In 2010, a summit was held in Damascus that brought together Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. The slogan under which the three leaders met was “All for one.” Three years since the summit and two years into a popular uprising turned into Western-backed armed rebellion, Syria's allies appear to be putting their words into action. Nasrallah's latest speech on Thursday, 9 May, was a manifestation of that when he declared that Syria's allies “would not allow it to fall into the hands of the Americans and Israelis and takfiri [atheist] groups,” in the first clear reference to the role played by Syria's allies — Iran and Hizbullah — in the Syrian crisis. However, while for some analysts, Hizbullah's support for the Syrian regime (regardless of the type of support, military or otherwise) was a done deal, it was Nasrallah's subtext messages that alerted Lebanese analysts and military strategists to the distant drums of an all out regional war. “The resistance camp has made an irreversible decision about supporting Syria,” says Anis Al-Naqqash, veteran analyst and staunch Arab nationalist. Each party in the resistance axis, he explained, knows what the other parties are capable of in terms of military potential, and therefore the next war would mean that all fronts — including the Golan Heights — will turn into battlefields against Israel. “The Israelis can only initiate a war if they feel capable of winning it, but there might not be war if all parties concerned believe they are on equal par in terms of deterrent capabilities.”
WAR OR NO WAR: For military analyst Elias Hanna, Nasrallah's speech reflected the unprecedented geo-political transformations taking place in the region. Historically, he explained, Lebanon has been Syria's most treacherous backyard from which most regime-threatening crises emerged. “Today Lebanon is acting as a safe flank to the regime in Syria.” Gone are the times when Syria's messages to Israel were delivered through Hizbullah. Now, says Hanna, for the first time in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a reversal of roles is taking place, where the new battlefield could be the Golan Heights while all is quiet on the southern Lebanon front. Hanna was referring to the Syrian regime decision to allow popular resistance in the Golan Heights in response to the Israeli raid on Syrian research facilities. Hanna concluded by posing the question: Is Lebanon playing the deterrent to Israel while Syria has become the battlefield? One flaw in this argument, however, is that from a Syrian regime perspective, Lebanon continues to pose problems in light of the incessant stream of fighters and weapons smuggled across the border into Syria and which surged during the second year of the crisis. The significance of the speech according to analyst Nasri Al-Sayegh is that it offered answers to many pending questions following the Israeli attack on Damascus and what response the resistance axis was about to make. “Nasrallah explained the popular resistance question in the Golan Heights as part of a strategic response to a strike that Israel wanted to be a game changer, making use of a bruised regime in Syria,” said Al-Sayegh. He pointed out that one key outcome of the Israeli strike against the research facility in Damascus is that it has given the Islamic resistance a pretext to obtain game changing weapons, thus breaking Israel's modus operandi set following the 2006 July war on Lebanon when it decided that the Islamic resistance should not be allowed to obtain weapons that shift the balance of the conflict, such as anti-aircraft missiles. Both the Syrian regime and Nasrallah said clearly that the resistance would obtain such weapons as a response to the Israeli strike. “From the beginning, Nasrallah saw the battle in Syria as a battle meant to liquidate the Palestinian question,” Al-Sayegh explained, adding that one of the Syrian opposition goals, according to Hizbullah, was to forsake Syria's role and what it stands for in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and was not just targeting the head of the regime. “What Nasrallah did was read the international community's orchestrated attack on Syria within its Palestinian context.” Nasrallah's answer to questions about the resistance's response to the Israeli strike, says Al-Sayegh, should be supported by field action so the initiative would not remain in Israel's hands. “Israel could launch more strikes if it felt that Syria is hand-tied and that the resistance has its calculations and Iran its nuclear programme to preserve.” This might find support in statements by Hizbullah's Sheikh Mohamed Yazbek who said that when the Golan Heights front is open for popular resistance, it would be the front to Palestine and Jerusalem. “We will not be afraid of the enemy's planes or its threats and we will continue to magnify our power,” Yazbek said. Echoing the same line, MP Ali Fayyad said that the resistance has the right to obtain any type of weapons to stand up to any future Israeli aggression. But other analysts questioned whether or not such statements could be interpreted as a sign that Hizbullah was planning to “move its resistance operations away from the Southern Lebanon front to the Golan Heights” as commentator Rosana bu Munsef wrote in an article published in the right-wing daily Annahar newspaper. Echoing Hanna's viewpoint, Bu Munsef concluded that Nasrallah's speech marked the end of an era when Lebanon was for decades the scene of the Syrian regime's wars against Israel and others. “Today, Syria is replacing Lebanon as the alternative battleground if a popular resistance movement started in the Golan Heights as the regime threatened.”
