In the summer of 2019, I took one of Beirut’s vintage Mercedes taxis to the city’s southern suburbs. I was in Dahieh to meet Lokman Slim, a prominent Lebanese researcher and fierce critic of Hezbollah. Slim, together with his German-born wife, lived and worked in a villa right under the group’s nose. I, like many locals, wondered how Slim was tolerated amid Dahieh’s rows of dense beige apartment blocks, less than a mile away from the infamous auditorium where Hezbollah broadcasts Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches to the world.
The quiet stillness of Slim’s villa, its libraries, its garden — all were a refuge from the hustle and bustle of Dahieh beyond. Slim, for his part, offered me coffee as we discussed Lebanon’s complex political existence, apparently unconcerned by his powerful armed neighbours. Yet less than two years later, in February 2021, he was dead, murdered by unknown assailants in his car outside Beirut. Though no perpetrators were ever identified, the assassination was obviously carried out by Hezbollah or one of its affiliates. Slim, like every Shi’a Muslim living in Dahieh, was ultimately swallowed by it.
This is the reality for many people in Hezbollah-dominated areas of Lebanon: sooner or later, you’ll either need to tie your existence to the group, or else be consumed by it. This was made plain by Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks last week, when communication devices exploded in supermarkets, offices, homes, and funerals across Dahieh, south Lebanon, and the Beqaa Valley, leaving no corner of Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state untouched.
Commentary on this revolutionary event has largely fallen into one of two camps. While some have derided the pager operation as an indiscriminate attack on civilians, others have noted that those who carried pagers distributed by Hezbollah were by default bonafide members of the organisation.
The truth, however, is that both these viewpoints are accurate simultaneously. Hezbollah in 2024 is not just a militia fighting Israel — it is an entire parallel society, boasting a political party, a social welfare system and charitable religious institutions, alongside five hospitals and hundreds of medical centres. Even the Beirut International Airport and the city’s commercial seaport have for years been under Hezbollah’s sway.
Altogether, these institutions serve a living, breathing, multi-religious patchwork of communities. As Lebanon has weathered financial ruin, disasters like the 2020 port explosion, and the intransigence of the country’s sectarian politics, the Lebanese government has slowly collapsed, taking many social services with it. This has pushed Lebanese Shi’a, Hezbollah’s primary constituency, even closer to the group, where they’ve been able to provide much more for adherents than the state itself. Examples abound. As pharmaceutical supplies dried up amid Lebanon’s economic crisis, Hezbollah was able to provide life-saving medication smuggled in from Syria and Iran to people living under its rule. As the value of the Lebanese lira plummeted, it opened supermarkets for its constituents that sold Iranian goods at lower prices than the competition.
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SubscribeSeriously? This author seems to be one of the many who says that Israel has a right to defend itself, but not by using its military. What is Israel supposed to do with the almost 100,000 displaced civilians? Just ceded the land to Hezbollah and tell all those people to find somewhere else to live, permanently? Judging by the statements this author made in the article, I imagine he thinks that Israel has to be more targeted in their attacks – no civilian casualties allowed, even if the enemy ON PURPOSE embeds themselves in the civilian population – but when Israel pulls off one of the MOST targeted attacks imaginable, there is still complaint. Please.
The author is saying that Israel has no strategic vision because this conflict is intractable. Anything short of nuking its enemies will only give it a short respite . There’s no clear distinction between combatants and civilians in this type of situations, so killing indiscriminately makes tactical sense ( some call it state sponsored terror but let’s leave it aside) but won’t bring any peace
Ok but where does that honestly leave Israel…you cannot negotiate anything with the Iranians or other Shiite groups that see destruction of Israel as a legitimate religious and political goal. What should Israel do? How do you honestly tackle religious extremism and Islamism – the West is doing a pretty terrible job of this too even without the guns and military involved…
Pundits talk endlessly about strategy, often without defining what they actually mean by the word, and of course in ideal worlds a great strategic vision, good planning executive and the elements needed to successfully apply the plan using effective tactics usually bring victory.
But our world isn’t ideal and if a strategic goal is impossible to articulate then you have to do what you can.
Right now, Israel seems to have a gap between the strategic goal of (as far as I understand it) dominating their near abroad economically and peacefully co-existing with it, and any possibility of achieving that.
Mainly because their near abroad seems to include many countries that want to exterminate them.
