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KILLING HEZBOLLAH LEADERS FAILED 30 YEARS AGO. IT WON’T WORK NOW  
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Elia Ayoub
October 4, 2024
972 Magazine
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_ Instead of debilitating Hezbollah, Israel’s assassination of
Hassan Nasrallah may prove to be a major PR boost for the embattled
organization. _

A portrait of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is placed on a table
with drinks and food to celebrate his assassination, outside a
supermarket in Jerusalem, September 29, 2024., Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

 

On Feb. 16, 1992, a decade into the Israeli occupation of south
Lebanon
[[link removed]], Israel
assassinated Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s co-founder and
Secretary-General. At the time, Israeli media praised the army’s
decisive action, predicting
[[link removed]] that “the age of
tussling with Hezbollah on its home turf, the Buffer Zone, is over,”
and that al-Musawi’s death would mark the beginning of “a new
era.”

Such predictions were proven hollow: al-Musawi was replaced by Hassan
Nasrallah, a much more effective and charismatic leader, and Hezbollah
grew so powerful that they successfully forced the Israelis out of
south Lebanon by 2000.

Over three decades after al-Musawi’s assassination, Israel killed
his successor. Like countless others in Lebanon and beyond, I was in
shock. Nasrallah was, after all, a political figure who has been
around my entire life. His story embodied so much of postwar Lebanon
— its contradictions, trauma, violence, and impunity, but also its
moments of defiance and possibility.

Nasrallah’s death also came at a time of unprecedented domestic
weakness for Hezbollah, due to its unpopular involvement in the Syrian
civil war and its violent politics in Lebanon. In this sense,
Netanyahu’s decision to assassinate Nasrallah — turning him into a
national and pan-Arab martyr — may prove to be Hezbollah’s
greatest PR win in years.

NASRALLAH WAS NO ‘HEAD OF THE SNAKE’

“Hassan Nasrallah will no longer be able to terrorize the world,”
the Israeli army announced
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death. IDF spokesman Doron Spielman praised
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assassination as eliminating “the Diabolical head of the Hezbollah
snake,” a metaphor frequently used
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Israeli media.

Israeli newspaper headlines at a coffee shop in Jerusalem on September
29, 2024, two days after Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader
Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

It is astonishing to see how consistently Israeli leaders have adhered
to this logic, despite being proven consistently wrong for decades. As
one 1992 article in Maariv argued
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al-Musawi: “Cutting off the head of the snake has long been
considered the most efficient way of countering terrorism … if the
message of deterrence is received, and if Israel doesn’t relent,
there’s a good chance of stopping the spread of this cancer for the
long run.” Such metaphors are a convenient way to avoid dealing with
the reality of resistance movements.

Israel’s strategy of assassinating Hezbollah leaders is based on two
assumptions: that the party wholly depends on its hierarchy to
function — and thus becomes debilitated without Nasrallah — and
that killing them serves as effective deterrence.

Hezbollah does indeed have a hierarchy, and there is no doubt that
targeting high-ranking members is a blow to the group. In what ended
up being his last speech, Nasrallah even admitted that the detonation
of pagers and walkie-talkies distributed to Hezbollah members were the
result of an intelligence failure.

And yet, Hezbollah’s rockets have not stopped since Nasrallah’s
death. In fact, they have reached further into Israel than ever
before, as far as Tel Aviv and other central Israeli towns. 

View of a house that was hit from a missile fired from Lebanon
overnight, in the northern Israeli city of Tzfat, September 28, 2024.
(Ayal Margolin/Flash90)

Moreover, Nasrallah himself repeatedly made reference to his impending
assassination — and in some ways, he may have longed for it. A
recently resurfaced interview
[[link removed]] from the early
1990s shows Nasrallah describing martyrdom as akin to going “into a
quiet, comfortable room” in which one finds that “a cocktail is
waiting for you, and you get to hear beautiful classical music.”

For a man who has lived most of the past two decades in underground
bunkers and tunnels, martyrdom was something he believed would honor
his struggle on Earth. And at a moment of growing political crisis for
Hezbollah, Nasrallah’s death may have turned him into more of a
rallying symbol than anything he could have ever been in life.

A MIXED LEGACY FOR THE ‘LEADER OF THE RESISTANCE’

Under Nasrallah, Hezbollah had both ups and downs. The liberation of
south Lebanon in 2000, and the “divine victory” that ended the
2006 war, enabled the party to cultivate its reputation as the most
powerful “resistance” to Israeli aggression.

Yet other policies made Hezbollah deeply unpopular. In Syria,
Nasrallah’s decision to militarily intervene to prop up the regime
of Bashar al-Assad remains highly controversial, given both the
history of Syria’s own occupation of the country until 2005, and the
regime’s brutal violence against Syrian protesters and civilians
since the 2011 revolution.

