Hezbollah leader Nasrallah's death offers Israel a chance it should seize

By Marc Champion

“We are winning,” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a defiant yet surreal speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, delivered shortly after ordering a massive air strike to kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. In military terms, that’s hard to argue with.

Nasrallah, who was confirmed dead on Saturday, led an Iran-backed organisation that exists primarily to fight Israel. On Oct. 8 last year, he had given his own fateful order, which was to support Hamas as it faced retribution in Gaza for its savage terrorist attack on Israel the day before. The rocket salvoes fired from Lebanon were limited, but they were acts of war that made Hezbollah and its leader legitimate targets.

 

It’s by now clear that was a mistake, enough to provoke Israel but not to force the two-front war that might have divided its resources and exhausted its armed forces.

You can’t overstate the regional significance of what’s happened in Lebanon over recent days and weeks. Israel’s security forces have made extraordinary use of their intelligence and air power advantages to obliterate Hezbollah’s command structure. The most potent force in Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, and Iran’s first line of deterrence against any Israeli attack on its nuclear program, has been thoroughly disoriented. That began with the detonation of thousands of boobytrapped pagers and walkie talkies Hezbollah carried, and culminated with Nasrallah’s assassination, together with yet another of his top commanders, an unknown number of civilians, and Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

As the emeritus professor of War Studies at King’s College in London, Lawrence Freedman, put it in a Substack article: “This is quite different from previous assassinations. It was full decapitation.” The former Australian General and military analyst Mick Ryan called Nasrullah’s death more important than the 2011 killing of the former Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

Ryan and Freedman are right. Bin Laden was retired by the time he was killed by a Navy SEAL unit, while Al-Qaeda was largely being superseded by Islamic State. Hezbollah’s role has, by contrast, been expanding. It’s a standing army that’s become increasingly well-armed and ambitious, fighting abroad in Syria and elsewhere. It will now be disorganized and likely demoralized, because this has been a rout. The question is what happens next — and it’s this that will determine whether Israel ultimately wins the lasting security that could count as victory.

The temptation to invade Southern Lebanon has to be growing fast. The value of decapitation is that it creates a moment of vulnerability to attack. Given time, Hezbollah’s lost commanders will grow back, like the many-headed Hydra of Greek mythology. Nasrallah himself replaced an assassinated Hezbollah leader.

The pressure to respond will be building in Tehran, too. It’s only a few months ago that its resistance axis seemed to be winning. Hamas was under attack but surviving. Israel was mired in a bloody war whose impact on civilians was turning much of the world against it. Any further normalization of Israeli relations with the Arab world had become politically impossible. Iran’s “unity of arenas” principle — a loose analog of Nato’s article 5 mutual defense clause, but for the Axis — was for the first time in play, with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq piling on in support of Hamas.

Now, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will have to decide whether to double down on support for Hezbollah. Unlike the current air war — where Israel has among the world’s most sophisticated air forces and missile defense systems, and Hezbollah none — the Shiite militia could at least hope to fight back on the ground. Yet the risk of losing Hezbollah altogether may drive Khamenei to have his now leaderless ally accept a separate ceasefire, abandon Hamas and retreat from the Israeli border. This would be a humiliating blow, but it could preserve Hezbollah and avoid a direct war with Israel and the US. 

Netanyahu’s UN speech contained many truths, but it was also surreal, because it seemed to exist in a parallel world where Israel embodies Good and its enemies Evil. In the complex realities of the Middle East, no such moral clarity exists.

Israel’s prime minister, for example, championed Israeli democracy, even though he’s been doing his best to unravel the country’s core democratic institutions. He talked about the “blessing” Israel represented to the region because it favored peace over war, even as he was refusing a ceasefire his generals want in Gaza and ramping up hostilities with Hezbollah. He cast himself as champion of the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, even though hostage families have been organizing huge protests against him. He talked up prospects for regional prosperity under a “closer than you think” normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, when the Saudi delegation had just walked out of the hall rather than listen to him speak. Above all, he offered Palestinians suffering in Gaza and the West Bank no hope, or cause to reconcile with the state of Israel.

Netanyahu is right that there is an opportunity to build a much more stable and prosperous Middle East through a reconciliation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, but he is now among the primary obstacles to that happening. Any such deal would, at this point, be impossible for a Saudi leader to make without a ceasefire in Gaza and framework for some kind of Palestinian future.

Iran’s aggression (or “forward defense” in Tehran’s eyes) does need to be reined in. The success of Israel’s air campaign against Hezbollah has opened a window of opportunity to destroy the terrorist group, but another Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon is unlikely to achieve that goal. It would instead renew the group’s reason for being, at a time when its decapitation and recklessness have made it vulnerable to pressure from within Lebanon, where much of the population despises it.

There may be only a very short window for Netanyahu to develop a still missing political strategy to end the war and win the peace. If he did, he’d enjoy the backing of powerful players, from the US to Saudi Arabia and the majority of a Lebanese population that’s sick of crisis and of Hezbollah. He should seize the chance, but his UN performance gave no sign that he will.

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