Thanassis Cambanis
Foreign Policy / September 28, 2024
The Hezbollah leader’s death will not bring lasting peace for Israel.
The last time Israel assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, it quickly regretted the choice. But the lessons of the early 1990s have faded fast, and today, decision-makers in Israel and the United States have embraced the logic that killing leaders can solve the most complex of problems.
Hassan Nasrallah captivated millions of people with his charisma. He was not, however, a magician. Under his reign, Hezbollah was still subject to the laws of political physics, commanding influence within the limits of its hard power and extreme views on regional conflict.
His assassination on Friday was not some clean, surgical decapitation strike; Israel destroyed a dense cluster of civilian residential buildings to reach an underground Hezbollah complex. Israel’s leaders, and their boosters in the United States, will argue that any “collateral damage” will be worth it as they celebrate the death of a man with mythic stature, at least for his fans and for the counterterrorism warriors who have an equally blinkered understanding of power and security threats.
For more sober observers, Nasrallah’s assassination carries considerable risks, fewer potential upsides, and is only one factor in an assessment of how, if at all, Israel’s total war since Oct. 7, 2023, might change the underlying drivers of conflict in the Middle East. If recent history is any guide, Israel might well succeed at destroying institutions and fragmenting a neighbouring polity. But it’s not likely to achieve any lasting peace and security as a result.
Nasrallah’s legacy was as much systemic as personal. He assumed leadership of Hezbollah in 1992 after Israel assassinated the previous leader, Abbas al-Musawi. What Israel discovered was that force and assassination did not eliminate the Hezbollah threat or persuade the organization to moderate its goals. The new leader proved more effective and willing to escalate the fight.
In fact, under Nasrallah, Hezbollah proved to be Israel’s most effective adversary ever. Within eight years, Hezbollah’s armed resistance had driven the Israeli military out of southern Lebanon, which it had occupied for 18 years. The Hezbollah victory in May 2000 was largely the product of Nasrallah’s disciplined leadership. He shifted Hezbollah away from tactics such as hostage-taking and suicide bombings that included civilian or hybrid targets such as the U.S. Embassy and focused the group on guerrilla warfare against military targets.
Israel withdrew from Lebanon in disarray in May 2000, far ahead of schedule, because of Hezbollah’s relentless, and effective, attacks. Nasrallah and Hezbollah reached a high-water mark of sorts in 2006, when they weathered a 34-day war with Israel and emerged as a popular symbol of courage and resistance across the Middle East.
Even then, however, Hezbollah and Nasrallah’s limits were apparent. Many Lebanese and people across the Middle East rejected Hezbollah’s maximalist vision of perpetual war and blamed Nasrallah’s recklessness for provoking the 2006 conflict with Israel. Many also correctly understood Hezbollah to be on the side of authoritarianism and theocracy.
Nasrallah might have won respect in some quarters for his nimble tactics against Israel and his willingness to support the armed uprising against the U.S. occupation of Iraq—but he also earned the justified opprobrium of many Lebanese and Syrians for his anti-democratic embrace of political violence. Hezbollah and Nasrallah were central actors in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 and served as bloody enforcers for Syria’s Assad regime—first, in the long Syrian military occupation of Lebanon, and then after 2011, in Syria, as the lead infantry in the indiscriminate repression of Syria’s popular uprising.
Hezbollah’s resistance was never about solidarity or self-determination; in fact, in its history Hezbollah has turned its vaunted military apparatus against fellow Arabs seeking reform, pluralism, or democracy to far more deadly effect than it has used its military deterrent against Israel.
The late Nasrallah period was characterized by arrogance, strategic miscalculation, and the construction of an ultimately hollow if dangerous advanced military infrastructure. During this period, Hezbollah mirrored Israel even more than in its early phase—bombastic, dehumanizing rhetoric and hyper-militarism. Also, internally, it developed a complacent decadence, corruption, and preoccupation with amassing wealth and investing in reactive status quo institutions.
Hezbollah’s complacent period began in 2008, when Israel released five prisoners in exchange for the remains of two Israeli soldiers captured in 2006, consolidating what Nasrallah called the “divine victory” against Israel. The Syrian civil war marked a major turning point. Hezbollah openly joined battle on Bashar al-Assad’s side in 2013 and became a well-documented enforcer of starvation sieges and baldly sectarian fighting. Gone was the pretence of leading a regional front against imperialism in which all were welcome—secular and religious, Muslim and Christian, Shiite and Sunni.
By the time of the Oct. 7 attack, Hezbollah might have grown delusional, underestimating Israel as a weak spider’s web in much the same way that Israel had underestimated Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2023. Nasrallah was a lengthy and charismatic orator, and many Lebanese felt genuinely devoted to him. But no leader can keep their edge for 32 years, and perhaps even the reputedly humble Nasrallah mistook the command turnout for his televised speeches for the dynamic fervour that motivated Hezbollah’s early recruits in the 1980s and ’90s when he was helping to build the organization.
Systemic factors drove most of Hezbollah’s transformations anyway—not the mad genius of a solitary, visionary secretary-general. Hezbollah’s trajectory from 1992 until today reflected regional trends and the shifting approach of Iran, always the most important ideological sponsor and military benefactor of Hezbollah.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 lent new vigour to resistance in the Middle East, at a moment when Hezbollah was struggling to maintain enthusiasm and justify its continuing armed struggle after successfully ending the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Once it joined forces with the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah looked even more like a status quo bully rather than a heroic popular resistance movement.
