What sort of a society do the Lebanese want to live in?

The BBC website is publishing correspondence between a Lebanese man in Beirut and an Israeli living in the border town of Shlomi, which deal with the prospects for peace after the ceasefire. One point the Israeli correspondent made that leapt out at me was the following:

"Israel is a democracy. If we feel that the government was wrong, it will pay the price at the next election. But in Lebanon, when Hezbollah feel they have sufficient strength, they may not wait for elections. They may take over the government by force of the arms that they are refusing to relinquish. And if they do, the fault will be that of the Lebanese, not of Israel.

Who will you complain to then, when the country is ruled by Muslim law, and your wife is forced to wear a burkha?".

While this correspondence ignores the fact that Lebanon is also a democracy, the point about Hezb'allah possibly seizing power by force in the future is a threat that Lebanon cannot ignore (and which I alluded to in my previous "coup d'etat" posting).

To view Hezb'allah as a benign liberator of Lebanon is foolish, given their initial aim in 1982 of replicating Iran's Islamic Republic and imposing Shari'ah law on all citizens, irrespective of their religious affiliation. A healthy society allows all of its citizens to believe what they want to believe, rather than having a faith imposed on them.