Here we are on the threshold of the second week of the war being waged, in our country, by “Hezbollah”. Last night, the party decided to replicate the Avichay Adraee experience. It published maps of settlements located within the Galilee Panhandle asking its residents to evacuate! Lebanese, and Israelis before them, know these maps have no field value, and likewise, albeit to a lesser extent, its rockets have no value. This is a part of the war’s feebleness. What is also a part of its feebleness, is that the government asked elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to leave Lebanon yesterday, and strangely, Israeli sources have also said these elements have begun to leave Lebanon!
We in Beirut have never met the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. We hear of its existence and that the Iranian embassy resembles a military barracks. But for the government to announce the guard’s presence amongst us brings us a step closer to facing these people. We should remember on the day of the 2024 pagers attack, one of them exploded in the Iranian ambassador’s face. The ambassador himself, not his assistant or the embassy’s head of security! This is the extent to which we are connected to Iran.
Is this war as its predecessors? The question many in Beirut will be asking. They have nothing else to do other than compare it with what they had previously experienced. Heavy airstrikes against the city’s southern Dahiya and displaced people camping in public squares and streets.
But yesterday, the Lebanese people experienced a new kind of terror. Avichay Adraee warned the entire southern Dahiya suburb. We began imagining how the entire suburb could be targeted at once. Recalling the events of previous wars will not help us imagine, as they never witness an incident of this magnitude. The people in the streets of Beirut lost their bodies’ compass. No one can determine their destination to propel their body towards it. Streets choking with cars, families carrying luggage running towards an unknown destination, and everyone hurriedly walking while looking at their phones.
Yesterday, Beirut witnessed what it had never experienced from wars or bombings. Fear wasn’t the only one etched on their faces, but bewilderment and ignorance of what meaning Adraee’s tweet—instructing the evacuation of tens of thousands at once— could hold. Most likely, “Hezbollah” concluded that it must create its own “Avichay Adraee”, and so it began sending parallel maps, and it sent them to us before sending them to the settlers, for in the party’s discourse these settlers are not civilians to be warned. Through them, the party wants to answer those doubting the effectiveness of its war, this being the majority of Lebanese and most likely the majority of its own constituency.
Among the war’s paradoxes and novelties is that Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri is angry with “Hezbollah” and is refusing to answer calls from party officials. This is what is being reported by media outlets. But the anger of the historical Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament is not documented and may be later denied. Such is everything being attributed to Berri, the man has a foothold in all places, but the firmest is with “Hezbollah”.
Berri’s fiercest enemies bet on his split from “Hezbollah”. What we are presenting here is not an analysis, but an account of what Beirut’s streets witnessed during these recent days of war. The vegetable vendor asking: “What will Berri do?” Journalists in Badaro Street, politicians in their offices even the Lebanese Forces and the Kataeb, all of them and all of us were waiting for the Speaker to defect, and yesterday they began feeling the man was eluding them. It seems that betting on Berri’s split is part of the “lightness of mind” that has afflicted us during this war.
The Lebanese people are stunned by what “Hezbollah” has done to them, and the party itself knows that communal groups’ sentiments can be managed. A few days of anger aimed towards it is fine, communal resentments return to correct it. His supporters have begun promoting the idea that Israel was preparing to initiate the war, and it preempted it. The resistance proponents of post-October 7 have begun to welcome this discourse and incorporating it into their war discourse.
What “Hezbollah” did to the Lebanese by launching a war with no horizon other than further defeat, it did manifolds to the discourse of the Lebanese state. Joseph Aoun’s speech of oath, with which Joseph Aoun began his presidency, has become scattered to the winds, and the narrative of monopolizing arms in the state’s hands as stated in the ministerial statement has turned into a joke within Beirut’s cafés. What happened may be the final bullet to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, it hit us in the head and offered Benjamin Netanyahu a precious opportunity to draw the map of the buffer zone presenting it as Israel’s new borders.
