Twenty-four years ago, on May 26, 2000, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah arrived in the Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil, a few kilometers from the Israeli border.
The day before, Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon after years of occupation and harassment by Hezbollah and other groups. Thousands of supporters gathered under Hezbollah’s yellow flag.
Wearing his familiar black turban and brown robe, the then 39-year-old cleric delivered one of the most famous speeches of his career.
Addressing the Arab world and the “oppressed Palestinian people”, Nasrallah claimed that despite its nuclear weapons, Israel remained “as fragile as a spider’s web”. The themes of his speech that day would define Nasrallah’s worldview for decades to come, blending concepts from Shia theology and liberation rhetoric and building on the idea that real resistance could defeat a far superior military force. On top of faith.
Since then, Hezbollah has transformed into a political and social power, both as a fighting force and in its relationship with the fragile Lebanese state. Yet while Nasrallah’s rhetoric may not have changed, his perception of the fragility of power, even over the world’s most powerful armed non-state actors, has, and he has drawn Hezbollah to Towards the brink of potentially the most serious conflict. It fired rockets and drones at Israel as it carried out airstrikes against Lebanese and Hezbollah targets.
When Nasrallah speaks these days, he is not greeted by the huge crowds that once arrived, arriving by bus from Lebanon’s Shia heartland. At carefully planned events, including a memorial service for the fallen Hezbollah commander, Nasrallah appeared not in person but on television screens. At one such event earlier this year, Hezbollah MPs in attendance explained to the Guardian that they declined to comment and that it was not up to them to interpret Nasrallah’s comments. For others, however, Nasrallah’s lengthy and oft-repeated speeches have become the subject of endless commentary on the Middle East war over the past eight months.
While Nasrallah and Hezbollah are often portrayed as proxies of Iran, they are much more than that. Despite their deep ties to Tehran, they are important regional players in their own right.
As Israel and Hezbollah edge closer to all-out conflict, two questions collide: What does Nasrallah want, and how much control does he have over the outcome?
On October 8, the day after Hamas launched a raid into southern Israel, Nasrallah’s policies in the first weeks of the cross-border conflict were ostensibly aimed at easing pressure on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza. But the strategy seems more important.
Nasrallah explicitly called for an end to Israeli hostilities in Gaza by stopping firing on Israeli forces in the north, and in laying out the framework for the battle, Nasrallah included unresolved territorial issues on the Lebanese border, including the Israeli-occupied Shab’a farms (Syria). also claims sovereignty) are taken into consideration.
The reality on the ground has created a more complex picture.
Putting aside the status quo between Israel and Hezbollah since the end of the month-long Second Lebanon War in 2006, which wreaked havoc on Lebanon, Nasrallah rolled the dice . That belied the deliberate ambiguity of his remarks, which hovered between threats to Israeli cities and insistence that his group did not want an all-out war.
“In a way, that’s what Hezbollah has been doing,” Heiko Wimmen, director of the International Crisis Group’s Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon program, told The New Arab. In the early weeks of the war, “it was to emphasize that they were ready to pay the price.
“But are they ready to pay the ultimate price? No one knows that because it’s part of the constructive ambiguity Nasrallah mentioned.
As the war escalated over the next few months, Nasrallah’s considerations of intervening in the conflict reached a critical point. “Controlled conflict” is becoming increasingly difficult to control as Israel targets senior Hezbollah officials and Hezbollah fires on Israeli military and civilian targets, most recently threatening Haifa and other cities.
“It’s important to understand Hezbollah’s worldview,” said Sanan Wakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. “What many of these actors excel at is getting to know their opponents through quiet, repetitive and thoughtful observations…Strategic patience is part of their perspective: knowing that opponents face different pressures in a democratic society.”
Nasrallah cited U.S. opinion polls on Israel’s Gaza war as evidence of the success of his broader strategy. “I think it’s also critical to understand that while Nasrallah’s leadership is very personal, the effectiveness of the organization is that it doesn’t operate as a personal fiefdom,” Wakil said, suggesting that even though Nasrallah’s leadership was very personal, Nasrallah was dismissed, but the organization will continue to exist.
She also expressed doubts about whether assumptions about Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s willingness to conflict before the current conflict hold true, since war reduces the room for both sides to withdraw from escalation. “We made a lot of guesses and assumptions, but we didn’t have access to the internal network to understand the decision-making process.”
Nasrallah’s ideological roots
What is clearer is how Nasrallah’s worldview is shaped by his personal history. As a teenager amid the sectarian violence of the Lebanese civil war, he briefly joined the Shia Amal militia at age 15 before studying at a seminary in Najaf, Iraq, where he was killed along with other Lebanese students in 1978. Dam Hussain was fired from there.
It was in Iraq that he first met his mentor, prominent cleric and Hezbollah co-founder Abbas Mousavi. Myler split. After Israel assassinated Mousavi in 1992, Mousavi succeeded him as the general secretary of Hezbollah.
In a 2006 interview with The Washington Post’s Robin Wright, Nasrallah described how his convictions came as he and his colleagues watched “Palestine, the West Bank, Gaza, Gogo “What happened in the Highlands and the Sinai Peninsula”. , teaching them that “we cannot rely on the Arab League countries, nor can we rely on the United Nations… Our only recourse is to take up arms and fight the occupying forces.
It is often self-evident that Nasrallah’s ideological refrain of “resistance” requires conflict with Israel – or the threat of Israel – to give it meaning and to justify the existence of Hezbollah and its presence in Lebanon The rationality of accumulated power. Conventional wisdom holds that Nasrallah would be constrained by Lebanon’s dire economic situation and unable to resist actions that could trigger an all-out war and undermine his own support. But in recent months, Hezbollah – like Israel – has changed its understanding of where the threshold lies.
In an article written for the Atlantic Council earlier this month, David Daoud and Ahmed Shaarawi described this dynamic. “The group believes that this threshold is not fixed. Rather, it rises as Israel’s actions in Gaza deepen, prompting Hezbollah to act while Israel’s attention and resources are focused elsewhere,” they wrote road. “But when these Israeli actions provoke growing dissatisfaction in the United States, which uniquely constrains Israel… Hezbollah feels it has more freedom of action, increasing the depth and lethality of its attacks.”
All this suggests that the room for both sides to escape from the crisis is shrinking.
