Latest moves in Middle East crisis are not the actions of a humane society

On Wednesday this week, when Pope Francis used his regular weekly audience to make an impassioned plea to the global community to do everything in its power to dissuade Israel from attacking Lebanon, he could hardly have imagined in his worst nightmares that just days later deadly 5,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs supplied by the United States would be raining down on Beirut.

Friday’s deadly attack was targeted at the headquarters of Hezbollah in the southern suburb of Beirut, and resulted in the death of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Figures so far claim that 11 people were killed and 108 injured, bringing the total number of people killed in Israeli strikes since Monday to nearly 800.

For its part the Israeli government is claiming this latest attack as a highly significant success in its efforts to eradicate the threat that Hezbollah presents to its northern border and, far from considering the ceasefire that Western nations have been pleading for, the Israelis seem intent on pressing home their advantage in an effort to eradicate Hezbollah from the middle eastern landscape. As well as threats of further bombings there are strong whispers that Israeli ground troops are preparing to make an incursion into Lebanon.

There had been a faint glimmer of hope on Friday that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have been thinking about the 21-day ceasefire proposal put forward by the US and France, and backed by Israel’s major Western allies, but when he came to the podium at the UN General Assembly in New York, such hopes were rudely shattered.

Israel has no choice but to fight irrational aggressors that were seeking its annihilation, and Mr Netanyahu made no apologies for Israel’s determination not only to seek military and strategic victories over the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas, but to seek out and eliminate every last one of the members and supporters of such organisations.

From the official Israeli images that appeared in the media, it looked very much like Prime Minister Netanyahu had authorised the latest deadly attack from his hotel room in New York, and US sources have confirmed that no-one in the US state administration was informed in advance of the impending attack. Clearly Netanyahu went to the United Nations fully aware that there was an overwhelming call for some form of ceasefire, but fully confident that he would – and could – ignore the pleas of the international community and press on with the implementation his own military agenda.

Much Netanyahu’s bullishness has derived from the fact that Western nations have long had a complex and mutually beneficial relationship with Israel – a bewildering array of military hardware and domestic goods are exchanged, and the West has been lamentably content to allow Israel to act as a military protagonist in dealing with the problem of subjugating anti-Western and anti-democratic threats. This is why Western calls for calm and mediation are more whispers than shouts. Of course what has unfolded in Gaza in recent months has so horrified the civilised world that democracy itself has become compromised – with Western leaders hanging on to the warped hope that Israel can finish its grubby work before the international outcry for peace becomes overwhelming.

Of course the spilling of this conflict into Lebanon is rightly raising grave concerns for the possibility of a much wider, uncontrolled conflict in the region. Iran in particular has long been a supporter of Hezbollah and the killing of Nassan Hasrallah pulls it perilously close to involvement in the escalating Israeli actions, which could have profound consequences for the wider world.

Although the presence of Hezbollah in Lebanon has presented an existential threat to Israel for decades, it’s a nation whose predicament has long been overshadowed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict centre on Gaza. Although today the Lebanese population is believed to be 69% Muslim (there hasn’t actually been and official census of the population since 1932), it’s a country that has traditionally had a unique and democratic relationship with its many faith groups.

Here in the largely secularised West it’s often hard to understand the state/faith relationship that occurs in many other countries, especially in the Middle East. Lebanon’s political system institutionalises the representation of faith groups, such that its representatives enjoy considerable legislative powers – especially in areas such as education, employment, finance and even some courts. Over many decades this has served to give Lebanon a uniquely attractive place in the Middle East; as recently as the 1970s it was the region’s only majority Christian country and prided itself in its multiculturalism and Westernisation, and it had the most buoyant economy, even though it wasn’t an oil-based nation. Sadly the civil war that erupted in 1975 shifted both the religious demographics of the nation, and its relationship with the West.

