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AFTER NASRALLAH  
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Adam Shatz
October 11, 2024
London Review of Books
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_ Hizbullah is not a personality-driven organisation, or claims not
to be, but in Nasrallah it had a leader of unusual gifts. _

Hassan Nasrallah - Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Wikipedia

 

Hassan Nasrallah’s​ death was announced on Saturday, 28 September,
the anniversary of the death of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel
Nasser, the father of Pan-Arabism. Nasser died of a heart attack in
1970, three years after his humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War, the
‘naksah’ or setback that led to Israel’s conquest of the West
Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai.
Nasrallah was killed under a fusillade of eighty bombs dropped by the
Israeli air force on his headquarters in Haret Hreik, in the southern
suburbs of Beirut. A few hours earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu had
addressed the UN General Assembly, denouncing the organisation as a
cesspool of antisemitism and vowing to press on with his war in
Lebanon. ‘He wasn’t just another terrorist. He
was _the_ terrorist,’ Netanyahu said, after it was announced that
Nasrallah was dead.

Netanyahu’s American enablers – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the
secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin – swiftly echoed the Israeli
prime minister’s celebration of Nasrallah’s death. Never mind that
Netanyahu hadn’t consulted them about the bombing, which made a
mockery of the American and French push for a ceasefire between Israel
and Hizbullah, to which Netanyahu had privately given his approval.
Never mind the Americans’ frequent warnings about the dangers of
escalation, and their stated desire to avoid a confrontation with
Iran. For Biden, the killing of Nasrallah provided a ‘measure of
justice’ for Hizbullah’s victims, from the 1983 bombings of
the US embassy and the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut to the
present. Harris called Nasrallah a ‘terrorist with American blood on
his hands’, as though Netanyahu and his cabinet colleagues had kept
their hands clean during the killing of tens of thousands of people in
Gaza and the violent displacement of more than 90 per cent of its
population – to say nothing of the wave of settler attacks and
demolitions in the West Bank, or the bombardment of southern Lebanon,
the Bekaa Valley and Beirut after the grisly pager and walkie-talkie
attacks two weeks ago. But ‘Arab blood’ does not have the same
value as American or Israeli in the moral calculus of the West.

Among his supporters in Lebanon, and for many outside the West,
Nasrallah will be remembered differently: not as a ‘terrorist’,
but as a political leader and a symbol of defiance to American and
Israeli ambitions in the Middle East. Although Hizbullah remained a
military organisation notorious for its spectacular attacks against
Western interests, the Party of God and its leader underwent a complex
evolution after the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990. It wasn’t an
unusual trajectory in the region. Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir,
former leaders of the Likud, Netanyahu’s party, both started out as
‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David
Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the
1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke
Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a
peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of
Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle in 1948. In graduating from violence
to politics, Nasrallah was following in the footsteps of his Israeli
enemies, whose careers he is said to have studied closely.

Nasrallah became Hizbullah’s leader in 1992, after Israel
assassinated his predecessor, Sheik Abbas al-Musawi. He was 31 years
old, and though he had been a leader in Hizbullah’s shura council
for five years, he was little known outside the movement’s inner
circles. To say that he proved more capable than al-Musawi is an
understatement: Nasrallah was a leader of historic proportions, one of
the figures who defined the Middle East of the last three decades. A
Lebanese writer told me recently that it was Lebanon’s curse – and
a symptom of the crisis of the secular elite – that the country’s
most talented political leader was a Shia fundamentalist.