Palestinian supporters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PLFP) wave the group’s red flag, the Syrian flag, and the
Palestinian flag as they holds poster of Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah, during a rally on May 7,2013. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

In Lebanon itself, Hezbollah became the primary backer of a corrupt
sectarian status quo that became the target of a Lebanese uprising in
October 2019. The party and its Shia ally Amal decided to repress
anti-government protesters, cementing Nasrallah’s reputation as the
“covenant and protector of the thieves’ government,” to quote
[[link removed]] the
late Lebanese writer Elias Khoury. Hezbollah’s assassination of the
Dahiya-based Shia memory worker Lokman Slim
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February 2021 was another reminder of the group’s willingness to
kill those it deemed a threat.

Had Israel continued to weaken Hezbollah through its notorious Dahiya
Doctrine, destroying both military and civilian infrastructure
throughout south Lebanon, Nasrallah would have found himself in an
increasingly precarious political situation: blamed for hiding away
while so many civilians were being massacred. In a country where
Hezbollah’s reputation was already at its lowest, this could have
been a permanent blow to his role as the “leader of the
resistance.”

But thanks to Netanyahu and his military leaders, Nasrallah died as he
lived: opposing the Israeli war machine. We learned that Nasrallah was
actually in Dahiya all along — in other words, that he never left
the people he swore to defend. Until his death, he showed that he had
managed to evade one of the world’s most sophisticated surveillance
states for three decades, while living a mere 100 kilometers north of
the Israeli border. 

How many billions were spent just to track and kill this one man? The
very possibility of his survival, it seems, was too terrifying for
Israel to fathom. Nasrallah was apparently worth dropping 80 entire
bombs
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leveling entire buildings filled with civilians in order to kill, a
method of assassination that shocked many in Lebanon and around the
world. The destruction was apocalyptic, a scene already familiar to
Beirutis who survived the August 4 port explosion. We will never know
exactly how many people were killed — many were pulverized out of
existence — but according to Hezbollah, Nasrallah’s body remained
relatively intact, dying from
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trauma from the force of the blast.”

What Netanyahu did was not cut off “the head of the snake.” He
elevated the leader of a movement that believes in predestination,
that the future is already written by God. Following this logic,
Netanyahu himself is now a central character in Nasrallah’s story.

Israeli soldiers seen at a staging area near the Israeli border with
Lebanon, September 27, 2024. (Ayal Margolin/Flash90)

It is also telling how much Hezbollah became so important in the
Israeli psyche, that the IDF even named one of its most notorious
doctrines after the neighborhood from which it is headquartered.
Nasrallah was living rent-free in the Israeli mind, and he will
continue haunting them for years.

ESCALATION THROUGH ESCALATION

Among the plethora of articles in 1992 praising the assassination of
al-Musawi, one made a relatively sober admission. “We don’t
believe this will do anything to advance the return of captive and
missing [Israelis],” the author argued
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Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah at the time. Over a year
later, another article
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“Hezbollah activity is predicted to escalate further,” but quoted
a military analyst urging Israel “to hit them harder.”

Israel’s military and political establishment seems once more
convinced that defeating Hezbollah requires bombing Lebanon
indiscriminately. At the time of writing, the IDF has already suffered
its first casualties
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its ground invasion. For months, Netanyahu has been itching to drag
Hezbollah and Iran into an all-out war, and by killing Nasrallah and
provoking a barrage of Iranian missiles, he may finally get what he
wants.

In the meantime, Hezbollah has yet to name Nasrallah’s successor —
although according to Naim Qassem, the group’s deputy leader, a
decision will be reached imminently. Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s
cousin who is also the head of the party’s executive council and a
member of its military council, is the likeliest candidate, and some
analysts have already declared him to be “even more hardline
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than Nasrallah.

Like the Israeli military commentators in the 1990s, both the
Netanyahu and Biden administrations have subscribed to the delusional,
Orwellian notion of “de-escalation through escalation.”
Washington, according
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expert, is “thrumming with ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’
energy,” as top White House officials see Israel’s war against
Hezbollah as a “a history-defining moment”
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will reshape the entire region. 

That we have reached this stage yet again only reveals how those with
the bigger bombs remain profoundly disconnected from reality — with
disastrous consequences for civilians across the region.

_ELIA AYOUB is a post-doctoral researcher and writer. He is the
founder of The Fire These Times podcast
[[link removed]] and co-founder of From the
Periphery media collective [[link removed]]. He holds a
PhD in Cultural Analysis on postwar Lebanon and runs a newsletter on
the region called Hauntologies [[link removed]]. He can be
found on Bluesky
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[[link removed]] and Instagram
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at iwritestuff.blog [[link removed]]._

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* Hezbollah
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* Israel
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* Lebanon
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