Israel’s firepower won’t win it peace

ISRAEL may have killed Hezbollah leader Sey­yed Hassan Nasrallah but what the world thinks of its occupation of Palestine, continued genocide in Gaza and provocative military action against Lebanon was evident at the UN General Assembly.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got to the podium to address the assembly, there was a mass walkout by a large number of delegates and the only applause and cheering at his delusional speech came from the galleries that the Israeli delegation ensured were filled with genocide supporters.
One commentator remarked, “It seemed the galleries were taken up entirely by members of the US Congress”, in a reference to the multiple standing ovations for Israel’s extreme right-wing leader during a recent address to the US Congress.
The most embarrassing moment for Netanyahu came when he was talking about eliminating ‘terrorism’ and then building a peaceful region with partners such as Saudi Arabia. The camera panned to the seating area of the Saudi delegation tagged with a lit-up sign ‘Saudi Arabia’ and showed empty seats as the delegates had walked out.
While the role (or lack of it) of the bulk of the Arab world has been far from proactive in putting pressure on US and Israel’s other Western backers to force it to stop its mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and now of Lebanese Muslims, the mood in many Arab streets was reflected in the decision to walk out.
As these lines were being written on Friday, the Israeli military officially claimed that the Hezbollah leader had been ‘eliminated’ after a massive air strike on six apartment blocks in a Beirut neighbourhood, seen as a Hezbollah stronghold in the Lebanese capital, on Friday. Hezbollah confirmed the news.
Hezbollah is the only force in the Middle East to have successfully confronted the Israeli military over the past 50 years and gave it a bloody nose in the 2006 conflict, forcing the formidable opponent to beat a retreat. This boosted the movement and propelled its leader, Hassan Nasrallah to become one of the most popular figures in the Arab world and beyond.
With its own and its Western allies’ financial and intelligence resources, it is clear now that Israel spent the period from 2006 to the present day planning and plotting about degrading Hezbollah, the only military force in half a century to stand up to it and face it down.
This Israeli view may well have been reinforced when Hezbollah and other Iran affiliates fought alongside Syrian government forces against IS that was threatening to overwhelm Syria and stopped the terrorists. Many believed that the terror group that sprang out of nowhere was the brainchild of Israeli intelligence or at the very least received immense help from Israel.
Interestingly, Hezbollah, along with the so-called axis of resistance comprising Iran, Yemen and Syria, is Shia and the only proactive ‘military’ allies of the Sunni Hamas movement in Gaza. This alliance perhaps is one of the reasons that Gulf monarchies and emirates and the US-backed autocrat in Egypt look at it with suspicion; it makes them reluctant to offer meaningful assistance to the Palestinians.
For Israel, which was moving closer to the UAE and Saudi Arabia and has close diplomatic and trade relations with Egypt and Jordan, this ‘axis’ had to be degraded, if possible destroyed, because it continues to challenge its settler colonial project in Palestine and other illegally occupied areas in Lebanon and Syria, such as the Shebaa Farms and the Golan Heights.
Against this backdrop, it is clear from the exp­loding pagers and walkie-talkies to the killing of Hassan Nasrallah and other senior Hezbollah lea­ders why Israel is claiming a huge success. But can these self-proclaimed wins, win Israel the security and peace it wants for its citizens as, it claims, has been its objective for several decades?
From the helicopter gunship strike in south Lebanon, killing Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi (Nasrallah succeeded him), his wife and five-year-old son in 1992, to the Gaza assassination of Shaikh Ahmed Yassin, the near-blind, wheelchair-bound, paraplegic Hamas leader in 2004, there have been many ‘decapitation’ murders in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and even in countries outside the conflict zone.
Has any one of these ‘successes’ celebrated by Israel brought it peace and security? The answer has to be a resounding NO. But Israel carries on relentlessly simply because it can. The leaders of the ‘free world’, such as those in office in the US, UK, Germany, France and several other Western countries, have decided that Israel is their most important ally in the region and they’ll indulge it no matter what it does.
They have collectively spent hundreds of billions of dollars to bolster Israel’s military capability and done nothing to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza. There are three main reasons as I can see.
The first must be the guilt at the Holocaust during which the psychopath Adolf Hitler wiped out five to six million Jews in Germany, Poland and other parts of Europe, while the US and UK looked on. The second is an ally in the Middle East which mirrors their own values, including colonialism. The third has to be the massive funding provided to election campaigns of US politicians by the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel billionaires and bodies such as the Conservative Friends of Israel and the Labour Friends of Israel in the UK, which undermines these ‘democracies’ by leaving their elected officials compromised.
Hope one day their voters ask what their carte blanche to Israel has delivered. From Shaikh Yassin who was succeeded by leaders such as Khaled Mashal, Ismail Haniyeh to the current leader Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian desire for freedom lives on.
Similarly, notwithstanding the setbacks, Hezbollah will find someone like Nasrallah’s cousin Hashem Safi al-Din, whose son is married to IRGC’s assassinated commander Qasem Soleimani’s daughter, to provide leadership. Hezbollah will find its feet again. Israel’s firepower is terrifying. But it should know the will of those resisting is no less.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
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Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2024