By Osman Softić || 30 Sept 2024

The latest Israeli unrestrained rampage in Lebanon under the diplomatic, political, and military protection and tacit approval of the United States, in confrontation with what is widely accepted as the Axis of Resistance and the Zionist Israel, a pariah state, which disrespects the norms of international law and basic human rights, controlled by the most extreme supremacist regime since the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, threatens to throw the already fragile, impoverished and dysfunctional Middle East into an all-out regional war, with serious risk of implicating Iran and the “collective West” led by the United States. The looming war could last for at least a decade, with no winners but all losers, endangering the world peace and global economy, unless the major global powers, China and Russia, and the Muslim world, and the West for that matter set aside their differences and collectively step in under the auspices of the UN to rein in an Israeli expansionist beast, hell-bent in its quest of establishing a regional hegemony by military force, endangering both regional and world peace.

During its most recent show of air and missile superiority in the armed confrontation with Hezbollah, Israeli air force carried out series of vicious and indiscriminate attacks against the targets in southern of Lebanon and in its capital Beirut killing at least 700 civilians in one day alone, according to official sources, and displacing more than one million of them, whose homes Israeli air raids targeted indiscriminately under the pretense of being used as alleged secret storage facilities for Hezbollah missiles and ammunition. This is an unprecedented war crime and human toll even in comparison with the Israeli daily genocidal aggression on Gaza. Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah, Lebanese Islamic resistance organization, was also killed on 27. September, along with several other senior figures and military commanders of the organization. This unprecedented war crime and terror attack by Israel using bunker buster bombs supplied by the United States of America, which killed hundreds of innocent residents, including many women and children, was brushed aside by Israel and its western backers and the mainstream media in the west purely as a collateral damage, which was “worth it” given the ‘Prize”, while the outgoing US president Joe Biden practically went along with this and other Israeli war crimes, tacitly agreeing with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu for killing Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the major regional resistance movement against Israeli occupation which relentlessly resisted Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza by daring to open the northern front with Israel in order to ease the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza and ease pressure on Hamas defenders.

Nasrallah’s assassination occurred during the meeting of the most senior figures of Hezbollah, which also indicates advanced planning, coordination and timing, with an element of surprise, aided by what is obviously a significant penetration of Hezbollah by the Israeli intelligence networks. Most observers view Nasrallah’s killing as a watershed event and as the most significant setback for Hezbollah since its establishment in 1982., and at least as a short-term victory for Israel, in terms of weakening Hezbollah, destroying its leadership structure and degrading its capacity to coordinate and direct future armed confrontation with Israel. Israeli leaders are gloating in the feeling of being able to restore the deterrence advantage over its major regional adversary, which was lost as a result of failure of Israeli intelligence to anticipate and deter Hamas October 7 operation against Israel a year ago, widely perceived as humiliating for “mighty Israel” in the region which since began to doubt Israeli superiority as a regional military, intelligence and technological superpower worth submitting to, or at least being on good terms with it, as indicated by the Abraham Accords signed between Israel and several Arab monarchies and Sudan.

For the past three decades Hassan Nasrallah led Hezbollah, political, social and military organization, which particularly for the past year (since October 7, 2023) has been valiantly spearheading the armed resistance against Israel and its hegemonic and expansionist campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and, to a lesser extent the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The armed wing of Hezbollah was acting as the de facto leader of the Axis if Resistance (a regional conglomerate of like-minded non-state militias supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran), and to a lesser degree Iraq, Yemen and Syria, dedicated to resisting Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank occupied by Israel and seeking to diminish the US domination and unwelcome presence in the region. Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated by Israeli air strikes in his underground compound in Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut in Lebanon, where he was hiding ever since he has been Israeli prime target for assassination for many years. Dahiya is known to be the Beirut power base of the Lebanese Shia Muslim resistance organization and was occasionally flattened by Israel during Lebanon past wars. Hence the infamous Israeli military “Dahiya doctrine”, which Israel practiced in Gaza during its carpet-bombing campaigns of the besieged Palestinian enclave.

To better understand the history of Hezbollah and the nature and purpose of the organization, which many analysts agree is arguably the most capable and best armed non-state actor in the world, one needs to step back and look at the recent history of the Middle East and Lebanon and Palestine in particular. This is useful before swallowing the Israeli and western-generated mantras and conceptions of Hezbollah, carefully projected by mainstream media, narrowly presenting Hezbollah as a designated terrorist organization, rather than looking at its complex history as a resistance group, but also as a social and political movement and a non-state actor which was in the first place engendered by Israeli expansionist wars in the region.

