AS`AD AbuKHALIL: Hezbollah’s Calibrated Response

The political party and militant group calling for Palestine’s liberation has factored domestic and regional conditions into its response to Israel’s genocidal war.

By As`ad AbuKhalil
in Beirut
Special to Consortium News

As soon as the war in Gaza broke after the Al-Aqsa Deluge last Oct. 7, Hezbollah faced a fateful decision: should it hold back and let its Palestinian comrades do the fighting against Israel and keep Lebanon out of this expanding war, or should take part in some way to help Palestine?

How could Hezbollah stray from its traditional rhetoric about Palestinian solidarity and “unity of arenas”? 

It was a difficult question especially since, by all accounts (and this summer in Lebanon I asked a lot of knowledgeable Lebanese and Palestinians about it) Hezbollah was not informed in advance about the Hamas attack. 

Hezbollah was taken aback. Some in its leadership wished there had been a degree of coordination or prior notice. But Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s emphasis on secrecy prevented that. Sinwar is the military and security chief of his movement, just as Hassan Nasrallah is the supreme security chief and military commander-in-chief of Hezbollah. 

Even Ismail Haniyyah, chief of Hamas’ political wing, whom the Israeli assassinated in Iran last month, didn’t know in advance about the Oct.  7 Al-Aqsa Deluge. 

Hamas had informed Hezbollah months in advance that an operation of some sort was being planned but gave no details and specified no time. The early losses of Hezbollah in the war have revealed the extent to which Hezbollah rushed to help the Palestinians with little preparation. 

Had Hezbollah declined to get militarily involved at all after Oct.  7, it would have faced huge criticism from its base in Lebanon and from the wider Arab public. 

How could the most vocal party calling for Palestine’s liberation and opposing  capitulation in the “peace process” with Israel stay quiet when Gaza is being subjected to one of the most savage genocides Palestinians have yet faced in the history of the conflict going back to 1948? 

How could Hezbollah, which has established a comradery of arms with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, dissociate itself from one of the most dangerous and crucial periods of the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation? How could Nasrallah effectively explain to Arab and Muslim audiences his party’s reluctance to get involved against the genocide?

The Calculation

Hezbollah has had to factor in many domestic and regional conditions in how it responds to the genocide. 

It is no exaggeration that Hezbollah fights in Lebanon with its hands tied behind its back because the Western-Gulf-Israeli alliance has, since 2005 (in the wake of the assassination of Rafiq Hariri) formed a large coalition that is multi-sectarian, albeit with minimum Shiite participation. This coalition is primarily focused on undermining the support base of the project of resistance in Lebanon and in the region.  

Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. dominate all Arab media, and they have been obsessed with demonizing Hezbollah through the blatant vilification of Shiites in an effort to distance Arab and Muslim opinion from the resistance agenda. 

Gulf despots are racing to reach agreements with the U.S. to normalize relations with Israel in return for crucial security and intelligence concessions. Furthermore, with bi-partisan agreement, the United States has effectively pledged to support any brutal Arab regime if it commits to peace with Israel, even if it means crushing dissent within that country.

This started in the Jimmy Carter era when he struck his Faustian deal with Anwar Sadat (the anti-Semitic, Nazi-inspired Egyptian despot). 

Hezbollah is also operating in the aftermath of the Lebanese economic collapse and the massive port blast of 2020 which exhausted the Lebanese people and made them disinterested in military confrontation that could further undermine the economy.

Yet, after over 10 months of war on the Lebanese-Palestinian border it has become clear that the Shiites of Lebanon stand squarely and wholeheartedly behind Hezbollah in its military confrontation with Israel.

Hezbollah has also been commended by many Lebanese (and this has been documented by public opinion surveys) for its careful calibration of military confrontation with Israel while avoiding instigating a larger regional war. It has not been an easy task for Nasrallah.

His management of the war has been largely seen in Lebanon as skillful and patriotic, and has earned the party new supporters among Sunnis and Druzes.

Even the chief Sunni cleric Hassan Mir`ib, who had previously viciously advocated against not only Hezbollah but against Shiites in general, has become a strong advocate for Hezbollah. That has earned him the wrath of Saudi regime supporters in Lebanon and the region. 