In that case…as with Churchill in 1940… in the absence of an achievable strategy just killing the bad guys is maybe all you can do?
Churchill was a Useful Idiot.
And you probably wouldn’t be here without him.
Coming from a Useless Idiot, this is hilarious!
Ya. I don’t get it. Hezbollah started bombing Israel on Oct. 8. What do people like the author expect it do? Sit back and take it? War sucks. When the leadership of a country decides to attack another country, the citizens face the possibility of death and injury. It’s not fair, but that’s what happens in war. We didn’t differentiate between Naz!s and German citizens in WWII. Why the double standard?
I think he excepts them to agree to a ceasefire, which, as has been stated numerous times, would cause everyone shooting rockets at them to stop.
The ceasefire would be an end to what? Why does Hezbollah launch rockets at Israel? Why haven’t they already stopped? Why did they start?
It’s Israeli agents paid to do this so as to keep up the justification for the endless blood sacrifice. The Temple Priests aka Butchers need endless flows of Blood.
Classic anti-semitism. Interesting to have one on board.
… for about a week.
What kind of parallel world do you live in? Show any evidence that the surrounding Arab nations, conquered by Islam, have ever shown how they can live and bless the existence of Israel. Should Israel just tolerate these terrorist regimes on their doorsteps who not only are ideologically opposed to Israel but who amass weapons and actually use them against Israel.
Whoah! I spent several decades of my life being assured that we did. Us being the civilized ones. Is this the ‘God will Know His Own’ option.
Yes. The one single thing that Israel cannot afford to do is display weakness. It’s extraordinary how many people in the West simply don’t understand that the Islamists don’t want peace or a ‘two state’ solution. If they negotiate it’s only so that they can re-group and re-arm. ‘From the river to the sea’ means precisely what it says.
This war is not about land; it’s driven by medieval superstition.
Not just about land you could have said – it most definitely is about Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa etc – Hamas reference this in ALL their press releases about attacks on Israel “for defiling Jerusalem…”
Have you ever met a Palestinian?
‘The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians and Lebanese; we are all members of the same nation. Solely for political reasons are we careful to stress our identity as Palestinians. Since a separate State of Palestine would be an extra weapon in Arab hands to fight Zionism with. Yes, we do call for the creation of a Palestinian state for tactical reasons. Such a state would be a new means of continuing the battle against Zionism, and for Arab unity.’
– former head of the PLO bureau of military operations, Zuhair Mohsen in 1977:
Very feweople have as they are essentially Egyptians.Jordanians etc?Your point?
They come from a place once called Palestine. There’s about 14million of them including diaspora.
People like you didn’t believe Stalin when he said that everyone who wasn’t poor should be destroyed, didn’t believe Hitler when he said that Poland should be destroyed, don’t believe Putin when he says that Ukraine doesn’t exist, don’t believe Iran and Hamas when they say that Israel should be destroyed.
I don’t have to meet a “simple” Russian, Iranian or Palestinian to discuss the peaceful intentions of these nice “simple” citizens.
You know that historically there is no such thing, It’s an ancient term used in referring to the many different people, including Jews, who lived in that region.
This conflict isn’t about Islam; though that ideology does provide some additional fervour to its adherents.
This conflict is about Zionists (virtually all of them European Jews) driving three-quarters of a million Arabs – Christian, Muslim, atheist, agnostic – off the land they’d been living and working on for scores of generations in an act of violent ethnic cleansing.
Zionists claim ownership by conquest. This is within living memory and the “conquered” do not accept it.
The problem isn’t going away unless something changes in a very major way.
I love that people who bring up the Nakab always neglect to mention it was the Arabs who attacked first and started the violence.
It has always been the Arabs starting the violence, every time the Israelis react it’s in response to the violence the Arabs start.
Maybe if the Arabs want this to stop happening they should stop the violence. But hey maybe you’re of the opinion that any violence and justification is okay as long as the other group is the “enemy”. It must be nice to have a neanderthalic view of morality.
No point in explaining the truth to the st George waving noddle heads on here.
In other words, you’re saying, “Jews can just go back to Europe.”
I’m sure they’ll be as safe there as they’ve always been, particularly with millions more Muslim “refugees” flowing over European borders.
