Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah
The Man Who Defeated Israel
Israel assassinated Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (1960-2024) because he refused to stop the attacks on northern Israel until the Israelis ended the genocide against the Palestinians. During the brief Israeli ceasefire, Nasrallah’s organization—Hezbollah—paused their attacks also. When the Israelis resumed fighting, so did Hezbollah.
Nasrallah was killed because he was unrelenting in his support for Palestine. Unlike every other Arab leader, Nasrallah had led the fight against Israel twice, which led to its defeat: first, when Israel was forced to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000 and second when Israel could not vanquish Hezbollah in 2006. The man who defeated Israel was finally killed on September 27, 2024, along with thousands of his fellow Lebanese.
In 2013, as the war in Syria escalated, I walked with a friend into a crowded area in Dahieh, a neighborhood of Beirut, Lebanon. We had come to listen to a speech being given by Nasrallah. I had been told that Nasrallah would address the reason why Hezbollah—which is both a political party in Lebanon and a military group formed to defend Lebanon from the constant Israeli incursions—had decided to enter Syria. A large television screen had been erected in the open space, and eventually, Nasrallah appeared on it and was greeted by loud cheers. Similar scenes would have been observed in other parts of Lebanon where Nasrallah would have appeared on television screens to address people about this consequential decision.
The reason Nasrallah was not there in person is that Israel had targeted to assassinate him ever since he was appointed to lead Hezbollah in 1992 at the age of 32. It would have been suicidal for him to appear in person. For that reason, his exact location was unknown, but it was clear where people could gather to listen to him. The speech began slowly, with Nasrallah laying out the complexities of the war in Syria, and the dangers posed to Lebanon’s people by the assaults of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda front, near the borders. If al-Nusra entered Lebanon, Nasrallah said, the group would target the Shia community, but also Christians and others. It is to protect Lebanon, Nasrallah said, that Hezbollah fighters would have to cross the border and fight in Syria’s Qalamoun Mountains.
Later, I went with another journalist into those mountains to observe the clashes between Hezbollah fighters and those of Jabhat al-Nusra. The reverence with which the Hezbollah men spoke of Nasrallah was impressive, and their own sense of destiny—to defend Lebanon from the scourge of al-Nusra—was commanding. If the Sayyed told them to do it, they said it would be done. And so, they were there, far from their homes, caught in difficult fights with al-Nusra fighters who were motivated by martyrdom rather than by the need to gain territory. If there was a poll among Hezbollah members and their families, Nasrallah would universally have the highest approval rating.
In his speech, Nasrallah said it was vital for Hezbollah to protect the Sayyida Zainab Mosque at al-Sitt, just outside Damascus. This mosque is said by the Twelver Shia to be the burial place of Zaynab bint Ali, the daughter of Ali and Fatima, and, therefore, the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad. Since the shrine is revered by the Shia community, and Al Qaeda groups had been terrorizing the Shia population in Syria and attacking Shia shrines, Nasrallah’s concern resonated with his followers.
It is vital to understand that in interview after interview, Nasrallah said that sectarian divides are anathema and that coexistence is essential. The entry of Hezbollah into Syria was partly about protecting Lebanon from al-Nusra and partly about protecting the Shia community in Syria and Shia shrines. It is emblematic of Hezbollah’s location in Lebanon both as a Lebanese national force and as the Islamic (not Shia) resistance. Throughout his leadership of Hezbollah, Nasrallah moved between these two aspects of the organization deftly.
Driving through Lebanon’s southern towns, it is clear that the depth of support for Hezbollah is unshakable. The reason is that it was Hezbollah’s military ingenuity that led to Lebanon being able to end the Israeli occupation by force of a large part of Lebanon in 2000, which had begun when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Hezbollah was born during that conflict and demonstrated both military prowess and political acumen as well as courage in the face of repression. Nasrallah had been in Iran from 1989 to 1991, studying at the Shia seminary in Qom. When he returned to Lebanon in 1991, he threw himself into Hezbollah and the next year—after the assassination of Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi (1952-1992) by the United States—Nasrallah became the leader of the organization.