Nasrallah was a close ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a
follower of the _velayet-e faqih_, Iran’s system of clerical rule,
but he was far from the fanatic ‘devoted to jihad, not to logic’
as portrayed by Jeffrey Goldberg in the _New Yorker_ in 2002. On the
contrary, he was a calculating, intelligent leader who seldom allowed
his fervour to overwhelm his capacity for reason; he was always
careful to consider the psychology of his enemy across the border. He
understood that Lebanon’s people, including its Shia population,
were not religious zealots, and that an Islamic state was not on the
agenda in the foreseeable future. He never tried to impose sharia on
his followers; women in his fiefdom in the southern suburbs of Beirut
were free to dress as they pleased without being harassed by morality
police. After Hizbullah’s liberation of the south from Israeli
occupation in 2000, Nasrallah made it plain that there were to be no
extrajudicial reprisals against Christians who had collaborated with
the Israelis. Instead they were taken to the border and handed over to
Israel. Shia collaborators, though, saw some retribution.

Until he led Hizbullah into the Syrian war on the side of Bashar
al-Assad’s regime, attracting the hatred of many who had once
admired him, Nasrallah appeared to be the last Arab nationalist, the
only Arab leader outside Palestine willing to stand up to Israel. He
was often compared to Nasser, but unlike Nasser, whose air force was
pulverised on the first day of the Six-Day War, he fought Israel to a
standstill in 2006, and even treated the people of Lebanon to a
televised speech announcing an impending attack on an Israeli ship,
which went up in flames as he spoke (he even briefly became an
improbable object of adulation in the Sunni Arab world). But though he
took pride in Hizbullah’s performance on the battlefield, he was
chastened by the ferocity of Israel’s bombardment, and acknowledged
that his movement’s cross-border hostage-taking operation had
offered Israel a pretext to destroy large parts of Lebanon, a mistake
that he vowed never to repeat.

Hizbullah was established in 1982, with assistance from Iran, after
the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. There had been a ceasefire between
Israel and the PLO since July 1981. But when terrorists employed by
Abu Nidal, Yasir Arafat’s sworn adversary, tried to kill Israel’s
ambassador in London in June 1982, the Israeli defence secretary,
Ariel Sharon, seized the opportunity to justify war against
Arafat’s PLO and invade Lebanon, where the PLO was based. Some
of the Shia in the south, exasperated by the heavy-handed presence of
Palestinian fighters, at first welcomed Israel’s efforts to remove
the PLO’s ‘state within a state’. But Israel rapidly made
itself an enemy, provoking a revolt by young Shia men.

Nasrallah, born in 1960, was one of them. Hizbullah is often described
in the West as an ‘Iranian-backed militia’, which it is, but most
political groups in Lebanon have cultivated foreign sponsors
(American, French, Saudi). And, as Hizbullah’s leaders often point
out, the Shia are less likely to have second passports, or second
homes in Paris and London. Whatever their ties to Iran, they are
‘sons of Lebanon’. Nasrallah grew up in a working-class, largely
Armenian quarter of Beirut, until his family was expelled by Christian
militias at the beginning of the civil war in 1975. They resettled in
the south, in the village near Tyre where his father had been born.
Nasrallah shared his father’s admiration of the Iranian-born cleric
Musa al-Sadr, whose Movement of the Deprived had promoted the
empowerment of the oppressed Shia in Lebanon before he mysteriously
disappeared on a trip to Libya in 1978. Like many young Shia,
Nasrallah also found himself drawn to Khomeini’s revolution in Iran.
And in 1982, the Islamic Republic arrived on his doorstep, when a
1500-member contingent of the Revolutionary Guard began to organise
the militia that became known as Hizbullah in the Bekaa Valley.
Nasrallah was one of its earliest members. On 23 October 1983, the
organisation made itself known to the world with a pair of suicide
bombings in Beirut targeting US and French peacekeepers, in which
more than three hundred were killed. Two years later, Hizbullah
published a communiqué in _As-Safir_, announcing its determination
to ‘expel the Americans, the French and their allies definitively
from Lebanon, putting an end to any colonialist entity on our land’,
and to replace the country’s political system with an Iranian-style
Islamic state.

