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Seven months after the Beirut port explosion was enough to shatter the image of “Hezbollah” and its ancient influence among Lebanese Christians. The decline of the party among the Christians preceded the disaster at the port. However, this was a turning point in the elimination of the hopes of the Free Patriotic Movement, an ally of Hezbollah, to save the era of its leader, the President of the Republic, Michel Aoun, who incited the Aounists to establish a distance between them and the party in order to preserve with a minimum capacity to represent the Christian street.
The party’s decline in its position among Christians is inseparable from its decline in its favor among other Lebanese. The surge in prices of their adventures outside the borders in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, and the reversal of those adventures, the isolation of the Arab world and Western sanctions, are no longer details and redundancies in the lives of the Lebanese, many of whom have professional or social ties abroad, which makes them subject to security scrutiny and rigor in dealing with them on their travels or in their businesses. However, this is the least of the problems. The explicit Arab boycott of Lebanon and the declared ban on Arab citizens coming to it for security reasons, in addition to the refusal to receive most Lebanese politicians in Arab capitals, even those whose doors were open in the past For all those seeking help or advice, all of this negatively affected the economy and tourism. This situation was aggravated by the fact that the Lebanese banks had large Arab deposits outside of any law.
On the other hand, Hezbollah’s adherence to the Michel Aoun era, defending it and preventing it from falling to the streets during the demonstrations of the uprising on October 17, 2019, had failed with the Christian public. That’s because many Christians who were affected by the economic collapse that year saw the party’s insistence that Aoun and his leader, his son-in-law Gebran Bassil, remain at the top of power, an obstacle to any economic and political reform they must . We have if the global crisis in Lebanon expires. The ban on overthrowing Michel Aoun was announced by Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in a speech he delivered two days after the outbreak of the demonstrations, thus outlining the limits that his organization allows popular demands to reach. These borders are not far away and reflect the secession of the party, whose financing, arms and supplies all Nasrallah announced several times from Iran.
The Aounists, who had previously enjoyed the widest representation among Christians, drew an optimistic picture of the alliance with the party, deluding themselves that the armed Shiite organization was capable of ensuring the safety of Christians. and restore the rights they lost under the government. Syrian tutelage that lasted between 1990 and 2005. They were convinced that the party would marginalize the Sunni community, which had suffered a series of setbacks that began with the loss of its leader, Rafik Hariri, and its defeats in all the confrontations it fought against. from that moment on due to the incompetence of his new leadership. and the disintegration of its audience. The implicit agreement that the Aounists promoted with Hezbollah is based on the internal power exchange that will be limited to Aoun and his foreign policy supporters, and on the rush to participate in the conflicts that concern the Iranian leadership, for which Hassan Nasrallah takes over the formulation of foreign policy. Lebanon’s strategic interests regionally and internationally as you wish.
The explosion of August 4, the material damage of which was concentrated in Christian areas, and Christians constituted the majority of its victims, placed under the microscope the justifications that followed the uprising of “October 17” under the microscope. Nasrallah appeared on television before the victims were recovered, denying any link to his party with the new disaster, offering neither condolences to the relatives of the dead nor expressing regret for losses that exceeded two billion dollars (according to estimates international). The only thing that mattered to the man was to distance himself and his organization from the responsibility that serious and deep questions and doubts began to link him with the party and its regional operators.
In the massive demonstration on August 8 to protest the port explosion and the reluctance of the authorities to attend to its victims, a sculpture of Hassan Nasrallah was raised on the stalks of the gallows without anyone coming to tear it down, contrary to what which was the practice on previous occasions, where protesters split and fights broke out in their ranks when Nasr was exposed. God is for insults or verbal abuse. The incident, apart from it, indicated a change in the Christian milieu that formed the body of weight in that demonstration, which especially included people from the areas affected by the explosion.
The explosion and investigating it, or rather hindering it, imposing an unprofessional path on it and directing it to burden several employees with its consequences without working to reveal the circumstances of the arrival of this enormous quantity of ammonium nitrate to Lebanon and those who are behind. It and the reason for staying seven years in the port and the appearance of the names of Syrian businessmen close to the Bashar al-Assad regime, as owners of the companies involved in the recruitment of the yoke, are factors that deepen the confidence that Christians even among the supporters of the Aounist movement joined Hezbollah. The name of the head of the movement, Gebran Bassil, was placed on the US sanctions list, under the Magnitsky Act, to announce that the intimate relationship with the party has become costly.
In addition, the government crisis, which appears as an intersection between the inability to reform the economy and the insistence of the Aounists in capturing all the articulations of power, allowed them to increase their demand that Hezbollah declare its explicit support for them in their conflicts. with other parts. This was evident in a series of statements by its officials, which included a clear criticism of the party’s policies and a revocation of their support for the Aounists on the government record and their “accusation” of fear of slipping into a new confrontation with the Sunnis. community.
The fact is that the return of the Maronite Patriarchate to play an important role in proposing solutions, whether by calling for neutrality or by holding an international conference on Lebanon, would not have occurred if the Free Patriotic Movement had not ceased. , an unprecedented decline in the area of Christian support for it. But the previous experiences of the Aounists indicate their inability to read the current changes with the required precision and that the decline in Christian support for “Hezbollah” will not go without tangible effects in the course of the current disaster.
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