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hassan nasrallah
Lebanon Foreign Minister Says Nasrallah Agreed to Cease-Fire Before IDF Assassination
One anti-war group called the minister's remarks "proof (if it was needed) that Netanyahu is hell-bent on initiating an all-out war in the Middle East."
Oct 03, 2024
Lebanon's foreign minister said in an interview aired Wednesday that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had agreed to a three-week cease-fire proposal led by the U.S. just days before the Israeli military assassinated him with airstrikes on Beirut—an attack that also leveled residential buildings and killed or wounded dozens of civilians.
"He agreed," Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib told CNN's Christiane Amanpour of Nasrallah's position on the proposed cease-fire, which was also backed by France, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other nations.
"We agreed completely," Habib continued. "Lebanon agreed to a cease-fire but consulting with Hezbollah. The [Lebanese House] Speaker Mr. Nabih Berri consulted with Hezbollah and we informed the Americans and the French what happened."
Habib said that U.S. officials communicated to Lebanon that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had also agreed to a cease-fire along the Israel-Lebanon border, seemingly setting the stage for a pause after roughly two weeks of devastating Israeli bombings and Hezbollah rocket fire.
But Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, including the country's foreign minister, proceeded to publicly reject the proposed cease-fire, undercutting the Biden administration even as it continued to arm the Israeli military. The 2,000-pound bomb used to kill Nasrallah was reportedly supplied by the United States.
The Israeli strike killed Nasrallah two days after the U.S. and allied nations issued a joint statement calling for "an immediate 21-day cease-fire across the Lebanon-Israel border to provide space for diplomacy."
The Associated Pressreported at the time of the statement's release that "the U.S. officials said Hezbollah would not be a signatory to the new cease-fire proposal but believed the Lebanese government would coordinate its acceptance with the group."
"They said they expected Israel to 'welcome' the proposal," the AP added.
Watch the Lebanese foreign minister's full CNN appearance:
You can watch my full interview with Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib here -- we spoke a few hours before Iran's strikes on Israel on Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/kNYt1WjQ17
— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) October 3, 2024
Stop the War, a U.K.-based peace group, called Habib's remarks "proof (if it was needed) that Netanyahu is hell-bent on initiating an all-out war in the Middle East to protect his precarious position and draw the U.S. into fighting alongside Israel."
In the days since assassinating Nasrallah, Israel's military has invaded Lebanon with ground forces and intensified its massively destructive and deadly bombing campaign. On Thursday, CBS Newsreported that "at least seven health and rescue workers were killed in an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in Beirut overnight."
"The strike in Beirut's residential Bashoura district hit a multi-story apartment building that houses an office of the Health Society, a group of civilian first responders affiliated with Hezbollah," the outlet added. "It was the second airstrike to hit central Beirut this week, and the second to hit the Health Society in 24 hours. The Associated Press said no Israeli warning was issued to the area before the strike. Residents reported a sulfur-like smell, and Lebanon's state-run National News Agency accused Israel of using phosphorous bombs in the strike, which are prohibited by international law for use near civilian populations."
Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the CEO of Mercy Corps, said in a statement Wednesday that "the expanded new front of war in Lebanon is already having a catastrophic impact on civilians as tens of thousands of families have been forced to flee their homes over the last week with what little they could carry."
"World leaders should be appalled that we have arrived at this apocalyptic level of chaos, conflict, and misery," said McKenna. "All those with influence and power must take urgent action: to deescalate and halt the unrelenting violence across the region; to do everything possible to achieve an immediate and lasting cease-fire; to release the hostages to their families; to restore life-sustaining services to Gaza; and to facilitate safe, sustained access to aid for millions trapped or on the move. Any hope for peace in the region depends on it."
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Israel Has Successfully Provoked Iran to Enter War
An interview with Lebanon expert Mireille Rebeiz, who says that "I would like to believe that Lebanon will not turn into a second Gaza," but now finds itself "in the middle of a major storm."
Oct 02, 2024
After nearly a year since the Hamas-led terror attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of close to 1200 people (roughly 800 civilians and nearly 400 security forces though some Israeli civilians and soldiers may have been killed by friendly fire as the controversial “Hannibal Directive” was deployed on that date, according to reported testimonies of soldiers and officers), Israel’s destruction of Gaza continues unabated.