Mir`ib’s is not the only case, as many Sunnis have voiced the opinion that the Shiites of Lebanon and the Houthis of Yemen have become the only real champions of the Palestinian people, while Sunni movements (besides Hamas) have stood largely aside, leaving the Palestinians to their cruel destiny. 

Lebanon’s chief Druze political leader, Walid Jumblat, has stood fully in support of Hezbollah during the war and now considers Hezbollah’s arms legitimate (in contrast to his previous stances when he was aligned with the Saudi regime and the U.S.)

The cruelty of the Israeli genocide has opened many eyes. It has trained new generations of Arabs to the savage reality of the Israeli occupation-apartheid state.

Nasrallah’s recent speeches have capitalized on that and have raised awareness about the dangers of the Zionist project not only to Lebanon, but to the Arab and Muslim worlds.

The last two speeches by Nasrallah can be considered — politically speaking and from the standpoint of the interests of the party — some of his most successful as they explained at length the history of the Zionist project and its threat to Lebanon. 

Since 2006 Hezbollah has justified its preservation of arms as necessary to defend Lebanon from Israel. This is proven in the current battle as the Lebanese Army has stood aside, watching the war and leaving the people of South Lebanon to their fate (and Hezbollah’s defense).

The Lebanese Army has remained uninvolved even when its own positions took direct hits from Israel. Under strict instructions from the United States, which manages and funds the Lebanese Army, restricting it to police equipment, the army is not allowed to return fire.  

In this war, Hezbollah has proven to the Lebanese and to Arabs that it alone can deter Israel, as many Lebanese remember when Israel invaded Lebanon for the flimsiest of reasons or pretexts. 

Israel has propagated  an “anti-war” message through its own and through Saudi media (which has wholeheartedly endorsed its agenda), though the Lebanese and Arabs know not to trust an Israeli pacifist message.  

Fancy billboards have been planted throughout Lebanon with the slogan “Lebanon against the war.” Some Lebanese journalists I talked to tried to find out who was behind them and they couldn’t come up with a name or a party funding the campaign that sprouted overnight.

It is most likely the work of the U.S. and Gulf embassies in Beirut, hoping to galvanize Lebanese public opinion against Hezbollah. But to no avail.

So despite all the pressure of these months and criticism that Nasrallah either went too far in becoming embroiled in war with Israel, or (according to Gulf regime supporters) he did not go far enough to support the Palestinians, the biggest challenge Nasrallah has faced was Israel’s assassination on Aug. xx of Fuad Shukur, chief-of-staff of Hezbollah’s armed wing. 

Nasrallah’s Bind

No one replaced Imad Mughniyyah, one of Hezbollah’s founders and ex-military chief, after his 2008 assassination, as no one had the same stature or credibility within the party to assume overall command of the military wing of Hezbollah.

Instead, Nasrallah opted to appoint somebody to coordinate the commanders of the various military sectors and that had been Shukur’s job. Western and Israeli media exaggerated his role to provide Israel with a victory that has so far eluded it over 10 months of war.

Here Nasrallah was in a bind: if he he didn’t respond, Hezbollah’s deterrence would be weakened, emboldening  Israeli aggression. 

If his response would be seen by Israel as an unacceptable escalation, he could be blamed in Lebanon for triggering a war the Lebanese aren’t in a position to tolerate.

The response also had to be calibrated to show Nasrallah’s calculations were purely in Lebanon’s interests and not linked to Iran’s calculus. He made that clear by saying Iranian retaliation for the assassination of Hamas’ political leader  Ismail Haniya in Tehran on July 31 was unrelated to Hezbollah’s retaliation for the murder of his de facto military chief. 

The response came and it was skillfully directed at Unit 8200, the electronic intelligence headquarters of Israel, which designs assassinations in the region.

Israel immediately imposed a total blackout on news of the damage Hezbollah had inflicted. It only released footage of harm done to a chicken coop, implying that was all that had been accomplished. 

But the Israeli press has increasingly admitted there was a direct hit on the HQ, even as Israel tries to avoid further humiliation from Hezbollah. 

The war is not over and Hezbollah’s strategic conflict with Israel has only increased. But total war has not yet arrived. And this is the biggest calculation of all: It won’t happen with an array of Western and despotic Arab military forces ready to defend Israel against a full-scale attack.

As`ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and America’s New War on Terrorism (2002), The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004) and ran the popular The Angry Arab blog. He tweets as @asadabukhalil

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.