Too many people see the existence of Israel as a provocation to a group of warlike, retrograde individuals, whom we are apparently forced to tolerate, many of whom strongly believe in principles that are entirely incompatible with western, constitutional, liberal democracy.
I’m sorry, but if they can’t live in peace alongside the west, and alongside the Jewish state, then there’s very little we can do but defend ourselves, and our allies.
You’re utterly wrong. Palestinian-Arabs have been committing atrocities on Jews since well before the creation of the modern state of Israel. The Salafist Muslim Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Father of Palestinian Liberation, began a campaign to ‘reassert’ Muslim rights over the
Jews’ holiest of sites in Jerusalem – places which predate both the Arab conquest of the region and the creation of Islam. He also incited the 1929 massacre of Jews at Hebron.
Husseini was paid by the Third Reich throughout WW2 to translate and spread anti-Jewish propaganda throughout the Middle East. He met with Hitler on 28 November 1941 to ask for help opposing the establishment of a Jewish national home at the height of the Holocaust. Apparently Hitler told him that, after Germany had ‘solved its Jewish problem’ with Europe, ‘Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power’. Browning, Christopher R. (2007). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942.
But this is LEBANON. It’s not Palestine. This area was NEVER in God’s Promise to the sly land stealers. King Solomon PAID King Hiram for all that timber. The ancient Yids never claimed Lebanon. What lies are they pulling off on us now. The dirty smelly unwashed gets.
You need your mouth washed out. I’m surprised the mods tolerate your anti-semitism.
The trouble you have Jane is that you’re not very bright. You’re also about as informed as a 2 year old, so you’ll swallow any old lizard people conspiracy. Worse still, you get emotionally worked up about said conspiracies – again like a 2 year old (there’s a link of course between impulse control & intelligence). You have your facts completely backwards _yet again_. I suggest not publicising your ignorant hatred of Jews. It’s embarrassing.
This is an interview with a Christian Lebanese American whose life was saved by Israelis after her country was destroyed by Islamists: https://youtu.be/hRp5xmwHEDc?si=GHqQ-OHS2Hw41-oe
It has been said many times before that “war solves no problems”. I think the truth is the opposite; history provides ample evidence. The Israelis live under constant threat, explicit and implicit, of their annihilation (the ‘River to the Sea’ mantra). They will only solve that problem, and at that only for a period, by all out war that destroys their enemies, those who are themselves intent on Israel’s destruction. Civilians (if such there be) are inevitably going to get caught up in it. Again, history is the tutor.
Have you not hear that the Islamists are considering adopting a new slogan: ‘From the liver to the knee’
If the world were just, Iran would be reeling under the weight of having all of its imports, exports, financial transactions seized and held to compensate all victims of Iranian imperialism. Instead Iran and its sock puppets are given aid and comfort to murder and pillage.
One way to end this is for the whole of Israel: population, hospitals, schools, military equipment and so on, to be relocated to a location without enemies. Of course this is absurd.
The alternative is to remain, which means fighting for their lives. I’m not sure if the West, in its blanketed, physco-babble version of living understands what that means, despite their Ukrainian flags posted on facebook. There is no choice for Israel, their very existence is under threat. The cruelty of the situation on all sides is clear, but that’s the state of things, it’s a war, war is a horror.
North Vietnam and it’s population, in its fight against France and the US, lived permanently on a war footing. There was no other way. In the end they won. There may be many reasons for that, but it ended with them winning. I think that’s what life is like for Israel. There is no no negotiating a peace with terrorist organisations, there is only the fight. That’s the reality, cruel and horrific as it is. Israel may not win enough times, but If they falter then I think they’ll lose.
They have a nuclear arsenal. No one is threatening their existence.
What an ignorant statement. They are literally being attacked on all sides: by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the PLO, the IRI & its proxies in Iraq & Syria etc.
Moreover their very existence is under existential attack by useful idiots like yourself across the world & the murderous dictators that now populate the UN (eg South Africa). If they used nukes do you think they’d survive beyond the week? And what happens when Iran gets nukes too?
So what do you think is going on there?
A nuclear deterrent is only a deterrent in a symmetric conflict. It is meaningless when you are fighting an asymmetric war of attrition against ghosts and shadows.
So try telling that to the 190.000 plus Israelis Hezbollah rockets have displaced.
Their “very existence” as an apartheid state is threatened, yes.
And as Israel was founded and is still maintained by terrorism, both sides are equal in this respect.
