Lebanese Seek To Map a Future Mired in Past

"As it is," they shouted back.

"How?" he asked.

"As it is," they answered.

"As it is?" he asked.

"As it is!" they yelled.

The Power of Hezbollah

This week, another rally, far larger, assembled in the southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil. It was organized by Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim movement, to commemorate five years since Hezbollah forced Israel to withdraw from the south.

In a fiery, hour-long speech from behind bulletproof glass, the movement's charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, recounted a conversation he said he had with Hariri a week before his death.

Would Hariri ask Hezbollah to disarm, as the United States and U.N. Resolution 1559 have demanded? Nasrallah said he asked. "I believe in the resistance," he quoted Hariri as saying, employing the term Hezbollah uses for its military wing. Only with a comprehensive peace in the region would Hariri bring up the subject, Nasrallah claimed. Only then would he and Hezbollah ponder the next step.

The question of Hezbollah's arms will prove one of the most pressing for the next parliament. In his speech, Nasrallah declared that as in the past, weapons were necessary to free a disputed sliver of land known as the Shabaa Farms, near the border between Lebanon and Israel, and to create a balance of power with Israel. Shabaa Farms is currently claimed by Israel, though the United Nations says it's part of Syria, and Hezbollah claims it as part of Lebanon.

"Any thinking on disarming our weapons is madness!" he shouted, his hands punctuating his words. Nasrallah worked the crowd, offering jokes, and speaking in a familiar slang. His tone rose and fell with the mood of his followers. "If anyone should think -- now listen to me -- if anyone should think of disarming our weapons, we will fight him like the people of Karbala fought," the turbaned cleric said, a reference to a 7th century battle pivotal in Shiite history. "Any step of the kind is an Israeli act, in Israel's interest, an Israeli decision. Any hand that is an Israeli hand, we will cut it off."

Part social welfare movement, part political party, part militia, Hezbollah, deemed a terrorist group by the United States, is a formidable force in Lebanese politics. In some ways, it can be seen as the modernization of the notion of the zaim. To its traditionally underprivileged community, in part through Iranian funding, it provides schools, hospitals, pharmacies, dental clinics, jobs and scholarships, filling the void left by the state (and some say forming a state within a state). It claims to speak on behalf of the Shiite community, Lebanon's largest. It claims to defend their interests.

In symbolism, words and message, it draws on its history to claim its future. "There is no place for retreat, no place for weakness, no place for humiliation," Nasrallah said.