It is hard to overemphasize the importance of Israel’s killing of Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and Chairman of Hamas’s Political Bureau Yahya Sinwar. Both were prime targets of the Zionist state’s war machine before and after October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked southern Israel and Hezbollah began a war of attrition with Israel across the Lebanon border as part of the ‘unity of the fronts’ proclaimed by the factions of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance. Nasrallah headed the most powerful militia in the axis and acted for the better part of three decades as the most committed and dedicated challenger to Israel’s project of fashioning the Middle East according to its wishes.
Sinwar, on the other hand, was a product of Israel’s brutal prison system for Palestinians. He engineered what turned out to be the most consequential military operation, one that punctured Israel’s sense of invincibility in October 2023. Toward the end of his life, he assumed the leadership of the arguably most effective Palestinian organization to resist Israeli dominance at a nadir in the Palestinian struggle for rights, independence, and statehood. His killing in a firefight with Israeli units in Rafah—and his obvious defiance by hurling a stick at an Israeli drone as he lay dying—encapsulated his years of resistance to the Israeli project of doing away with the Palestinians as if they never belonged on the land they inhabited for millennia.
Nasrallah’s and Sinwar’s killings were but mere chapters in an Israeli project to eliminate all sources of resistance
But considering the continuing war on Gaza and Lebanon today, it is obvious that Nasrallah’s and Sinwar’s killings were but mere chapters in an Israeli project to eliminate all sources of resistance to a pax Israelica in the eastern Mediterranean that seals the final imposition of hegemony there by the Zionist state. The two leaders’ deaths have not so far and in any way slowed the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, and Lebanon. Following Nasrallah’s assassination on September 23, the Israeli military began a punishing assault that continues today on Hezbollah’s positions in southern Lebanon, Beirut’s southern suburbs, and other areas where the Shia community—the party’s core constituency—resides. The assault did not spare other non-Shia areas where more than one million displaced were forced to take shelter from the Israeli military’s indiscriminate bombings.
Immediately after Sinwar’s killing—and as happened when Israel assassinated his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh in Iran—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged a continuation of the war on Gaza until Hamas is soundly and irredeemably defeated. To be sure, the push button that could turn off Israel’s war machine appears to have been deactivated until Netanyahu and his cohorts are fully satisfied that no challenge can ever again emerge to his country’s unperturbed hegemony. But this scenario of unfettered dominance that would allow Netanyahu and his right-wing government to dictate all terms of future regional arrangements promises constant war for war’s sake only. Indeed, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah appear to be near full collapse, or close to assured surrender, and are not ready to accept Israel’s wishes.
The current state of affairs after more than a year of war points to four main conclusions.
Israel Has Become the Ultimate Rogue State
First, since the start of the war on Gaza and its extension in Lebanon, Israel’s military has exhibited a wanton disregard for the basic laws of war by indiscriminately targeting civilian areas and facilities, killing and displacing millions of people, and destroying vital infrastructure and assets, all in contravention of international law. Israel’s government is conducting a genocidal war to empty out at least the northern part of the Gaza Strip through starving its inhabitants and the border area in southern Lebanon in order to either occupy them or create buffer zones to guarantee its own security at the expense of the sovereignty of other nations. The utter destruction of Gaza and areas of Lebanon expose Israel as a country that lives on cruelty, brutality, and criminality with right-wing leaders who have decided that the international rule of law is too much of a hindrance to what they want to accomplish, all niceties and lawfulness be damned.
Israel under its current leadership may have decided that its hostages are no longer a priority.
By becoming a lawless and rogue entity, Israel under its current leadership may have decided that its hostages are no longer a priority, despite the occasional lip service they receive about continuous efforts to free them from Hamas’s captivity. To be sure, it is hard to imagine that the freedom of the hostages is paramount in Tel Aviv when round after round of negotiations to free them were aborted by the Netanyahu government and when the Israeli military simply carpet bombs all areas of the Gaza Strip where the hostages could be housed. Nor are Israel’s position and reputation in the world of concern to its leadership when Israeli forces on the border with Lebanon wantonly fire on the positions of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon to force them to flee so that the Israeli Army can invade. Indeed, Israel has become the ultimate rogue state despite its protestations that its behavior and conduct of war is an example of lawful adherence to international legality and probity.
