24 years ago, on May 26, 2000, the Secretary General of Hezbollah Hasan Nasrallah, whose death Israel announced this Saturday, arrived in the small Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil, a few kilometers from the Israeli border.
The day before, Israel withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon after years of occupation during which it was harassed by Hezbollah and other groups. Thousands of supporters gathered there under the yellow flags of Hezbollah.
The cleric, then 39 and wearing his familiar black turban and brown robe, delivered one of the most famous speeches of his life.
Addressing the Arab world and the “oppressed people of Palestine,” Nasrallah claimed that Israel was “weak as a cobweb” despite its nuclear weapons. The lines of his speech that day would define Nasrallah’s worldview for decades to come, merging notions of Shiite theology and liberation rhetoric, and building on the belief that true resistance can defeat force. very powerful military.
Since then, Hezbollah has transformed, both as a fighting force and in its relations with the fragile Lebanese state, to become a political and social power. But while Nasrallah’s rhetoric may not have changed for the rest of his life, his perception of the fragility of power, even for the world’s most powerful armed non-state actor, mutated and dragged Hezbollah into a potentially more serious conflict. It has launched rockets and drones at Israel, while Israel responds by attacking Lebanese and Hezbollah targets with airstrikes, notably on Beirut.
Lately, when Nasrallah gave a speech, he no longer did so in front of the huge crowds that once received him, arriving by bus from the Shiite heartland of Lebanon. At carefully choreographed events, such as memorial ceremonies for fallen Hezbollah commanders, Nasrallah no longer appeared in person but on a television screen. At one such event earlier this year, Hezbollah representatives present told the Guardian that they should not interpret Nasrallah’s words. For everyone else, however, Nasrallah’s long and often repetitive speeches have become the subject of endless exegesis during the final months of war in the Middle East.
Although they have often been portrayed as proxies for Iran, Nasrallah and Hezbollah have been much more than that. They are themselves important regional players, despite their deep ties to Tehran.
And as Israel and Hezbollah move closer to all-out conflict, two questions collide: What did Nasrallah want and how much control did he have over the consequences?
Nasrallah’s policies during the first weeks of cross-border clashes that began on October 8, a day after Hamas’ surprise attack on southern Israel, were ostensibly aimed at relieving pressure on the Palestinian armed group in Gaza, a strategy which seems to have been more important on the diplomatic level than on the military level.
By explicitly making any demand for an end to attacks on northern Israel conditional on an end to Israeli hostilities in Gaza, Nasrallah addressed outstanding territorial issues on the Lebanese border, including that of the Shebaa Farms occupied by Israel, which Syria also claims. framing the fighting in terms of a broader rejection of US policy in the Middle East.
The reality on the ground has created a much more complex situation.
Leaving aside the status quo Between Israel and Hezbollah, which has continued since the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, which lasted a month and caused enormous destruction in the country, Nasrallah rolled a die. This belied the deliberate ambiguity of his statements, which ranged from threats against Israeli cities to insistence that his group did not want all-out war.
“To some extent what Hezbollah is doing,” said Heiko Wimmen, director of the Iraq, Syria and Lebanon project at the International Crisis Group. New Arabic in the first weeks of the war, “it underlines that they are prepared to pay the price. But are they ready to pay the final price? “No one knows because it is part of the constructive ambiguity mentioned by Nasrallah.”
In the months that followed, the growing dynamics of the war pushed to the extreme the considerations that led Nasrallah to enter the conflict. A “managed conflict” became increasingly unmanageable, as Israel attacked senior Hezbollah officials, notably in Beirut, and Hezbollah fired on Israeli military and civilian targets. Nasrallah cited U.S. opinion polls on Israel’s war in Gaza as evidence of the success of his broader strategy.
Nasrallah’s ideological origins
What is clearer is how Nasrallah’s worldview was shaped by his personal history. As a teenager amid the sectarian violence of the Lebanese civil war, he briefly joined the Shiite Amal militia at age 15 before going to study at a seminary in Najaf, Iraq, from where he was expelled with other Lebanese students by Saddam. Hussein in 1978.
Under the influence of his mentor, the prominent cleric and Hezbollah co-founder Abbas al Musawi, whom he met in Iraq, he joined Hezbollah in 1982, following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when the group separated from Amal. When Israel assassinated Musawi in 1992, it replaced him as secretary general of Hezbollah.
In a 2006 interview with Robin Wright of Washington PostNasrallah described how his beliefs were formed as he and his companions observed “what was happening in Palestine, in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, in the Golan, in the Sinai,” teaching them that “we cannot not trust the States.” of the Arab League, nor in the United Nations… The only way we have is to take up arms and fight against the occupying forces.”
What is often not said is that Nasrallah’s much-repeated ideological commitment to “resistance” requires conflict with Israel – or the threat of such conflict – to give meaning and justify existence of Hezbollah and the power it has accumulated in Lebanon. It was said that Nasrallah would be forced by Lebanon’s dire economic situation to resist behavior that could lead to full-scale war and undermine his own support. But in recent months, Hezbollah – like Israel – has changed its understanding of where that threshold lies.
In an essay for the Atlantic Council earlier this month, David Daoud and Ahmad Sharawi described this dynamic. “The group believes that this threshold is not fixed. Rather, it increases as Israeli operations in Gaza intensify, prompting Hezbollah to act while Israel’s attention and resources are focused elsewhere,” they wrote: “But when these Israeli operations generate growing discontent in the United States… Hezbollah believes it has more freedom. of action, thus increasing the depth and lethality of its attacks.
All this suggests that the room for maneuver available to each side to reverse the crisis is becoming increasingly small.
