Washington in Lebanon and Palestine: fatal manipulation

A Good Article

By Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Conflicts Forum
(a visiting scholar at the Middle East Center of the Carnegie Endowment in Beirut. She is the author of Hizb’ullah: Politics and Religion)

"Many parallels are currently being drawn between the crises in Palestine and Lebanon. A number focus on the most visible similarity: the “two-state, two-government” scenario which has become a reality in Palestine (with different authorities in charge in Gaza and the West Bank) and threatens to do the same in Lebanon (where the country is polarised between major political blocs). But there are more affinities between the two situations and the political developments and players driving them, and it is an unavoidable reality that the regional political strategy of the United States underlies the evolving conflicts in the respective countries......

In a further bid to delegitimise Hamas and Hizbollah and their actions, the United States has sought to detract from their nationalist identities and agendas by reducing them to proxies of Iran and Syria, out to destabilise their countries on behalf of their foreign “sponsors”.....

The glaring reality is that in neither the Palestinian territories nor Lebanon case has there been a state to speak of, considering that the basic functions of the state, in the tradition of western liberal political thought - providing for people’s basic needs and protecting their lives and property - has been historically amiss. The provision of social services and defence of national territory has been assumed by non-state actors like Hamas and Hizbollah, whose performance of these functions in lieu of the absent central state has more accurately rendered them states within non-states, as opposed to states within states. “Hamastan” and “Hizbollahstan” are therefore the consequences, not the causes, of weak or non-existent states.

Since there is such a fine line separating such non-states from failed states, the US’s virtually identical strategy in Palestine and Lebanon is doomed. It , threatens both to turn these states into failed states and to transform the world’s sole superpower into an abysmally failed power in the middle east."