Israel has rejected calls from the international community for a ceasefire/prisoner swap deal and blatantly ignored an International Court of Justice ruling not to engage in any military offensive in Rafah where the situation in the southern Gaza city was already “disastrous.” Now, however, after having killed more than 41,000 Palestinians (though the toll could reach up to 186,000 dead according to a study published in early July in the prestigious medical journal Lancet) and making Gaza practically unlivable, Netanyahu’s neo-fascist government that makes Europe’s right-wing extremists seem like little farceurs has turned its focus to Lebanon. A joint operation between the IDF and Mossad spread terror by exploding walkie-talkies and pagers that people in Lebanon used, killing many and severely wounding thousands, while the Israeli military carried out massive airstrikes across southern Lebanon that have already killed more than 1,000 people, including many children, and wounded thousands.
Airstrikes have killed scores of senior Hezbollah figures, including its long-time leader, Hassan Nasrallah. But the airstrikes on Lebanon did not stop even after Nasrallah’s death despite calls for de-escalation, raising fears of a regional war between Israel and Iran. The Israeli military has even targeted central Beirut, and up to one million people may have been displaced. And as even further evidence that Israel is seeking to provoke a regional war, it launched a ground offensive in the south of Lebanon where heavy fighting is apparently taking place between Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters. Indeed, Iran seems now to have been dragged into a regional war by launching a major missile attack on Israel.
What is Israel after in Lebanon? Has Nasrallah’s death altered the direction of the conflict? Are we on the brink of a full-blown war in the Middle East? In the interview that follows, Mireille Rebeiz, a Lebanon and Hezbollah expert tackles these and other related questions. Rebeiz is Chair of Middle East Studies and Associate Professor of Francophone Studies & Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College (Pennsylvania).
C. J. Polychroniou: Almost a year after launching its devastating attack on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice, scores of international human rights organizations and leading international law scholars and historians have called a genocide, Israel has turned its focus on Lebanon. It blew up communication devices that the armed group Hezbollah had ordered months before the explosions, killing dozens and wounding thousands, and the Israeli military launched a wave of deadly attacks on Lebanon’s capital, one of which struck Hezbollah’s headquarters killing its long-time leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel’s war objectives in the Gaza Strip are to wipe Hamas off the earth and make Gaza unlivable. What is Israel trying to accomplish with its attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanon?
Mireille Rebeiz: From Israel’s point of view, the on-going war on Lebanon falls under its right to self-defense against terrorism.
Last week, we saw a series of attacks on Hezbollah fighters including the explosions of pagers and other wireless devices and the assassinations of several leaders. Although Israel has not officially commented on the attacks, evidence suggests that it has been planning this action for some time now.
Escalation continued with the assassination of Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and several other commanders. Israel dropped at least fifteen-times, American – manufactured, 2,000-pound bombs on south Beirut. Dubbed the “bunker busters” for their ability to pierce the ground before detonating, these bombs leveled several concrete buildings.
More recently, Israel started a ground invasion on south Lebanon and bombed Damascus by air.
The announced goals are clear: eliminate Hezbollah at all costs and send a message to Iran and Syria that Israel will no longer tolerate Iranian-backed militias in the region.
On the surface, one may look at these facts and consider that Israel is justified in its actions. However, international law tells a different story for Israel is piling violations of several rules and regulations related to armed conflicts. Furthermore, the war on terrorism is never innocent and always carries other motives.
Article 7 of Amended Protocol II on the Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices, to which Lebanon, Israel, and the United States are parties, explicitly bans these types of weapons and methods of warfare. Article 2(4) of Amended Protocol II defines “booby-trap” as “any device or material which is designed, constructed, or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object or performs an apparently safe act.”
Clearly, the pagers and other wireless devices have been tampered with to cause harm irrespective of its holder. As a result, at least 32 people, including two children were killed and thousands more were injured, and it is impossible to argue that every single person killed or injured is a Hezbollah fighter.
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions specifically states that persons not taking part in the hostilities and those placed “hors de combat” should not be targeted and shall be treated humanely. The wireless communication device explosions and the intense bombing of south Beirut cannot guarantee any protection to civilians and those unrelated to Hezbollah. Many civilians -- Lebanese citizens, Palestinians and Syrian refugees -- live in south Beirut for its affordable housing.
Beirut itself ranks as the 6th most expensive city in the Arab world, coming after Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Riyadh, and Jeddah. Globally, it ranks as the 113th most expensive city out of 178.
According to the World Bank 2023 report, inflation rate in Lebanon is in the triple-digit. There is serious decline in income as the Lebanese pound lost over 90% of its value. This led to the erosion of the middle class, and half of the population plunged under poverty line with unemployment nearing 30%.