Your simile using North Vietnam is a good one… it’s just you’ve got it backwards. The Arabs are the North Vietnam in this analogy.
You’ve got around 10 million Zionists surrounded by 400 million anti-Zionists. Most of the latter regard the former as European colonialists, and once the West are no longer in a position to maintain the status quo, I don’t fancy Israel’s odds of survival… at least as an apartheid State.
I suspect that in time, Israel will be seen as Jews’ greatest mistake.
Israel is not an apartheid state. Nor is it maintained by terrorism, It’s maintained by being a democratic state, Those are facts, what you think doesn’t matter.
As democratic as us? Ha ha ha.
Feel like explaining that?
You’re back to front, Jim C.
In his review of _Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America_ by Gabriel, Brigitte, Bill Muehlenberg wrote the following back in 2006. I reproduce it in full:
‘Lebanon used to be a bright spot in a very dark Middle East. It was a rare democracy with a Christian majority. Muslims and non-Muslims could live together in peace and calm, even at the political level. It was a beacon of hope and freedom to the surrounding Arab nations. The Lebanese had the highest standard of living in the area. In many ways it seemed more like a Western nation, and Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East.
But all that changed in 1975 when radical Muslims from surrounding nations declared jihad on the Lebanese Christians, and poured into Southern Lebanon to set up a Muslim state. Radical Muslims who hated democracy and wanted to impose Sharia law turned the Lebanese oasis into a hell hole.
Among those who lived through the terror was one young Maronite Christian girl, Brigitte Gabriel. She was ten years old when the rape of Lebanon began. For the next seven years she and her family would spend most of their time living in an underground bomb shelter, enduring the onslaught of Islamist anger and fury.
She witnessed firsthand the murder, rape, hatred and genocide of a once-great land. She experienced the terror, ethnic cleansing, and dictatorship of Muslim radicals. And she also saw how these Islamists masterfully controlled and manipulated the media, to make it look like they were the good guys, and the Christians and Jews were the source of evil in the region.
This book tells her story in chilling and moving detail. But the book is much more than a personal story. It is also a warning. It is a warning to America and the West that the very thing that happened to Lebanon is now happening to all Western democracies. Radical Muslims have declared a holy war against the West, and made clear their intention of destroying it.
Radical Muslims made their intentions known about Lebanon, and they did what they said they would do. They are now telling us their intentions about the West. And they are working to carry out those intentions. Gabriel asks, will we learn from the experience in Lebanon? Or will the West close its eyes and pretend the threat of radical Islam does not exist?
The recent incursion of Israel into Lebanon must be seen from the backdrop of the story told in this book. The hatred and venom that Muslims have for Jews is carefully discussed here. The desire of 150 million surrounding Muslims to drive 5 million Jews into the sea is a daily reality for the Israelis.
And as Gabriel shows, the same media manipulation and deception is taking place now, as it did three decades ago. A favourite tactic of the Palestinians then, like Hezbollah now, is to set up rocket attacks from Christian villages. After the rockets are fired, the Islamists quickly pull out, knowing full well Israeli reprisals will then fall on innocent Christian habitations. And the media of course will be there to record the Jewish “barbarism,” while ignoring the initial terrorist attacks.
The horrible tactics and the frightening aims of the Islamists are here carefully laid out. So too are the lies and the deception Islamists are quite happy to resort to. There are even Arabic terms for these: taqiyya and kithman.
Radical Muslims are willing to present themselves as victims and oppressed peoples. And apologists for the Islamists, and those who loathe their own Western heritage, readily find reasons to blame the West for Islamic terrorism. Somehow the West is to blame for acts of Islamist outrage.
Yet as Gabriel reminds us, it is foolish to suggest that we must somehow address their grievances. “Their grievance is our freedom of religion. Their grievance is our democratic process.” These radicals have repeatedly made their goals known: they seek to destroy Western democracies and set up an Islamic state. Says Gabriel, “Unless we take them at their word, and defend ourselves accordingly, they will succeed.”
And she reminds us that there is a sacred obligation to impose Islam on the entire world. This is not a distortion of Islam, nor the ideas just of extremists, but the very heart of mainstream Islam. “It is mandated by the holy writings of Islam, as interpreted by a vast majority of the classical authorities.”
