Jumblatt: Hezbollah will eventually join Syrian resistance

Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt said Monday the Syrian National Council would eventually replace President Bashar Assad’s government, and predicted that Hezbollah would one day close ranks with the "Syrian resistance" against Assad. “On Land Day, a salute to the Syrian National Council which imposed itself Sunday at the Istanbul conference and will impose itself sooner or later as an inevitable alternative to an oppressive minoritarian familial regime,” Jumblatt said in his weekly statement to Al-Anbaa newspaper. The "Friends of Syria" conference, which gathered together representatives of over 70 countries in Turkey Sunday, recognized the Syrian National Council as “a legitimate representative of all Syrians” and “the leading interlocutor of the opposition with the international community.” On the occasion of Land Day, which commemorates a violent crackdown on March 30, 1976, by Israeli forces against Palestinian citizens of Israel protesting land confiscations, Jumblatt said Israeli and Syrian forces share certain traits. “In Palestine, there is an occupation force that confiscates land, destroys homes and kills Palestinians, and in Syria, there is a regime that confiscates land, destroys homes and kills Syrians,” he said. In a direct reference to Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah’s alliance with Syria, Jumblatt expressed his confidence that "the resistance in Lebanon will one day join the Syrian people's resistance." Jumblatt also reiterated his criticism of Russia’s support for Assad and said that it would have been better had Moscow, which has always supported the Arab people’s rightful demands, sped up the process of removing the Assad family from power and ended the Syrian people’s daily suffering. The PSP leader, who has grown increasingly vociferous in his criticism of his former ally Assad, drew similarities between the paths of the "Palestinian liberation" movement and the SNC, adding that the former paid a heavy price before it arrived at where it is today.