When Nasrallah became secretary general in 1992 he led Hizbullah into
politics, prevailing over members who argued that the movement should
confine itself to resistance in the south and avoid getting drawn into
Lebanon’s sectarian system, though he tried to remain personally
aloof. His stature increased after his 18-year-old son, Hadi, died
fighting Israel in 1997. ‘My son had the extraordinary opportunity
to die as a martyr,’ he said. ‘If I am suffering at a personal
level, at a national level, I am happy.’ From then on, Nasrallah was
known as ‘Abu Hadi’. After the US assassinated Qasem Soleimani,
the leader of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, in
2020, Nasrallah became the most influential leader in the Iranian axis
– second only to Ayatollah Khamenei, according to some analysts. As
Hizbullah got increasingly embroiled in the Lebanese political system
it had once excoriated, Nasrallah became keen to extend his influence,
sending Hizbullah operatives to train allies in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
He gave the impression of having outgrown his small country.

Before​ he was forced to go underground in 2006, Nasrallah
occasionally made himself available to foreign reporters. I managed to
land an interview with him for the _New York Review of Books_ in
2004. At his office in Haret Hreik, my translator and I were greeted
by a journalist from Hizbullah’s television station, al-Manar, and,
after a thorough but polite search, we took the lift up a few floors.
The reception room was decorated with photographs of al-Musawi,
Khomeini and Khamenei. At the entrance was a photograph of Hadi
Nasrallah. (For all of Hizbullah’s efforts to style itself as the
beating heart of Arab nationalism, there were no photographs of Sunni
Arab leaders, a reminder of the party’s inability to shed its
sectarian origins.) During our conversation I was struck by the casual
authority Nasrallah displayed: his colleagues respected him but
didn’t seem to fear him. If he was intransigent in his views, he was
also affable and unpretentious, and never boastful. His arguments were
meticulously formulated, reflecting his reading of history and his
study of his enemy; religion never came up. (He responded to my
questions in Arabic through the translator – a Lebanese Shia woman
who worked for the UN – but clearly understood English.)

His pride in his movement’s achievement was evident. Four years
after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, Hizbullah was
still basking in the glow of victory. The party had a $100 million
annual budget, much of it supplied by Iran, and ten seats in
parliament; it continued to increase its military power in the south
and the Bekaa Valley. Nasrallah was emphatic that Hizbullah had to
retain its weapons in case Israel decided to return to Lebanon.

Israel, however, wasn’t Nasrallah’s only enemy or his only worry.
In Lebanon he remained a divisive figure, even among those who were
grateful for his battle against the occupier. There were rumours that
he had taken part in the killing of Lebanese communists in the 1980s,
as well as in the violence and hostage-taking aimed at Western
interests. As Hizbullah grew into a state within a state far bigger
and more powerful than Arafat’s had been, Nasrallah’s enemies in
Lebanon multiplied. He didn’t hesitate to use his power to exploit
the sectarian political system that Hizbullah had denounced in its
1985 communiqué, or to intimidate and sometimes murder opponents,
including Shia critics of the party, such as the journalist Lokman
Slim. Hizbullah was also implicated in some of the great calamities to
befall Lebanon in recent years, from the 2005 assassination of its
former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, to the 2020 explosion at a Beirut
port warehouse where Hizbullah had reportedly been storing ammonium
nitrate. He tried to position himself as a kingmaker above politics,
but he also called vehemently for an end to various high-profile
investigations, and even defended Riad Salameh, the disgraced head of
the central bank, after the 2019 financial collapse. Nasrallah may
have been right to lead Hizbullah into politics, but his critics were
right to warn that the Lebanese system would corrupt the party and
chip away at his own reputation for integrity.

But no decision by Nasrallah was more damaging to his party’s
standing than his intervention in the Syrian war on behalf of the
Assad dictatorship: not surprisingly, some of Assad’s victims have
expressed joy at Hizbullah’s recent humiliation. Nasrallah’s
reasons may have been pragmatic: Assad was part of the so-called Axis
of Resistance, and if he fell from power Hizbullah would not be able
to transport weapons from Iran over the Syrian border into Lebanon.
(Just as dangerous, from Hizbullah’s perspective, was the growing
strength of Sunni jihadists in the Syrian opposition, enemies of the
Shia.) But Nasrallah had styled himself as a defender of the
oppressed, and many were unhappy to see Hizbullah fighters assisting a
ruthless war of repression.