By the time Pope John Paul II visited the country in 1997 Christians were in a minority, but a remarkable revival was under way under the influence of the Maronite patriarch Nasreallah Sfeir, who had turned the tide of Christians leaving the country and instilled in them a new sense of Lebanon as a sacred homeland for Christians. Sfeir had a major patron in John Paul II, who famously framed his 1997 visit around the message that “Lebanon is more than a country, it is a message of freedom and an example of pluralism for the East as for the West.”

In a speech made on his arrival at Beirut International Airport on 10th May 1997, John Paul II said, “Today, with great emotion, I have kissed the soil of Lebanon, as a sign of friendship and respect. I come among you, dear Lebanese people, as a friend who wishes to visit a people and support them in their daily journey. It is as a friend of Lebanon that I come to encourage the sons and daughters of this land of hospitality, this country of ancient spiritual and cultural traditions, so desirous of independence and freedom.”

Later that day he signed off the Apostolic Exhortation A New Hope for Lebanon which called on those responsible for the guardianship of the country to ensure that Lebanon “while preserving her particular treasures and remaining faithful to herself, must be able to embrace the new realities of modern society and to take her full place in the community of nations.”

Sadly, over the subsequent quarter of a century, this hope has become tarnished heavily by the more complex realities of global politics in the 21st century. Confusion and uncertainty now surround the Land of Cedars, which has slumped into economic paralysis, political deadlock and deep societal divisions which have enabled more radical elements of Lebanese society to assume control of the country’s narrative – and much of it for the worse.

As a consequence of the latest escalation of violence, it is of course the ordinary law and faith abiding citizens of Lebanon who are taking the brunt of political failures. Since Monday alone more than 90,000 citizens have been displaced from their homes, with the United Nations Office for the coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stating that the number internally displaced people now exceeds 200,000, and this in addition to the 111,000 already forced to flee since last October.

Back in October 2021, speaking at a prayer meeting in the Vatican with Lebanon’s Christian patriarchs, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s Foreign minister, said it was essential that Lebanon “remains the final vanguard of an Arab democracy that welcomes, recognizes and coexists with a plurality of ethnic and religious communities that in other countries aren’t able to live in peace.”

The concept of Lebanon as a unique country of reconciliation and peaceful co-existence between peoples and faiths is a much-cherished notion that has always talked to the need for some kind of new and meaningful peace in the Middle East, but circumstances now place it literally in the firing line of far more brutal ideological narratives.

History will have to be left to explain how the citizens of such a diverse and tolerant country came to be dominated by what the UK and US describes as terrorist organisation that is not only a widely-supported brutal militia that has engrained itself into Lebanese society, but is also a political party with representation in the country’s parliament.

It is often said that the troubles of the Middle Eastern nations are unique, but the reality is that any nation riven by political corruption, incompetent governance and the exploitation of its people is at risk of the inculcation of dangerous radicalisms. It’s also a salutary truth of history that confronting violence and terror with reciprocal aggression rarely leads to a peaceful outcome, but usually serves only to entrench and radicalise a country more deeply.

Hezbollah has already pledged to fight on despite the death of Hassan Nasrallah, and the group has wealthy and powerful friends such as Iran who will step to ensure that Friday’s acts are avenged, and the war of attrition and intolerance continues. For the West this will likely only necessitate further ramping up of military activities and actions in the region, as the tired old routines and rituals of warfare grind on relentlessly.

The killing of Nasrallah is undoubtedly a massive escalation of the Middle East conflict and carries considerable potential to spill over into a far more widespread conflict that would draw in US and UK forces. The Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is pinning his hopes, and the hopes of countless others, on Friday’s actions being what he was described as an “historic turning point.” Unfortunately that’s not generally how embittered and bloody conflicts are resolved; bloodshed invariably leads to more bloodshed.

In his 2020 encyclical Fratelli tutti Pope Francis said, “each war leaves the world in a worst state than before … war is always a failure of politics and of humanity, a shameful surrender, a defeat in the face of all forces of evil.”

There’s really nothing new in that, mankind has lamented the folly of resorting to war since the days Sumer and Elam, yet millennia later the human intellect is still struggling to find other pathways to reconciliation – seemingly because it still cannot find the courage turn its face to God and simply call out for peace.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian