Hizbullah has vowed to exact equal damage on Israel if it wages war on Lebanon, writes Omayma Abdel-Latif The commercial with Hebrew subtitles that recently aired on Al-Manar Television before the evening news summed up Hizbullah's thinking on -- and the new equation present in -- the conflict with Israel: a building for a building, an oil refinery for an oil refinery, a factory for a factory. The declaration made in a speech by Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah last Tuesday during the commemoration of the party's Martyrs' Day perhaps says nothing new. In previous speeches, Nasrallah has been keen to send veiled messages about the Islamic resistance group's readiness to confront any future Israeli aggression on Lebanon. Nonetheless, he always fell short of elaborating on the type of armaments in Hizbullah's possession. This time, however, Nasrallah revealed new weapons capabilities that could play a deterring role in any future confrontation. Also for the first time, Nasrallah gave a full account of the type of Israeli targets that Hizbullah is capable of hitting in the next round of fighting, leading many to suggest that Nasrallah has taken the conflict to a new and unprecedented level. "I want to tell the Israelis the following: Not only if you hit Dahiyeh we will hit Tel Aviv, but if you hit martyr Rafik Al-Hariri's International Airport in Beirut, we will hit your Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv; if you hit our ports, we will hit yours; if you hit our oil refinery, we will hit yours... if you hit one building in Dahiyeh, we will destroy buildings in Tel Aviv," said Nasrallah. Nawaf Al-Musawi, of the Loyalty for Resistance Bloc in the Lebanese parliament, explained the moves leading to Nasrallah's declaration. This declaration, he said, has been the fruit of painstaking efforts around the clock since the end of the July War in 2006 until February 2010: "Tens of thousands of fighters have been training to take the resistance to a level where Israel dare not make any hasty decision of going to war with it, otherwise it would prove suicidal for it," Al-Musawi said. Nasrallah's new equation, continued Al-Musawi, is the beginning of a new chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict when Israel's threats of war and aggression will no longer go unanswered. Hizbullah, according to its leaders, is far better equipped today than in 2006. "If the Israelis think they will cause more damage against us, they now know that we can also inflict more damage on them," Hizbullah's deputy head Sheikh Naim Qassim told The Times. The Nasrallah speech came two days after head of the Lebanese Forces and former warlord Samir Geagea accused Hizbullah, in a 14 February speech, of giving Israel the pretext to launch a war against Lebanon by virtue of Hizbullah keeping its arms. This notion has been making the rounds, particularly among the rightwing Christian parties of March 14 -- the Phalange Party and the Lebanese Forces. Nasrallah responded to this view with a counter-accusation. "It is very dangerous rhetoric because it absolutely justifies any Israeli aggression and holds the resistance beforehand responsible for any Israeli aggression. Is this a call for an Israeli war against Lebanon? Are we before 1982 circumstances anew? Do some see that there is no way for their dreams and expectations except through an Israeli war against Lebanon, again? This is the question," Nasrallah exclaimed. Geagea reiterated his position on Monday, 21 February, in a press conference devoted to addressing Nasrallah's speech. He suggested that, "there is no point in having the dialogue [session] that is meant to address the issue of a unified defence strategy for Lebanon." Nasrallah has demanded that both the Lebanese state and government make clear their stand on such rhetoric. Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Al-Hariri responded indirectly through a number of statements to Italian dailies while on a visit to the Vatican in which he criticised Israel and accused it of threatening Lebanon with war. For one thing, Nasrallah's latest declaration proved the naivety of a dominant view in Washington's intellectual circles about the US's ability to engage Hizbullah in low-level talks "in cooperation with the British and while informing the Israelis throughout," as one observer put it, to finally force the demilitarisation of Hizbullah along the lines of the decommissioning process that the IRA underwent. This view, which sees Hizbullah's armament as posing a threat not just to Israel but "to Lebanon", suggested that one of the incentives to get Hizbullah to give up its arms is to get a commitment from Israel to refrain from attacking Lebanon if "Hizbullah submitted to decommissioning process". But for Hizbullah, which believes that the international community failed Lebanon during the 2006 war, such a proposal ignores basic realities. The above view -- as laid out by analysts Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson in Foreign Affairs in January -- suggests that signing up to a demilitarisation programme would provide Hizbullah with temporary immunity in case Israel "paid another, better calibrated visit". To think that Hizbullah would engage in such a decommissioning process to seek immunity is evidence of ignorance of both the capacities, conviction and calculations of the resistance movement. Simon and Stevenson even tied the decommissioning process with providing the Lebanese army with more advanced US weaponry. But there is widespread conviction that the US would never provide the Lebanese army with any weapons that could pose a threat to Israel, or even prevent daily Israeli flyovers violating Lebanese sovereignty. Al-Musawi, reflecting this conviction, suggests that the Lebanese army seek strategic and military cooperation with both Syria and Iran.