Major events aggravated the financial crisis in Lebanon: the collapse of the infrastructure, the severe shortage of fuel, the pandemic that put a lot of stress on medical care, and finally the Beirut port explosion of 2020.
These factors pushed many Lebanese and others to rent apartments in south Beirut, and Israel cannot guarantee that every resident of this part of town is a Hezbollah fighter.
There is no doubt that these tactics imply a major escalation and a serious violation of international law. Former CIA director Leon Panetta labelled these attacks in Lebanon as terrorism: “I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism.”
Since the United States of America is the one providing many of these weapons, there might be criminal implications under U.S Law as the violation of Article 7 (2) could amount to federal offense. This prompted Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to quickly dissociate the US from the attacks and call for restraints. This comes at a time when the Biden Administration is under investigation for the export of billions of dollars in arms to Israel in assistance of a foreign government accused of committing gross human rights violations including blocking humanitarian aid.
Furthermore, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a strategy that goes beyond the Israel – Hezbollah war. His political survival is dependent on him staying in power.
Before the October 7 attacks, Netanyahu was on trial for corruption. After winning the election, he aligned himself with extremists, forming a far-right government, one that sought to transform Israel into an autocratic theocracy. For instance, his government proposed a contentious law to reduce minority rights, make it harder to file complaints against corruption, and legalize the annexation of the West Bank. His plans triggered massive protests around the country.
The October 7 attacks were heinous, and they provided Netanyahu with the perfect excuse that would allow him to stay in power: he shifted the narrative to Palestinian rights – including the right to self-determination – as an existential threat to all Jews, justifying thus the need for a long war in Gaza.
In other words, it is in Netanyahu’s interest to keep Israel in a permanent state of war. To do so, he must reject all diplomatic negotiations and place the blame of their failure on the other party.
At this point, Netanyahu is buying time to present the messianic radicals, on whom he relies on to stay in power, with concrete results, ones that would save his image and political career. His undeclared goals would be the annexation of Gaza, the West Bank, and possibly south Lebanon. The hostages are not among his primary concerns.
Under international law, annexation of territory is illegal. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) said Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal and ordered Israel to stop its illegal settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip. The United Nations even declared these settlements as “settler-colonialism.” Netanyahu’s response was that the ICJ’s decision is based on lies.
The occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights is equally illegal, and the on-going ground invasion in Lebanon is not only a violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and an act of war, but also may be the excuse to occupy south Lebanon and annex it.
C. J. Polychroniou: Hezbollah emerged in Lebanon largely in response to the Israeli invasion of that country in 1982. It is an Iran-backed Shiite Islamist militant group and political party with lawmakers in the Lebanese parliament and is seen in fact as something like “a state within a state.” What does Hezbollah do in Lebanon and how much support does it have?
Mireille Rebeiz: Over time, Hezbollah’s popularity shifted inside Lebanon. Hezbollah itself was born in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon and imposed a brutal two-months siege on Beirut killing an estimated number of 17,000 to 19,000 people. While Israel retreated from Beirut, it kept south Lebanon under occupation till 2000. During this period, it illegally detained thousands of Lebanese resisting the occupation. Over 200 were detained and tortured in the Khiam Detention Center.
From 1982 till early 2000, many Lebanese supported Hezbollah and saw it as the guardian of Lebanon’s sovereignty and its liberator. The shift began in 2000 when Israel withdrew from the south. Many Lebanese started speaking up against Hezbollah’s armed presence in Lebanon, its alliance to the Syrian regime, and its commitment to Iranian ideology.
As a matter of fact, Hezbollah explicitly supported the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad despite the numerous reports of severe human rights violations in Syria. As to Iran, in its 1985 Manifesto, Hezbollah vowed its allegiance to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini and made explicit its wish to create an Islamic state in Lebanon.
And many paid a heavy price for speaking out. Former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri was assassinated on February 14, 2005, and fingers pointed at Hezbollah and Syria. Many Lebanese journalists and political figures were also assassinated: a blast killed the anti-Syrian journalist, Samir Kassir. The former Communist party leader George Hawi and the journalist and lawmaker Gibran Tueni were also killed in car bombs.
This wave of killings sparked the Cedar Revolution, which clearly expressed the Lebanese’s opposition to Hezbollah and Syria.
In the past two decades, this opposition continued and took different forms.
