Nasrullah's Divine Victory

Hasan Nasrullah gave his "Divine Victory" speech on Friday to thousands of followers in South Beirut, which was heavily bombed by Israel during the Lebanon War.

The Daily Star reports that he said:

' "There is no army in the world capable of making us drop our weapons as long as there will be people who believe in this resistance," he said. "We don't want to keep our weapons forever and they will never be used against anyone inside Lebanon. These are not Shiite weapons but the weapons of all the religions and the Lebanese and will protect Lebanon's independence and sovereignty."

Nasrallah said disarming Hizbullah "under this government ... means leaving Lebanon exposed before Israel to kill and detain and bomb whoever they want, and clearly we will not accept that."

"When we build a strong and just state that is capable of protecting the nation and the citizens, we will easily find an honorable solution to the resistance issue and its arms," he added.

"Tears don't protect anyone," Nasrallah said in a barbed refer-ence to Siniora, who openly wept several times when describing the destruction of Lebanon during the war. '

Worrisome fissures have increasingly appeared between Hizbullah and the Lebanese government headed by PM Fuad Siniora. Israeli political strategy during the war was to attempt to set the Christian-Sunni reformist bloc against Hizballah as a way of blunting the latter. During the war, Lebanese leaders largely resisted the temptation to turn on one another as the Kadima government of Ehud Olmert intended. It may be that if Tel Aviv's political plan fails, it is mostly because the Lebanese government is not in fact capable of taking on Hizbullah's paramilitary.

Helena Cobban has more.

Israeli spokesman Mark Regev said that Hizballah should have no missiles. He did not say anything about the hundreds of thousands of cluster bombs that Israel dropped on Lebanon, many of them as the war was ending. Cluster bombs often don't explode immediately, and therefore South Lebanon is littered now with deadly bomblets attractic to children and deadly to farmers. Several people have already been killed by them. This Israeli action was a war crime on a vast scale and rather damages Israeli credibility in condemning Hizbullah's rockets.