiite community because he fears that the culture of resistance
Hezbollah has cultivated may be on the wane. Or, as anti-Hezbollah
Shiite activist Lokman Slim told me “The shelf-life of the resistance
has reached its expiration date.”
 
Last week in Beirut I found that many Shiites, even those not actively
opposed to Hezbollah, are becoming increasingly anxious about the role
that the party has designed for them—as cannon fodder in the next
round of warfare with Israel.
 
***
 
I spoke with Slim at a reception he was hosting last week in Beirut in
honor of a dissident Shiite cleric, Sheikh Hassan Mchaymech, once a
part of Hezbollah’s leadership and now imprisoned [3] for challenging
the party’s doctrine. In his writings over the last two decades,
Mchaymech has promoted democracy and criticized the notion of
guardianship of the jurist (wilayet al-faqih), the theory handed down
by the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
which confers on Iran’s supreme religious leader supreme political
power as well.
 
Guardianship of the jurist is also what gives Tehran command and
control over Hezbollah, an organization that it seeded more than 30
years ago in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley and continues to fund lavishly.
The result is that the fate of Lebanon’s entire Shiite community—
whether or not they’ve signed on to the culture of resistance—is in
the hands of the Iranians. Hezbollah and its allies in Syria have
accused Mchaymech of collaborating with Israel in order to silence him
and anyone else who thinks of stepping out of line. But Slim contends
that it is Hezbollah that is collaborating—with Iran—at the expense of
Lebanon’s Shiites.
 
Slim is hardly alone in his criticism of Hezbollah. Recently there
have been a number of signs—including books, like the recently
published volume of Mchaymech’s, as well as newspaper articles from
Shiite journalists explicitly attacking [4] Nasrallah—that suggest
Hezbollah is feeling the heat at home.
 
Hezbollah may control the Lebanese government, but the party hasn’t
distinguished itself for its stewardship. Even in its own Shiite
regions, like Beirut’s southern suburbs, the community, according to
knowledgeable inside observers, is plagued with a growing crime rate,
drug usage, and other sociological problems that Hezbollah has proven
incapable of managing.
 
Perhaps worst of all, the situation unfolding in neighboring Syria has
left Hezbollah and its constituents in a bind: If the Assad regime is
toppled, Hezbollah will lose one of its two patrons, Iran being the
other. And yet Nasrallah has openly sided with the regime in Damascus
and perhaps even sent fighters to assist Assad. And now many of
Lebanon’s Shiites are asking themselves: Why is a resistance movement
that is supposed to champion justice taking the side of a regime that
slaughters other Muslims?
 
In short, it’s not a great time to be Hassan Nasrallah. Indeed, even
last Friday’s celebration [5] for the southern suburbs is evidence of
the challenges the Hezbollah chief faces.
 
“The party was supposed to be held this coming July,” said Ali al-
Amine, editor of a monthly Arab-language magazine called Shu’un
Janubiya, which focuses on the concerns of the country’s Shiite
community. “They pushed it up two months for a reason. Hezbollah is
trying to show its supporters that they’ve done something good for the
community and this is the only occasion it has to bring good news.”
 
This gathering for Mchaymech, which brought together notable Shiite
figures including clerics, like Sheikh Sayyed Muhammad Hassan Al-Amine
(the editor’s father), politicians, and journalists, suggests that
while Hezbollah still commands the loyalty of much of the Shiite
community, there is a small yet growing resistance toward Hezbollah.
 
“Some of the Shia community benefited from the 2006 war with Israel
and wants to hold on to its gains,” said Slim, referring to the money
that poured in from Iran and elsewhere during the conflict. He argues
that this has created a level of affluence that has the potential to
be damaging to a movement whose members used to rate themselves
according to their sacrifices, not the size of their SUVs.
 
Slim has his own resistance credentials. In the Lebanese civil war, he
fought alongside the Palestinians against Israel and promised to
himself that if he lived through Ariel Sharon’s 1982 invasion he’d
leave the war as well as Lebanon. In the early ’90s, he returned from
Europe to the southern suburbs of Beirut to stand up to Hezbollah in
one of its own strongholds and has seen the damage that the party has
done to the Shiite community. “Those Shia who lost their homes and
money in 2006 don’t want to go through it again,” Slim said. “As far
as they’re concerned, Hezbollah checked off that box labeled
resistance with the 2006 war. It’s over.”
 
***
 
In the likely scenario detailed by Israeli, American, and other
Western strategists, if Israel attacks Iranian nuclear facilities,
Tehran will unleash [6] Hezbollah to retaliate. Now that Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formed his unity government—what some
are calling a war Cabinet—it’s clear that the Shiites are anything but
eager to bear that burden in Iran’s fight with Israel. Moreover, it
appears that the Jewish state isn’t even Hezbollah’s biggest concern
at present. “The Israel issue is secondary right now,” Amine, the
editor, told me. “The Syria issue is primary.”
 
Hezbollah’s big concern is that the 14-month-old uprising against
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could cut off its main arms route and
strip the Lebanese militia of its strategic depth. The Shiite
community also fears the uprising, but for a different reason: If a
Sunni ruler replaces Assad’s Alawite regime it would jeopardize the
political and financial prestige that many Lebanese Shiites have come
to enjoy under the dispensation of Hezbollah. As Hezbollah leaders
have quietly let on among their followers, a Sunni regime will
represent an existential threat to the Shiites. “They don’t talk about
it in public speeches,” Amine said. “But their internal communications
are all fixated on the Sunnis. They talk about the threat coming from
al-Qaida and the Salafis.”
 
Naming Israel as the enemy is easy, said Slim. But identifying the
Salafis as their main concern poses a delicate problem for Hezbollah.
“These are fellow Muslims,” Slim explained. Moreover, playing the
sectarian card may well backfire on the Shiite resistance movement.
But right now, Hezbollah’s main goal is to keep the reins tight on its
own community. As Amine said, “Hezbollah is using this fear of the
Salafis to control the Shia.” And most Shiites, he added, “live and
breathe because of Hezbollah. They can’t exist outside of this
culture.”
 
And yet there are other members of the Shiite community who are in the
midst of a full-scale insurrection against the party of God. Slim told
me that he’s been waiting for this moment. “I saw the birth of
Hezbollah,” he said. “It is not divine, but a human thing, which means
it has a lifespan. I will see its end as well.”

 
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/99746/hezbollahs-ne
..
 
ZZZZZ
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3482538,00.html
 
abbiamo visto...