Nasrallah’s decision helped preserve the Assad regime. It also
strengthened Hizbullah’s ties with Russia. But it proved as ruinous
as Egypt’s intervention in the civil war in North Yemen in the
1960s, which Nasser described as ‘my Vietnam’. Not only did
Hizbullah lose thousands of fighters: the party of resistance was now
the party of counterinsurgency against fellow Arabs, and its
collaboration with Syrian and Russian intelligence left it susceptible
to penetration by the US and Israel. Hizbullah had targeted soldiers
in its fight against Israel, but was now party to a scorched earth
campaign in Syria that made no distinction between soldier and
civilian. After 2006, Hizbullah took part in only occasional
tit-for-tat exchanges with Israel, usually involving the Shebaa Farms,
a sliver of territory that Hizbullah claims belongs to Lebanon and
Israel to the Syrian Golan Heights, and which is still under Israeli
control. Otherwise, the border was relatively quiet – so quiet that
Sunni radicals in Lebanon accused Nasrallah of being one of Israel’s
border guards. All of that changed, however, on 8 October 2023, when
he decided to open a ‘northern front’ in support of Hamas and the
people of Gaza.

Israeli commentators, on both left and right, have argued that
Hizbullah had no reason to fire rockets at northern Israel, that it
chose to launch this conflict. Nasrallah took a different view.
Hizbullah, he believed, was ‘at the heart of the Arab-Israeli
conflict. This is one whole, and you cannot partition it. It is
ultimately one reality.’ As he saw it, he was assuming his
responsibilities within the Axis of Resistance to reduce the pressure
on his ally in Gaza. Hizbullah’s attacks on northern Israel, which
led to the evacuation of more than fifty thousand Israeli civilians,
were denounced as terrorism in the West. But many Palestinians
appreciated Nasrallah’s support, especially since none of the other
Arab leaders was doing anything to defend the people of Gaza. Mohammed
bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, spoke for many of them
when he told Antony Blinken, shortly after 7 October: ‘Do I
personally care about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people
do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.’

Nasrallah’s gamble was that by targeting military and defence
infrastructure, and largely avoiding civilian casualties, he could
show a measure of support for the people of Gaza and force Israel to
reach a ceasefire with Hamas, without leading to an escalation on the
Lebanon-Israel border. He knew that a war with Israel would be opposed
by most people in Lebanon, including many Shia, as well as by his
allies in Tehran, who wanted to reserve Hizbullah’s arsenal in case
there was an Israeli assault on Iran. But he also had to safeguard his
movement’s image as a defender of the Palestinian resistance, a
reputation that would have been destroyed if he’d failed to act.
Hence his insistence that this was not a final apocalyptic battle with
Israel: Hizbullah merely intended to deter Israeli aggression in Gaza
and would stop firing its rockets when Israel accepted a ceasefire.

Nasrallah repeatedly stressed that he had no desire for a wider war,
as did his allies in Iran, notably its conciliatory new president,
Masoud Pezeshkian, who struck an incongruously Gandhian tone in his
appeals to end the fighting in Lebanon during his visit to
the UN General Assembly. High-level Iranian responses to Israel’s
provocations – especially to the assassinations of Hizbullah and
Hamas leaders in Beirut, Damascus and Tehran – were restrained. But
Nasrallah, who had earned the respect not only of Arabs but also of
Israelis for his analysis of the intentions of Israel’s leaders, for
once misjudged his enemy, while also revealing a surprising streak of
naivety about the true balance of forces. Although Hizbullah had
succeeded in creating a state of mutual deterrence with its neighbour,
Israel had only grudgingly accepted this situation. With his attempt
to link northern Israel and Gaza on 8 October, by launching rockets
‘in solidarity’ with the Palestinians, Nasrallah offered Israel
the pretext it had long sought to rewrite the ‘rules of the game’
that had governed the border since 2006.