Indeed, we must reject the myth of moderate Islam. While there are many moderate Muslims, the religion itself is not moderate. Religious and political freedoms are just not hallmarks of Muslim societies. Indeed, the “only social liberal thinkers in the Muslim-Arab Islamo-fascist world are dead ones”.
In this important book Gabriel documents the many Islamist assaults on the West, and asks why we even allow terrorists to live in our own countries, as they prepare to carry out their acts of carnage and destruction. The parallels between what is now happening in the West and what took place in her homeland are too ominous to be ignored. Yet the West seems intent on doing just that.
Gabriel says we must wake up to the fact that a war has been declared against the West. Do we have the will and the resolve to defend our way of life, or will we simply give up without a fight?
She closes her volume with a number of hard-hitting recommendations if the West is to prevail in this conflict. For America these include much stricter border controls, development of alternative energy sources, and security profiling of high-risk groups.
These and other stringent steps must be taken if we want to win this battle against the Islamic terrorists. Mere conciliation, arbitration and diplomacy will not reduce the threat. The radical Muslims do what they do because they hate. And until we learn that lesson the casualties will continue to mount, and freedoms will continue to be snatched away.
To understand the hatred, and why this hatred is such a threat, all concerned citizens must read this book. It is a prophetic warning to the free West. If we do not want to see what happened to Lebanon take place on a far greater scale, then we must wake up to the threat that is staring us in the face, and take appropriate steps in response.
This book is a much needed wake up call to a sleepy and indifferent West. But if we do not heed its warnings, we may well find that the free West will be no more.’
Why does Israel have to exist anyway. And don’t answer “The Holocaust”. That was real but look DEEPER into History,who really instigated it and for what purpose. Who FUNDED the Nazis.
Where did THE MONEY come from.
Just thought i’d let you know i’m flagging your pathetic anti-semitic comments to the mods
I almost can’t be bothered to correct your BS.
A small portion of Israel is made up of non-middle eastern Jews who fled the Holocaust. Ie the majority of Jews in Israel are descendants of people who have lived in the area for centuries. Clue’s in the fricking name: Judea. They have been joined by Jews ethnically cleansed from all the surrounding Muslim countries.
The Nazis, meanwhile, funded the leader of the Palestinian Liberation movement, the Mufti Husseini, to help spread disinformation & wipe out the Jews from earth.
But you’re beyond help. Go back to reading David Icke. It’s ok: the lizard people will prevail.
Totally disagree. They have pagers because they are worried the Israelis can track their movements. Now if all you’re doing is delivering food and clothes to the vulnerable it’s likely you don’t need to avoid Israeli tracking.
That’s assuming that the number of pagers was so limited that Hezbollah only handed them out to military or military support staff. If there was an abundance of these pagers, then they could have been handed out to other people too. We don’t know.
Possible but unlikely.
What does abundance have to do with it if they serve no purpose? Who uses pagers nowadays, except people who are worried about being tracked? Carrying an extra gadget around for no reason is silly.
A couple of children were reported killed, but it doesn’t matter. Israel’s supporters regard the Arabs as sub-human and have no sympathy for them. They certainly care far less about Arab children being killed than Israeli children being killed, with the former always dismissed as “collateral damage”, and the latter as evidence of terrorism.
12 children were killed by Hezbollah rocket, idiot.
Also the Israeli children were Druze: the Druze are Arabs.
Israel is not a racist country like you are
Wow-thats scraping the barrel of arguments!!!
By the logic of this “brilliant” author, fighting the Nazis was doomed from the start. One cannot defeat radicalism and terrorism by war, apparently …..
‘fighting the Nazis was doomed from the start.’
The IDF, it seems to me, are the ones displaying nazi brutalism. The poor in the Warsaw ghettos also fought with what meager weapons they had.
You have that completely upside down… the bad guys are the ones who want to exterminate the other side.
There have been many Muslim leaders and governments who have said ever since Israel was founded that they want to exterminate every Jew in Israel. Israel has never expressed a wish to exterminate every Muslim Arab.
The Nazis wanted to exterminate Jews and eliminate Poland. The people in the ghetto didn’t want to exterminate Germans, they were just fighting to preserve their own lives.
Hezbollah is firing rockets into Israeli villages, into homes, into cars, in schools, and into soccer fields. Israel is firing back at — Hezbollah. You’ve got your facts back to front, friend.
