The death of Hassan Nasrallah shows why this is a just war

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was killed last night in an Israeli air strike on Beirut, as part of its ongoing offensive in southern Lebanon.

Nasrallah’s death exposes the glaring omission in most of the media coverage of the conflict. Few outlets seem willing to recognise the fact that Israel faces an annihilationist threat from the Iran-backed terrorist group and its Islamist allies.

At best, media reports will acknowledge that Hezbollah has fired thousands of missiles into northern Israel since 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas pogrom. This of course is why Israel has had to evacuate 60,000 of its citizens from its northern communities. In rare instances, the media might mention that Hezbollah has flagrantly flouted a UN resolution to stay at least 12 miles from Israel’s border. But Israel’s deeper motivations for its conflict with Hezbollah and allied Islamist groups are rarely taken seriously.

Instead, the media paint a picture of Israel as a malign, irrational actor wilfully slaughtering innocent civilians. This is demonstrated most clearly on Al-Jazeera, an international TV channel based in Qatar. It consistently portrays Israel as indiscriminately attacking Palestinian and Lebanese people, seemingly just for the sake of it. The BBC and Sky are not far behind when it comes to the demonisation of Israel.

The annihilationist stance of Israel’s Islamist opponents ought to be hard to ignore. The absence of discussion about it is one of the strangest aspects of the coverage of Israel’s wars. Hezbollah, literally the ‘party of god’, is very open about its ultimate aim. Its foundational document, the 1985 ‘Open Letter’, states that:

‘Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognise no treaty with it, no ceasefire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.’

Here Hezbollah states that its goal is the obliteration of Israel, the ‘Zionist entity’. This is not a statement about Lebanese sovereignty, or a call for Palestinians’ freedom. Hezbollah has no interest in either concept. Rather, it frames its project in terms of the umma, the global Muslim political community.

Although this programme is almost 40 years old, the leaders of Hezbollah have made countless similar statements over the years. In July this year, the late Nasrallah repeated a common Islamist metaphor when he called Israel a ‘cancerous tumour that must be eradicated’.

All of this is in line with the sentiments expressed by other Islamist groups, from Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen to their principal backers, Iran. In this, they all follow the precepts of Islamism, a reactionary political movement that first emerged in Egypt in the 1920s. According to one of its foundational ideologues, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), Islamists are locked in a struggle against the cosmic Satanic evil of the Jews. He wrote this in a 1950 work tellingly entitled, Our Fight with the Jews. Ali Khamenei, the current supreme leader of Iran, translated four of Qutb’s books into Farsi. Although Qutb was an Egyptian Sunni and Khamenei is Shia, as is Hezbollah, the anti-Semitic core of Islamist politics is common to all of these groups.

Islamists are more than willing to turn this exterminationist theory into practice. Indeed, Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October 2023 was at least partially inspired by a similar Hezbollah plan to attack northern Israel. There is also evidence to suggest that Hezbollah would have launched a ground offensive after the Hamas attack if Israel had not mobilised its reserve forces so quickly.

Hezbollah has a formidable military capacity to back up its anti-Semitic aims. It is probably best seen as a terrorist organisation with the capabilities of a regular army. A July study by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies estimated that Hezbollah’s main arsenal ‘consists of at least 150,000 missiles, rockets, and other lethal weapons, including hundreds of precision-guided medium- and long-range missiles, covering Israel’s entire populated areas’. Israel’s recent offensive will have reduced Hezbollah’s capacity and wiped out many of its leaders, but it likely still remains a potent threat. Earlier this week, Hezbollah sought to show onlookers its continued strength by launching its first ballistic missile attack on Tel Aviv.

Hezbollah has other substantial military capacities, too. One report, published in July by the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), estimated that Hezbollah has about 45,000 fighters, of whom 5,000 have completed advanced training in Iran.

Some claim that Hezbollah only emerged as a movement in response to an earlier Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982. This is partly true. But its advent has to be understood in the context of what an Israeli historian, Yigal Kipnis, has recently called ‘the long war in Lebanon’.

Lebanon is a nation that has long suffered from having a weak central state. This has always allowed non-state actors to flourish. So it’s true that Hezbollah, rooted in Lebanon’s Shia minority, formed partly as a response to Israel’s invasion in 1982. But in the years prior to Hezbollah’s emergence, Israel was still facing a threat from groups operating from within Lebanon. In particular, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), with support from the hundreds of thousands in refugee camps in the region, had been using Lebanon as a base to launch frequent attacks on Israel.

These long-running conflicts shouldn’t be a surprise. Throughout Israel’s history, it has been a relatively small state surrounded by hostile actors who refuse to accept its existence. Some now argue that Israel is fighting a war on as many as seven fronts. According to a report in Foreign Policy, ‘that war involves Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen; various Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria; Tehran’s efforts to arm Palestinian militants in the West Bank; and Iran itself, which directly attacked Israel for the first time in April’.

Israel is surrounded by enemies committed to its destruction. While much of the media downplay or refuse to acknowledge their annihilationist intent, Israel cannot afford to be so complacent. In this tragic conflict, the threat to Israel is existential.