Hezbollah's Choice - NYTimes.com BEIRUT - When Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of Hezbollah, the Shiite political party and militia, gave a public speech in Beirut on Friday - something he rarely does these days for fear of assassination - he told his Arab audience to stay focused on resisting Israel. "We the Shiites of Ali bin Abi Taleb will not abandon Palestine," he declared to the rapturous applause of several thousand supporters in a party stronghold in the southern suburb of the capital. Shiites consider Ali bin Abi Taleb, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, to be his rightful successor rather than Abu Bakr, who became Islam's leader upon the Prophet's death. In central Beirut, whose residents tend to be more affluent and better educated, the reaction was different. Fewer people here buy Nasrallah's line anymore since Hezbollah seems to have neglected Palestine in favor of the war on its eastern doorstep. While the group's traditional base is the one-third of the country that is Shiite, its resistance narrative had found favor among many others, too, in Lebanon and beyond. The party has also become in recent years a dominant player in mainstream politics, holding, in effect, veto power in the cabinet since 2008. But now its open support for Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, who is killing his own people to hold on to power, is tarnishing Hezbollah's reputation at home. Since June, when Hezbollah fighters joined the Syrian Army to take back Qusayr, a town close to the Lebanese border, from Syrian rebels, people in Beirut have seemed to talk of little else. Hezbollah claims to be defending Shiite villages in badly demarcated territory along the Syrian-Lebanese border from attacks by extremist Sunnis in Syria. But most ordinary Syrians started fleeing into Lebanon because of the regime's brutality well before any extremists appeared among Syria's opposition. Criticism of Hezbollah has now become unusually bold. On Saturday, the day after Nasrallah's speech, the Lebanese journalist Nadim Koteich, a Shiite, took the party to task on his popular satirical TV show, DNA. "Either the fighters have lost Palestine on the map and think it is in Syria," he said. "Or they were informed that the road to Jerusalem runs through Qusayr and Homs," two Syrian towns where Hezbollah has fought alongside army troops. This image problem marks a huge transformation. When I moved to the Middle East - to Damascus - in 2008, Sunnis and Christians would tell me how much they admired Hezbollah for taking on Israel during their 33-day war in 2006. In opinion polls, Nasrallah and Assad were regularly ranked as the top Arab leaders. But Hezbollah is increasingly looking like a party for and about Shiites only. And all the more so because the warring sides in Syria fall along sectarian lines. The core of Assad's regime is Alawite, a sect regarded by most Sunnis and most academics as having Shiite roots, and it is backed by Shiite-majority Iran and Hezbollah. The opposition is made up almost exclusively of Sunnis and supported by Sunni states in the Persian Gulf. During an off-the-record conversation last month in Dahiya, the Beirut suburb where Nasrallah spoke on Friday, I asked a member of Hezbollah whether the party's reputation was suffering from the accusations that it is now killing fellow Muslims rather than resisting Israel. "We don't have the luxury of thinking about ideology," he told me, adding a strange analogy. "It's as if a well-dressed, beautiful woman were dumped into a river with a photographer there," he said. She wouldn't worry about how she looked. In other words, Hezbollah knows the costs of its actions but cannot afford to lose Assad: It needs his friendly regime to keep receiving weapons from Iran and act as a counterweight to the powerful Sunni Gulf states. And with Assad looking strong for now, Hezbollah must be thinking it didn't make such a bad bet.