A Measure of Justice in Beirut

The military response was late, but when it finally arrived, it hit the target. On 27 September, an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut bunker eliminated Hezbollah’s general secretary Hassan Nasrallah. This operation was the boldest stroke yet in an Israeli campaign that began ten days before with the detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah’s operatives, continued with the targeting of the group’s senior military leaders, and has now decapitated the organisation entirely. A week ago, if any group could claim the mantle of revolutionary Islam in the Middle East, it was Hezbollah. Now, its entire senior leadership has been liquidated and its future is uncertain.

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The bombardment that dispatched Nasrallah, and flattened much of Hezbollah’s stronghold in south Beirut’s Dahiya neighbourhood, was amply justified by the laws of war and any reasonable standard of self-defence. Nevertheless, critics in the West predictably complained that Israel’s strike had been an “alarming escalation.” It should not be necessary to point out that the relentless barrage of rockets the Party of God has fired into Israel over the last year—about which most of these same critics have said precious little—was itself an unprovoked escalation. This unrestricted war has driven some 80,000 Israelis from their homes in the country’s northern towns and kibbutzim, thereby making Hezbollah’s leadership a legitimate target for destruction.

On 8 October, Hezbollah responded to Hamas’s genocidal frenzy in the south of Israel by launching a volley of rockets into the country’s north. Jerusalem immediately ordered a civilian evacuation and deployed three IDF divisions to deter a ground incursion by Hezbollah’s forces. For almost every day since, Hezbollah has blanketed northern Israel with some 9,000 rocket and missile attacks. The IDF has answered each attack with one of their own, retaliating against Hezbollah commanders in the border zone, targeting weapon stockpiles and safe houses, and occasionally striking deeper into Lebanon and even in Syria. Nevertheless, it refrained from directly attacking Hezbollah’s leadership while the US laboured fruitlessly to reach a diplomatic solution.

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Once Hezbollah entered the fray, some senior Israeli leaders, including defence minister Yoav Gallant, pressed for immediate military operations in the north, and Hezbollah targets were duly selected for destruction. The strategic instinct not to postpone a showdown with Hezbollah was sensible—war theorist Carl von Clausewitz advised armies to confront their most formidable foes before turning to their weaker ones. However, Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered the Israeli air force to stand down at the last moment under pressure from the US.

Until 17 September, Hezbollah boasted 100,000 fighters (though Western officials estimate its force is substantially smaller), a larger contingent than Hamas. It also retains a much larger stockpile of long-range and precision-guided rockets and missiles at its disposal, many of which are capable of hitting predetermined targets across Israel. According to the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Herzilya, even without Iranian assistance, Hezbollah could fire 3,000 missiles into Israel a day for many weeks. 

But since deferring to Washington last October, the Netanyahu government has generally met Hezbollah’s continued aggression with remarkable restraint. As it pounded Hamas in Gaza, Israel pointedly refrained from doing anything remotely comparable to Hezbollah, preferring to absorb its attacks and bide its time until Hamas had been defeated as a military organisation. But this posture was unsustainable indefinitely in the teeth of relentless aggression without inflicting further damage on Israel’s deterrent power—a remote consideration for inveterate critics of Israeli counter-terrorism but an essential one for the stewards of Israeli security.

In recent days, a decision was finally made by Israel’s war cabinet to spurn the Biden administration, which has not displayed much interest in allowing its allies to actually win wars initiated by their enemies. First, Israel detonated Hezbollah’s communication devices, which Israeli intelligence had booby-trapped with explosives, decommissioning thousands of Hezbollah fighters and operatives at a stroke and spreading paranoia through its rank and file. This ingenious attack compelled the militia’s senior officers to meet in person, which provided Israel with the opportunity it needed to waste Hezbollah’s chain of command, including Nasrallah himself.

Netanyahu ordered the strike in the Dahiyah before he left Israel to address the UN General Assembly, underscoring his nation’s independence from a global consensus that has preferred to denounce Israel while giving succour to its terrorist enemies. The alternative would have been to permit Iran’s revolutionary network, laboriously built around Nasrallah since he was elevated to lead Hezbollah in 1992, to remain intact. It was pure folly and naivety, in Washington as much as in Jerusalem, to think that such a malign and expansionist force could be safely accommodated, let alone absorbed into a durable regional order.

Hezbollah’s malice toward Israel has been unambiguous since its inception. An early Hezbollah manifesto—its 1985 open letter addressed to the “Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World”—promised to evict outside powers from Lebanon and terminate “the influence of any imperialist power” (besides Syria or Iran). The main enemy of the “Islamic resistance,” it declared, was the United States, which deployed Israel as the “spearhead” to inflict suffering on the Muslims of Lebanon and beyond. The clerics directing Hezbollah’s foot-soldiers have been committed in word and deed to perpetual war against Israel ever since.

