The operation killing Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut represents a dramatic shift in Israeli strategy.
Reprinted with permission from Tablet magazine:
Friday evening in the Levant, Israel targeted buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut killing Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. This operation represents a dramatic shift in Israeli strategy. Not only have they finally liquidated an adversary they’ve long been capable of killing, they’ve also turned a deaf ear to their superpower patron of more than half a century.
But at this stage, heeding Washington’s advice in war is like taking counsel from the angel of death. Just as the US is no longer willing or able to win the wars it commits Americans to fight, the Joe Biden administration won’t let US allies win wars either.
By ordering the strike on Nasrallah while attending the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored the Jewish state’s independence from the global consensus that has resolved not to confront terrorists but rather to appease them, whether they’re plotting in the Middle East or living among the local populations of Western nations, including the United States.
Israel’s attack also shows that almost everything US and other Western civilian and military leaders have believed about the Middle East for the last 20 years was simply a collection of excuses for losing wars. The questions that senior policymakers and Pentagon officials, think-tank experts and journalists have deliberated over since the invasion of Iraq — questions about the nature of modern warfare and the proper conduct of international relations in a multipolar world, etc. — can now be set aside for good because they have been resolved definitively.
The answers are as they ever were — at least before the start of the “global war on terror.”
Contrary to the convictions of George W. Bush-era neoconservatives and the pro-Iran progressives in Barack Obama’s camp, securing a nation’s peace has nothing to do with winning narratives, or nation-building, or balancing US allies against your mutual enemies for the sake of regional equilibrium, or any of the other academic theories generated to mask a generation’s worth of failure.
Rather, it means killing your enemies, above all those who advocate and embody the causes that inspire others to exhaust their murderous energies against you. Thus, killing Nasrallah was essential.
Taking down officers demoralizes a force. Wiping out its chain of command cripples it. Hezbollah is a function of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and if allowed to survive the Lebanese militia will be replenished and trained by the IRGC to replace the fallen.
Nasrallah issued from a different source. He was the protégé of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Their tenures — until now — were roughly coterminous: Khamenei replaced the founder of the Islamic Republic Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 and chose Nasrallah to lead Hezbollah in 1992. The Iranians built around Nasrallah not only a network of proxies stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf but also a comprehensive worldview — permanent resistance. Killing him marks a defining moment capping the end of a 30-year reign of terror.
Israel’s campaign went into high gear on Sept. 17 with the detonation of Hezbollah’s communications devices, which Israeli intelligence had booby-trapped with explosives, decommissioning thousands of the terror organization’s medical and logistical support staff as well as fighters.
Because Hezbollah’s communications infrastructure, as well as its supply chain, was compromised, senior officials were forced to meet in person. Consequently, Israel was able to liquidate senior operations commander Ibrahim Aqil — who took part in the 1983 attacks on the US embassy and Marine Barracks in Lebanon — and other top commanders from the elite Radwan force in a strike in the southern suburb of Beirut on Sept. 20.
In attacks on Hezbollah strongholds across Lebanon, Israel has killed hundreds of fighters and destroyed thousands of long- and medium-range missiles and launchers. With Nasrallah and virtually all of its senior command dead, Hezbollah has been decapitated.
Israel’s immediate goal is to get the 60,000 Israelis who have been displaced from the north since Oct. 7 back into their homes.
