Israel has warned Lebanon to abort Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's provocative plan to tour the volatile Lebanese border with Israel when the Iranian president visits next week. Israel delivered its warning to the Lebanese government through intermediaries from the United States, France and the United Nations, an Israeli daily newspaper reported yesterday.
Lebanon was told that "it wouldn't be wise" to facilitate Mr Ahmadinejad's visit there, a high-ranking Israeli official told Haaretz. Mr Ahmadinejad, who revels in provoking controversy, has said he hopes to hurl stones at Israeli soldiers on the other side of the border fence, the London-based Arabic newspaper, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, reported last week. The Iranian president's scheduled two-day visit to Lebanon begins on October 13. It will be his first since being elected in 2005. It comes at a time of growing domestic tensions in both Tehran and Beirut, as well as rising political friction in the wider region. Mr Ahmadinejad's Levantine excursion will probably exacerbate tensions in the Middle East and beyond, analysts said, even though Iran's official media dutifully proclaimed that he will bring a "message of peace, stability and unity for the Lebanese".
He is scheduled to hold talks with his Lebanese counterpart, Michel Suleiman, who invited him, as well as the prime minister, Saad Hariri, and the parliamentary speaker, Nabih Berri. Mr Ahmadinejad is also to meet the Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, a key ally whose militant group and party is considered an Iranian proxy. Mr Ahmadinejad's plan to head to south Lebanon is also generating controversy in Beirut, where the largest parliamentary bloc said it would be a "provocation".
"The message is that Iran is at the border of Israel … He doesn't need to go there," Fares Souaid, the co-ordinator of the ruling March 14 alliance, said last week. "Ahmadinejad through this visit is saying that Beirut is under Iranian influence and that Lebanon is an Iranian base on the Mediterranean," said Mr Souaid, whose coalition is led by Mr Hariri and backed by the West and Saudi Arabia. Lebanon is already on tenterhooks over unconfirmed reports that a UN-backed tribunal is set to indict members of Hizbollah in the 2005 assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, Saad's father. There are concerns that if the Special Tribunal for Lebanon implicates Hizbollah, sectarian clashes similar to those that brought Lebanon close to civil war two years ago could erupt.
Unconfirmed Arab media reports said that Syria's president, Bashar Assad, has asked Mr Ahmadinejad to postpone his Lebanon trip given the fragile political situation there. But there were also suggestions that Mr Assad might be "delineating his territory" in his wish for Lebanon to be more in Syria's sphere of influence than Iran's, the Los Angeles Times reported. Syria, a Sunni-majority secular republic, and Iran, a Shiite-led theocratic state, have had an unlikely strategic alliance for three decades that has endured despite numerous regional and international pressures. Washington has repeatedly attempted to bring Damascus into its sphere of influence, but with little success.
Mr Souaid pointed out that Mr Ahmadinejad was going to Beirut when the West is struggling to rescue US-backed peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. "The Iranian president is here to say that Lebanon is a land of resistance and to reaffirm his project of a continuous war with Israel," he said. Lebanon's southern border area with Israel is largely controlled by Hizbollah. It was devastated during the 2006 war between the militant party and Israel.
Iran heavily financed the reconstruction of the area after that conflict, which, according to opinion polls, made Mr Nasrallah and Mr Ahmadinejad the two most popular figures in the Arab world. The Iranian president's regional standing has since been undermined by the violent aftermath of his disputed re-election last year. Tehran, goading Israel and Washington, recently offered to send military aid to Lebanon after the US froze such support to Beirut over concerns the weapons could be used by Hizbollah.
If Mr Ahmadinejad does venture down to Lebanon's southern border, it could provide Israel with a unique opportunity for Israeli forces to seize him and "bring him to trial as an inciter to genocide and Holocaust denier", Aluf Benn, Haaretz's diplomatic editor, suggested last week. He assured readers, however, this "is not going to happen". Aluf's article was seemingly more of a tongue-in-cheek challenge to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to live up to his pre-election rhetoric, which focused on the "Iranian threat" and portrayed Mr Ahmadinejad as "the new Hitler".