In recent years, only the most rigid ideological core supporters considered Hezbollah idealistic or admirable. The bulk of its supporters appreciated its power and shared some of its views on religion or resistance but could no longer see Hezbollah as an alternative to Lebanon’s corrupt ruling warlord class. Hezbollah, in fact, had become the cornerstone of Lebanon’s warlord order. Under Nasrallah’s firm hand, Hezbollah helped suppress the popular uprising in 2019 against the pillaging of Lebanon by its corrupt banks and political leaders; played the central role in the 2020 explosion in Beirut’s port that shattered the country—and then used force to derail an investigation; and then, finally, cavalierly opened a so-called solidarity front against Israel on Oct. 8 but was never able or willing to employ the military deterrent capabilities that it promised and of which many analysts, including myself, believed it capable.
Israelis often justify extreme or illegal military strikes as necessary because the country’s adversaries supposedly only understand force. For decades, at least since the 1990s, Israel and its key adversaries have certainly negotiated with each other primarily through the idiom of force. Political changes or concessions seem to follow only after extreme violence (indiscriminate bombing by Israel, suicide bombings by Hamas, taking of hostages by Hamas or Hezbollah).
It’s possible that Israel’s total war on Gaza and now Lebanon will impose lasting change on the military reach of Iran and its partners Hezbollah and Hamas. Perhaps state actors that support or tolerate military activity by the so-called Axis of Resistance will impose more limits. Perhaps Iran will change the regional strategy it has followed since 1979.
It’s equally possible, and maybe more likely, that the pro-Israel Arab states will continue to avoid any constructive role in the region, while Iran and its partners will slowly rebuild and continue to pose a security threat. It’s not hard for a small, committed group to play a spoiler role. And it’s not even that hard, given geography and oil wealth, for Iran and its partners, even after the destruction they are experiencing right now, to revive their ability to fire missiles and fly drones into Israel and U.S. bases in the Middle East.
Iran and its partners only need to be able to disrupt normal civilian life in order to deter Israel. Nasrallah’s signal error was believing that he had reached military parity with Israel and that Israel couldn’t seriously strike Hezbollah without suffering unbearable consequences. It turns out, at the only point in time that it truly mattered for Hezbollah, the group could not muster any meaningful military response to Israel.
Listening to Nasrallah’s speeches, as I did more often that I would have liked during two decades of writing about Hezbollah, I saw a leader coming into a full sense of his power and then staying on for many long years after that peak. Like most political leaders, Nasrallah lied—he denied Hezbollah’s role in the Hariri assassination, he tried to hide Hezbollah’s fight in Syria long after it was publicly known, and in his final act, Nasrallah bragged of military powers that Hezbollah turned out not to have.
Hezbollah has a succession plan and will continue to be a major force in Lebanon, although maybe less so in the wider Middle East. Hezbollah draws on the generous largesse of the Iranian government but also has major sources of power and revenue through its dominance of the Lebanese state and its commanding position atop an illicit economic network. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese will remain loyal to Hezbollah, perhaps even more so at a moment when Lebanon is under indiscriminate attack.
Nasrallah’s replacement could try to replicate the reversal Hezbollah managed after the 2006 war, when it engineered a comprehensive political victory out of a military defeat. Post-Oct. 7 Israel might force a different, and in my view much worse, outcome. Israel could seek to destroy Hezbollah’s operating area in Lebanon as Israel has done to society as a whole in Gaza. In that case, Hezbollah will struggle to rebuild the state-like structure it commanded so effectively from 2008 until today. It has another option though: return to its roots as a nimble guerrilla force, less invested in administrative power than military prowess. Like its sister organization Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, it could focus on violence and military effects unfettered by the tiresome trade-offs of governance. By killing Nasrallah and ravaging a huge swath of Lebanese society, Israel might create a period of security calm on its northern border. But history suggests that a shattered, grieving, and fragmented state is a recipe not for calm but for chaos and extremism. In 1982, Israel accelerated the civil war in Lebanon on the theory that the more Lebanese fought each other, the less they’d fight Israel. In truth, over the course of a decade, the disorder benefited the most effective and extreme. In the end, the Lebanese state never fully recovered—but Hezbollah did, handing Israel an irrefutable defeat in 2000.
This time around, Israel is experimenting with more force than we’ve ever seen a modern, high-tech state deploy. Israel has completely dispensed with any observation of the laws of war and has calculated that it won’t face any consequences if it commits genocide. We know that sometimes total war accomplishes its goals, as it did for Russia in Chechnya or for the Sri Lankan government against the Tamil Tigers.
In 10 years’ time, I fear we’ll see a region where Palestinians and Lebanese have irrevocably lost what little they once enjoyed of self-government, minimal rights, or the dream of genuine sovereignty. The law of force will prevail, made writ not by suicide bombers but by government lawyers in Israel and the United States who signed off on war without limits and without regard for civilian life. All this murder and mayhem won’t bring even a tainted peace, however, because the survivors of all this killing will take up the imperative to speak yet louder in the language of force—apparently, the only way to bring about change.
Thanassis Cambanis is the director of Century International; he is the author of A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Endless War and five other books about the Middle East
