Arab Press Outlets Mixed On Hezbollah ‘Victory’

Qatar’s emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, surprised many on Monday when he praised Hezbollah’s actions against Israel as “the first Arab victory, which we have wanted for many years.”While the general consensus has been that Hezbollah is the undisputed victor of its recent conflict with Israel, this opinion is not entirely shared by the Arab press.Some leading writers have said Hezbollah actually lost, and they are comparing the declaration of victory by the terrorist organization’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, to those of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, who previously claimed to have defeated America and Israel.“Soon Syria and Iran will start spreading illusions of victory… doing a repeat of 1967 when Gamal Abdul Nasser and other intellectual terrorist groups attempted to turn a disgracing defeat into a temporary setback,” the editor in chief of the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, wrote in “Confront Reality, Accept Defeat,” an article in the paper’s August 13 edition. “Hezbollah’s defeat has affected everything in Lebanon — including its people, buildings, and infrastructure. … The Arab world must face reality and accept it has been defeated. … Arabs should understand it will be a fatal mistake to challenge a powerful enemy and lead their countries into a dreadful adventure like Nasrallah and then urge the Arab and Islamic worlds to come to the rescue.”“Today, after the war has ended, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad, and Assad have come out to announce ‘a strategic victory.’ Whose victory is this?” the editor in chief of Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Tariq Alhomayed, wrote August 16 in an article titled “A Fake Celebration.” “Nasrallah, who started his fight, claiming, ‘We don’t need anyone’s support,’ changed his speeches to demand a cease-fire … after the fighting stopped, he spoke of victory, bluntly warning anyone from trying to disarm Hezbollah. … Today, after Lebanon has been destroyed, it is proclaiming ‘a strategic victory’!”“Another fantasy” is how a Libyan intellectual, Dr. Muhammaed Al-Huni, described claims that Hezbollah won. In an article he authored for the Arabic reformist Web site Elaph.com on July 26, he too compared how the Arab world believed that Saddam would deliver a humiliating defeat to America to believing now that Hezbollah and Sheik Nasrallah defeated Israel.“Nasrallah’s gift to the Lebanese people … devastation and destruction that Lebanon has never witnessed anything like it before,” an Egyptian journalist, Subhy Fouad, wrote in “Which Victory Are They Talking About?” an August 16 article on Elaph.com.”What is the historical and strategic victory achieved by Hassan Nasrallah over Israel that he gives to the Lebanese people? … I would have wished that Nasrallah had announced his responsibility for the wrong decision in involving the Lebanese people against their will in a war against Israel knowing its consequences in advance.”Massoud Behnoud furthered this argument on August 14 in the Iranian reformist daily Rooz. “The more damage that is inflicted in Lebanon, the more epic becomes the words and reports of newspapers such as Keyhan that claims the victory of Hezbollah. Interestingly, they portray an image as if the whole world is calling for the victory of Hezbollah and that the world champion today is no other than Lebanon’s seyed, Hassan Nasrallah. So far from reality,” he wrote.“Is it logical that people are saying that Hezbollah’s jihad and the defeat it is handing to Israel did not liberate Lebanon, but rather set us back 50 years, and handed over at least part of southern Lebanon to French forces?” the Egyptian liberal Mamound Fandy’s wrote in the August 7 edition of Al-Sharq Al-Awsat in his “ironic” take on the outcome of the conflict.“Hezbollah’s situation is not like that of Israel, which has suffered much less destruction than Lebanon has,” Hazem Saghieh wrote August 14 in the London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat. “Israel has not given up. … Instead, it threatens us with wide-scale land invasion. … But we delude ourselves by talking about ‘the beginning of the end of Israel,’ portraying the loss as a defeat, or putting Israel’s loss on par with our victory, while witnessing what is becoming of Lebanon.”Mr. Saghieh noted, “The Lebanese, who hailed the ‘beginning of the end of the American Empire’ after U.S. Marines withdrew from Lebanon, recall that this ‘empire’ succeeded, after only seven years, in defeating the Soviet Union without shooting a single bullet. How, then, can we say that Hezbollah has triumphed?”Clearly, it is too soon to declare a winner in the recent Hezbollah-Israeli conflict. Only history books will determine this.Mr. Stalinsky is the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

Arab Press Outlets Mixed On Hezbollah ‘Victory’

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