Hezbollah after Nasrallah

LaThe death of Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general and religious guide of Lebanese Hezbollah, was announced on Saturday September 28, the anniversary of the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the father of pan-Arabism. Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, three years after his humiliating defeat in the six-day war, the naksa (Arabic for "setback"), which led to Israel's conquest of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. , the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai. Nasrallah was the victim of a salvo of eighty bombs dropped by the Israeli air force on his headquarters in Haret, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Hours earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly, calling Hezbollah “ a festering center of anti-Semitism ( 1 ) » and promising to continue his offensive in Lebanon. Nasrallah was not a terrorist like the others, declared Mr. Netanyahu after the announcement of the death of the Lebanese Shiite leader: he was “the” terrorist par excellence.

For US President Joseph Biden, Nasrallah's death made " partly justice » to all Hezbollah victims since 1983, the date of the bombings against the United States embassy and the marine barracks in Beirut ( 2 ) . Vice President Kamala Harris was quick to describe the Shiite leader as “ terrorist with American blood on his hands ", as if Mr. Netanyahu and his colleagues had clean hands, as if they were innocent of the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza and the forced displacement of more than 90% of its population. Not to mention the wave of attacks and demolitions perpetrated by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, or the bombing of southern Lebanon, the Bekaa plain and Beirut after the macabre attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies in mid- september. In the moral accounting of the West, Arab blood does not have the same value as American or Israeli blood.

Among his supporters in Lebanon, and for many people outside the Western world, the figure of Nasrallah will be remembered quite differently: not as a "terrorist", but as a political leader and a symbol of resistance to American and Israeli ambitions in Middle East. Although Hezbollah remained a military organization known for its spectacular attacks against Western interests, the Party of God and its leader underwent a complex evolution in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) ( 3 ) . Their trajectory is not exceptional in the region. Menachem Begin and Itzhak Shamir, former leaders of Mr. Netanyahu's Likud party, both began their political careers as “terrorists.” Begin was credited with orchestrating the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, an action that resulted in the deaths of around 100 civilians; As for Shamir, in 1948 he planned the assassination of the United Nations representative in Palestine, Folke Bernadotte. Even Itzhak Rabin, revered by progressive Zionists as a peacemaker, is not without stain: it was he who oversaw the 1948 deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the towns of Lydda and Ramle and the villages surroundings.

In moving from violence to politics, Nasrallah has only followed in the footsteps of his Israeli adversaries, whose careers he is said to have studied with great attention. Having arrived at the head of Hezbollah at the age of 31 - in 1992, after the assassination by Israel of his predecessor, Sheikh Abbas Moussaoui - he remained little known outside the internal circles of the movement, even if he had been there for five years. one of the key men of the Shura Council (main governing body of “Hezb”). To say that he acquired a more eminent stature than that of Moussaoui would be an understatement: Nasrallah was a leader of historic dimension, one of the great figures who shaped the Middle East over the last three decades.

He was a staunch ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a follower of velayat-e-faqih, the Iranian doctrine of the Supreme Leader, but he was far from being the devout " supporter of jihad and not of logic » that Israeli-American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg depicted in The New Yorker magazine in 2002 ( 4 ) . On the contrary, he was characterized by a calculating intelligence that rarely let his ideological passion prevail over his ability to reason. He understood well that the Lebanese, including the Shiites, were not religious fanatics and that an Islamic state was not on the agenda in Lebanon in the short or medium term. He never even tried to impose Sharia law on his own supporters; the women of her stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut were free to dress as they wished without being harassed by the moral police. After the liberation of the south of the country by Hezbollah in 2000, Nasrallah made it known that there would be no reprisals against Christians who had collaborated with the Israeli occupier. The culprits were simply taken to the border and handed over to the Israeli authorities. Shiite collaborators, on the other hand, did not escape acts of vengeance.

Until the moment he dragged Hezbollah into the Syrian war alongside the regime of Mr. Bashar Al-Assad, thus attracting the hatred of many of his former admirers, Nasrallah could pass for the last Arab nationalist, the only ready to oppose Israel, fighting this country until the temporary truce of 2006 ( 5 ) . He was proud of his party's performance on the battlefield; but, impressed by the ferocity of the Israeli bombings, he ended up recognizing that the hostage-taking operations carried out by his movement in enemy territory had provided Tel Aviv with a pretext to destroy entire regions of the Cedar country, an error that he had sworn to never repeat.

Moreover, Israel was not its only enemy nor its only concern. In Lebanon, he remained a controversial figure, even among those who were grateful to him for his fight against the occupier. He was, according to some rumors, involved in the assassination of Lebanese communists in the 1980s and was directly involved in episodes of violence and hostage-taking targeting Western interests. As Hezbollah transformed into a state within a state, much larger and more powerful than that of Yasser Arafat, the guide's enemies multiplied in Lebanon. He did not hesitate to use his power to exploit the same political-confessional system that his movement had denounced in 1985, to intimidate opponents, and sometimes assassinate them, also targeting Shiite critics of the Party of God, such as journalist Lokman Slim, killed on February 4, 2021. Hezbollah was also responsible for some major disasters that have hit Lebanon in recent years, from the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005 until the explosion in 2020 from a warehouse in the port of Beirut, where some suspect that the Shiite militia stored ammonium nitrate. Striving to position himself as a sort of arbiter above the fray, Nasrallah nonetheless threw his weight behind blocking a series of high-profile corruption investigations. He even went so far as to defend Mr. Riad Salamé, the governor of the Bank of Lebanon, who fell from grace after the financial collapse of 2019 ( 6 ) . The leader of Hezbollah was undoubtedly right to defend the integration of his movement into the heart of the local political system, but his detractors were right when they prophesied that the Lebanese system would corrupt the Party of God and damage the reputation of integrity of its leader.