After assassinating Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in a devastating airstrike on Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood, the Israeli military took to Platform X to triumphantly boast that Nasrallah “would no longer be capable of terrorizing the world”.
Certainly, the objective observer would be forgiven for not understanding how Nasrallah is supposed to be responsible for ground terrorism when he is not the one who has presided over the genocide in the Gaza Strip for almost a year. It is obviously not him who has just killed more than 700 people in Lebanon in less than a week either.
Israel takes credit for all of this, just as it takes credit for pulverizing numerous residential buildings and their residents in an attempt to kill Nasrallah – as good an example as any of “terrorizing the world “.
And while Israel presents Nasrallah’s elimination as a decisive blow to the organization, a brief glance at history reveals that, unsurprisingly, such killings do nothing to eradicate resistance but rather intensify it.
Case in point: Abbas al-Musawi, co-founder and second secretary general of Hezbollah, was assassinated in 1992 in southern Lebanon by Israeli helicopter gunships, which also killed his wife and five-year-old son. Also on this occasion, Israel was quick to congratulate itself on its bloody feat – but the celebration was woefully premature. After al-Musawi’s assassination, Nasrallah was elected secretary general and established Hezbollah as a formidable force not only in Lebanon, but throughout the region.
Under his leadership, Hezbollah expelled Israel from Lebanese territory in 2000, ending a brutal 22-year occupation, and successfully retaliated during the 34-day war against Lebanon in 2006, inflicting humiliating blows on the Israeli army.
Meanwhile, Israel’s continued obsession with killing Hezbollah figures has done little to weaken the group. The joint Mossad-CIA assassination in Syria in 2008 of Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh, for example, simply propelled the man to ever more mythical status in the Hezbollah Hall of Fame.
Then, of course, there are the myriad assassinations of Palestinian leaders going back decades – none of which have deterred Palestinians from wanting to, you know, exist.
The Associated Press notes that several leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were killed in their apartments in Beirut in 1973 by Israeli commandos “during a nighttime raid led by Ehud Barak, who later became the highest commander of the Israeli army and prime minister.
According to the AP report, Barak’s team “killed Kamal Adwan, who was responsible for PLO operations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank; Mohammed Youssef Najjar, member of the PLO executive committee; and Kamal Nasser, PLO spokesperson and charismatic writer and poet.”
This came a year after Ghassan Kanafani – respected Palestinian author, poet and spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – was assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut along with his 17-year-old niece.
These and other assassinations of prominent Palestinian figures have done little to quell the Palestinian resistance movement. As the first and second Intifadas demonstrated in the 1980s and 2000s, Palestinians can launch mass popular uprisings even without political or military leaders to organize them.
And as Israel worked to violently rout traditional resistance groups, new ones emerged. This was the case with Hamas, which the Israeli occupation authorities in Gaza were only too happy to encourage at first as a counterweight to the PLO.
Ultimately, Hamas also found itself a victim of Israel’s assassination strategy, which, as usual, failed to achieve its supposed goals.
In 1996, Israelis killed Hamas engineer Yahya Ayyash by planting explosives in his cell phone – a precursor, perhaps, to Israel’s recent terrorist enterprise in which he detonated pagers and bombs. other electronic devices across Lebanon.
Then there was the assassination in March 2004 by a helicopter strike in Gaza City of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a wheelchair-bound cleric and founder of Hamas. His successor Abdel Aziz Rantisi was killed less than a month later in an Israeli airstrike.
And yet, despite three apocalyptic wars in addition to regular Israeli military assaults and constant assassinations, Hamas managed to build enough capacity to carry out the October 7 attack on Israel.
Today, the assassination in July 2024 of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh – one of the main negotiators of a ceasefire agreement in Gaza and considered internationally as a “moderate” – is nothing made to diminish Palestinian resistance to the genocide, but largely emphasized Israel’s commitment to derailing any chance of a pause in the killings.
As for Nasrallah’s demise, it is worth reiterating that Hezbollah’s very existence is the result of Israel’s propensity for massacres – particularly the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon which killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians.
The invasion, dubbed “Operation Peace for the Galilee,” ostensibly aimed to stamp out anti-Israeli resistance in Lebanon, but naturally only strengthened it.
The casus belli cited to justify the operation was an assassination attempt against Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom. Argov survived, a luxury not afforded to the Lebanese and Palestinian victims of “Peace for the Galilee.”
If even a failed assassination attempt on an inconsequential diplomat is known to provide Israel with a pretext for a massive massacre, it is surprising that the Israeli administration does not stop and think about what kind of retaliation the real assassination of a diplomat without consequences. a larger-than-life Arab icon – especially in the context of a relentless genocide against his fellow Arabs.
Here again, the main thing is undoubtedly to prepare the ground for a perpetual and ever more psychopathic war.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
