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, Fanon, France’s war in Algeria, mass incarceration in America and Deleuze and Guattari. His LRB podcast series, Human Conditions, considers revolutionary thought in the 20th century through conversations with Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards. Sign up here.
The London Review of Books is Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from art and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy, not to mention fiction and poetry. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as book reviews, memoir and reportage, each issue also contains poems, reviews of exhibitions and movies, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to every piece we’ve ever published in our digital archive. Our new website also features a regular blog, an online store, podcasts and short documentaries, plus video highlights from our events programmes on both sides of the Atlantic, and at the London Review Bookshop.
A reader recently described the LRB as ‘the best thing about being a human’. Make it the highlight of your fortnight, too, by taking out a subscription.
History
The London Review of Books was founded in 1979, during the year-long management lock-out at the Times. In June that year, Frank Kermode wrote a piece in the Observer suggesting that a new magazine fill the space left by the temporary absence of the Times Literary Supplement. The first issue of the LRB, edited by Karl Miller, appeared four months later. It included pieces by Miller and Kermode, as well as John Bayley on William Golding and William Empson on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and poems by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.
Edited by Mary-Kay Wilmers from 1992 to 2021, the LRB now has the largest circulation of any magazine of its kind in Europe (2021 ABC: 91,659). Jean McNicol and Alice Spawls were appointed editors in February 2021. In 2019, our neighbours Faber published London Review of Books: An Incomplete History to mark our 40th anniversary – be sure to buy a copy from the LRB Store.
Subscribe to the London Review of Books.
