Hezbollah fighters and Syrian army units take control of a position outside Qalamoun at the Syria-Lebanon border during a battle with ISIS in 2017. Photo: Al-Manar TV.
By Musa al-Sada – Jun 6, 2024
Hezbollah fighters did not target nor spill the blood of Syrian civilians during the Syrian war. The preceding statement is accurate. It is not accurate because we want it to be, but because it is a fact, and because there is no evidence or witness that makes it contrary to the truth. And if there is evidence, then the burden of proof simply falls on the accuser.
The most important and obvious thing is that its correctness does not imply that statements like “the Syrian regime is dictatorial,” or “the Syrian war has mobilized sectarian identities and narratives in the Levant,” or “the Syrian revolution is supported and funded by Gulf countries and NATO countries” are either correct or incorrect. What makes the statement that Hezbollah’s resistance fighters did not shed Syrian civilian blood a frightening and bold statement that seems to defy reality, despite its truthfulness, has two reasons.
The first is that war and acute civil strife are based on chaotic and noisy narratives, bundled together and played like a cassette, with these narratives being drawn along sectarian and factional lines. However this is an incidental reason.
The main reason, however, is that this falsehood is politically motivated, targetting the resistance against the Zionist enemy and the United States. In other words, the most effective way for the Gulf states, NATO, and their followers to target the resistance project is to target it morally and as an idea (this is an old imperialist policy linking liberation movements with crime and drugs), in the form of a blatant and false claim that Hezbollah fighters entered a certain village, killed children and women, committed massacres against civilians, besieged cities, bombed the innocent, and ended a people’s aspirations for freedom and dignity.
The irony is that the Gulf and NATO’s need to make this claim is also the same political and strategic reason for Hezbollah’s entry into Syria. In other words, there is another party with a military-political project supported by the United States (and also the US directly) aiming to eliminate the resistance project, both militarily and morally, continuously to this day. The narrative implies that the Israeli air force attacks on Hezbollah’s resistance fighters and their comrades in Syria is part of the Israeli humanitarian intervention to protect Syrian civilians, and Washington’s support and criminal sanctions aim for human rights and democracy, and Hezbollah has thwarted this democratic project!
And here is the logical conclusion: without Hezbollah’s sacrifices against the objectives of this project, there would have been no Al-Aqsa Flood, and the the regional forces today would not be forging a new strategic equation against the Western axis of annihilation in such a miraculous way.
And here is another lost obviousness: the existence of such a Western project does not negate the existence of an internal conflict between Arab societies and a disintegration of identity, tyranny and the rule of a corrupt and sectarian clique. Rather, the Western project is based on exploiting these conflicts. Accordingly, a pivotal part of confronting it is not denying the internal contradictions or the Western project, but rather approaching them together. Unless we are under the illusion that the Arab political, economic and social situation without Western intervention is a bed of roses!
This dual approach is the most sincere path for all the sacrifices that have been made and the blood that has flown in the Levant, and for building a future that the Westerners cannot exploit anew. There is no luxury of choice in this approach, but rather a duty for the future of this region and its liberationist project, and also because we belong to an ethical and value system from which we derive our great revolutionary ideologies and slogans. Unless sectarianism, classism, tyranny, and the perpetuation of the social rift between the poor of our peoples are not on the agenda of the liberation project, the project of building the human of the Al-Aqsa Flood.
The paradox today, while hundreds of Hezbollah’s resistance fighters have been martyred in the noblest front against the Zionist enemy, is that the transgression and lying against these youths, either directly by branding them as killers, or the cowardly and brazen justification that they are martyrs today “despite what they did in Syria,” is a testament and witness to the entrenched political sectarianism at the Arab level.
There is no room here for maneuvering or pretending to be morally superior, for no matter what your narrative about the Syrian war is, the truth remains: these youths are the remaining honor of Lebanon against Israel, their hands were not stained with any crime against Syrians, and they are too noble to even acknowledge or defend against such an accusation. Rather, it is those who make these accusations that should be shunned for lying on the heads of the martyrs. It is accurate to say that those who transgress against Hezbollah’s fighters by accusing them of shedding Syrian civilian blood without evidence in the Syrian war have stood, and stand, in the trench of the Western project and feed on the perpetuation of the Arab civil strife. More importantly, in the middle of our existential war for this century, they are not even in the category of reluctance to support Palestine, but rather complicit against it.
Therefore, you see them being mobilized by the centrality of the Palestinian cause, trying to turn the Arab homeland into a basket of separate issues. Not because Palestinian blood is different, or more precious, but because it exposes that their pretense of caring about Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni and other blood is only a justification for their allegiance to the United States and the West; and that this Palestinian blood exposes that this stance is against the interest of Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni blood; and that the issue is not really a concern for anyone’s blood in an Arab blood Olympics.
The issue, simply put, is between those who want to tell us that the support and money of the European Union and the United States is in the interest of decentralized “issues,” so they resort to lying, and a Hezbollah fighter who has sacrificed, and is sacrificing, his blood in Syria and on the borders of Palestine for the same cause. They are the fighters who are killed and targeted by the Zionist enemy from Aleppo to southern Lebanon, as part of a single struggle, evidence of which is Israel’s own actions, which is the most eloquent testament to the truth and actions of these very martyrs themselves. The Hezbollah fighters said it and did it on every front: their blood was never spilled except on the path of Al-Quds.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/DZ/JRE/SC
Musa al-Sada
Musa al-Sada is a researcher and political analyst. His works can be found in Al-Akhbar, Al-Mayadeen, and Al-Carmel.
