Why the Killing of Nasrallah Is a Pyrrhic Victory for Israel

By Nader Hashemi

THE ASSASSINATION of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is a Pyrrhic victory for Israel. It is an illusory victory for the United States, too, and for Arab dictators around the region who are also quietly celebrating. Nasrallah’s killing—in a massive Israeli airstrike that leveled several apartment buildings in southern Beirut—will make Israel less secure while further impugning the reputation of the West, and the U.S. in particular, in the Arab and wider Islamic world. Arab autocrats that have sought an alliance with Israel will face blowback of their own.

To understand why, one must analyze the politics of the Middle East from outside of the proverbial box of Western national security, which singularly focuses on Israel while ignoring the rest of the region. The reality is that Israel has long been viewed as a settler-colonial state among many Arabs and Muslims. This image also exists in large parts of the Global South that have a collective historical memory of the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which has become ever more brutal in recent years, has reached its apotheosis in the context of a genocidal war in Gaza. It is now extending to Lebanon, where Israel’s bombardment has killed over 1,000 people in one week, including many women and children, while reportedly displacing almost a million people. 

Israel is increasingly viewed across the Middle East as far worse than a settler-colonial state. It is now seen as a genocidal state and thus an irredeemable one. In the eyes of most people in the region, though not the dictators that rule over them, can there be any coexistence with such an entity? There has been too much death and destruction of Palestinian life, and now Lebanese life, to ignore this new reality. Israel’s legitimation crisis is beyond redemption. Current and successive generations of Arabs and Muslims will now view Israel as a rogue state addicted to mass violence that makes a mockery of international law.

Security for Israel in the Middle East now takes on a new meaning. You cannot live with security and stability when the neighborhood you reside in views you as an existential threat. Israel’s ongoing war of collective punishment in Gaza in retaliation for Oct. 7 and its expanded assault on Lebanon, with a looming ground invasion, will deeply entrench this view.

As for the West, U.S. President Joe Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have consistently backed Israeli policy in Gaza and Lebanon over the past 11 months. “The objective that Israel has in the first instance in Lebanon is an important and legitimate one,” Blinken stated following Israel’s bombing of southern Beirut. Both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have issued statements endorsing the assassination of Nasrallah; Biden called the Israeli airstrike “a measure of justice.”

The lesson this will bequeath to the Middle East is that “justice” can be obtained through total war and extrajudicial killings, no matter the civilian costs. International law and the legitimacy of courts do not matter. The West’s indefatigable solidarity with Israel and its complete rejection of recent rulings by the International Court of Justice and the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will certainly be invoked by militants who will justify their own political violence by the actions of Israel and its chief patron in Washington.

Meanwhile, from their palatial and heavily guarded mansions, Arab dictators have been privately cheering Israel’s destruction of Hamas—and now Hezbollah. But they are celebrating what the ancient Greeks called a Cadmean victory, an illusionary triumph that entails one’s own ruin. The weakening of the so-called “Axis of Resistance”—the various militias that Iran backs throughout the region, led by Hezbollah—will not change the underlying drivers of instability in the Middle East. Rooted in mass poverty and pauperization for the average citizen, lack of political freedom and the absence of basic citizenship rights, these factors not only remain in place but have gotten significantly worse since the popular uprisings of 2011 were brutally suppressed with Western acquiescence.

When judged by key indicators such as civil and political rights, press freedom, censorship, political accountability, representation, the status of minorities, human rights protection and state-sanctioned executions, the Middle East has some of the lowest scores in the world. Data on global inequality also reveals that the region, despite an abundance of oil wealth, has some of the highest wealth inequality scores in the world. The World Inequality Lab, a global research center, reports that the Middle East is “the world’s most unequal region,” where the top 10 percent capture 61 percent of national income. The United Nations estimates that 31 Arab billionaires—all of them men—own almost as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the region’s population. An Oxfam study revealed these trends have been significantly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

These regional socioeconomic trends overlap with Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza. Collectively, they will produce another political fault line that will contribute to a societal explosion rooted in despair, helplessness and humiliation, fueled by the fact that the horrors in Gaza have taken place before the eyes of the world and with “ironclad” Western support.

This anger will be directed first at Israel, for obvious reasons. But Arab regimes will not be able to avoid this societal wrath. Despite their abundance of weapons, they could not send a single bullet to defend the people of Gaza. States like the United Arab Emirates, which normalized relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords, have been mostly silent, doing little to pressure Israel to end its war while deporting students for expressing solidarity with Palestine. Yet back in April, when Iran sent a barrage of missiles and drones toward Israel—in retaliation for Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus —these same Arab regimes rallied to use their missile-defense systems and intelligence capabilities to protect Israel.

This fury will also be directed at the U.S., which seeks to maintain an authoritarian regional order backed by force of arms and client states.

As Israel and its Western supporters revel in their Pyrrhic victory, it should not be forgotten that for much of its modern history, Israel has been assassinating its opponents. This policy is rooted in a core Zionist belief, predating the establishment of the state of Israel, that Arabs only understand the language of force. The eminent Oxford historian Avi Shlaim has written that both rival wings of the Zionist movement, led by David Ben-Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, early on “concluded that only insuperable Jewish military strength would eventually make the Arabs despair of the struggle and come to terms with a Jewish state in Palestine.”

Has this policy worked? What has it really produced beyond endless occupation and apartheid rule? One result is Oct. 7, the bloodiest day in Israel’s history. I fear more atrocities of this magnitude on the horizon, as the perhaps inevitable fallout of Israel’s total war in Gaza and now Lebanon. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, backed by the West, are not making Israel any safer. Instead, everything Israel is doing today threatens its very place in the Middle East.

• Nader Hashemi is the director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an associate professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The article first appeared on https://dawnmena.org/.

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