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3. Hezbollah Reneging on Surrendering Its Arms

Hezbollah and its allies – Speaker Nabih Berri, former Minister Najib Mikati, and Hezbollah ministers in the previous cabinet – all signed the ceasefire agreement with Israel that ended the war and that stipulated that arms in Lebanon must be exclusively in the hands of six government military and security agencies. When this happens, according to the deal, Israel withdraws from Lebanese territories. Now Hezbollah is reneging on its ceasefire promise, moving the goalposts, and reversing the order by saying that Israeli withdrawal comes first, then it might consider disarming.

In his Friday prayer sermon, Deputy Chief of Hezbollah’s Executive Council Sheikh Ali Daamoush said this: “You say that the state is the one that protects the country and defends the homeland and that weapons must be restricted to the state.”

He added: “Today, the state is the one present along the border and has the opportunity to exercise its role, with weapons in hand, along with the ceasefire supervision committee and the international community.” He concluded: “So, what [has the state] done so far in the face of the daily Israeli violations and attacks? At least convince us of the effectiveness of restricting weapons to the state.”

The Iran-backed militia knows that the end of what Daamoush calls “daily Israeli violations and attacks” is incumbent on surrendering its arsenal to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and disbanding its militia.

But now, Hezbollah wants to reverse the order of things by arguing that Israel must first withdraw from five remaining Lebanese hilltops and stop its overflights and targeting of Hezbollah assets arms depots, and factories. Then the pro-Iran militia might consider disarming and disbanding.

Daamoush could not be more ingenuine in calling on the state to defend the homeland by stopping Israel. The cleric knows that Israel is policing Lebanon only because the state is not doing enough to rein in Hezbollah, therefore forcing Israel to do it. If Daamoush wants an end to “Israeli violations and attacks,” he can simply make Hezbollah surrender its arms to the state. At this point, the Jewish state will have no reason, or excuse, to continue policing its neighbor to the north.

While Hezbollah’s partisans hail their leaders for their imagined honesty and consistency, these leaders have been the opposite. They have been as manipulative as other Lebanese leaders, such as their ally Michel Aoun, who switched from decades of calling Hezbollah a terrorist group to befriending the militia that helped him become president.

In 2009, feeling that it was on the cusp of a sweeping victory, late Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said that whoever wins the parliamentary election governs, and whoever loses sits in the opposition and waits for its turn to come back to power.

Hezbollah lost the 2009 election and Nasrallah changed his mind. He argued that Lebanon was not a regular democracy in which the majority rules and the minority opposes it but a consensual democracy where all blocs must be represented in a national unity cabinet. Just like that, Nasrallah moved the goalposts that he had set up himself. No one called out the late Hezbollah chief for not sticking to his word or for his politicking.

Now, the pro-Iran militia is using politicking again to wiggle its way out of a commitment it had cut to the world to disarm and disband.

Hezbollah’s word, it seems, is good for nothing, and as long as this is the case, “national dialogue” over the militia’s arms and a “national defense strategy” will not be worth the paper they’re written on.

Hezbollah must be policed and forced to surrender its arms to the state. If the state of Lebanon does its job, as both President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam have promised, then Israel will certainly withdraw from the five hilltops, demarcate the border, and even sue for peace.

However, if the Lebanese state and the LAF sit back and watch, hoping that Hezbollah disarm out of its own volition, that will be a movie that all of us, especially Israel, have watched so many times, a claim that no one is going to believe. If the LAF does not discipline Hezbollah and control the border, someone else will, and in this case, it will be Israel.

The Lebanese know what it means when Israel polices Hezbollah. It means a destructive war whose effects will need decades to reverse. It unfortunately takes Hezbollah, and some Lebanese, only a few months to forget how destructive war can be.