By TARIQ ALI*
Nasrallah understood Israel better than most. His successor will have to learn fast
To kill Hassan Nasrallah, one of the most popular leaders of the resistance (and not only among Shiites), the Israeli Armed Forces (IDF) had to destroy several buildings, launch terrorist attacks through messaging devices and, once again, kill hundreds of innocent people, dropping at least fifteen US-made bombs.
Benjamin Netanyahu gave the order to set fire to the buildings in southern Beirut while he was in the United States to address the UN General Assembly. Just to rub it in. The true “special relationship” is sacred and eternal. Hassan Nasrallah will not rest in peace.
As we now know, neither Genocide Joe nor the other leaders of the gang in the West, nor their proxies in the Arab world who support him, care how many Arabs are killed or in which country. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen: the US and its proxies have watered them with blood. The attitude was summed up by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after Muammar Gaddafi was lynched and the nation was effectively handed over to jihadist factions: “We came, we saw, we killed him".
The post-11/XNUMX wars acclimated many Western citizens and the politicians they elected to such routine torture and murder. The Israeli genocide in Gaza did the rest. Jubilant Israeli cabinet ministers applauded each atrocity and called for more. Israeli TV networks broadcast footage of ordinary Zionist women screaming that their children were superior to their “filthy Arab” counterparts, who deserved only death.
Os establishments The political and cultural figures who tolerate the death camps in Palestine will now regard the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah as a triumph and “collateral damage” – 700 dead in airstrikes and over 50 in air strikes pagers e walkie-talkies, in addition to thousands of injured – as necessary.
That Hassan Nasrallah was an extremely astute strategist and tactician is acknowledged by both his supporters and his enemies. Speaking to Noam Chomsky once in Santa Fe, he confessed that the two most intelligent political leaders he had ever met were Hugo Chavez and Hassan Nasrallah, but he could not say this in public. Both are now dead, so I can say this for him. I never met Hassan Nasrallah personally, but Noam Chomsky was impressed by how well informed he was about Israel, the US, and his pimps in the Arab world.
Mainstream commentators are asking whether he is “irreplaceable”. The exact model – a self-taught working-class militant, radicalised as a teenager by the Iranian revolution, the leader of the militias that drove Israel out of Lebanon to the delight of the Arab world – is hard to recreate. His broadcasts were a fascinating combination of classical Arabic, incisive analysis and psychologically sharp, popular expressions of the Lebanese street.
However, there are a number of available replacements. Hassan Nasrallah was well aware of his fate. The IDF/Mossad had been trying to eliminate him for decades. He personally oversaw the political, educational, and military training of several hundred cadres. Israel’s regular attacks on Hamas leaders have not eliminated the organization as a military force, as October 7 deadly demonstrated. Despite the loss of its leader, Hezbollah will find a new one. No one is irreplaceable.
Will Iran wage war on Israel? Hard to predict. Iranian leaders are aware that this is what Israel is trying to provoke, but Iran-US relations have a different logic. The clerics in Tehran supported the Iraq war and the US intervention in Afghanistan, hoping that these acts of goodwill would be met with a friendly response. Perhaps Barack Obama would fly to Tehran as Richard Nixon once did to Beijing to promote peace and sign a treaty.
The Israeli lobby in the US has effectively shut down that possibility. And the Iranian leaders, nationalists above all, who have tried so hard to do so have been left in the lurch. They seem unlikely to launch an all-out attack. Israel, however, knows that the Islamic Republic is on the defensive and will almost certainly seize the opportunity to inflict further blows.
Will Hezbollah engage in revenge killings? It is quite possible, but they will choose their own time and pace. Benjamin Netanyahu remains extremely popular in his own country, and killing him would not be appreciated by many Israelis. But the mask has slipped. Gaza has seen the collapse of international law, human rights norms, and the courts established by the “international community” in the past. If US leaders refuse to pull the Israelis by the feet, who can?
Hassan Nasrallah understood Israel better than most. His successor will have to learn fast. The 19th-century German philosopher Bruno Bauer once wrote that “only he who knows his prey better than it knows itself can defeat it.” To this one might add a warning. An eye for an eye can blind the world, the elixir of revenge can poison the mind. The resistance must think carefully before the next attack.
*Tariq Ali is a journalist, historian and writer. Author, among other books, of clash of fundamentalisms (Record). [https://amzn.to/3Q8qwYg]
Translation: Rôney Rodrigues for the website Other words.
Originally published on the blog of New Left Review
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