The links between Nazism & the Palestinian-Arab cause – violently opposed to Palestinian-Jews – began well before Israel was even created.
The founder of the Palestinian Liberation Movement, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, inspired his Muslim followers to massacre Jews on several occasions, eg the Hebron massacre of 1929.
Husseini was paid by the Third Reich throughout WW2 to translate and spread anti-Jewish propaganda throughout the Middle East. He met with Hitler on 28 November 1941 to ask for help opposing the establishment of a Jewish national home at the height of the Holocaust.
Hitler told him that, after Germany had ‘solved its Jewish problem’ within Europe, ‘Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power’. Browning, Christopher R. (2007). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942.
There are photos of the Father of ‘Palestinian Liberation’ meeting with Hitler & touring the Nazi death camps – again all BEFORE Israel was created. Anyone claiming this is about land or Israeli actions or anything other than an ideological hatred of Jews is either ignorant or deliberately deceiving you.
The strategy is that once in a while, Israel needs to beat its enemies into submission and buy some more time until the next round. In the meantime life is pretty good here. No-one yet has found a better strategy. The failure to stick to this strategy over the last couple of decades, due to an illusion of “the end of history” is what brought us to the current crisis.
It’s probably as stark as that, but at the same time, don’t you think it’d be worth pursuing the kind of rapprochement with the Saudis that may well have been responsible for prompting the 7 Oct attack by Hamas?
Israel can’t just sit in isolation. It is, i believe, dependent on US weaponry for its military capabilities. In order to continue with such supplies, it needs to be seen to be making peace where it can. I wish it luck.
This is what many in the West find hard to understand. This has nothing to do with Palestinians and Two-State solutions. For all the posturing, nobody cares two hoots about that. This was true before the outbreak of war – and led to the Israeli hybris that we were entering a new epoch where the Palestinian Question was becoming an irrelevancy – and is still true now, where we now understand that Hamas was still crucially important, but in their capacity as an Iranian proxy.
Throughout the last year, the Abraham Accords have held up and Saudi Arabia has continue to court Israel to join the party. The only reason the Abraham Accords took off is because joining Israel and the US is a path to strength, stability and prosperity in the face of the poverty, anarchy and death promoted by Iran and Russia. You can argue chicken vs. egg, but every country where Iran has influence is a failure and people live in misery with no future. Jordan and Egypt sit on the fence because they are more imminently scared of insurrection by the Muslim Brotherhood (aka Hamas) than they are of the long-term threat of Iran. In this, Jordan’s position is far more precarious than Egypt’s because the Iranian threat to them is also pretty imminent.
Saudi Arabia is waiting for the opportune time to join the coalition. However they will only do this if they see that Israel can deliver and that US backing can be trusted. Saudi Arabia will only join if Israel wins this war decisively with the US behind them. Otherwise they have no need for Israel and certainly not for the US.
Spot on …. That 2 or 3 decade period of idle indulgence by all of us, in virtually all countries across the West after the USSR collapsed, is really at the root of so many of our problems now. The feckless political class is feckless because we have indulged them for too long, letting them pretend unimportant things are important and vice versa.
Israel has never had that luxury and, let’s be honest, will never be able to.
Lucky Israel, really, in a way.
The IDF is exceptionally good at creating their own enemies. During the civil war they invaded Lebanon to fight Palestinian militants in the south. The Palestinian militants just ran away so they brutalised the local Shi’ites instead and Hezbollah was formed to get rid of them. A similar thing happens everywhere they go because they always choose force over diplomacy.
Try: during the murderous takeover of peaceful Lebanon by Islamist militants, the Israelis were the only ones to go in & save the lives of Jews, Christians, & other civilians from certain death. Are you actually trying to blame Israel for the rise of Hezbollah?! Be careful. Your mask is slipping.
You would do well to listen to some of the survivors of that bloody coup, before you publicise your misinformation.
Christian survivor Brigitte Gabriel provides testimony along with a crucial warning to the west (not to be suicidally tolerant to intolerance): https://youtu.be/hRp5xmwHEDc?si=NKfXIkA1cnV5kIbK
Saying “the IDF is exceptionally good at creating their own enemies” (my emphasis), is a not-so-subtle trick of rhetoric. You mean “Israel” but you say “IDF”, because you know that by presenting the only democratic Western state in the Middle East as its army and no more, the falsehoods in your text will appear more palatable.
