The Illusion of a Solution: Killing Hassan Nasrallah
The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern. Ignore base causes. Ignore context. Target leaders, and target personnel. See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot. Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.
The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations. The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe. These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the nation state and plundering self-interest, leaving aside the complexities of ethnic belonging and tribal dispositions. Tragically, such cartographic fictions tended to keep company with crime, dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing and enthusiastic hatreds.
Since October 7, when Hamas flipped the table on Israel’s heralded security apparatus to kill over 1,200 of its citizens and smuggle over 200 hostages into Gaza, historical realities became present with a nasty resonance. While Israel falsely sported its credentials as a peaceful state with dry cleaned democratic credentials ravaged by Islamic barbarians, Hamas had tapped into a vein of history stretching back to 1948. Dispossession, racial segregation, suppression, were all going to be addressed, if only for a moment of vanguardist and cruel violence.
To the north, where Lebanon and Israel share yet another nonsense of a border, October 7 presented a change. Both the Israeli Defence Forces and Hezbollah took to every bloodier jousting. It was a serious affair: 70,000 Israelis displaced to the south; tens of thousands of Lebanese likewise to the north. (The latter are almost never mentioned in the huffed commentaries of the West.)
The Israeli strategy in this latest phase was made all too apparent by the number of military commanders and high-ranking operatives in Hezbollah the IDF has targeted. Added to this the pager-walkie talkie killings as a prelude to a likely ground invasion of Lebanon, it was clear that Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, figured as an exemplary target.
Hezbollah confirmed the death of its leader in a September 27 strike on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh and promised “to continue its jihad in confronting the enemy, supporting Gaza and Palestine, and defending Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people.” Others killed included Ali Karki, commander of the organisation’s southern front, and various other commanders who had gathered.
Israeli officials have been prematurely thrilled. Like deluded scientists obsessed with eliminating a symptom, they ignore the disease with habitual obsession. “Most of the senior leaders of Hezbollah have been eliminated,” claimed a triumphant Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called the measure “the most significant strike since the founding of the State of Israel.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated with simplicity that killing Nasrallah was necessary to “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come” and enable displaced Israelis to return to their homes in the north.
Various reports swallowed the Israeli narrative. Reuters, for instance, called the killing “a heavy blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.”Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr opined that this “will be a major setback for the organisation.” But the death of a being is never any guarantee for the death of an idea. The body merely offers a period of occupancy. Ideas will be transferred, grow, and proliferate, taking residence in other organisations or entities. The assassinating missile is a poor substitute to addressing the reasons why such an idea came into being.
A dead or mutilated body merely offers assurance that power might have won the day for a moment, a situation offering only brief delight to military strategists and the journalists keeping tabs on the morgue’s latest additions. It is easy, then, to ignore why Hezbollah became a haunting consequence of Israel’s bungling invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Easy to also ignore the 1985 manifesto, with its reference to the organisation’s determination to combat Israel and those it backed, such as the Christian Phalangist allies in the Lebanese Civil War, and to remove the Israeli occupying force.
Such oblique notions as “degrading” the capacity of an ideological, religious group hardly addresses the broader problem. The subsequent shoots from a savage pruning can prove ever more vigorous. The 1992 killing of Hezbollah’s secretary-general Abbas al-Musawi, along with his wife and son, merely saw the elevation of Nasrallah. Nasrallah turned out to be a more formidable, resourceful and eloquent proposition. He also pushed other figures to the fore, such as the recently assassinated Fuad Shukr, who became an important figure in obtaining the group’s vast array of long-range rockets and precision-guided missiles.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi of California State University, San Marcos, summarises the efforts of Israel’s high-profile killing strategy as shortsighted feats of miscalculation. “History shows every single Israeli assassination of a high-profile political or military operator, even after being initially hailed as a game-changing victory, eventually led to the killed leader being replaced by someone more determined, adept and hawkish.” Another Nasrallah is bound to be in tow, with several others in incubation.
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John C -
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Clakka
Return to home pageHesbollah and Hamas need to target senior zionist officials in the same way cowardly way. Should not be too difficult to get a fix on the genocidal scumbag slug known as netenyahu and his nazi-like storm trooper generals. They are always spouting their BS to the media so plenty of signals to focus in on. I would laugh my head off it the slimy pond scum’s mobile phone suddenly exploded taking most of his head with it. It is the very least the sub-human sleazebag deserves.
Some balance of aggression, some equality in totals of players lost, might encourage peace talks with a slight chance, but, that would mean a very high total of zionist terminations, eliminations, discontinuations. But, that might seem fair to many. Meanwhile, war industry profiteers are doing well, everywhere, every time…
We are told (constantly) that Israel has a right to self defence but that the Palestinians in Gaza did not – evidently because they are not a state.
So does this mean that the Lebanese have a right to self defence when attacked by an external belligerent force ?
Yes, it does seem that Netanyahu is now a legitimate target for assassination.
There seems to be a widespread misapprehension that targetting senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials for assassination is designed to achieve some strategic objective. Too much reading of Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed” I suspect.
