This essay was published first by New Lines Magazine on November 3, 2023.اضافة اعلان
Like
many Lebanese, I spent the morning glued to my screen waiting for Hezbollah
Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah’s first speech since the beginning of the
latest Israel-Palestine war. While I haven’t lived in Lebanon for more than a
decade, Nasrallah’s speeches remain important events in my life, as both a
foreign policy professional and a Lebanese. So I found myself parked on the
side of a Washington road in rush hour traffic, watching. After all, he was
expected to announce Hezbollah’s intentions toward Israel — and Lebanon’s fate
— amid its escalating war with Hamas.
The key
question was whether Nasrallah’s Hezbollah (and its Iranian patrons) intended
to launch a wider war against Israel as their contribution to the “resistance”
agenda, despite the inevitable harm this would bring to Lebanese, including its
supporters, and potentially to the wider region. This was important to many of
those watching; if you are Lebanese you have an obvious stake in the matter.
Some people — Lebanese or others — want Hezbollah to enter the war despite the
certain destruction it will bring to Lebanon. Others sympathize with the
Palestinian cause but have enough problems living in a failed state. And there
are those (including Lebanese) who are enjoying watching Hezbollah squirm in
the face of Israeli military deterrence thus far, sporadic operations aside.
A key
takeaway from the speech, especially among people who dislike Hezbollah, is
that it was empty bluster, doublespeak, an awkward attempt to disguise
Hezbollah’s cowardice or weakness in the face of Israel, shown by its failure
to escalate the war against the latter from Lebanon. There is some truth to
this, of course. Nasrallah is a talented public speaker, but he is also a
deceptive and manipulative one. And he did fail to announce any escalation
against Israel despite the increasingly horrific war in Gaza. Yet the speech
was arguably more than simple posturing to hide weakness and went some way in
revealing Nasrallah’s worldview and that of his patrons.
What
did Nasrallah actually say? It is true that early into the speech he started
building a case for Hezbollah’s restraint. For example, he made it clear that
the October attack was a Hamas operation — indeed that it was a complete
secret, a surprise to other groups in the “resistance” and a purely Palestinian
matter. This could be read as praise for Hamas’ initiative and autonomy, but it
seems more like a means of limiting Hezbollah’s responsibilities toward the
Hamas campaign, buying Hezbollah and Iran freedom to set their own policies.
Nasrallah’s
answer to the question of when Hezbollah will join the fight was simple:
Hezbollah was already in the fight, having opened a front with Israel in south
Lebanon early, where it has already lost dozens of fighters. Nasrallah boasted
that this had deterred any preemptive war plans against Lebanon by Israel and
forced it to divert assets from the Gaza front, which might be true. His larger
aim was obviously to defend Hezbollah against accusations of cowardice and
calls for escalation: The party was already doing its “resistance” duty after
all.
If you
are Lebanese — or don’t wish for there to be a war in Lebanon — this might be
enough to put you at ease. But alongside such relief was a good deal of
schadenfreude and contempt toward Hezbollah, observers contrasting its usual
bombastic propaganda with its meekness in the face of Israel and its ostensible
selling-out of its “resistance” partner Hamas. Conversely, Hamas will be
disappointed with Nasrallah’s restraint. But this is not all that Nasrallah had
to say on the matter.
Nasrallah
spent much of the speech contextualizing the war in the broader strategic
worldview of the “resistance axis” and its specific historical chapters.
Nasrallah made clear that Hezbollah continues to see Israel as a fundamentally
dangerous but weak actor plagued by internal contradictions and limited means —
the “spider web” of this and previous speeches. Indeed, he pointed to the
American rush to fund and arm Israel after the Hamas attacks as proof of the
latter’s weakness rather than of its good standing with a superpower. He even
spent a substantial amount of time singling out Israel’s current cabinet as
particularly dysfunctional and shortsighted, another supposed indication of
Israel’s decline.
Nasrallah
is clearly satisfied at the shock and disorientation Hamas’ killings provoked
and raised a crucial point: Israel’s perceived habit of responding to
provocations with maximalist positions that they are then forced to climb down
from. The example he used was the 2006 Lebanon war, when the Israelis tried to
force Hezbollah to return kidnapped soldiers through large-scale military
action, only to have to agree to a humbling prisoner swap after a strong
performance by Hezbollah. Unlike Hamas, Hezbollah (and Iran) do have some
history of inflicting strategic setbacks on Israel, especially in Lebanon, at
least at some critical junctures. In his speech Nasrallah urged Hamas to see
the “resistance” as unfolding in discrete stages and to focus on immediate
achievements. This is consistent with the broader “resistance” view to which
Nasrallah, who remains a true believer despite his Lebanese political cynicism,
subscribes.
All of
which tells us that while Nasrallah and his patrons do not want a war in
Lebanon, this does not necessarily mean they believe Israel is going to win in
Gaza (according to either Israeli or Hezbollah definitions of victory). They
may simply not know what is going to happen there or perhaps expect Hamas to
emerge bloodied but alive (a victory in “resistance” terms). If that is the
calculation, then it would make no sense for Hezbollah to escalate against
Israel — or it would at the very least be cause for patience and restraint.
Nasrallah
did, however, make a crucial point of saying decisions about escalation are
tied to events in Gaza, raising the possibility that a war in Lebanon is
possible after all, under certain circumstances. We can only speculate as to
what those might be, though an approaching elimination of Hamas — a true
Israeli victory, as Nasrallah or Iran might see it — could provide an answer.
Faysal
Itani is a senior director at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy.
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