Hezbollah was created as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation in the early 1980s. Without the role and contribution of Hezbollah Lebanon would have long been controlled or perhaps even portioned by Israel. Lebanon would hardly be able to function as a society given its deep religious and sectarian divisions, cross-sectarian distrust, history of brutal civil war, suppression of the Palestinian liberation movement and some of the highest level of political corruption and foreign meddling any country in the world had withstood so far, had it not been for Hezbollah prowess political clout and protection of Christian communities due to its flexibility and an ability to build consensus and coalitions internally so as to prevent Lebanon from sliding back into a civil war.

It is important to note that Lebanon, a tiny Mediterranean country, which is now in the spotlight again of global attention, was once a part of Syria and the larger Ottoman empire. It was then cut off from Syria by colonial France and made into a nominally Maronite Christian nation with the aim of serving Western colonial interests (a kind of a position Israel today occupies in the Arab/Muslim world). The Republic of Lebanon was composed of Sunni and Shia Muslims, various Christian sects and the Druze community. Lebanon later became home to a large number of Palestinian refugees driven from Palestine by Israelis, which is today northern Israel, where, by the way, the Israeli regime is now attempting to return its Jewish residents who fled the region due to cross border shelling. The Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990) between Maronite Christians and Muslims and the Druze, as well as clashes between Sunni and Shia militias was additionally complicated by the influx of Palestinians who, naturally, used Lebanon’s territory to resist Israel which displaced them, first in genocidal campaign of Al-Nakba of 1948 and then during subsequent wars of aggression, and 1967. occupation of what was designated by the UN for the future state of Palestine, and further ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Israeli regimes of all political persuasions.

The Palestinian resistance movement was at the time led by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Yasser Arafat, which made Lebanon its headquarter after it was expelled by Jordanian regime of King Hussein, who relied on foreign powers to expel the Palestinians who he viewed as threatening the survival of his regime, including prominent role played by the former Pakistani dictator Ziaul-Haqq who commanded the anti-Palestine forces on behalf of Jordan during the pogrom of the Palestinians known as Black September in 1970 and their expulsion to Lebanon. In order to eliminate the PLO, Israel attacked and later occupied Southern Lebanon and suburbs of Beirut in 1978 and in 1982. Israel stayed in Lebanon as a military occupier for two decades during which time it initially installed as its proxy the notorious Christian militia known as South Lebanese Army (SLA).

SLA committed massacres of Palestinian women and children in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut under the supervision of Israeli occupation forces and the US Reagan administration’s tacit approval, as has recently been meticulously documented by Seth Anziska, a leading British Jewish historian of the Middle East, in his widely acclaimed study titled Preventing Palestine, based on declassified archives of the Israeli defense force and the US archives. Israel-backed SLA, just as France’s Vichy regime, lasted until Israel had finally defeated and expelled from southern Lebanon by Hezbollah fighters who began from a small and disparate resistance Shia organizations in South of Lebanon, and subsequently, with the help of Iran (after the Islamic Revolution in 1979), emerged to become a formidable military force and an astute political organization and indeed the largest political party in Lebanon’s history, to be reckoned with. Hezbollah and Hassan Nasrallah himself were inspired by the teaching of imam Musa Sadr, an Iranian-born cleric of Lebanese origin who set up the Movement of the Deprived (Amal) which still exists in Lebanon, and is a junior ally of Hezbollah. Its aim was to empower the downtrodden condition of Lebanese Shia Muslims concentrated in the eastern and southern parts of the country who, throughout the modern history of the Middle East, had been discriminated against as a minority sect within Islam. However, the cleric who will later impress a major influence on Hassan Nasrallah during his religious studies in Iraq was Abbas Mussawi, a protégé and a disciple of imam Musa Sadr, who will lay the foundation for Hezbollah.

