470 Resisting Publics
raid. Hizbullah’s strategic mistake was not anticipating that such an
action would spark a large-scale conflict that would ultimately lead to
the destruction of almost all Lebanon’s post-civil-war achievements.^39
Although some Lebanese question the wisdom of Hizbullah’s action,
which was used by Israel as a justification for inflicting so much damage
on the country, in many ways Hizbullah emerged from the crisis enjoy-
ing more popularity than before.^40 However this was not uncontested or
unproblematic, as will be made clear in this section.
mong the factors that helped the image of Hizbullah during the A
war was the role of its media. Although the main purpose of its media
was to mobilize Hizbullah’s constituency and raise its morale, al-Manar
TV, “the channel of the Arabs and the Muslims,” continued its regional
and international outreach to the Muslim world and beyond. Even though
Israel completely leveled the al-Manar building and radio station al-Nour
sustained substantial damage, neither went off the air for a single min-
ute as Hizbullah had contingency measures in place and had organized
alternative undisclosed locations underground from which to broadcast.^41
Likewise, the newspaper al-Intiqad was regularly published on time every
Friday, and even, exceptionally, twice in the second week of the war^42 in
order to publicize Hizbullah’s “feats” on the battlefield.
n an attempt to end the war, on 5 August 2006 the Lebanese cabinet I
unanimously endorsed Prime Minister Sanyura’s “Seven Points,”^43 includ-
ing the fourth point, which stressed that the state has absolute monopoly
over the use of force. After rejecting a UN draft resolution that fell short
of demanding an Israeli withdrawal and in an attempt to influence the
wording of a new resolution to Lebanon’s advantage, the Lebanese cabinet
unanimously approved the deployment of 15,000 Lebanese Army soldiers
to the border with Israel. The cabinet also approved UNSC Resolution
1701 of 11 August 2006, which called for, among other things, the cessa-
tion of hostilities and Hizbullah’s disarmament—just as UNSC Resolution
1559 had in September 2004. In these decisions, Hizbullah’s two ministers
voted “yes.”
greeing to these cabinet decisions seems to constitute a genu-A
ine policy change rather than a rhetorical move. Hizbullah had hitherto
opposed sending the Army to the south, seeing it as a pretext for pro-
tection of Israel from the Lebanese Resistance. Now, however, Nasrallah