Israel's Assassination of Hezbollah Leader Will Perpetuate the Islamic Resistance
Israel's Assassination of Hezbollah Leader Will Perpetuate the Islamic Resistance
Imperial violence doesn't work the way you think it does.
Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, using U.S.-made 2,000 pound bombs that killed hundreds of others in a Beirut suburb, is a wicked and criminal act of escalation in Israel’s long, ongoing war of domination, colonization, and genocide.
In the days after this bombing, Israel has also killed a Hamas leader along with his wife, son, and daughter in a strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, following a similar strike in Iran that killed the head of Hamas’ political wing in July. In another strike in Beirut, Israel murdered three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist group. Israel has a long history of extrajudicial assassinations throughout the world, and it is betting that this tactic will topple the regional resistance to its apartheid system. They are wrong.
Nevertheless, the killing of Hezbollah’s leader is an immense blow. Ali Abunimah, executive director of the Electronic Intifada, writes that “Nasrallah’s stature as a tactical and strategic thinker, as the most prominent and trusted leader of the Axis of Resistance, and as a personality capable of inspiring and reassuring supporters even in the worst of times, cannot be overstated.” The killing of Nasrallah, Abunimah writes, “is likely, at least in the short term, to cause enormous shock, despair and demoralization among supporters of the resistance to Zionism in Lebanon and across the region.”
Israeli officials have made it explicit that they murdered Nasrallah because of his demand for an end to Israel’s war against Gaza as a condition for Hezbollah to cease its attacks against Israel. For Palestine, Nasrallah was martyred. For Palestine, the Houthis in Yemen have been paying a similar price. For Palestine, students all over the world are being beaten and imprisoned. For Palestine, for the over 100,000 people killed in Gaza, we, all of us, are responsible.
With “self-defense” as its evergreen excuse, Israel is instigating belligerence with its neighbors. Israel is now amassing troops at its border with Lebanon, a frightful prospect of invasion and occupation which it carried out before throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, characterized by mass murder and torture of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees. Since Israel’s bombing campaign of southern Lebanon has commenced, 1.2 million people have been displaced and over 2,000 people have been killed. Israel is currently bombing critical Yemeni ports, a retaliation against the Houthis for choking trade through the Red Sea in order to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against the Palestinians. Israel recently bombed the Syrian capital of Damascus, killing three people, following a strike on the Iranian embassy there in April that killed 16 people and strikes in Aleppo that killed over 40 people. Israel is continuing its violent project of ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank largely unimpeded, with Palestinian authorities reporting that 902 family lines have been annihilated by Israel since October 7th, with 1,364 other families having only one member currently surviving.
None of these crimes would be possible without the United States backing Israel to the hilt. The liberal wing of the U.S. political spectrum, led by presidential candidate Kamala Harris, called Nasrallah a “terrorist” and described his murder as “a measure of justice,” while the U.S. has given Israel $8.7 billion in just its latest military aid package to keep the genocide going.
The struggling resistance fighters of Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah, are imbued, by virtue of their stance against the most powerful and bloodthirsty empire the world has ever known, with their own power that cannot be simply snuffed out. Just ask a Vietnamese veteran of America’s criminal war against them. Even with perhaps 3-5 million Vietnamese killed, the guerillas kept on fighting. And so the resistance against the misguided Zionist project will continue, as it has for generations, until the intolerable boot is yanked away from the neck.
“Even if you besiege us in a small piece of land,” Hassan Nasrallah said, “we don’t feel that we are besieged.”
We have with us the earth, the mountains, the valleys, the soil, the rivers, the seas, the oceans, the clouds, the winds, the sun, the moon, the stars, the seven heavens, the angels, and what god has created... We feel that you are besieged. America, with all its greatness, is besieged, and all of our enemies are besieged. … You are fighting a losing and useless battle that will lead to no results. Killing increases our awareness, stubbornness, and determination.
The creation of martyrs such as Nasrallah is a losing game for the West. It invests the resistance with an inexorable will. When I see the very real heartbreak in much of the Arab world over the martyrdom of Nasrallah, coupled with the stubborn will to keep on fighting, to hold onto some humanity, to keep liberation in sight, I think of these prophetic words by James Baldwin:
Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary, and this revelation invests the victim with patience. … [H]owever long the battle may go on, the victor can never be the victor: on the contrary, all his energies, his entire life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win — he has simply become the prisoner of the people he thought to cow, chain, or murder into submission. … The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything. They do not know the precise shape of the future, but they know that the future belongs to them.
