by Mohammad Shamandafar (from Amman)
Following last week’s events in Lebanon and Iran, the sirens of war in the Middle East region started on October 7th between Israel and Hamas seems to have reached a(nother) dangerous peak. In a matter of few days, three serious events accelerated the possibility that a full-on conflict would expand from Palestine and Israel to Lebanon and Iran.
In response to a deadly strike fired from Lebanon on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights which killed 12 children, Israel responded by inflicting two heavy blows on his Hezbollah and Hamas. On July 30th, the Hezbollah top commander, Fuad Shukr, died of an attack from the Israeli Air Forces that hit the area of Southern Beirut, killing also two children, a woman and wounding other 70 persons. The day after, Tel Aviv went even further by targeting the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran using an explosive device covertly hidden in the guest house where he was staying.
In the following days international and regional actors made all moves pointing to the direction of a full-scale war beyond the Israel-Palestine perimeters, including US reinforcing its military fleet in the Mediterranean. As expectations grow that Iran might respond soon with a direct attack into Israel’s territory, it is instead on the Lebanese front that preparations for the worst are much more advanced.
“Lebanon is on the edge, once again”, says Ronnie Chatah, reached by AoW to comment on the current situation in Beirut and the rest of the country. Hosting “The Beirut Banyan” podcast, a series of storytelling episodes that reflect on all that is modern Lebanese history, Ronnie is also a regular contributor to international and local media. Yet, despite several countries – including US, France, UK, Italy – have invited all their citizens to evacuate immediately Lebanon, which in turn is stocking additional medical supplies to prepare for “war injuries”, “red lines have not yet been crossed”, according to him. “What we see today is a further escalation of the a “tit for tat” tactic going on for over ten months, but despite how dangerous and delicate this is, it might not go beyond that”.
Ronnie speaks reminding of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, even though the context is very different. “On one side, we need to consider that the current war started on October 7th with Hamas surprise attack in Israel was not entirely known by Iran and Hezbollah, nor it is likely that between them and the Gaza-based party there was any coordination.”
Certainly, the situation today is different after ten months, during which only for Lebanon almost 100,000 people have been displaced and around 500 Lebanese have died, according to the latest records from the UN agency OCHA. Military attacks through missiles and drone strikes from both Israel and Hezbollah are seen on a daily basis, as well as sonic booms over Beirut are more and more frequent in the past week. According to Ronnie, “this looks still more like a psychological warfare, and it might remain so even if Iran will respond to the killing of Haniyeh on its territory”. Eventually, such a retaliation will occur, but it might end to be more a symbolic show of force as it happened last April. “And even if that would be stronger”, he states, “we are still far from a regional war we have seen in the past, or more localized ones like Israel and Lebanon in 1982 or 2006”.
According to Ronnie, referring to that recent historical event, an indication that a large-scale war would occur would imply that either Hezbollah or the Israeli forces would deploy actions across the borders. “But such red lines did not materialize yet. That the situation can get out of hand, however, is not to be excluded”, he warns, and once again the Lebanese people may find themselves trapped into a war not theirs.
What is often missing in the mainstream media narratives in the past weeks and months about Lebanon is what people think towards the tragic events from October 7th, 2023 onwards. Through his podcast episodes and writings, Ronnie continuously stresses that “this is an Iran war against Israel through its proxy, Hezbollah”, but not a Lebanese war. “True, whenever there is a sonic boom or an attack by Israel inside our country, sympathy towards who responds, Hezbollah, is almost inevitable. But by no means this corresponds to the reality that the majority of Lebanese support the (Shiite) party”. Stuck into a financial and economic crisis since 2019, preceded by a mass-protest movement emerged to demand a radical change of long-established sectarian-based politics, the war on Gaza could only exacerbates the Lebanese population, whose 70% is experiencing multidimensional poverty according to the latest World Bank reports.
Furthermore, while the latest events are critically affecting one of the few vital economic sector, tourism, led mainly by the Lebanese expatriates regularly visiting their home country during summer time, they also occurred around an important date symbolizing the failure of Lebanon as state. On August 4th, marking the fourth anniversary of the explosion at the Beirut port, one of the biggest non-nuclear explosion ever occurred, hundreds of people gathered to still demand accountability and the end of corruption and impunity of Lebanese politics, as for the blast nobody has been held responsible yet.
“The longer this war drags on, the harder it becomes to find a civil and peaceful resolution in the country. Nobody talks anymore about the demilitarization of Hezbollah, who de facto hijacked the Lebanese state”, bluntly concludes Ronnie. Diplomacy and mediation are concepts very dear to Ronnie, whose father Mohammad Chatah, a diplomat and an economist, was killed by a car bomb in 2013, allegedly set by Hezbollah. Recently, his podcast’s Youtube channel posted an episode presenting his father speaking at a conference with Austrian and Switzerland ambassadors, focusing on the topic of neutrality, among other things, as a possibility for Lebanon to survive the Middle East turmoil. “Compared to Vienna and Geneva’s histories, the Lebanese experience to neutrality is limited only to the ‘60s, during which Lebanon managed to not getting involved into the regional wars back then.”
For Ronnie, “neutrality in the Lebanese terms does not mean do not sympathize with the Palestinians or the Syrians, for example, but meant, not opening its border to the next door conflicts”, which history has shown well instead which disasters created the opposite to Lebanon in several occasions. “Today we are still there, with Lebanon being trapped between warring parties, and the UN resolution 1701 (2006, calling, among other things, of the complete disarmaments of armed groups in Lebanon) seems to be completely watered down”. With consequences, once again, unpredictable.
On the cover photo, a Lebanese middle east airlines plane landing over Beirut waterfront skyline during sunset ©Ali Chehade Farhat/Shutterstock.com
