Spectator Online, 28/9

The killing of Lebanese Hizballah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah by Israel in Beirut on Friday September 27 is a strategic event,  transcending the immediate context of the Israel-Hizballah confrontation under way since October 8, 2023.   

Nasrallah was both a leader and a symbol of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s bid for hegemony and domination in the Arab world.  As the veteran leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ oldest and most successful franchise organisation, he was deeply involved in Teheran’s machinations across the Middle East. 

His fighters and operatives play key roles in advancing Iran’s cause in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and beyond the region – into Europe, Africa and Latin America.  

At the same time, as known and rarely stated by western diplomats and officials, Nasrallah was the most powerful man in Lebanon and its de facto ruler.  He led a military force and a political structure which dwarfs the ailing official state in its capacities. 

More than any other single figure. Nasrallah symbolized the swathe that Iran has cut through the Arabic-speaking world over the last decades. 

The IRGC’s methods of political warfare found their clearest expression in Nasrallah’s career. From the early days of the Shia Islamist ferment in Lebanon that followed and accompanied the Islamic Revolution in Iran, through the emergence of Hizballah as an Iranian proxy from the circles of the Islamic Amal movement,  and on to the leadership of the movement after Israel’s assassination of Abbas Mussawi in 1992, Nasrallah managed a successful insurgency against Israel in the 1992-2000 period, and an inconclusive war against the same enemy in 2006. 

After the defeat of the rival March 14 movement in 2008, Hizballah and Nasrallah were the undisputed de facto rulers of Lebanon, the official governments and cabinet quite without capacity to challenge the movement’s will.  It was on this basis that Nasrallah took  the decision that now appears to have sealed his fate – namely, opening a ‘support front’ to assist Hamas, from October 8, 2023, and maintaining a subsequent daily arrange of missile and drone attacks on Israel’s north, displacing around 80000 people from their homes. 

Nasrallah, surely, would find little to regret concerning the manner of his demise, amid fire and collapsing buildings in the city to which his career above any other in recent years had brought war and ruin.  Presumably he would not also have been surprised at the authors of his departure from the stage.  Nasrallah in his public statements exemplified that casual dismissal of any distinction between political opposition to Israel and theological hostility to Jews which characterizes the rhetoric of Teheran’s servants in the region.  Here he is speaking in Beirut in 2002: ‘Among the signs and signals which guide us, in the Islamic prophecies is that this State of Israel will be established, and that the Jews will gather from all parts of the world into occupied Palestine, not in order to bring about the anti-Christ and the end of the world, but rather that Allah the Glorified and Most High wants to save you from having to go to the ends of the world, for they have gathered in one place–they have gathered in one place–and there the final and decisive battle will take place.’

And elsewhere, in a speech marking the Shia festival of Ashura, ‘“If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.”

History has few examples of a figure who so actively pursued the eventual demise which claimed him, nor one who, in the eyes of Israelis and many others in the region, so richly deserved it. 

What is the likely impact of Nasrallah’s exit?  The graveyards, after all, as Charles De Gaulle said, are full of indispensable men. 

Firstly, as the author of that adage’s own career exemplifies, it is naïvete playing at sophistication to discount the importance of specific individuals in political and military leadership.  Nasrallah, like the Qods Force leader Qassem Soleimani,  was one of the architects of the methods for mobilizing and fusing political and military capacities which have brough Iran its great successes over the last two decades.  There is a consensus among those who watch this system closely that it has yet to recover from the departure of Soleimani, assassinated by the Americans in January, 2020.  The accession of the weaker, less influential Esmail Ghaani to the Qods Force’s helm has not of course led to the eclipse of the Iranian-led alliance, but it has significantly impacted on its functioning.

In Nasrallah’s case, it is important to note that his killing completes a process already under way for some weeks of the effective decapitation of Lebanese Hizballah’s operational leading echelon.  Chief of Staff Fuad Shukr, Radwan Force head Ibrahim Aqil, missile force commander Ibrahim Qubaisi, as well as a host of less senior operatives have fallen victim to Israeli targeted strikes in recent days and weeks.  Last night’s attack left a gaping whole in the organisation’s physical infrastructure, wiping out a headquarters beneath an apartment building in Hizballah’s Dahiyeh heartland in south Beirut.  The loss of Nasrallah is the keynote moment in a campaign which has wiped out over 500 Hizballah men since the organisation’s ill fated decision to join Hamas in the war it commenced with the October 7 massacres in southern Israel. 

Of course, assassinations bring with them no guarantees.  Nasrallah, after all, acquired his own leadership position thanks to the killing of his less able predecessor.  And even as Israelis will be taking justifiable pride in the intelligence and air warfare capacities on display over Beirut last night, it should be noted that the crushing blows inflicted on Hizballah do not mean the loss of its core capacities. Hizballah is continuing its blind firing on Israel’s north. Which means that a solution for Israel’s internal refugees remains elusive.  This is the most urgent matter deriving from the northern front of the current war.  It remains unresolved. 

Israeli pundits were talking last night of a deterioration to all out regional war, with the possibility of Iran itself once more entering the fray.  Nothing should be ruled out, and the yet to be revealed identities of the Iranian officers killed alongside Nasrallah in the Beirut bunker are of importance.   Iran’s attack on Israel on April 14, remember, came because of the killing of IRGC General Mohammed Reza Zahedi, in Damascus.  But it is equally likely that Lebanese Hizballah will itself be the factor seeking revenge.  Mussawi’s killing was avenged by an attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, and then by the destruction of a Jewish community center in the same city in 1994.  There will be heightened alerts in Jewish communities worldwide in the period ahead. 

But the main effect of the killing of Hassan Nasrallah is a moral one.  The Iran led regional axis is now reeling, its vulnerability to intelligence penetration, and its helplessness against Israel’s precision air power laid bare, its carefully cultivated veneer of inevitability and invulnerability irrevocably torn. In this regard, I should conclude by declaring an interest:  Late last night, as the first confused reports confirming Nasrallah’s death began to come in, I thought of two comrades of mine from my army days, who died fighting Hizballah.  I’m sure that their families felt a kind of closure last night, whatever may follow. From conversations in the last 12 hours with Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian friends, I can attest that there are many, many others across the region, including in places formally controlled by Iran-aligned forces, who feel the same.  A historic moment.   .