The truth is a little more subtle and recognises that brute force will not completely suppress non-government actors ( ie terrorists) or their ideology: the best that can be hoped for is to control their activities with the minimum amount of effort. So governments target the most efficient and ruthless of the non-government actors and allow the lesser, marginally more moderate opponents to survive and advance within the NGA organisation.
Let’s see who gets to survive the current round of targetted killings!
The whole concept of “defensive” offense is just plain bullshit. The Israelis must stop their slaughter of innocents.
History has proven over and over and over that every attempt to quell an ideal, a concept of social justice for “insert here” with the use of brute force and propaganda is doomed to failure.
The portrait of History is always painted most glowingly by those who control the narrative, but history and Truth are two very different pictures
Whether it be here in Australia during the mid1800’s goldrushes, or South Africa, or the PRC, or the neverending struggles of the Middle East, the big personalities are the ones whose ideals get carried like banners by the ones who come after, whether that person be saint or sinner. Peter Lalor. Nelson Mandela. Mugabe. David Ben Gurion. Hassan Nasrallah. All inspired their countrypeople, and brought about Big Change. Some good. Some not so good. Damn paintbrushes again.
Israel can murder as many “militants” as it can before even America says “No More” but what will Israel do when the children of the slain grow up without the guiding hands and thoughts of their parents?
“Where are my mother and father?.. The f..ing israelis murdered them, my son” is guaranteed to breed the next generation of people wishing destruction on “the others” and setting their hearts on nothing else.
What Hamas perpetrated on October 7 last year was an attrocity. Inexcusable. Unforgivable. No question. The Israeli response is just as bad. Just as Inexcusable. Just as Unforgivable.
They consider themselves to be a civilised people amid savages, without a though, or care, for their own actions. Oh to be so arrogant and self sure.
This disaster of apocalyptic proportions that is unfolding as we read, write, speak, did not start on October 7. In movie-speak, there is a Prequel. Or ten. And several spinoffs that might explain the whos, wheres, whys. Tragically, this is no Starwars epic of the mind. This is REAL.
And it is time for ALL of the actors who even vaguely support Israel in it’s murderous campaign to take the idiot at the wheel, along with his bunch of maniacal criminal sidekicks, and nail their heads to sticks. Literally and Publicly.
With a sign below that reads “ENOUGH”
Hang on. There is no confirmation that the Hamas (and others) prison breakout killed “over 1,200” Israelis. There IS evidence – and Israeli eyewitness accounts – that many of the dead were killed by the IDF following Israel’s infamous Hannibal directive.
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
All involved and all observing know this well. Now that ‘assassinations’ have entered the Israeli (and journalistic) narrative of their m.o., it is clear that the m.o. is one of provocation and elimination, not defence and negotiation. And it is clear that they seek to make the world accustom to such m.o., despite it being an act of criminality supposedly being a root cause for the designation of ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorist group’. The UN designation circa 1994-1996 states in its declaration, para 3;
“Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them;”
The United States, of course has its own set, mainly associated with the provision or not of weaponry. Such an irony, in the face of the ‘legitimate’ international arms trading industry, and the massive ‘non-legitimate’ international arms trading industry.
It appears however that ordinary people, as well as being the ‘collateral damage’ victims, by international rhetoric and inaction or illegitimate reaction, are forced to try and untangle the ‘criminality’ and the largely irrelevant historical revisionism that disguises what is essentially commercial and acquisitive supremacist action that promotes hatred and vengeance.
And clearly, such actions initiated on entire populations constitute acts of genocide, which whether completed or not, also perpetuate and strengthen reciprocal cycles of hatred and vengeance.
That Israel claims they have no choice because their enemy hide themselves within and behind ordinary citizens is abject hypocritical nonsense, as all combatants anywhere and their commanders and politicians that drive them, also ‘hide’ themselves within and behind ordinary citizens. And this can particularly be said of Israel and the IDF, which were designed and founded as inseparable twins, which every non-Arab citizen (with minor exceptions) has by law to participate and train in, and be always available to.
Whilst it seems most ordinary citizens prefer to be in a state of cooperative thriving, among despots and clerics who’s power relies on ‘othering’, the ability to muster a voluntary standing army is diminished by the success of ordinary citizen’s secular education and their ability to master their own sustainability. So laws are devised by the despots and clerics to compel ‘loyalty’ by service as destroyers and cannon-fodder. A death cult machined by falsehoods of righteousness and loyalty. Yet, increasingly no-one wants to be cannon-fodder or suffer the generational blights of PTSD. But the despots and clerics, to provide as much as possible, a ‘palatable’ moral distance for the earning of ordinary citizen’s loyalty, not only amp up divisive rhetoric and plots, but also devise mines, IEDs, long range explosions and ballistics, unmanned craft and vehicles, robots and ‘star wars’.
Will it be that the masters of death cults, peddle their disinformation and misinformation, and have their wars deployed by unwitting citizens in their living rooms or by their phones?