Hezbollah’s military parade sends familiar message to Israel

The Times has published an opinion piece arguing that the Lebanese Shia Islamist political party Hezbollah’s latest military parade was a defensive message to Israel. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Who knew Hezbollah had a marching band? I certainly didn’t, but that may have been my ignorance: the Lebanese Shia militia and would-be vanquisher of Israel has kept Western journalists at a distance for the past 15 years or so.

That ended yesterday (May 21 – ed.), at least for the time being, with a bang. Lots of bangs, in fact, as masked fighters paraded weaponry, stormed hilltops and practised martial arts routines before an admiring crowd and a more sceptical one of Lebanese and foreign reporters.

The “military operation” had been planned for weeks and advertised to journalists a short time beforehand. What was not clear before we set off in convoy from Beirut was what this special “operation” was. Neither was it entirely clear afterwards. It was certainly the biggest show of strength Hezbollah had put on in public for years, if not since its inception in Lebanon’s civil war.

Journalists are occasionally invited to witness Shia parades in Dahiyeh, the group’s south Beirut stronghold, or to see mementoes of battles with the “Zionist occupier” at Mleeta, the Hezbollah museum in the mountains near the Israeli border. This was on a different scale.

The band greeted visiting dignitaries to a parade ground at Aaramta, 12 miles from the border, part of a Hezbollah base that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been open to outside inspection.

Seated in the viewing stands, we were greeted with lengthy speeches paying special tribute to the brigade of hacks and the “families of the martyrs” — widows, mostly, dressed in black Iranian-style chador, accompanied by cheerful children in western-style jeans and T-shirts.

What we were about to see would be a demonstration of how Hezbollah’s soldiers would “come from where you know and where you do not know, come from under the ground and above it, from the sea and from the land”.

Hezbollah’s display culminated in an assault on a hillside bearing Israeli flags.

There was not much coming from under the ground, but there were a lot of motorbikes and explosions, culminating in an assault on the hillside opposite, where Israeli flags were shot, blown up and finally replaced by the yellow of Hezbollah.

Souped-up military parades are a standard feature of Arab regimes. Also standard is the rhetoric about Israel’s coming defeat. It took a final address by Hashem Safieddine, a Shia cleric who heads Hezbollah’s executive council, to give a coded explanation. He spoke of a new balance in the region — a reference to the reconciliation between Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran — and the balance with Israel.

“If you try to change the balance,” he said, addressing Binyamin Netanyahu by name, “we will rain down our precision missiles”.

This was a defensive message, though, not a declaration of war — a show of loyalty to Hezbollah’s paymasters in Tehran. Nothing was revealed that would strike fear in Israel. What does cause sleepless nights is those precision missiles, and it was noticeable that if any are in Aaramta, they are well-hidden.