The Canary in the Middle Eastern Coalmine

It’s easy to miss rather significant developments in critical regions all over the world with the explosive situation between Russia and Ukraine, the mystery of a missing international flight or even the riots and killing in Venezuela distracting global attention. An exchange of bomb and artillery fire between Israeli troops and forces in Southern Lebanon, purportedly the pro-Syrian Hezbollah militia that dominates local politics, can slip by with little notice. A fragile attempt to restore a government in faction-torn Lebanon, one that had gone the better part of a year without any real operating government in place, glides silently, garnering little attention. The parliament simply ceased meeting and the top ministerial jobs went unfilled.

As Secretary of State John Kerry has fruitlessly attempted to bring Israeli and Palestinian leaders back to the bargaining table, hoping to generate a meaningful and peaceful solution to the issue of Palestinian autonomy, the Middle East still simmers with dysfunction. Instability continues, looking at just a few of the hot spots, from the growing civil unrest in Egypt under the new military government to the never-ending conflict in Syria, the latter strangely exacerbated by Russia rather dramatic show of force in Ukraine. Russia has been a staunch defender of Syria’s brutal Assad regime.

As that Syrian civil war has dragged on, refugees have pushed into neighboring countries, but tiny Lebanon, with a population estimated to be around 5.8 million people, has experienced the greatest impact. Of that small population, estimates place over a million as Syrian refugees. And if you look behind the numbers, the soft underbelly of irreconcilable differences becomes apparent. 27% of Lebanon is Shiite (mostly represented by Hezbollah, labeled by the U.S. government as a terrorist group), 27% Sunnis – both of the above are the Muslim factions – with 21% of the balance being members of the Maronite Catholic Church. The rest are other Christians or very small Muslim groups (e.g., Druze who make up 5% of the total).

Apply those numbers to sympathies with either the incumbent Assad regime (Alawites who are a branch of the Shiite side of Islam) or the rebels (mostly Sunnis), add the mix of Syrians running for their lives into Lebanon, and you can see why pockets of violence has surged back into Lebanon, making picking top leadership for the country exceptionally difficult. The fact most factions within Lebanon also have their own militias and that the most anti-Israeli militant, Hezbollah, dominates Southern Lebanon and literally sits on the Israeli border, makes the situation that much more volatile.

So how does a country like Lebanon – the poster boy for Middle Eastern factional violence – generate the kind of coalition (the government has a unicameral parliament) to restore meaningful governance? Any Lebanese government is going to have to recognize the fact that no one faction remotely has a majority, but the powerful splits of philosophy make getting a majority coalition close to impossible. Still, the Lebanese are trying.

The tensions with Israel, the flow of refugees from Syria and the diametrically opposite views of the major factions make the gridlock issues in our own Congress seem trivial by comparison. A fragile coalition has been hammered out, but the accommodation of conflicting sensibilities does not seems to have dissipated. “Lebanon's new government agreed to a compromise policy statement on [March 14^th] that fell short of explicitly enshrining the militant group Hezbollah's role in confronting Israel but which would give all citizens the right to resist Israeli occupation or attacks.

“The agreement on the compromise language came after weeks of dispute brought the government to the verge of collapse, and now paves the way for Prime Minister Tammam Salam to put his government to a vote of confidence…Information Minister Ramzi Jreij told reporters that most ministers had agreed on a compromise statement that declares Lebanese citizens have the right to "resist Israeli occupation" and repel any Israeli attack.

“The deal was reached a few hours after Israel's army said it fired tank rounds and artillery into southern Lebanon in retaliation for a bomb that targeted its soldiers patrolling the border. No injuries were reported on either side… The Israel-Lebanon border has been mostly quiet since Israel and Hezbollah fought an inconclusive war in 2006, but Israeli forces still hold at least three pockets of occupied territory which are claimed by Lebanon.

“‘Based on the state's responsibility to preserve Lebanon's sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity and the security of its citizens, the government affirms the duty of the state and its efforts to liberate the Shebaa Farms and Kfar Shouba Hills and the Lebanese part of Ghajar through all legitimate means,’ the government statement said… It also ‘affirms the right of Lebanese citizens to resist Israeli occupation and repel aggressions and recover occupied territory.’” Reuters, March 15^th. Reading between the lines, Hezbollah seems to have retained its right to its anti-Israeli militancy, notwithstanding failing to secure a clearer statement of their goals. The words “resist” and “resistance” are pretty much are how Hezbollah refers to its military operations.

Seems as if their problems aren’t much of a concern for us or the rest of the world. Wrong. The battles over Ukraine could easily spillover into Syria, and what happens in Syria often explodes into Lebanon. That Israel faces Sunni militants (Hamas) in Gaza on one side of its borders and Shiite militants (Hezbollah) in Southern Lebanon on another suggests that that elusive solution to the Palestinian quest for autonomy is now sliding into the abyss, which will only aggravate and motivate militants all over the region to escalate their anti-Israeli efforts. The Middle East is hardly just a ticking time bomb… it is an aggregation of many ticking time bombs, many of which are linked to each other. The canary is either dead… or dying.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the nature of foreign affairs can seem overwhelming, but all the pieces do impact each other, and each and every one of us will feel the consequences whether we are aware of the cause or not.