Contrary to the popular myth that Hezbollah emerged as an organic “resistance” organisation during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the group was already a stalking horse for Iranian interests in the Levant by then, created and trained by the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. The ill-conceived and ill-fated Israeli invasion undoubtedly aided the group’s proliferation —it “let the genie out of the bottle,” Yitzhak Rabin later conceded—but it was Iran, intoxicated by the euphoria of its 1979 revolution, that nurtured its lethal proxy on the shores of the Mediterranean. And it was Iran that provided the materiel and military backing to its fellow Shi’ites in south Lebanon who, until then, had been a disdained underclass in Lebanon’s polyglot ethnic makeup. Its operatives and fighters, newly urbanised and in search of religious purpose, came to think of themselves as warriors in Ayatollah Khomenei’s wilayat al-faqih, a Shi’ite notion of ordained supremacy. In time, Hezbollah became not only the most powerful force in Lebanon but also the most dynamic and feared militia in the Middle East.

The group’s poisonous ideology—a grim trinity of anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and antisemitism—combined with its revolutionary passion has wrecked Lebanon. Hezbollah began by driving suicide truck-bombs into US targets and kidnapping prominent Americans, evolved into an anti-Zionist guerrilla army, and then effectively took over the Lebanese state from within. In the process, it emerged as a uniquely malevolent force in the Arab world. As Thanassis Cambanis observes in A Privilege to Die, Hezbollah is “not quite a state, but much more than a political party; not quite an army, but much more than a terrorist network; not yet a full-fledged transnational movement, but much more than a Lebanese faction.”

As the crown jewel in Iran’s “axis of resistance,” Hezbollah has been a font of unceasing hostility and aggression, and not one by any means exclusively directed against the Jewish state. In the southern suburbs of Beirut and south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, it consolidated its power by pitilessly crushing domestic opposition. But its reign of terror extended far beyond Lebanon, across the Syrian frontier into Iraq, where its forces have propped up local tyrannies and militias friendly to Iran’s version of radical Islam. In the last decade, it found its principal role in shoring up Bashar al-Assad’s murderous dynasty, and thanks in no small part to Nasrallah’s foreign legions, the tumult in Syria became a vast humanitarian catastrophe.

The public outpouring of joy in Beirut, Aleppo, and Tehran that greeted the news of Nasrallah’s death demonstrates that Hezbollah’s fervent hatred of Israel was not enough to endear it to the Arab and Persian street. Even if Nasrallah commanded more popularity in the region than any other figure—particularly in the holy precincts of Iran and Shi’ite Iraq—he was also widely despised. He was Iran’s man in Lebanon, and the Iranian imperium has made many enemies in its ruthless pursuit of regional hegemony. If the peoples of the Levant could not always contest Hezbollah’s vast influence and power, they were not blind to its cruelty and fanatical zeal. The countless victims of its militant and revolutionary ideology have, after all, been predominantly Arab.

The strike against Nasrallah is a punishing blow to the Iranian bid for supremacy in the Levant. The evisceration of Hezbollah’s top ranks will not be easily overcome by the Shi’ite faithful, whose ability to carry out offensive operations has been abruptly and substantially weakened. Hezbollah suddenly finds itself in a precarious position at home, vulnerable to renewed jockeying and reconfigured alliances within the labyrinth of Lebanese politics. The strike thus provides a historic opportunity for Lebanon to free itself from Iran’s grip and perhaps even make peace with Israel. Only then will it be able to fashion the kind of free and open republic that has proven so elusive over the years, but which most Lebanese instinctively believe to be their birthright.

Israel and its allies must now brace for a vigorous campaign of conventional and unconventional counterstrikes, not just from Shi’ite Islam’s true believers but also from its Persian patrons. Ayatollah Khamenei has pledged revenge (as he always does), but it should not be forgotten that he also vowed to avenge the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in July and then did nothing. Iranian deterrence is in tatters and its axis of resistance is now vulnerable and exposed. It will only become more vulnerable if Israel and its allies continue to turn the screw.

By eliminating Nasrallah after 32 long years of toleration, Israel ignored the dictates of Western politicians and pundits who counsel de-escalation at every stage. It was right to do so. And whatever mealy-mouthed objections may issue from the Élysée Palace or the White House, Israel should not relent in degrading Hezbollah and its war-fighting capabilities. This will, however, require renewed vigilance about Iran’s nuclear aspirations. If the Islamic Republic should manage to acquire the bomb, all of the substantial progress made in recent weeks will be squandered.

These dangers notwithstanding, Nasrallah’s death has brought a measure of belated justice to a region that seldom sees anything of the kind. The Near East now has a chance to cultivate the sort of social and political evolution that he devoted his bloodthirsty career to snuffing out. It now remains to be seen whether or not Lebanon’s notoriously dysfunctional state can reassert itself to capitalise upon this unexpected deliverance.