The Lebanese sure showed Israel this weekend. For years, the two held the same thing sacred, while only one could hold the title. That title, of course, is who could make the largest batch of hummus.

Israel used to hold the record for making the largest plate of the dip, but no longer after Lebanese chefs served up over two tons of chickpea-y goodness on Saturday. The entire affair is comical in the sense that too often it seems like neither side is actually talking about hummus.

The slogan for the event was, "Come and fight for your bite, you know you're right," illustrating the growing frustration. Several Lebanese businessmen also used the belligerent rhetoric.

"Lebanon is trying to win a battle against Israel," Fady Jreissati, the events promoter said. "Hummus is a Lebanese product and part of our traditions."

This isn't the first time the two counties have clashed over the dish, last year the Association of Lebanese Industrialists sued Israel in an effort to stop them from marketing hummus as Israeli. Saturday, the head of that group said, "If we don't tell Israel that enough is enough, and we don't remind the world that it's not true that hummus is an Israeli traditional dish, they will keep on marketing it as their own."

However the food wars don't end with hummus. Yesterday the Lebanese also made the world's largest batch of tabbouleh, a salad which Lebanon claims the Zionists are trying to take as their own.

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Robert Worth has a great piece in today's New York Times on Salah Ezzedine, the billion-dollar pyramid schemer being called "Lebanon's Bernie Madoff". Ezzedine seemed to use his close ties to Hezbollah to rope in Shiite investors, not dissimilar from the way Maddof preyed on eldery Jewish investors:

Many of the investors — mostly Shiites living in Beirut and southern villages like this one — say those party links were the reason they chose to risk their hard-earned savings with a man who offered 40 and 50 percent profits but never showed any paperwork.

The scandal has embarrassed the party, which prides itself on a reputation for honesty and selfless piety. It has also illustrated the way many of Lebanon’s Shiites, despite their ascent from near feudal poverty just a few decades ago, remain in some ways a nation apart. Their residual distrust of mainstream Lebanese institutions, which helped fuel Hezbollah’s rise as a virtual state within a state, also appears to have made them vulnerable to Mr. Ezzedine’s schemes.

The big question now is whether the scandal will be a blow to Hezbollah's credibility, or whether the party can use the same trust Ezzedein preyed on to lay the blame on the usual suspects:

Mustafa Fneish, a wizened 54-year-old taxi driver in Mahroub, said he invested $10,000 with Mr. Ezzedine and had received an 80 percent profit on his investment, or $8,000. When asked whether he had received the principal back, he looked confused, and said no.

“All this happened because of the United States and Israel,” Mr. Fneish added, echoing a refrain that springs easily to people’s minds here. “When they discovered that Ezzedine was close to Hezbollah, they ruined him.”

Lebanese politics tend to oscillate between tragic and absurd. With Saad Hariri's announcement yesterday that he was stepping down from his position as Prime Minister-designate and abandoning attempts to form a national unity government, we are clearly in the realm of absurdity. Since his March 14 Alliance won a decisive victory in last June's parliamentary elections, Hariri and his allies have been unable to agree to terms with the Hezbollah-led opposition over the composition of the new government.

In a true democracy, Hariri would now likely abandon his attempts to include the opposition in the national unity government and move forward with the composition of a cabinet composed solely of his parliamentary majority. But Hariri, along with his allies in Saudi Arabia and the United States, are leery of forming a partisan government set up in opposition to Hezbollah. As in 2008, such a move would risk a downward spiral of recrimination and violence, culminating in Hezbollah using its superior force to settle the matter. Hariri, prevented from even threatening to form a March 14-only government, has been robbed of the leverage that his parliamentary majority should give him in the negotiations over the form of the government.

While there is no shortage of sideshows in Lebanon, the fundamental issue remains that the country's two poles, Saad Hariri and Hassan Nasrallah, have yet come to an agreement over the distribution of political power. Under Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, Saad's father, Hezbollah was willing to leave economic policy to Hariri in exchange for free reign to maintain its military, social and economic preeminence in South Lebanon.

But following the armed confrontation in May 2008, which pitted Hariri's supporters against Hezbollah in Beirut, Hezbollah does not have sufficient confidence in Saad Hariri to give him the same latitude. If these two actors fail to reach a modus vivendi, Lebanese politics will likely swing once again from absurd to tragic.

David Kenner, a former editorial researcher at FP, is an assistant researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.  

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So, it turns out that Lebanon's ruling pro-Western coalition managed to hang on to power, defeating a rival coalition that includes Hezbollah.

The editors over at HuffPo appear to credit this development to Obama's Thursday speech, blaring these headlines:

The Obama Effect? Pro-Western Majority Declares Victory Over Hezbollah In Lebanon

Early Test Of President's Efforts To Forge Middle East Peace

I hate to burst the bubble, but there's simply no evidence yet that Obama had any impact on the outcome. As Paul Salem explained Friday for FP, there were plenty of indications - such as the fact that it only ran 11 candidates -- that Hezbollah didn't really want to win and give up its cozy seat in the opposition. And further, it was Hezbollah's coalition partner, the mostly Christian Free Patriotic Movement, that seems to have underperformed expectations. In any case, the AP story on HuffPo flatly declares, "Obama's speech did not resonate in the election campaign."

Nor should we breathe a sigh of relief just yet. Now comes the ugly business of negotiating ministries, and it's likely that Hezbollah (whose power is measured in more than just parliamentary seats) will again demand a veto in a cabinet of "national unity" -- to the extent that such a thing exists in fractured Lebanon. It could be months of agonizing negotiations before a new government is formed.

The good news, of course, is that the Hezbollah-FPM coalition didn't win, which could have led to ugly recriminations, or worse, if the ruling Sunni-Druze-Christian alliance didn't accept the results. But I don't think we can chalk these results up to any "Obama effect" just yet, if ever.