In 2005, the anti-Hezbollah and anti-Syria bloc won the parliamentary elections.
In 2015, the environmental movement “You Stink” was born. It criticized the State’s inability to sustainably manage waste, and it opposed all political parties, including Hezbollah. In 2019, massive protests erupted all over the country under the slogan of “All Means All” to denounce the corrupt elites.
There is no doubt that Hezbollah operates as “a state within a state.” In light of the weakness of the State of Lebanon, Hezbollah offers its own healthcare, education system and other social services to the Shiite community. It functions inside and outside the governmental structure and unilaterally holds the decision for peace/war.
In 1992, Hezbollah participated in parliamentary elections and won several seats in the Parliament. In 2005, it entered the government. Alone, they were never a majority. However, their presence was strong enough to oppose any parliamentary or governmental decision that would go against their own interests.
C. J. Polychroniou: Nasrallah was being considered as something of a pragmatist rather than an ideologue. It is now quite conceivable that the next Hezbollah leadership might be more driven by revenge than Nasrallah was. At any rate, what does Nasrallah’s death mean for Hezbollah, Lebanon, and the Middle East? Will Iran become directly involved in the conflict?
Mireille Rebeiz: Nasrallah’s death is a definite blow to the group, and it did not take long for Iran to respond. In fact, Iran launched several missiles into Israel to avenge the killing of three of its top leaders: Hamas Chairman Ismail Haniyeh, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, and Deputy Commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Abbas Nilforushan. Iran made it clear that this is a self-defense attack and that it will respond further should Israel attack Iran.
Ironically, Hezbollah started this war to support Hamas and the Palestinian cause. Now, the attention has completely shifted from Gaza and the West Bank to Iran, Israel, and the United States.
C. J. Polychroniou: Under president Joe Biden, US foreign policy in the Middle East has been a complete failure. Over the past several months, Biden has said on countless occasions that “we are closer than ever” to a Gaza ceasefire only to see Netanyahu turn Gaza into a graveyard. Biden called for a 21-day ceasefire along the Israel-Lebanon border only to see Netanyahu make him look again like a bumbling idiot. How do you explain the US-Israel relationship?
Mireille Rebeiz: The US is Israel’s closest and proudest ally. However, the failure of US foreign policy in the Middle East is in large part to blame for the recent events. At no point in the past two decades did the US lead any serious diplomatic dialogue on Israel – Palestine.
President Biden continues to support a far-right government in Israel irrespective of the consequences in the region and the major escalation we are witnessing. Many Americans are horrified by this support and the US’ potential complicity in atrocities in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s’ visit to the United Nations, his rejection of the 21-day cease-fire, and the immediate attacks that followed in Lebanon indicate a clear separation between what the US would like to see and what Israel wants.
Stephen Collinson speaks of a humiliating pattern indicating American impotency in curtailing Israel’s defiance, and the results are obvious: Gaza is leveled with over 41,000 civilians killed, of which 17,000 are children. Lebanon is under attack with a ground invasion in progress, and violence is escalating in the West Bank.
C. J. Polychroniou: Gaza is gone, and there are fears that Israel could turn Lebanon into a second Gaza. In your view, what does the future hold for Lebanon?
Mireille Rebeiz: So far, the rhetoric is that Israel will only bomb areas where Hezbollah fighters are located or areas suspected of storing Hezbollah’s weapons.
The level of destruction is massive, and the number of casualties is on the rise. I would like to believe that Lebanon will not turn into a second Gaza. However, the situation is fluid, and it depends on on-going diplomatic negotiations and the arrival of other actors on the scene such as the Houthis in Yemen or Kata’ib Hizballah in Iraq or even Iran.
In any case, I pray that Lebanon will be spared. Lebanon is in the middle of a major storm. As US-backed Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants are exchanging fires and settling debts, the Lebanese people are caught in the middle of the crossfire.
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Ultimately, Israel's Treatment of Its Neighbors Will Come Back to Haunt It
Netanyahu, more than anyone else, is persuading the Arab world that an Israel that behaves like this, does not belong to this region.
Oct 02, 2024
A ritual is performed every time Israel starts another war, before the white phosphorus rains down, before the fear and panic of people fleeing their homes, before the footage of stunned survivors sifting through the rubble of collapsed apartment blocks.
It’s called the cease-fire ritual—a public display of handwashing. It’s the charade of pretending that there are honest diplomats out there trying to search every avenue, stretch every sinew, to stop this bedlam from starting.