The major goal and purpose of it was and still remains resisting Israeli aggression and preventing future occupation of Lebanon by Israel. Due to weakness of the state and the national army, not least as a result of Western and regional meddling in Lebanon, internal corruption as well as distrust among its various religious and sectarian constituencies, Hezbollah gained reputation and strength thanks to its resistance capacity and became the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon capable of confronting Israel and its objectives. In a way, Hezbollah for a long time held a fragile balance of power in Lebanon. Israel invaded Lebanon again in 2006 but failed in its effort to crush Hezbollah. In a summer war which lasted one month, Israel was eventually defeated by Hezbollah, which was hailed as the most spectacular victory over Israel by any Middle-eastern adversary. After the civil war ended in 1990. Lebanon recovered for a short while, and lingered overseen by the overlordship of the Syrian peacekeeping and administrative forces under the UN mandate, only to return to a somewhat lower level of ideological and sectarian tensions marked by an unprecedented level of instability, mismanagement and corruption, which led to embezzlement of billions of dollars of public funds by political officials and bureaucrats. Lebanon’s fragile sectarian consensus was almost shattered by the explosion of ammonium nitrates stored for years in the port of Beirut, killing hundreds, not to mention earlier assassination of the prime minister Rafiq Hariri, which eventually led to expulsion of Syrian troops from Lebanon and accusations leveled against Hezbollah for his murder and the subsequent verdicts by the international court at the Hague for which the organization adamantly rejected involvement and responsibility. Lebanon’s parliament has for two years been unable to elect president of the republic due to lack of political consensus among various political and ideological constituencies

Israel launched mass air strikes on southern Lebanon on 21. September killed 600 civilians and wounded almost 2000. Prior to conducting air raids Israeli intelligence interfered with electronic communication devices purchased by the Lebanese resistance organization, weaponizing them and killing and injuring thousands of ordinary people including children. Israel did this war crime without any repercussions or condemnations by the official US government or that of its allies, although former CIA director Leon Panetta did say, truth be told, that “it was a clear case of state terrorism”. One should not take Israeli propaganda and justification at face value, for the recent atrocities and assassinations which is, as always, dressed up as “right to self-defense”, “need to eliminating terrorism”, or “restoring deterrence (read instilling fear)” by force of superior power in blatant disregard for civilian life. These have been Israeli propaganda tools to create consent with the public worldwide for time immemorial. The real objective of unscrupulous Israeli use of military might, as clearly confirmed by Eric Margolis, one of the most seasoned war correspondents with a huge experience from the region, is to drive the Arab population from southern Lebanon across the Litani river all the way to the north. Margolis argues that Israel’s extremist regime elements have always coveted southern Lebanon. Now they have their chance since Netanyahu enabled them to be the government. Israeli Zionist supremacists want to take full control of the Litani River because it is the last major water source which so far escaped Israeli control. Gaza is important to control and exploit its gas reserves and to use its shores for making it into a Dubai-like international tourist resort area for Trump and his Zionist son in law ventures in the future. But water is a more precious resource and Israel must have it all, it seems. In addition, according to Margolis, Israel also wants the prize of ports of Tyre and Sidon.

Surely, Arab Gulf monarchies would mind if Israel gets its way as it would enable the implementation of the IMEC project approved at the G20 summit in Delhi in 2023, despite Turkey, China and Russia opposing it. Therefore, Israel as an expansionist regional power, views Hezbollah as an existential threat to its hegemonic aspirations and therefore will use all its necessary to destroy Hezbollah if it is able to do so. A well respected retired senior US Middle East expert and a former defense intelligence analyst and scholar indicated to me in our correspondence on several occasions that the Israeli right wing government’s aim is to drive out all the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. John Mearsheimer too holds similar views. Therefore, resistance to Israeli expansionism and hegemonic designs over Middle East and the creation of Greater Israel is no longer possible to portray as antisemitic view.

It is a reality which the Axis of Resistance has so far been attempting to prevent by resisting it. Hypocrisy of the US government and its western allies has now been seen for what it really is and the world, at least the global south and people in the west, not the elites, can see the futility of its platitudes when they talk about democracy, human rights, rules-based international order and alike. Israeli terror is aided and abetted by the west and therefore the rest of the world needs to find ways to generate enough to reign in the nuclear-armed Israeli right-wing regime before it is too late. Israel has now become the single most dangerous threat to regional and world peace while neither Hamas or Hezbollah represent a threat to peace. Unless cease fire is agreed in Gaza, Israeli elimination of Hezbollah leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, may in the long run prove to be a pyrrhic victory.

Osman Softić is a Senior Research Fellow of the Islamic Renaissance Front. He holds a BA degree in Islamic Studies from the Faculty of Islamic Studies of the University of Sarajevo and has a Master degree in International Relations from the University of New South Wales (UNSW). He contributed commentaries on Middle Eastern and Islamic Affairs for the web portal Al Jazeera Balkans, Online Opinion, Engage and Open Democracy. Osman holds dual Bosnian and Australian citizenship.