UPDATE: Elias Muhanna weighs in:

Far more decisive, in my opinion, seems to have been: (1) the high turnout of Sunnis in Zahle — many of whom came from abroad — coupled with a low turnout of Christians; (2) strong feelings of antipathy towards Hizbullah by the Christians of Beirut who voted decisively for March 14th’s list in the district of Achrafieh; (3) some rare rhetorical blunders by Nasrallah in the past couple of weeks, calling the events of May 7th “a glorious day” for the resistance.

JOSEPH BARRAK/AFP/Getty Images

If you were worried that Hugo Chavez's global reach would shrink right along with the oil prices, there good news for your today, as Lebanon inaugurates the Hugo Chavez shawarma spot. The Venezuelan ambassador was on site for the "emotional" opening of the restaurant, replete with great festivity all around.

The restaurant, it seems, is quite patriotic indeed -- decorated with flags and pictures of the Venezuelan president and, nearby as the press release from the Embassy put it (my translation), "instructions of our head of state relating to the fight for the sovereignty of the oppressed people of the world against the pretensions of potential imperialists."

What atmosphere! Add the waiters' red shirts and hats, clothes traditional to Venezuela, and you've go the whole deal. Now, I just wonder how good the shawarma is.

Two weeks before Lebanese Parliamentary elections, Der Spiegel has released a blockbuster report contending that U.N. investigators for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon have acquired new evidence implicating Hezbollah in the 2005 assassination which took the life of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The piece reports that Lebanese security forces discovered that the mobile phones used by Hariri's assassins were often in close proximity to another network of phones, all belonging to members of Hezbollah's powerful militia.  The investigators received another break, the article claims, when one of Hariri's killers used his "hot" phone to call his girlfriend, allowing him to be identified as Abd al-Majid Ghamlush, a Hezbollah member who had completed training courses in Iran.

There are good reasons to be skeptical of this story. First, the entire piece is based on the claims of one anonymous source. The timing is also suspicious, with the news breaking just as Lebanon prepares for Parliamentary elections which pit Hezbollah and Saad Hariri's Future Movement. The story could simply be intended as one of the most macabre voter mobilization effort in recent memory, stoking the anger of the predominantly Sunni Future Movement in order to draw them to the polls. Nor is the author's explanation for Hezbollah's motivations in killing Hariri particularly convincing. For what it's worth, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah denounced Der Spiegel's claims yesterday as an "Israeli accusation."

Hezbollah has been known to overreach -- most recently, with the revelations of a Hezbollah cell operating in Egypt. Involvement in Hariri's assassination, however, would be Hezbollah's most spectacular overestimation of their domestic position in history. While the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has officially remained mum on its findings, whenever the court reveals what it has uncovered in the past four years of investigation into Hariri's murder, it promises to have a significant impact across the Middle East.

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Barack Obama made the first tentative steps toward opening lines of communication with the Syrian regime in the past week. In Sharm el-Sheikh, Hillary Clinton exchanged a handshake with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem. Contacts were also reestablished in Washington, as Jeffrey Feltman, the acting assistant secretary for the Near East, held a two-hour meeting with Syrian Amb. Imad Moustapha. Today, Clinton tapped Feltman and National Security Council aide Daniel Shapiro as envoys to Damascus.
 
While the Obama administration has proven its willingness to engage with Syria, it is also signaling that negotiations do not mean that the United States is surrendering to Syrian demands. Clinton downplayed the possibility of a speedy improvement of U.S.-Syrian ties at a press conference in Jerusalem, saying that "we have no way to predict what the future with our relations concerning Syria might be." 

In his discussions with Moustapha, Feltman raised the issue of Syrian support for terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas, its pursuit of nuclear weapons, the regime's meddling in Lebanon, and its worsening domestic human rights situation -- not issues that top Damascus's preferred agenda for U.S.-Syrian negotiations.

The very presence of Feltman (shown above being burned in effigy by Hezbollah supporters) in U.S.-Syrian negotiations is also a message. Feltman is a former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, and was consequently the point man for George W. Bush's hawkish Lebanon policy. In Beirut, he has a reputation as a strong and energetic supporter of Lebanon's pro-Western, anti-Syrian political coalition. He was a bête noir of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who took to calling Lebanon's anti-Syrian government "Feltman's government," rather than the government of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora. This antipathy no doubt extends to the Syrian regime.

Nevertheless, Obama's decision to establish Feltman as a primary U.S. interlocutor with Syria is a welcome sign that he is approaching a possible rapprochement with few illusions. Syria will try to leverage a decrease in tensions with the United States to attract business to the country, and gradually break down the economic sanctions regime erected against it. Feltman has the reputation to dissuade the Syrian regime that it can get something for nothing. Syria has to realize that it must take tangible steps for reconciliation to take place, not just engage in the process of negotiations. For Obama's first foray into the Arab world, this is a good start.

HAITHAM MUSSAWI/AFP/Getty Images

A bulldozer crushes pirated CDs and DVDs at a parking lot in the Beirut suburb of Kfarshima on Feb. 24. The Lebanese Intellectual Property Unit affiliated with the judicial police forces destroyed about 100,000 pirated CDs and DVDs confiscated from Lebanese vendors and traders. Soaring piracy of CDs, DVDs, business software, and cable networks has devastated the cinema, video, and related industries in Lebanon. More than half of the CDs, DVDs, and software sold in Lebanon are copies, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a private-sector coalition that represents U.S.-based copyright industries.

Meanwhile, check out question 6 of the latest FP quiz: What percentage of the world's music downloads are illegal?

• Peruvian slot machines
• The bottles of Indonesia