Hezbollah, the Shi’ite militia that holds Lebanon hostage, has always been perceived as an outside player in the Arab world for the way it scurries to carry water for its patron, Iran. To counterbalance this, Hezbollah has always tried to portray itself as the foremost defender of the Palestinian cause in opposition to Israel. On Sept. 23, as Hezbollah rockets came crashing down on the West Bank Palestinian town of Deir Istiya, this false friendship was fully revealed as a cynical farce.
After all, this is, unfortunately, a tired old play in the region. The cause of a Palestinian state was adopted by the Arab League (AL) as a cynical ploy from its very origins: in 1945, the year the AL was founded and World War II ended—and more than two years before Israeli independence—the AL declared a boycott on what it termed “Jewish products and manufactured goods.” The AL always presented maximalist goals, refusing proposals to split the British Empire’s Palestine Mandate between Arabs and Jews and instead opting for all-out war.
This cynicism continued with the schemes of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian general who overthrew his country’s leader, King Farouk, and established a “United Arab Republic” that gobbled up Syria and Yemen and briefly aimed to create a new great power that would have controlled the geographic space of Israel. While a million Jews expelled from the Arab world and Iran were integrated into the State of Israel, the various Arab states refused to normalize the status of Palestinian arrivals, forcing them to live as stateless persons in permanent “refugee camps.”
A man sitting in a shop watches the televised speech of Lebanon’s Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah, in the occupied West Bank town of Tubas on Nov. 3.
JAAFAR ASHTIYEH/AFP via Getty Images
An interesting sleight-of-hand took place after Israel defeated Nasser’s ambitions in the 1967 Six-Day War. Before that conflict, Gaza was integrated as a tiny piece of Nasser’s empire. At the same time, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were annexed into Hashemite Jordan, and Syria ruled a small piece of the Galilee with an iron fist. Not one of these countries attempted to give the Palestinians under their control self-rule. Instead, the AL founded the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) at its 1964 Cairo summit, giving it a charter calling for Israel’s destruction.
Predictably, this Frankenstein’s monster came back to bite the hand that created it, as the PLO attempted to overthrow the Jordanian government in 1970, leading to its expulsion and then destabilizing the formerly functional Republic of Lebanon and sparking its 15-year civil war. The space created by the PLO’s former “state within a state” in South Lebanon has now been replaced by Hezbollah and its Iranian advisors.
The so-called leadership of the Palestinian people, created by outsiders for selfish reasons, continues to treat their people as their lowest priority. Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the PLO, is now serving the 19th year of his four-year elected term as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which runs the West Bank. Meanwhile, the jihadi fanatics of Hamas, who conquered the Gaza Strip through violence in 2007, have consistently treated their own people as human shields, stockpiling military equipment in schools, hospitals, churches, and mosques.
To Hamas’s mad calculus, as admitted by their leader Yahya Sinwar, Palestinian deaths actually have a strategic benefit in that they can increase world sympathy. Even so, it was a breathtaking display of brazenness when Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem that risked harming the Islamic holy sites like the Dome of the Rock, and that did hit the PA administrative center of Ramallah in the West Bank.
Hezbollah doesn’t even pretend that its first loyalties are local, taking orders from the non-Arab nation of Iran. So when Hezbollah rockets fell deep in the West Bank, physically damaging Palestinian villages, they were following in the footsteps of a long list of outside radicals, eager to fight Israel to the last Palestinian. Hezbollah’s strike on Deir Istiya (accidental or not) serves as a stark reminder of the enduring hypocrisy and manipulation surrounding the Palestinian cause. Hezbollah’s actions, mirroring those of its predecessors, expose its true priorities and callousness towards Palestinian lives. It is time for the international community to see clearly that Iran and Hezbollah, like Hamas, are not the champions of the Palestinian people but their bitterest enemies.
Bassem Eid is a Palestinian human rights activist. He lives in the West Bank.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