After 7 October Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, reportedly
wanted to strike Hizbullah first, not Hamas. Netanyahu rejected
Gallant’s advice, but the war on Hizbullah, for which Israel had
been preparing for nearly two decades, remained part of the
discussion, even as Netanyahu pretended to defer to the Biden
administration’s warnings about a regional conflagration. He knew
that Biden and Blinken would ultimately capitulate, with a feckless
ceremony of ‘concern’ and ‘caution’ over ‘the best way
forward’. Over the next eleven months, Israeli pounded southern
Lebanon, killing several hundred people and forcing nearly a hundred
thousand to flee their homes, but this troubled the Western conscience
far less than the flight of Israelis on the other side of the border.
Israel carried out 80 per cent of the attacks along the border, but
once again this disparity was hardly remarked on in the American
press, where the exodus of Arabs under Israeli violence is treated as
a natural catastrophe and described in the passive voice.

With​ the pager and walkie-talkie assaults of 17-18 September, which
killed dozens of people and injured thousands more, it became clearer
that Israel was closing in on Nasrallah and Hizbullah. The attacks
didn’t only destroy Hizbullah’s communications system: they
revealed the sheer extent of Israeli penetration into the
organisation, throwing it into a state of paralysis. Then came the
murderous bombardment of Lebanon, on the first day of which more
people died than on any day since the end of Lebanon’s civil war,
followed by the assassinations of Nasrallah and much of Hizbullah’s
high command. About 1.2 million people in Lebanon – nearly a quarter
of the population – have been displaced from their homes, and more
than 1400 killed. (One of those was a 56-year-old Lebanese-American,
Kamel Jawad, a father of four, who had been volunteering in his
hometown of Nabatieh, and whose death will be of no more interest to
the US government than that of the 26-year-old Turkish-American
Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers at a
peaceful protest near Nablus in early September.)

Hizbullah isn’t the only target: Israel has carried out strikes
against leading figures in Hamas and the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine in Lebanon, as well as against the Houthis in
Yemen. And while the world’s attention is fastened on Israel’s
wars abroad, the people of Gaza are dying in airstrikes – on 10
October, 28 people were killed while sheltering in a school in the
town of Deir al-Balah, one of more than two hundred schools bombed by
the Israeli forces in the last year – and entire neighbourhoods in
the West Bank are being flattened by Israeli bulldozers. The Biden
administration has stood by Israel, even as it has been humiliated by
Netanyahu’s defiance, either because it believes American pressure
could endanger Harris’s chances of victory, or because it tacitly
welcomes Israel’s onslaught as a way of weakening Iran’s line of
defence in Lebanon. Netanyahu has repeatedly lied to
the US administration. Having given assurances that Israel’s
ground offensive would be ‘limited’, he sent the army into
southern Lebanon, where they were greeted by well-trained Hizbullah
fighters who, however much their capacities have been degraded, have
been preparing for this fight since 2000, and know the terrain far
better than the Israelis. In the first week alone, eleven Israeli
soldiers were killed in Lebanon. Hizbullah has also continued to fire
missiles into Israel.

Netanyahu has warned the Lebanese government that if it fails to
remove Hizbullah – something it does not have the strength to
achieve, even if it wished to do so – Lebanon will face
‘destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza’. Meanwhile,
Israel’s supporters abroad claim that, as Bernard-Henri Lévy put it
on X, ‘Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating it.’ Such
rhetoric is hardly new. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon was advertised as
‘Operation Peace for the Galilee’. It not only failed to destroy
the Palestinian resistance; it led to the creation of an even more
effective fighting force: Hizbullah. During the 2006 war,
the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, claimed to hear the
‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’ as Israel bombarded southern
Lebanon and Beirut.

