Hizbullah Presents its Case That Israel Involved in Hariri Assassination

I was a bit flippant in my remarks last week when Hizbullah announced that Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah would present evidence that Israel was involved in the Hariri assassination. I'm no fan of Hizbullah, and while Israel does use targeted assassination, I still don't think Hariri would be high on their list. The original suspect, Syria, and the current suspect, Hizbullah, make more sense.

But to be fair to Nasrallah, much as I personally dislike Hizbullah's goals and ideology, his speech seems to be a serious rhetorical effort to marshal data that can be used to suggest Israel had motive, opportunity, and means. It includes some surprises (Hizbullah claims to have, or to have had the capability to monitor Israeli surveillance video transmissions), and by raising a new candidate for perpetrator, it muddies the waters and diverts attention from the accusations expected from the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL). Israel has said it monitors all of Lebanon and indeed, if Hizbullah was monitoring drone footage for a decade, it could have cherry-picked the footage to suggest a special interest in the waterfront area where Hariri died. (And while many Arab commentators are praising the intercepts as a defeat for Israeli intelligence, don't forget that we learned last year that Iraqi insurgents had hacked the feed of US Predators; Hizbullah is certainly technically more capable than Iraqi insurgents.)

Here is the full transcript of the press conference in Arabic from Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV, and here's a lengthy English summary and paraphrase also by Al-Manar. Naturally, Lebanon blogger Qifa Nabki is on the case; he live-blogged yesterday's speech, and has a commentary up on Foreign Policy's Mideast channel, plus a new post on his blog on the dilemmas facing Sa‘d Hariri. For those with good enough Arabic, the whole thing is on YouTube in 14 parts (though I haven't watched it all), of which here's part one:



Whatever else you may think of the actual case, I believe Nasrallah has played the STL rather well here: You say you have a case against us; well, we have a case against Israel. Nasrallah admits he has no smoking gun. It remains to be seen whether the STL does.

I had not previously commented much about Lebanon's ongoing and unfolding alleged uncovering of a major spy ring. which recently saw the arrest of former General Fayez Karam, who is said to have confessed to spying for Israel since the 1980s. He was more recently a senior official in Michel ‘Aoun's (Hizbullah-allied) Free Patriotic Movement. But Nasrallah pointed to evidence from the arrested spies that he claimed supported his allegations, though their testimony is not yet public.

I'm not convinced, but Nasrallah's speech has shifted Lebanon's internal debate, and that's what he was seeking to do.