Unlike every word uttered by the staffs of the Washington Post and New York Times and the members of the Democrat Party, this post will not be a lie. Instead, it will present a few basic facts that certain hypothetical "people" might like to know. The facts will be presented in a straightforward way, without extraneous expressions of rage and/or despair. The facts, unadorned, could conceivably be presented to a hypothetical "person" who is confused about the situation and seems in danger of being snowed by the media, the propagandists, and other professional liars.

1) Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization being manipulated from a distance by Iran. It is a political party with a military wing, a party which represents the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon. It is backed by Iran, which is the only Shi'ite majority state in the world. There is a real convergence of interests between the Lebanese and Iranian Shi'ites, which should not be surprising, and should not be understood as a dark consipracy.

The Shi'ites are a poor minority in Lebanon, as they are everywhere else in the world except Iran. In Lebanon, they had never seeked to enfranchise themselves, as Shi'ites, until the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel. Before that invasion, the PLO (a secular organization) had taken over the south of Lebanon. This did not please the Shi'ites, who became even more resentful of the Palestinians when Israel invaded Shi'ite territory to get rid of the Palestinians who had ensconced themselves there. To this day, there is bad blood between Hezbollah and the Palestinians (which makes the recent Hezbollah attacks on Israel, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with the brutalized people of Gaza, especially significant).

Even though the Shi'ites resented the Palestinians, they did not appreciate the Israeli effort to remove the PLO from southern Lebanon. This supposedly defensive operation was, as Uri Avnery points out in the crucial article I've pasted into a previous post (scroll down), an attempt to install a Christian dictator in Beirut. This operation led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths and the 20-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah was founded in order to remove the Israelis from southern Lebanon. Even after the PLO had been routed from this region, the Israeli army stayed. Hezbollah was born of the ultimately successful effort to rid the region of this occupying army.

Hezbollah has committed terrorist attacks, including the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1995. But it has not committed an act of terrorism since this attack. After 1995 Hezbollah focused on IDF targets in southern Lebanon, from which the Israelis left ignominiously in 2000. Since 2000 Hezbollah has occasionally launched rockets into northern Israel, in order to protest the presence of IDF soldiers on a small piece of land called Shebaa farms. These attacks have had minimal casualties. They are intended to maintain Hezbollah's credibility with its Shi'ite consituency in southern Lebanon. The major basis of this credibility is Hezbollah's successful removal of the IDF from much of the region. The rocket attacks are a reminder to Shi'ites of the enemy that Hezbollah successfully faced down.

Hezbollah is not a nice organization. It is very violent, its version of Shi'ism is simplistic and aggressive, and its rhetoric is anti-Semitic. But to suggest that Hezbollah is merely a terrorist organization, much less a terrorist organization manipulated from a distance by Iranian paymasters, is a dangerous oversimplification. This description of Hezbollah is dangerous to all concerned, because it does not conform to reality.

Hezbollah is the only organization that represents the interests of a significant minority in Lebanon. It controls about a third of the seats in the Lebanese parliament, not because one-third of the population of Lebanon is a bunch of bloodthirsty terrorists, but because one-third of the population is Shi'ite. It is Hezbollah that has looked out for the Shi'ites. Hezbollah's actions against the IDF are continuous with its general program of advocacy for Shi'ites. Some may think that I'm naive for saying this, that Hezbollah really exists only to destroy Israel. But Hezbollah has in fact provided much needed infrastructure and support to impoverished southern Lebanon--healthcare, transportation supervision, parliamentary advocacy, etc. Its resistance to IDF occupation was a part of this general program.

2) Hamas is not just a terrorist organization, nor is it manipulated from a distance by Syria. Hamas has a "military wing" which is not in reality "military" but in fact terroristic in the most appalling way. I would never say otherwise. Hamas's ruthless recruitment, manipulation, and transformation of teenage boys into suicide-murderers is beyond the pale. But Hamas is also a grassroots Islamist political movement that, even more than Hezbollah, has provided desperately needed support and advocacy to a disenfranchised population.

The Palestinians voted for Hamas not because Palestinians love suicide bombing, but because Hamas is the only major Palestinian organization that has stood up for Palestinians since the first intifada. The PLO was horribly corrupt. It did nothing for its constituency. It is Hamas that has set up medical clinics, schools, etc. And it is Hamas--and only Hamas--that rejected the bogus Oslo "peace process." The PLO went along with this "process" not out of "moderation," but out of a corrupt desire for power.

Hamas came into existence in the early 1980's, with IDF encouragement (the Islamists were seen as a counterweight to the real enemy, the secular PLO). But Hamas really began to develop during the first intifada--the stone-throwing demonstrations of the late 1980's. Israel reacted brutally to those stone-throwers because it knew that the spontaneous demonstrations were an expression, on a scale of unprecedented size in Palestinian history, of new national consciousness.

The first intifada could not be put down, and only ended when, after three years and the first Gulf War, Israel agreed to the Madrid peace conference. Israel then commenced the implementation of the strategy that has led to the current state of affairs: Israel would use the corrupt PLO against the newly articulate aspirations of the Palestinian people.

Yasir Arafat and the PLO had missed out on the whole first intifada. The Palestinian cause had more visibility and international support than ever before, because of the teenagers in the streets throwing stones. But Arafat had been in Tunis the whole time, and had not been involved in this spontaneous movement. So he was delighted to be given--by Israel and the U.S.--a spot at the negotiating table.

This was the dynamic that governed Madrid and then Oslo: Arafat, weak and corrupt and hungry for international plaudits, would accept the recognition bestowed on him not by his own people, but by the "peace process." The "peace process" was his meal ticket, and Israel realized that Arafat had to keep it alive at all costs--even if this meant betraying his own people and the cause he had built.

So Israel and the U.S. dictated the 1993 accords and then ignored them. The settlements were not halted, as they were supposed to be, but expanded--they doubled in size during the "peace process." Arafat never left the negotiating table. Only Hamas called a spade a spade. And once it became clear that the "peace process" was a sham--that it was a way for Israel to build "facts on the ground" in the form of ineradicable settlements and inextricable intertwinements of population, that Israel was using the "peace process" as a way to force the Palestinians into a truncated, surrounded, non-contiguous, and impotent township state--once all this was clear, Hamas was the only game in town.

The Hamas suicide bombings began in 1995.

Syria has long helped Hamas, and the leader of Hamas lives in Syria. But it is the Palestinians who give Hamas whatever power it has. And they lend their weight to Hamas because Hamas has fought for them when their appointed leaders were selling them out.

One should have no illusions about Hezbollah and Hamas. They are filled with hatred and they are cruelly violent--though in the last 10 years only Hamas has been a terrorist organization. Hamas's military leaders are bloodthirsty and intoxicated with the sick power they wield over young men who are willing to die at their command. But the idea that either of these organizations are merely military, much less that they are military implements remote-controlled from Iran and Syria, is pure fantasy.

Things would certainly be easier for Israel if this fantasy had some basis in reality. If it did, then Israel might indeed be able, as the newspapers there are demanding, to "smash Hezbollah," and to "stamp out Hamas" once and for all. However, because of the meaningful roles they have played in the histories of their communities, both organizations are far too powerful to defeat with overwhelming force.