Dana El-Kurd

And she said that, like, we're sending humanitarian aid and we have UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon and so on.

UNIFIL forces, those UN peacekeeping forces, as I said, don't have a legal right to even retaliate against the Israelis, including when Israel bombs them, which it has done at least twice in the past few weeks.

The Lebanese army rarely engages with Israelis.

They don't even have the means in the first place.

And so what are people expected to do?

And this is sort of the context in which everything else almost doesn't matter.

Like in terms of whether you personally like the Hezbollah, I certainly don't.

And whatever like one's personal feelings or even politics is towards a political party, because they are also members of the Lebanese parliament, towards the state itself, whatever it is, that it really feels that ultimately it's like out of our hands.

And this is like a component of this entire thing that I really see, to be honest, discussed as though there are like two sides to the story or like two equal armed actors for that matter, even non-armed, like equal states for that matter.

And it's just not the case.

So it's important to note that Hezbollah comes from a certain context.

They rose in the context of South Lebanon during the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon.

They rose as the alternative to existing parties that were either seen as too complicit with the Israelis or maybe too weak or complacent or whatnot.

And essentially because there was a need for something like Hezbollah at the time.

And again, this is completely regardless of my personal opposition to a lot of their politics, whether it's in Lebanon or especially in Syria.

But that question, if you want to call it the Lebanese question, is completely being sidestepped.

It's not being tackled whatsoever.

And in fact, it's not that dissimilar, I think, from the Israeli attempt to erase or try to pretend as though the Palestinian question as well as can be completely sidestepped, that they can just continue to pursue this policy of just complete domination, as you said, you know, make these Arabic accordions with the UAE and some of the other Arab states, for example, without any mentions of Palestine or Palestinians and so on and so forth.

And in the case of Lebanon, it's less official because there isn't that component, but the spirit of it is pretty similar.

There is a sort of like a legalistic framework of the land for peace.