The future, god willing, belongs not to the West, but to the world. This may be where we are headed. On September 11th, 2001, Al-Qaeda opened a calamitous Pandora’s Box. They poked the eye of the dragon. In time, in some twisted way, that terror attack may be seen as the central event which precipitated the fall of the dastardly American empire. The United States wasted what worldwide sympathy we had after 9/11 by using it as a pretext to carry out disastrous, crusading wars that accomplished nothing except the murder of millions, the empowerment of nihilistic terror, and the loss of any remaining belief in the U.S.-led “international rules-based order.” We kidnapped innocent people and sent them to torture camps. We rained death on entire lands, wiping out whole families using trigger men sitting comfortably on the other side of the world staring at tiny figures on computer screens. We killed hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan in order to maintain an enrichment scheme for U.S. private contractors. In the short term, 9/11 was a gift to the “self-licking ice cream cone” that is the military industrial complex. In the long term, because of our hubris, our inchoate violence, our total abandoning of humanity, that terror attack, ironically, may mean our complete undoing. Let it be so.
The U.S. unleashed globalized lawlessness unto the world after our bruising that day in September. Every single criminal act that we normalized in our reactionary war on terror has now been adopted by other nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended his genocidal acts in Gaza by saying that the U.S. would be "doing a hell of a lot more" after a terror attack like October 7th.
If we can do it, why can’t they? Thus, Israel tortures and kills Palestinian prisoners, none of whom have legal representation nor have been charged with a crime. The shocking levity on display in the pictures that U.S. soldiers took of themselves at Abu Ghraib — forcing Iraqi prisoners to pile naked on top of each other, forcing them to jerk each other off, siccing dogs on them, spreading feces all over them, smiling and flashing a thumbs up in front of their corpses, forcing them to walk on all fours while leashed like dogs — this casual cruelty and unafraid posterity is now what characterizes the Israeli genocide against Palestinians. Israeli society, by the evidence, has zero compunction about showcasing their war crimes and dehumanization of Arabs. We do these horrific things because we know that we will never be held accountable. Our victims are losers. We are the gangster states that would be nothing without our guns.
I want to tell you that the entire U.S.-led project of empire and global capitalism, with Israel as its useful cudgel in the Middle East, long given legitimacy by a veneer of liberal platitudes, is not worth preserving. It deserved to die a long time ago. They are right to hate us. All of them. All over the globe. We have no right to ask for their forgiveness. We have no right to feel sorry. We have no right to enjoy the poisoned bloody fruits of empire. Every death by our country’s hands is an irrevocable failure of our collective movements for justice. I want to tell you that these people you call terrorists are your very children. You birthed them. You raised them. You planted the seeds of their hatred. And now you must deal with them.
I want to tell you that Aaron Bushnell was right, and so was Alice Herz, both in what they said and what they did as self-immolators. Bushnell wrote shortly before he self-immolated at the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. in protest of Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
In her 1965 letter written shortly before she set herself on fire on a Detroit street corner in protest of Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, Alice Herz, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, called her adoptive countrymen to action:
Confused by hatred and fear that were consciously stirred up over the last twenty years, you allowed your lawmakers in Congress to spend endless billions of dollars on an incalculable arsenal of destruction.
Awake and act, before it's too late! Yours is the responsibility to decide, if this world shall be made available to live for all human beings, to be the site of a good, dignified and peaceful life - or whether she should blow herself up into oblivion.
Alice Herz has her picture hung in a hall of heroes in Ho Chi Minh City. Aaron Bushnell’s image has been carried on banners in Yemen, streets have been named after him in Jericho. These are the kinds of people amongst us who are rightly revered by those we oppress. It is ironic that they do not get the same treatment by their home country. Bushnell’s and Herz’s sacrifice, their divine violence, their sublime madness, their flash of conviction, is precisely what our tired, decadent, somnambulant society needs. As I see what we wreak upon the Palestinians every day, contrasted with the contagion of moral apathy in our society, our unthinking retreat into the frivolous and the trivial, our happy opiates, our spectacle, our deathly American trance — I want to scream. I want to overthrow the tables. I want to wake the children sleeping. No more can this go on. This, all of it, is unbearable. And yet it is borne.
“How is it even possible, at all,” Nasrallah said, “that for the past six months, given what has been happening in Gaza, to the women of Gaza, the children of Gaza, the people of Gaza, someone can call themselves a Muslim and be able to live, be happy, enjoy, hold music concerts, and continue with entertainment as if nothing is happening and the world is perfectly fine? How, how, how?”
Because of these and other things, our whole world must be turned topsy-turvy. Must be torn asunder. Must be ruptured, and born anew. So the last shall be first, and the first shall be last. God bless the resistance. God bless the intifada. Amen.