Err…look at the history of how Israel has handled East Jerusalem..they could have just destroyed the mosque and the Islamic site built on top of their holy site. Look at all the negotiations to form 2 states…look at the Abraham accords – there is only one side that doesn’t do diplomacy and that is the Islamists….
Michal Kranz seems to have been inspired by today’s Sky News headline:
.
Hezbollah has been provoked like never before by Israel and may be tempted to unleash its firepower
Unbelievable.
I think their command and control is non-existent. Do they lead from the front with their swords drawn?
Hezbollahg, when they run out of utility to their masters in Tehran, will be replaced by another group willing to fight to the last for Tehran. Typical imperialist strategy.
Twice is coincidence, three times…?
In as many days I have had my account renewed automatically (I was on manual renewal) and today my comment, which I saw posted, and doesn’t contain any nasty words, has disappeared, just like that!
You are not alone 🙂
Me too.
The phrase “collective punishment” is telling. Israel left Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. These territories are ruled by death cults. These death cults covet civilian casualties in the wars they start with Israel. The death cults are joined by so-called human rights organizations in using the desired casualties to delegitimize Israel. When Israel defends itself, it’s collective punishment!
Well said. What has happened to UnHerd? Surely it didn’t use to publish apologias for Putin and Islamists?
When Danny Morrison was asked why the IRA gave up the armed struggle, his reply was, ‘They lost the intelligence war.’ It looks like Israel is winning the intelligence war. However, there is still a long way to go.
Well for a start I suspect your friend was put to death by Mossad. And all these relentless rockets fired on Yidland by Hamas(no news from Gaza lately) and Hezbollah. No,it’s Yid agents keeping up the fake bombardment in order to keep the pretext for answering violence fresh.
Why on earth would “shopkeepers, hospital workers and mechanics” be given some of a few thousands old-fashioned pagers that were purchased expressly for the purpose of masking its users’ communications with the Hezbollah military command? This doesn’t make any sense. Linking, for reference, to an article of the WaPo – whose foreign desk is occupied mainly by former Al-Jazeera “journalists” – makes it even worse. This discredits the whole analysis.
The author also forgot to mention that, among the innocent people hurt by exploding pagers, together with “shopkeepers, hospital workers and mechanics”, was the ambassador of Iran to Lebanon.
He must be the one that Nasrallah calls up to return his car from the shop after an oil change. Or perhaps to pick up his groceries.
Surely Israel is doing what settled states have always had to do when bordered by disordered societies. They are engaging in punitive raids, disrupting communications and destroying arms.
This was the pre-colonial condition of much of the world until the European Great Powers spread a veneer of order over the globe. Now that order is comprehensively unravelled the tendency returning, in Somalia, Sudan, Pathanistan, Syria, the Levant and the Caucasus and even, with migrant incursions, in Pannonia, The Agean ansd Spanish North Africa.
There is a term for such areas and they are called Marches, Marks or Borderlands.
The idea of a settled, peaceful, civilianised nation states living side by side under the rule of law is a freyed relic of Colonial order.
It was all going well until:
“As the last year of warfare in Gaza has made clear to the world, Israel has little problem with inflicting devastating civilian casualties to achieve its battlefield goals.”
FACT Check. No Army ever has gone further in a conflict situation to uphold the Law of Armed Conflict requirements to minimise civilian casualties than the IDF has in Gaza. Hamas and Hezbollah use ordinary civilians as human sacrifices to pursue their aims of enlisting international support for their terror campaigns. Statements like the above just show how effective the terrorists have been in capturing their targets.
Israeli civilians have had to move south to get out of range of Hezbollah rockets, because IDF could not fight on 2 fronts simultaneously. Now it is the turn of Lebanese civilians to move North for a while as IDF have advised them to. There would have been no civilian casualties in the region if Hamas had not attacked on Oct 7th and Hezbollah had not joined in on Oct 8th.
Substitute ‘Hitzbolah’ with Nazis and Israel with WWII Allies and see if you reach the same conclusions.
From Fifties British Kenya, to post-2011 Syria, where powerful actors tried to tame guerilla forces and the restive populations that supported them, history shows that such a strategy is doomed.
The author has forgotten Malaysia, a brilliant British win over an entrenched guerilla force. In like kind, the Philippines has kept a lid on Communist/guerilla thugs. There are other examples.