Updated Sep. 28, 2024 at 1 p.m.
Israeli has assassinated longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an air attack on the southern outskirts of Beirut. It is a major blow to the powerful Iran-backed Islamist organization that for decades has dominated Lebanese public life and sown terror in the region and around the world. The following profile of Nassrallah was published Aug. 27 by Beirut-based news outlet Daraj, translated and adapted from Arabic by Worldcrunch:
BEIRUT — Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s speech in late August after Israel assassinated Fouad Shukr, a top commander in the Lebanese militant group was a gesture of political realism, very different than Hezbollah supporters’ celebrations of the “victory” that Nasrallah chose not to declare.
Yet both reactions – Nasrallah’s realism and his supporters’ celebrations — have a function in the context of the Middle East conflict and rising attacks across the Lebanon-Israel border.
Nasrallah addressed Israel and the United States with his “realism,” while the Hezbollah supporters directed their celebrations to the Lebanese people, who are increasingly ridiculing the ineffectiveness of the militants’ response. One quip said that Hezbollah’s response to the July 30 assassination had been “targeting a chicken farm.”
The two messages have long co-existed in Hezbollah tradition. The Iranian-backed group has always been “realistic” in its clashes with the Israelis, and has also always been confrontational and tense in its internal discourse.
Celebration time
Hezbollah’s supporters used to celebrate such “victories.” It’s become a habit. But this time, the celebration was a kind of response to the implicit disappointment from the Israeli strikes over the past 10 months, and the dominant emotion is a feeling of relief from Nasrallah’s declaration to residents of southern Lebanon: “You can return to your homes.”
With the Israeli preemptive strikes on Hezbollah sites early Sunday, there is another variable now: Nasrallah has begun to respond directly to a new level of Israeli populist discourse . The Israeli army said that its strikes destroyed thousands of missile launchers, which supposedly spared millions of Israelis the risk of being targeted.
It seems that Netanyahu’s need to sell illusions to the Israelis dictated this amount of lying. The “thousands of missiles destroyed,” according to the Israeli narrative, was nothing more than Tel Aviv’s own need for a victory similar to the victory that we, the sons of “victorious” and bankrupt societies, have always suffered from.
Civilian v. military
In his speech, Nasrallah captured the delirium of his enemy, and met it with a degree of realism that characterized a large part of his speech — which also included some of the battlefield rhetoric that seems difficult to avoid in his speeches.
He said, and he was most likely right, that the response was prepared so that the number of missiles would not exceed 300, and that the targets were all military sites, and that Tel Aviv and none of the settlements were part of the response map.
We can conclude that Hezbollah is prepared for realistic, non-ideological negotiating terms.
This may be the first time that Nasrallah’s speech includes a distinction between civilian and military in Israel. Here, we can conclude that Hezbollah, contrary to its tense internal discourse, is prepared for realistic, non-ideological negotiating terms. Hezbollah’s response is gauged within the terms of engagement and aims to avoid targeting civilians.
Missiles and drones
With his realism, Nasrallah went so far as to acknowledge that the Israeli raids on Sunday began before Hezbollah launched its missiles and drones. On the one hand, this implies an acknowledgment of a breach that allowed the Israelis to know Hezbollah’s plan; but on the other hand, it prompts us to believe his account of the extent of the response that Hezbollah was preparing. In his speech, he cited facts that actually occurred.
The Lebanese, both Hezbollah opponents and supporters, were waiting for a victory speech, as Nasrallah has regularly offered since 2006. But it was difficult for a preacher like Nasrallah to declare a victory without any of its elements, so he left his announcement to the supporters and the media. And he took the speech to the political level.
This does not mean, of course, that Nasrallah advanced the Lebanese interest on top of Hezbollah’s, which are always driven by ideology and recruitment imperatives. He had previously dismissed this possibility since the first day of the “occupation war,” but the reality here is in a non-Lebanese regional context.
International equations
The reality is that the response will not undermine the Iranian negotiating position, which calculates in Israeli military superiority, and the American military support that Israel receives.
If we are suffering from the symptoms of “victories” and their transition from speeches to the street in the form of militia practices, parallel symptoms have begun to appear. They are represented in the inability of Hezbollah opponents in Lebanon to produce a discourse that goes beyond the injustice that the group’s hegemony has inflicted on the country.
Hezbollah has dominated Lebanon in light of internal, regional and international equations. Addressing Hezbollah as merely a tool of Iranian hegemony remains incomplete. We should instead be playing close attention to the fact that the world has begun to accept that Nasrallah is the only one who has the final say in Lebanon.