Israel insists it had no choice, which is demonstrably false. It could
have worked to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza. It could have embraced
the US-French proposal for a 21-day pause in fighting between Israel
and Hizbullah, to which Nasrallah gave his approval, and which might
eventually have led Hizbullah to retreat to the Litani river. As
the US national security spokesman John Kirby pointed out, the
proposal ‘wasn’t just drawn up in a vacuum. It was done after
careful consultation, not only with the countries that signed onto it,
but Israel itself.’ Instead, as he has done repeatedly in the Gaza
negotiations, Netanyahu helped the Americans to draft a ceasefire
proposal he had no intention of honouring, while conspiring to kill
the Arab leaders with whom the ceasefire was to be reached: first
Ismail Haniyeh, the former leader of Hamas’s political bureau,
killed in Tehran on 31 July, and now Nasrallah. Netanyahu is alleged
to have hesitated over assassinating Nasrallah, but agreed to the hit
as he boarded the plane to New York.

Hizbullah is not a personality-driven organisation, or claims not to
be, but in Nasrallah it had a leader of unusual gifts, and his death
is an enormous, if not a mortal, blow; it is also a huge setback for
Iran. On 1 October, with little forewarning but clearly in response to
the assassinations of Nasrallah and Haniyeh, Iran fired nearly two
hundred ballistic missiles at Israel, causing little damage but
hitting a few army bases and killing a Palestinian man in the West
Bank. Biden had advised the Israelis to ‘take the win’ after
Iran’s previous attack, in April, was intercepted (with substantial
American assistance). This time, he merely counselled Netanyahu not to
attack Iran’s oilfields (the result would be a major spike in oil
prices) or its nuclear installations. Will the Israelis listen? Their
habit of defying their patrons is hardly reassuring. ‘Our attack
will be deadly, precise and above all surprising,’ Gallant promised
in a video posted on 9 October. ‘They will not understand what
happened and how it happened. They will see the results.’ But even
if the Israelis attack some of Iran’s nuclear sites, its nuclear
programme isn’t likely to be derailed. As Avner Cohen, the leading
historian of Israel’s nuclear programme, pointed out
in _Ha’aretz_, Iran’s nuclear programme is spread across a
sprawling complex of sites – unlike Israel’s centralised nuclear
facility at Dimona. Iran’s installations – some of them buried
deep underground – are ‘decentralised and can be moved with
relative ease’. The Iranians have declared that in the event of an
Israeli assault they will abandon the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. ‘I suggest that we not take their declarations lightly,’
Cohen concluded.

The Americans should heed this warning, but they have repeatedly
appeared willing to capitulate to Israeli defiance, even at the risk
of jeopardising US interests. The American press has been full of
reports of the ‘strained’ relations between Biden and Bibi. In Bob
Woodward’s new book, _War_, Biden privately describes Netanyahu as
a narcissist and a liar, and at one point tells him to his face:
‘You know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is
that you’re a rogue state, or a rogue actor.’ Yet for all these
‘strains’, the arms keep coming. Over the last year, the US has
supplied Israel with $18 billion in military aid and doubled the
number of its own fighter jets in the region, in case Israel is
attacked by Iran. After Nasrallah’s assassination, it sent several
thousand more troops to the Middle East, along with squadrons of
F-15E, F-16, and F-22 fighter jets and A-10 attack aircraft. Israel is
dependent on the US, yet the Biden administration seems to have no
leverage – or no leverage it is willing to exercise, given that
Israel is weakening Washington’s own adversaries in Beirut, Tehran
and Gaza. On 3 October, Israel assassinated Nasrallah’s cousin
Hashem Safieddine, widely expected to be his successor, as well as
‘the replacement of his replacement’ (Netanyahu’s words). Tens
of thousands of civilians in eastern Lebanon – many of them Syrian
refugees – are now crossing the border into Syria. The destruction
of villages and homes in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, the
southern suburbs of Beirut and now central Beirut, where 22 people
were killed in an airstrike targeting a Hizbullah leader on 10
October, will soon be celebrated on TikTok by Israeli soldiers. While
Israeli Jewish society is awash in commemorations of 7 October, the
expression of national sorrow is offset by the pleasures taken in
revenge and the restoration of ‘deterrence’.

