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ON THE DANGERS OF ISRAEL’S ASSASSINATION OF NASRALLAH  
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Paul R. Pillar
September 29, 2024
Responsible Statecraft
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_ Israel seems to forget that Nasrallah was a more effective version
of the last Hezbollah leader it assassinated in 1992 _

A mourner holds up a poster of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah with a quotation of him: We will definitely win. At
Enqelab-e-Eslami (Islamic Revolution) St in downtown Tehran, Iran,
September 30, 2024, Vahid Salemi/AP

 

The most immediate and visible consequences of Israel’s rapidly
escalated assault in Lebanon are being felt in Lebanon itself.

As with Israel’s year-long devastation
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of the Gaza Strip, Israeli military operations are claiming many
civilian lives. According to the Lebanese health ministry, more than
1,000 people, including at least 87 children, have been killed
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by those operations during the past two weeks. More than 90,000 people
have been displaced from their homes.

The death toll sharply increased Friday with the Israeli attacks south
of Beirut that killed Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah.
Those attacks, on a densely populated neighborhood, flattened
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several residential buildings.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel’s fight is
with Hezbollah, not Lebanon, but Lebanon is suffering from the fight.
Even before the recent attacks, Lebanon was in a deep economic crisis
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Its accompanying political
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crisis will not be made any better by attempting to disembowel an
organization that is one of the Lebanon’s major political parties
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which has ministers in government and lawmakers in the parliament, and
has been a member of coalitions including Christians and others.

The Israeli assault, including the killing of Nasrallah, will not
eliminate the ability, and certainly not the willingness, of elements
within Lebanon to respond forcefully to Israel’s actions. Israel’s
operations — like those against Hamas — are based on the false
rationale that threats of violence against Israel originate with the
malign nature of certain groups, and that the only appropriate
response is thus to kill as many members, and preferably leaders, of
those groups as it can.

The principal driver of anti-Israeli violence is anger over Israel’s
own actions. This does not depend on the nature or even the existence
of any specific group. As the long history
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of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians illustrates, if any one
resistance group is beaten down or fades into irrelevance, the anger
and desire to strike back will find other channels.

It should be recalled that Hezbollah’s establishment and rapid rise
in strength in the early 1980s owed much to widespread anger over an
earlier Israeli attack on Lebanon — a full-scale invasion
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that, among other ugliness, featured the massacre
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Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Hezbollah won much popular support by
presenting itself as the chief defender of the Lebanese against
Israeli depredations.

Israel has a history of decapitating Hezbollah, and the approach has
not gone well for Israel. In 1992, it used an attack by helicopter
gunships to kill
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the secretary-general of Hezbollah at the time, Abbas al-Musawi. The
most significant effect in Lebanon was to open the position for
Nasrallah, who proved to be a more effective leader of the group than
Musawi was.

Additional history relevant to the kind of violence likely to grow out
of the current fighting includes two lethal bombings in Buenos Aires,
each of which probably was a reprisal for Israeli attacks on Lebanese
Shia interests back in the Middle East. In March 1992, a truck bomb
with a suicide driver exploded
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at the front of the Israeli embassy, killing 29 and wounding 242. A
claim of responsibility
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Jihad Organization — widely perceived to be a cover name for
Hezbollah — stated that the attack was reprisal for the killing of
Musawi the previous month.

In May 1994, Israeli commandoes kidnapped
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Lebanese Shia guerrilla leader Mustafa Dirani, while at the same time
raiding a Hezbollah camp in southern Lebanon. Two months later, a
suicide truck bombing [[link removed]] of
a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires killed 85 and injured over
300. As an official Israel report later acknowledged
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the attack may have been payback for the Israeli operations in
Lebanon.

The recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon — especially the killing of
Nasrallah — give Hezbollah at least as much motivation as it had in
the 1990s to retaliate. Regardless of how much Israeli strikes may
have weakened Hezbollah’s ability to fight a conventional war in the
Levant, its capacity for irregular operations elsewhere is probably
undiminished. The chance of terrorist reprisals against
Israeli-related soft targets during the next few months is high.

If such an attack occurs, the reaction of outside observers,
especially in the United States, probably will include something along
the lines of, “Hezbollah is a terrorist group, and that’s what
terrorist groups do.” Such a response will perpetuate the mistake
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of viewing terrorism as a fixed group of bad guys rather than as a
tactic that different groups and nations have used for different
purposes. That mistake impedes understanding of the nature of the
conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and its underlying causes.

Israel has long used terrorist tactics in this conflict, including car
bombings
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and other clandestine assassinations
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It added to that record with its recent use of explosive-rigged pagers
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impossibility of controlling who would become victims when thousands
of the devices were detonated remotely, along with the clandestine
nature of the operation, fully qualified it as a terrorist attack.
That the principal intended targets were members of Hezbollah does not
remove that qualification, partly because being a member of
Hezbollah—a multifaceted political as well as paramilitary
organization—is not the same as being a combatant involved in
fighting Israel.

Even insofar as true combatants were involved, a useful comparison is
with the deadliest attack by Hezbollah against U.S. interests: the
suicide truck bombing
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of the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, in which 241 U.S.
military personnel died. The vast majority of Americans would consider
that incident to be terrorism, despite the reservations of sticklers
who say that because the victims were military personnel on an
overseas deployment, the event should instead be considered warfare.
If the bombing of the Marine barracks is terrorism, then Israel’s
pager operation certainly is too, given that the targets were not even
on a foreign military mission but were mostly in their own homes,
businesses, or neighborhoods when the devices exploded.

Even more fundamental than niceties about how to define terrorism is
the broader pattern of political violence that causes innocent persons
to suffer. Regardless of whether the violence is inflicted by F-16s or
by truck bombs, the suffering is just as bad and the relevant moral
issues basically the same. If Israel uses one method of inflicting
such violence — and it has inflicted far more
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of it than its adversaries have inflicted on it — while Hezbollah
uses a different method, that difference reflects the available
capabilities of each side rather than any morally or politically
relevant distinction.

U.S. policymakers should reflect on all this, especially the prospect
of terrorist reprisals, as they shape their responses to the escalated
warfare in Lebanon. They also should reflect on the hazards of the
United States again becoming a target of terrorism itself. Hezbollah
will be seeking to retaliate against Israel, but with the United
States already having become more of a potential target
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because of its association with the Israeli destruction of Gaza, that
hazard will increase to the extent it allows itself to become
associated as well with the Israeli offensive in Lebanon.

The attack that killed Nasrallah was one more in a long series of
Israeli actions taken without
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even informing the United States, let alone taking into account any
U.S. views. But the continued unconditional support that the United
States nonetheless gives to Israel, especially including munitions
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that Israel uses in its lethal attacks, makes the United States also
responsible, in the eyes of the world, for the resulting casualties
and suffering.

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Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for
Security Studies of Georgetown University and a non-resident fellow at
the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an
Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not
necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.

* Hassan Nasrallah
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* Hezbollah General Secretary; Lebanon; Israel;
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