Some 20 years ago, at the height of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, I wrote the piece below. Not much has changed, except that in 2024 there is a war going on in Gaza, that Hassan Nasrallah is dead, and that there is no functioning government in Beirut, and that the economy and state institutions have completely collapsed. All other factors and actors are still in place: prosperous corruption, ultra-religiosity bordering on the primitive, loyalty to religious identity over a non-existent national identity, and – at least within the Lebanese Christian community whose existence is on the line – the tribal-feudal party leaders continue to haggle over who among them should be the next Taef-castrated president. Given the inaccessibility to the Jews in Palestine, Lebanon continues to be the village idiot of the Muslim world because it has a disposable second-hand Christian community.
In civilized countries, leaders like those we have in Lebanon, who have succeeded only in delivering treason, corruption and incompetence for their people, would have long left politics or been dumped by their people and forgotten. But in primitive societies like Lebanon’s, pretty much the same warlords, their sons and sons-in-law, and occasionally their widowed wives, who have been infighting since the 1975 war, are still making decisions, served by a captive mentally-disabled people who still vote them back to power. In their incompetence, all these leaders can do as the missiles are falling on us is to beg countries that are evacuating their nationals from Beirut to come to their assistance. They never did understand, and still do not understand what it takes to ensure the survival of their community and the country that their forefathers built.
Please keep the 2006 context in mind as you read the text below that was slightly edited.
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Thank you, Hezbollah
Youssef Hitti – Boston, Massachusetts
New England Americans for Lebanon
August 07, 2006
Thank you, Hezbollah, for showing us that we, the Lebanese people, don’t need an army or a government or an infrastructure. As long as we have “sacred unity”, steadfastness and brotherhood and all the other slogans, we do not need organized society, and History will judge us well on our actions. We don’t need incomes, a GDP, a budget, or any of those Western economic concepts, since our love for each other under the rubble and the wreckage of our country is sufficient to sustain us. It doesn’t matter if our Hariri-inflicted $40 billion deficit grows to $50 billion, and if the nascent economy we had is back to ground zero, for it does not weaken our resolve to liberate Palestine for the Palestinians and show the world what clay we are made of. In our megalomaniacal patriarchal macho tendencies as the not so humble people that we are, we want to prove to the world that the Islamic faith is a great motivator for high-quality warmongering and that our irresponsibility as a country can still lead us to success, all our failures of the past 40 years notwithstanding. With God and his prophets and saints on our side, and friends like Iran and Syria who provide us, respectively, with hundreds of millions of dollars a year, plenty of rockets, missiles and mercenaries, we don’t need the world. In fact, the world has tired of us.
Thank you, Hezbollah, for showing us that of all the Lebanese people, only Shiite men are brave, courageous, and capable of defending the country against our made-up enemies. There is no need to ask now – but it’s just a thought for the future wars of liberation we are dreaming of – with the unity we have demonstrated against the Israeli aggression, why are there no Sunni, Christian or Druze Lebanese men or women joining their Shiite brethren to fight off that aggression, either through their own militias or under the banner of the near-mythical highly organized, highly-trained Hezbollah? Why is it that with all the support they have proclaimed, our sisterly Arab countries, especially the throbbing heart of Arabism, Syria, are nowhere to be seen on the road to Palestine.
Anyway, thank you for showing us that we don’t need a regular army. After all, Lebanon is the Switzerland of the Middle East – though much less physically or morally clean and organized – and even though the real Switzerland is neutral, it still has a powerful army. But we the Lebanese are so smart. We are not neutral, yet we maintain a salon army that we display like a trophy and rarely use as an army, and to wage wars on others and ourselves, we rely on foreign and domestic criminal organizations and militias like the PLO, the Lebanese Forces, the Amal militia, the Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah and others. We think we’re smart but we are really smart-asses because we never seem to think thoroughly of the consequences of our actions. Just watch our leaders, Nasrallah, Siniora, Berri, Hoss, Karami, Frangieh, Gemayel, Aoun, Geagea and all the rest. They are so smart that they went about killing their own people for decades, then suddenly, after 40 years of warfare, decreed immunity for themselves and discovered unity only when they were in excrement up to their eyeballs. Too bad they did not discover that unity 3 months ago, or a year ago, or 5 years ago, or 30 years ago. We would have spared ourselves so much pain and destruction.
Thank you, Hezbollah, for showing us that our elderly men and women, in the final years of their lives, can be stripped of their children, their dignity and their possessions, and after having lost everything, they are made to flee alone, on foot, under the Israeli bombs, leaving behind them homes and villages they have known all their lives. Thank you for hiding behind our houses to fire at the enemy, and for making our children fodder for war, while all the children of the Arab Umma are quietly enjoying their summer vacations in summer schools or on the beach. Thank you for preparing the country so well for the possible retaliation you knew was coming as a result of your smart and ballsy action.
Thank you for showing us that in Lebanon words mean nothing, that agreements, national dialogues, and memorandums of understanding are not worth the paper on which they are written, and that in a headless country like Lebanon, the blind can truly lead the blind to certain death. Thank you for showing us that the Lebanese people, as a people, are totally abnormal for discovering unity only after destruction, for discovering strength only after defeat, for discovering dialogue only in death. It really is just too much to ask a people to be united, strong, and genuinely engaged before death, destruction and defeat, when they are alive, when their country is standing, and when their children and homes are safe.
I am sure there will be new giant posters of mullahs and ayatollas and martyrs on every dirty street corner of Beirut after all this ends one day. There will continue to be a great resolve to avenge the aggression, liberate Palestine, restore the dignity of the Umma, and add yet one more defeat to the long list of “victories in sacred unity”. For that is how Arabs measure victory or defeat: Not in terms of territory lost or won, not in terms of military battles lost or won, not in terms of buildings, cities, and villages saved or destroyed, not in terms of the numbers of dead and injured, not in terms of the effort it will take to rebuild, not in terms of how many people left the country to emigrate to more normal places to live. No. None of those things matter in this life for the smart people of Lebanon and their leaders. What matters in the end is how divine we think our leaders are in comparison with the enemy’s leaders, how much higher is the level of testosterone in their veins, and how much longer our phallic rockets are compared to theirs. That, my fellow Lebanese, is what we are dying for and why our country is being destroyed, and we should all thank Hezbollah for showing us that Hassan Nasrallah’s manliness and machismo are worth the destruction of Lebanon and the death of its children.