Much of it is choreographed. Other parts are improvised. But be sure about one thing: It is pantomime. It bears no relationship to reality.
Nothing can persuade its Arab neighbors that Israel cannot live with them in peace more than the course on which Israel is currently set—a course that targets and threatens Christians, Muslims, Shia, and Sunni alike.
Hours before Israel declared that its ground attack on Lebanon had begun, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot was vainly insisting in a media conference in Beirut that his proposed 21-day cease-fire was “still on the table.”
As he was doing so, the U.S., France’s co-sponsor, was briefing journalists that cease-fire talks had stopped. This position went through several iterations as the afternoon wore on, and the contradictions accumulated.
The U.S. simultaneously wanted a diplomatic solution, while describing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination as an “unalloyed good.” It claimed to have restrained Israel to a limited operation on the border, while also expressing anxiety about the humanitarian aspect of the operation. And it pledged to continue to work on de-escalating tensions while acknowledging that Israel was a sovereign country that made its own decisions.
If this charade sounds horribly familiar, that’s because it is.
Cut through the verbiage and the bottom line—as the Pentagon has confirmed—is that the U.S. supports a ground invasion of Lebanon, and cease-fire plans can go hang.
Desire for Vengeance
The same happened in Gaza a year ago. Israel’s “right to defend itself” is shorthand for flattening every neighborhood unfortunate enough to live next to it.
This macabre dance serves a purpose: Virtually every media outlet in the Western world on Tuesday described the unfolding operation in Lebanon as “targeted” or “limited”—precise commando raids that go in and come back out—just as they did during the initial phase of the Gaza war.
“We do not expect it will look like 2006,” a U.S. official toldThe Washington Post.
Meanwhile, Israeli diplomats and generals could not stop themselves from blurting out the truth. Mike Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., said: “The American administration… did not limit us in time. They, too, understand that following Nasrallah’s assassination, there is a new situation in Lebanon and there is a chance for reshaping.”
A “reshaping” of Lebanon does not mean a targeted operation limited to the border. Nor was limitation in the thoughts of one Israeli army commander, who noted: “We have a great privilege to write history as we did in Gaza here in the north.”
Rage and hate speech have reached psychotic levels in Israel. The desire for vengeance directed against the people of Gaza has swiftly found a new target: the people of Lebanon.
Nir Dvori of Channel 12 News gloated that “Nasrallah died in torment” amid reports that the Hezbollah leader had suffocated. The head of the Shlomi town council welcomed the ground invasion, saying: “It is necessary to cleanse the area.”
Political commentator Ben Caspit dreamed of the “day after” such a cleansing operation, suggesting that even the grandmothers of any fighter in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force who crossed back over the Litani River should “die at that moment.”
Funny he should mention the Litani River, whose name has often been invoked as the upper limit of southern Lebanon that Israel wants to clear of Hezbollah rockets—because that, too, is turning into a myth. The military ambitions of this operation go far deeper into Lebanon.
Barely 12 hours after the U.S. State Department said it had limited Israel’s operation, the Israeli military issued evacuation orders to more than 20 towns and villages in southern Lebanon. “You must head immediately to the north of the al-Awali River,” near Sidon, army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on X (formerly Twitter).
Redesigning the Middle East
This indicates that Israel has claimed as its area of military operations the whole of southern Lebanon, almost one-third of the country. In a stroke, Israel doubled its area of operations.
This is in line with the promise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made in the hours after Hamas’ attack a year ago.
“We are going to change the Middle East,” Netanyahu told officials visiting Jerusalem from the country’s south, where Hamas had struck on 7 October 2023.
Jared Kushner, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and real estate investor who has apparently spent hours studying Hezbollah and considers himself an expert on the subject, wrote similarly on X: “September 27 [the date of Nasrallah’s killing] is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough… Anyone who has been calling for a cease-fire in the North is wrong.
“There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance.”
Netanyahu and his American backers will change the Middle East by invading Lebanon, that is for sure. But not quite in the way they imagine.
After leading the liberation of southern Lebanon after 18 years of occupation, and having led the battle against Israel in 2006, in Hezbollah’s eyes successfully, Nasrallah kept the northern border quiet for nearly two decades.
Under Nasrallah’s rule, Hezbollah was totally absorbed in another fight altogether: the civil war in Syria. This had many consequences. It downplayed the primacy of the struggle to liberate Palestine. And Hezbollah, as it grew in size and political importance, became easier for Israel’s Mossad to infiltrate.