The United States Has Helped Kill International Law
A second conclusion is that a combination of American hubris and political expediency helped allow Israel to ignore international law and behave barbarically and without serious consequence over the last year. Indeed, Israel’s rogue status is as much a product of Zionist ideology as it is the result of American permissiveness and complicity by an administration and a Congress beholden to political interests controlled by the power of pro-Israel constituencies in the United States. While the Republican wing of American politics by and large gave Israel a carte blanche in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, establishment Democrats pretended to call for Israel’s adherence to international humanitarian law just as President Biden’s administration continued to fund and arm the same killing machine that proved Israel a rogue state.
From now on, it is impossible to believe any American politician, bureaucrat, or political party official when they discuss and defend the sanctity of international law as the yardstick for the behavior of states. To be sure, the United States has deprived itself of the right and indeed the privilege of, for example, criticizing Russia for invading Ukraine in violation of the sovereignty of states and for Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians. The Biden administration has also flouted American law and continued to supply weapons to Israel despite findings by its own Department of State that the Zionist state likely violated international humanitarian law in Gaza by blocking aid to Palestinians there. Any future reevaluation of American foreign policy—as applied around the world and in the Middle East—must come to terms with this obvious contradiction in American policy and behavior.
Hamas and Hezbollah Are Here to Stay
Third, whatever their political and religious ideology and proclivities, the two organizations are part of the Arab political scene and represent a constituency in Palestine, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Arab world. They by no means represent a majority of public opinion and have diehard opponents, but their primary appeal centers around a visceral emotion in the Arab public— that of adhering to the principles of Palestinian liberation and fighting Israeli occupation and settler colonialism. In the absence of the Arab states’ adherence to similar principles, Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s defiance and continued resistance to Israel make them de facto representatives of a yearning by ordinary Arabs for a defender of rights and independence.
killing Sinwar and Nasrallah in the hope of ending the lives of Hamas and Hezbollah is unlikely to work.
The killing of Hassan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar by no means signals the death and disappearance of either Hezbollah or Hamas. If anything, both organizations will regenerate their leaderships, which will continue the present battles with Israel and rebuild the structures and functions of their charges. Sinwar’s deputy, Khalil al-Hayya, has vowed to continue the fight against Israel and in fact promised to stay with the former leader’s conditions for a deal over Gaza: Israel’s ending all operations there, Israeli withdrawal from the Strip, and release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Nasrallah’s deputy, Naim Qassem, also upon his chief’s death vowed that Lebanon cannot be separated from Palestine and that nothing changed of Hezbollah’s position on war with Israel. In other words, and despite what Israel, and definitely the United States, think about the efficacy of assassinating leaders, killing Sinwar and Nasrallah in the hope of ending the lives of Hamas and Hezbollah is unlikely to work.
The Arab World Is No Longer Relevant; Perhaps Never Was
Fourth, the Arab states are practicing what amounts to a shared silence over Israeli atrocities and genocide. Ignominy and irrelevance have accompanied the Arab states for some time now, only to become a constant state of existence for the Arab political order since October 2023. Careful not to antagonize the United States—Israel’s main supporter and supplier of arms, but also their dreaded benefactor—or to be seen by Israel as ostensibly defending Hamas and Hezbollah, they have occasionally made declarations about respect for international law and the sanctity of human life in Palestine and Lebanon. Safe behind brutal security and intelligence services that controlled the tempo of the Arab street during the last year’s genocidal and destructive wars on Gaza and Lebanon, Arab regimes preferred to remain irrelevant bystanders watching Israel trying to refashion their own region and non-state actors—Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iran-friendly militias—trying to thwart it.
Perhaps Arab regimes think that destroying Hamas and Hezbollah will help limit Iran’s influence in the Arab world. Perhaps they also think that crushing the two groups will make it easier to find an acceptable accommodation with Israel even if doing so does not guarantee full Palestinian rights. Some regimes already accommodated themselves to the present reality of Israel—as occupier and apartheid state—and established fully normalized relations with it. Others were on their way to join the accords but continued to insist that Israel accept the establishment of a Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967, borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. None, however, has found it necessary to assert the Arab right to defend what remains of Palestinian aspirations for independence and statehood. And none has acted decisively to stop Israel’s criminal assault on the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank and the Lebanese as they flee their homes on the southern border and in the suburbs of Beirut.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Mohammad Kassir, Anas Mohammah