Nasrallah immediately set in motion a policy that remained in place until his assassination: Hezbollah would only hit Israeli military targets, but if Israel struck Lebanese civilians, then Hezbollah would retaliate against Israeli civilians. When Israel withdrew in defeat in 2000, Hezbollah made a public statement that it would not target anybody in Lebanon who collaborated with the Israeli occupation. The Lebanese had to heal and become a nation.
In the Lebanese coastal city of Sur (Tyre), unknown people bombed a number of restaurants that serve alcohol in late 2012. I went down to talk to some of the owners of these restaurants and of a brewery, all of whom told me that they had been visited by people from Hezbollah who offered to pay for the damages even though the attacks were not by their members. Nasrallah had said that though he opposed the consumption of alcohol, he did not believe that Lebanese society must conform to the social views of any group but should learn to tolerate the mores of each other.
For all the talk of Nasrallah and antisemitism, it would be worth considering that it was Hezbollah under Nasrallah that helped the reconstruction of Beirut’s Maghen Abraham Synagogue. “[It] is a religious place of worship,” Nasrallah said, “and its restoration is welcome,” stated Arab News. It is this attitude that partly led to Nasrallah telling Julian Assange during a discussion about Palestine in 2012 that “the only solution is the establishment of one state—one state on the land on Palestine in which the Muslims and the Jews and the Christians live in peace in a democratic state. Any other solution will simply not be viable, and it won’t be sustained.”
When Israel, with US support, began its bombardment of Lebanon in 2006, it appeared certain that Hezbollah would be demolished. But it withstood the attack and counterattacked Israel. Years earlier, friends in the Arab states would ask me, “Why can’t we produce a Hugo Chávez?” meaning why could they not have a leader who would stand up against the interference of the West and the occupation of the Palestinians by Israel. During the 2006 war, these same people began to say that Nasrallah was their Chávez, that he was the incarnation of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The fact that Hezbollah was not destroyed and was able to stand up for itself proved to large sections of the Arab world that Israel lost that war.
The victory is partly attributed to Nasrallah’s ability to convert Hezbollah from a military force into an integral part of the “resistance society” (mujtama’ al-muqawama) in large parts of Lebanon; this resistance society shaped the worldview of the villages of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, where they committed themselves to the long-term struggle to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the Israeli interventions in southern Lebanon. It is this resistance community that defines Hezbollah’s endurance rather than the thousands of missiles it has hidden away in tunnels across Lebanon’s southern region. The Israelis tried to kill Nasrallah many times during and after 2006 but did not succeed. He would often talk about how one of his speeches was his last since it was unclear when the Israelis might succeed.
The assassination of Nasrallah produced a sense of shock across Lebanon because a view had been growing that he could not be killed. But Nasrallah was a man, and human beings die one way or the other. Robert Fisk asked him to explain what it meant to prepare for martyrdom, according to a 2001 article by him. “Imagine you are in a sauna,” Nasrallah said. “It is very hot but you know that in the next room there is air conditioning, an armchair, classical music, and a cocktail.” That would have been his attitude when the Israeli bombs landed.
In 1997, his eldest son—Muhammad Hadi—was killed in an Israeli ambush in Mlikh. It was a personal loss for him. The day after his death, Jawad Nasrallah, his son, went to the site of the gruesome crater resulting from 85 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs dropped by Israeli planes and screamed in torment looking at the obliterated bodies. So far, Israel’s continued bombardment has taken the lives of more than 1,000 people in Lebanon and displaced more than half a million others. A society that lives in anticipation of war now struggles with the ruthlessness bestowed upon it by a desperate leadership in Israel that would like to make its genocide of the Palestinians into a war against Lebanon and eventually Iran. Israel’s actions have pried open the jaws of hell.
Meanwhile, black flags were flown from the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, Iran, and the Sayyida Zeinab shrine outside Damascus, Syria; this is an honor that few receive, not even Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989) got this honor. The shock that now pervades the Arab world will soon dissipate. Hezbollah will try to recover. But it will not be able to easily replace Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the only Arab leader who could legitimately claim to defeat Israel.