Hezbollah's bounded victory.

Israel's month-long war against Lebanon, which began July 12, ended with Hezbollah claiming the high ground. Banners touting Hezbollah's "divine victory" quickly decorated the disaster areas of southern Lebanon, and billboards denounced "the savage destruction inflicted by the Zionists and the Americans."

Thanks to the U.N.-brokered cease-fire agreement, the violence on both sides largely came to an end. Afterward, Hezbollah's official media outlets continued airing triumphant anthems and interviews with the families of the victims showing their total allegiance to the group and their readiness to sacrifice anything, including their own children, for the resistance. My own interviews also show support.

"The resistance is defending our dignity. If it weren't for the resistance, we wouldn't be returning home today," says Fatima Bezih, a young mother in her twenties, after going back to her southern village Zebquine, which was heavily pounded by Israeli warplanes. "Sayyed Hassan [Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah] entered our hearts spontaneously."

"Now that we witnessed the cruelty of Israelis, we value the resistance even more. If Hezbollah was to give up its arms, we would demonstrate against that," says Hassan Ramez Chahine, a thirty-six-year-old pharmacist who stayed in his southern village despite the continuous bombing all through the war.

"The party feels now more justified in keeping its weapons because the Israeli onslaught showed that the Jewish state was a real threat," says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, who has been working on Hezbollah for the past eleven years. "In this climate of unprecedented escalation, how can you ask Hezbollah to disarm?"

Disarming Hezbollah, which started as a resistance movement to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982, does not seem in the offing.

It is true that U.N. Resolution 1701, which brought the war to a halt, allowed for the historic deployment of the Lebanese Army along the borders with Israel after twenty-eight years of absence. But for most of the population there, the fighters of Hezbollah and not the army provide protection. In 2000, Hezbollah was proclaimed as a national heroic group for driving Israeli troops out of the south.

"The army is not strong enough; it should remain side by side with the resistance," Bezih says.

In the first days following the resolution, it became clear that the army would not be attempting to dismantle Hezbollah.

Later, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan stressed that the international peacekeeping forces "were not going there to disarm Hezbollah. Let's be clear about that."

"Our situation has changed but has not been turned upside down," says Ahmad Malli, a member of Hezbollah's political council. "Hezbollah will deal with the new reality on the ground carefully."

In a televised interview on August 27, Nasrallah said that Hezbollah had "committed" not to show any military manifestation of the group south of the Litani River.

In other words, Hezbollah will keep its arms hidden and its fighters will maintain a discreet presence in the villages and towns along the borders with Israel.

While Hezbollah has more power than any other group in Lebanon, there are also limits. Hezbollah and its ally the Amal Party represent the vast majority of the Shiites--believed to comprise between 35 percent and 40 percent of the population--in Lebanon today. Hezbollah has fourteen members of parliament out of a total of 128, and it has two ministers in the Lebanese "consensual" cabinet, which divides positions by religious affiliation reflected in the population.

But because Hezbollah remains a religious organization in a narrow sense, its ideology cannot be accepted by other groups, according to Hilal Khashan, political science professor at the American University of Beirut.

"Support in Lebanon is not usually transported across sects. Constituencies are sectarian in nature, so Hezbollah cannot hope to expect to transfer or gain more popularity from other sects," Khashan says. In that sense, Hezbollah's military success cannot be translated into more political gains in the framework of the Lebanese system, he added.

The conflict with Israel polarized the country. The so-called March 14 Forces--an anti-Syrian coalition of Sunni, Christians, and Druze leaders backed by the United States--accused Iran and Syria of using Hezbollah to attain their strategic goals in the region. They insisted that the decision "of making peace or waging war" should be the decision of the government as a whole. They called for the integration of Hezbollah in the Lebanese army and argued that the issue of Shebaa Farms--a small stretch of land claimed by Lebanon but held by Israel, even though the United Nations says it belongs to Syria--should be dealt with by using diplomatic means. While U.S. support for Israel's attacks on Lebanon put these leaders in an uncomfortable position, they still wield clout.

And despite Hezbollah's strong showing in the conflict, it did suffer some blows.

"This war was highly destructive on Hezbollah's constituency and so internal pressure coming from the Shiites who were exhausted by this war could lead the group to enter the mainstream political system," says Lebanese columnist All al-Amin.

The tighter grip on Lebanon's entry points will impose more restrictions on the freedom of Hezbollah, making it harder for the group to receive arms from Iran through Syria. The new situation will eventually facilitate Hezbollah's further incorporation into the political system, predicts Amin.

But even if that happens, longterm peace in Lebanon still depends on the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the land disputes that flow from it.

"These elements will continue to be latent factors that would make the situation explosive again," Amin warns.

Raed El Rafei is a reporter at The Daily Star newspaper in Beirut and the correspondent of Forbes Arabia magazine in Lebanon. During the war between Israel and Hezbollah, he wrote a personal blog (blog.ziet.de/Beirut).

Illustration by Christiane Grauert