The euphoria may prove short-lived, however, especially as attrition
sets in, in Lebanon as in Gaza, where Hamas fighters continue to
challenge Israeli forces. Like other secondary wars carried out in
times of quagmire – the French bombing of Tunisia in the late 1950s,
the American bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70 – the assault on Lebanon
is unlikely to provide more than a fleeting consolation. Killing
Nasrallah isn’t likely to hasten the defeat of Hamas in Gaza, or the
return of the remaining hostages (in whose fate Netanyahu appears to
have lost all interest, except as a talking point), much less the
surrender of the Palestinian people to Zionist aspirations. Hizbullah
will slowly rebuild, and Nasrallah and his cadres will be replaced by
a new and no less embittered generation of leaders who will remember
the furies unleashed by Israel in Lebanon: the killings, maimings and
displacement caused by one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in
the 21st century. Nasrallah’s death is as humiliating a setback for
his movement as Nasser’s defeat in 1967 was for the Arab cause. But
nothing feeds resistance like humiliation.

Israel’s​ leaders have always known this, but they have also
always preferred to humiliate (or kill) their enemies rather than to
negotiate with them, much less to arrive at a new dispensation that
would allow for an equitable settlement in Israel/Palestine. ‘Let us
not hurl blame at the murderers,’ Moshe Dayan said in his 1956
funeral oration for a kibbutznik killed on the Gaza border by
Palestinian gunmen. ‘Why should we complain of their hatred for us?
Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with
their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and villages
where they and their forebears once dwelled.’ Dayan’s advice to
the assembled mourners was never to ‘flinch from the hatred that
accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who
live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may
claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be
weakened. That is the decree of our generation.’

The lesson that most Israelis drew from 7 October was that their
leaders had averted their eyes and allowed their hands to be weakened,
while Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif prepared their plans for Al-Aqsa
Flood. And no one had averted his eyes more than Netanyahu, who had
forged a tacit alliance with the Hamas authorities in Gaza, confident
that they had been neutralised, while doing everything he could to
weaken the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Even his supporters
were convinced, in the weeks after 7 October, that his fall from power
was imminent. But over the last year he has turned the attacks into an
opportunity to reorder Israeli society, with his fascist colleagues
Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose vision of a greater Israel
cleansed of Arabs is a mirror image of Sinwar’s vision of an Islamic
Palestine. Despairing of Israel’s future, an untold number of Jews
with second passports – the ‘elites’ Netanyahu despises – have
been fleeing for France, Germany, Portugal and the US, but, contrary
to the fantasies of Sinwar and some members of the Palestine
solidarity movement abroad, the state isn’t at risk of collapse,
because Jews on the religious right aren’t budging, and the
country’s future appears to belong to them. The multifront war
launched a year ago has not only increased their power, it has
reinforced the theocratisation of the army and emboldened the settler
militias terrorising Palestinian villagers in the West Bank. The war
has also inspired increasingly murderous proposals for ethnic
cleansing in Palestine, and reshaping the Middle East in Israel’s
favour. The retired Major General Giora Eiland, an influential thinker
in Israeli military circles, recently proposed that all residents of
northern Gaza should be ordered to evacuate within a week, before a
siege was imposed on the area, with supplies of water, food and fuel
stopped until all those remaining either surrendered or died of
starvation. Eiland is not a fringe figure. Writing
in _Ha’aretz,_ the columnist Zvi Bar’el says that what frightens
him most isn’t

the coming war with Iran, or the understanding that the third Lebanon
war is no longer a brief aspiration. It’s the recognition that
Israel will continue to be ruled by a malicious gang that has managed
to turn the worst disaster in the country’s history into a
lifesaving drug for itself. And thanks to its crimes, which led to the
disaster of last October 7, it will receive new life, enabling it to
brilliantly lead the country to more Octobers.