Some of the major operations over the past month, such as the supply of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, were years in the making. The exact locations of Hezbollah’s bunkers, and the movement of targets between them, were also the result of years of work and research.
Dramatic Contrast
None of what transpired to deliver a body blow to Hezbollah was unprepared, which is why it contrasts so dramatically with the difficulties Israel has experienced in attempting to decapitate Hamas in Gaza.
But Israel was also helped by Hezbollah and Iran’s “strategic patience,” or their lack of response to its mounting attacks on their commanders and leaders. Hezbollah never took revenge for the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, the leader of its military wing. Nor did it reply in kind to the assassination of senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri earlier this year in its heartland of Dahiyeh in Beirut.
The meekness of the response from Hezbollah and Iran only gave Israel the confidence to redouble its blows on Lebanon and Syria.
Every time this happened, both Hezbollah and Iran went out of their way to say they did not want to start a war with Israel; and that their campaign was in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza and would stop the moment a cease-fire was reached.
And when they did strike, it was generally, although not exclusively, on Israeli military targets. Hezbollah’s rockets and propaganda videos were demonstrative, designed to show its power, not to use it.
In hindsight, this strategy has proved to be a strategic mistake, for which Hezbollah is paying today—because it gave Israel the confidence to do what it is now doing to Lebanon.
Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah have outnumbered Hezbollah’s replies by five to one.
This is not just the miscalculation of those who are routinely dubbed hardliners in Lebanon and Iran. Reformist Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said he was lied to by the Americans, who promised a cease-fire in Gaza if Iran could restrain itself from replying to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran.
It was the failure of Iran’s strategic restraint that led on Tuesday night to the bombardment of more than 180 missiles on targets across Israel. After the attack, Pezeshkian still maintained that Iran did not seek a war with Israel, but the policy of restraint has clearly been dumped. One can expect Hezbollah and all armed groups in Yemen and Iraq to be more active.
But an even bigger miscalculation is being made by Israel in its desire to strike while the iron is hot.
Untamed Aggression
Israel is reengineering the entire Middle East to hate it, while the Palestinian issue remains unresolved. It is reverse engineering a period of three decades, since the Oslo Accords, when the Palestinian conflict lost its supremacy and centrality in the Arab world.
Nothing is doing more than Israel’s untamed aggression to heal the deep divisions in the Arab world created by the counter-revolution to the Arab Spring.
When you drop 80 tonnes of explosives to kill Nasrallah and kill 300 others in doing so, you move him from being a symbol of resistance to a legend.
“The symbol is gone, the legend is born, and the resistance continues,” was how Lebanese politician Suleiman Frangieh, a scion of one of the country’s leading Maronite families, put it.
Ibrahim al-Amin, the editor of Al Akhbar, a newspaper close to Hezbollah, compared Nasrallah to Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who is regarded as the third imam in Shia Islam.
He wrote: “Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah did not imagine himself in the image of Hussain when he fell as a martyr. He is not in Hussain’s position when the world has let him down. Rather, he is in the image of Hussain who got up and fought in defence of a right that the cost of collecting is very high… [Nasrallah] has become an eternal symbol for every rebel in the face of injustice, and… he was martyred in defense of Jerusalem and Palestine.”
Nasrallah had a charismatic appeal as an orator to his Shia constituency and the pro-Palestinian masses in the Arab world, in the same way that former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had for the Arab nationalist movement in his time.
In death, Nasrallah promises to do that much.
Profound Consequences
Of course, this is not the view of the Arab elites who have spent so much of their careers cozying up to the U.S. and Israel. But even they have to acknowledge the passions coursing through their people.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman used Israel as a path to being taken seriously by Washington. But even he is brutally candid about his limits as a leader.
“Seventy percent of my population is younger than me,” the 39-year-old ruler reportedly told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. “For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.”
A Saudi official disputed this account of Mohammed bin Salman’s conversation with Blinken, but it bears the ring of truth.
Yes, the region is being redesigned by an Israel that has broken its leash.
Nothing can persuade its Arab neighbors that Israel cannot live with them in peace more than the course on which Israel is currently set—a course that targets and threatens Christians, Muslims, Shia, and Sunni alike.
Netanyahu, more than anyone else, is persuading them that an Israel that behaves like this, does not belong to this region.
This will have profound strategic consequences for the future. So is Nasrallah’s death truly an “unalloyed good” for the region?
Beware what you wish for, because it just may happen.
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