What are the effects of the Shia' resistance in the Middle East after ten days of war in Lebanon? One may think of katyusha missiles launched in the north of Israel. But there is more.
After the attack on Gaza started in June and has caused till now 130 dead, the Palestinians are pushed to the extreme: without political solutions and humiliated by the Israeli military power. Palestinians in the West Bank –among whom many from Gaza have been following day after day the vicissitudes of their Gaza's conational on Al-Jezeera. Then, suddenly the conflict enlarges to the Lebanese border.
During the first clashes, the men of Nasrallah capture two Israeli soldiers and kill another seven.
Nasrallah is a resistance leader, Nasrallah is a Shia' leader.
But as it happened in the case of the elections of Hamas, religious differences straighten out and the only common sense that prevails is one for the survival of the common people. This and nothing else can explain why some Palestinian youths have already hung to the wall of their rooms the photography of Nasrallah. To Palestinians nothing has remained but to watch this man of sword and word who has had the shrewdness to publicly apologize for the death of two boys caused by a missile launched from Hezbollah on Nazareth.
The target was an important Israeli strategic site that has been constructed just above the Palestinian area of the city, inhabited for the two thirds by Palestinians. And Palestinians were also the two young people hit and killed during attack.
After that another 350 Lebanese civilians have died under the precise missiles sold by the US to Israel, the issue of the right to exist for the populations of the Middle East within defined and sure territorial borders has brought, this Friday, the Lebanese and Palestinian flags together in the streets of Nablus.
Why Nablus? For three days the city has been under siege, the ministry of Health occupied by the Israeli army while the headquarter of el-Muqata was shaved to the ground including the prison of the city, after that the prisoners have been freed. In all six Palestinians have been killed and 25 men of the security have been arrested; the Ministry of the Interior demolished and its archives including all civil documents were also destroyed. In spite of all of this, there is still room for a smile when the Israeli military radio declares: we have attacked the al-Muqata of Nablus because Hezbollah guerrillas were hiding there.
The support to Nasrallah never has been so symbolic as it has become in these days: as the same Lebanese President Emil Lahud says, the Lebanese choose to remain united in order to defend the national sovereignty against the enemy who attacks our people. It is a matter, therefore, of giving support to the Lebanese people and halting the attacks against civilians. As the demonstrators say this is not only a support arriving from the Palestinians, but is all the public opinion of the Middle East that now is asking for the attacks on the Lebanese people to stop. In this both Shia' and Sunnites components join back together to support the Lebanese people. The only people that do not see 'any need for a cease fire' (in Condoleezza Rice's words) remain the cynical men of the Bush administration: the Israeli military hierarchies have free hand to go on war at least for another week, that is until the 26 July when the diplomacy is expected to be resumed.
But finally something begins to move also inside the Israeli society. The day after the demonstration of Nablus, 2,500 persons met in the squares of Tel Aviv to say no to the war. Also here, in a State of deep ethnic contradictions, the religious fragmentation straightens out during a sunny Saturday of war and, for the first time, the Palestinian groups of Israel come down in the street beside the historical activists of the Israeli opposition: someone remembers the captured and forgotten soldiers while accusing the government of political failure and useless military choices. In the end, however, also from this front the only message asked by the people was to stop immediately the war.
This is the winning paradox of the Shia' Leader Nasrallah: to have brought back united the people of the Middle East.