More than a year after 7 October, Israel is engaged in a series of
overlapping and expanding military conflicts, without any end in
sight. Israel’s cities, too, have seen a renewal of armed attacks by
Palestinians avenging the destruction in Gaza. The dream of a
‘normal’ state, let alone a sanctuary, has receded into the
distance, perhaps for good. ‘Something subtle has taken place,’
Yezid Sayigh wrote on the anniversary of 7 October. ‘Israel has
joined the unenviable club of Arab countries trapped in forever wars
of their own.’ These wars are not likely to end soon, because the
Palestinians are not going to disappear, but for now they serve
another aim: they enable Netanyahu to hold on to power in the face of
corruption charges and anger over his catastrophic failure to prevent
the 7 October attack, and his indifference to the hostages still in
Gaza. Yet it would be a mistake to regard this as Netanyahu’s war.
It is also Israel’s, and it is supported by the vast majority of
Israeli Jews, including those who despise him. (Palestinian citizens
of Israel who oppose the war run the risk of arrest for
‘incitement’; a Palestinian girl who expressed sorrow over the
killing of children in Gaza was suspended from school.) Indeed,
support for the war is one of the few things on which the bitterly
divided Jewish population agrees.

The human cost of these wars is staggering. More than 42,000
officially dead in Gaza – and possibly tens of thousands lying under
the rubble. A resurgence of polio, widespread malnutrition, a growing
famine. An epidemic of amputations, a generation of orphans. Once upon
a time, perhaps, it was possible to write that it was ‘tragic’
that Israel, a state where many Holocaust survivors settled after the
war, a state dedicated to ensuring Jewish survival after the
destruction in Europe, was subjecting another people to statelessness,
oppression and persecution. But after Gaza it is merely obscene –
and made still more outrageous by Israel’s ability to secure Western
diplomatic support and weapons by invoking the Holocaust. There is
nothing novel about such aggrieved posturing. Milošević in Bosnia,
Putin in Chechnya and Assad in Aleppo were no different. Even the
Germans could point to the savagery of the fire-bombing of their
cities during the Second World War, much as Israelis continue to point
to 7 October, as if history began on that day. But the immense
suffering of 7 October did not, and does not, turn the state of Israel
into a victim of a conflict in which it is the principal perpetrator.
And while Western powers may be willing to genuflect to Israel’s
manipulation of Holocaust memory, it has squandered whatever moral
capital it still had in the rest of the world. It has also endangered
the physical security of Jews in the diaspora, where incidents of
antisemitic violence are on the rise. Israel’s leaders will no doubt
take such paroxysms of rage, brought on by its own conduct, as proof
that Jews require an ethnically exclusionary state for their survival.
The ancient memory of victimhood and the arrogance of military might
– both indulged by a superpower patron – have blinded Israelis to
their responsibility in this war, and condemned Palestinians to
occupation, apartheid, and now genocide.

It’s hard to see what strategy, if any, lies behind Israel’s
reckless escalation of its war. But the line between tactics and
strategy may not mean much in the case of Israel, a state that has
been at war since its creation. The identity of the enemy changes –
the Arab armies, Nasser, the PLO, Iraq, Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas –
but the war never ends. Israel’s leaders claim this war is
existential, a matter of Jewish survival, and there is a grain of
truth in this claim, because the state is incapable of imagining
Israeli Jewish existence except on the basis of domination over
another people. Escalation, therefore, may be precisely what Israel
seeks, or is prepared to risk, since it views war as its duty and
destiny. Randolph Bourne once said that ‘war is the health of the
state,’ and Netanyahu and Gallant would certainly agree.

_ADAM SHATZ is the LRB’s US editor. He is the author of Writers
and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which includes
many pieces from the paper, and The Rebel’s Clinic: The
Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. He has written for the LRB on
subjects including the war in Gaza
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