The whole of progressive humanity is mourning the death of Hassan Nasrallah, a brilliant and intrepid fighter against imperialism, who led the organisation of which he was General Secretary – Hezbollah – as it stood indomitable and often alone in the Arab world in mounting armed resistance to Israel, the racist colonial state imposed and maintained by Western imperialism on the Middle East.
A deeply religious Shia Muslim, Nasrallah first came into politics to struggle against the marginalisation of the Shia community in Lebanon. In the Lebanese civil war between Christian Maronites and Muslims, he joined and fought with Amal (the Movement of the Deprived) that had been founded in 1974 by his mentor Sadr.
In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon with a view to clearing out the Palestinian resistance that was operating from there. Israel besieged Beirut for 10 weeks before occupying it in September. To deal with the the invasion, Lebanese President Elias Sarkis formed a unifying National Salvation Committee, including Amal leader Nabih Berri and Lebanese Forces militia leader Bashir Gemayel, Israel’s main Christian ally in Lebanon. However, the Committee determined to expel the Palestine Liberation Organisation from Lebanon so as to appease the Israelis.
In the face of this intended betrayal of the Palestinian cause, Nasrallah broke away from Amal to found a new resistance group that was subsequently to evolve into Hezbollah. It launched a guerrilla group to drive the Israelis out of Lebanon, and under its aegis hammer blows were rained on the occupiers, who were pushed out of Beirut and restricted to a zone in south Lebanon where they hung on precariously until 2000. In fact, Since the founding of Hezbollah in 1982, there has not been a year when there have not been exchanges of fire or rocket fire between the two sides.
All this time, Hezbollah’s star had been rising while Amal’s had faded. In 1992, Nasrallah became the group‘s third secretary-general, after his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, was killed by Israeli missiles.
In the mid-1990s, Hezbollah expanded military operations in the Israeli-occupied zone, miring Israel in an unwinnable guerrilla warfare with the result that in May 2000, Israel finally withdrew from Lebanon, the first time it had ended the occupation of an Arab territory without a treaty or security arrangement. The move validated Nasrallah’s long-standing argument that only armed resistance could recover Arab land and consolidated his influence over the Lebanese body politic.
Thereafter Hezbollah went from strength to strength, turning itself into a national political party attracting support from all of Lebanon’s different communities and participating in national elections. In the 2018 parliamentary elections, Hezbollah won more than 340,000 preferential votes, the most for any party in Lebanon since independence.
Although pressurised to disarm, it always refused to do so, but on the contrary built up a large, well-equipped army. In October 2021, Nasrallah said that Hezbollah had 100,000 fighters, making it among the most powerful non-national armed organisations worldwide. Nasrallah repeatedly turned down calls for his group’s disarmament, saying, “Hezbollah giving up its weapons … would leave Lebanon exposed before Israel.” As it is, Hezbollah’s army is the only armed force, national or otherwise, to have forced Israel to retreat from an Arab country.
The army became battle hardened by its participation in support of the Syrian government holding out against imperialism’s efforts to topple it through mobilisation of jihadi maniacs. Nasrallah was severely criticised by various Arab governments, and ridiculously accused of creating a communal divide between Shias and Sunnis, when it should have been obvious to all that it was the egregious religious intolerance of the jihadis that was creating a divide, not the intervention of those who opposed them. Many Arabs did not like Hezbollah’s close relationship with Iran whom Arabs have traditionally perceived as regional rivals. Nevertheless, one thing at which Nasrallah was very clear about was the difference between primary and secondary contradictions, and the need to focus at any given time on the primary, not to get diverted into the secondary. It was self-evidently clear to him that the enemy to be defeated was US imperialism and its Israeli lackey state, who were the implacable enemies of the Arab people, a perpetual threat to their lives and livelihoods and marauders out to plunder their natural resources. The mission had to be to unite with everybody equally threatened to get rid of the fatal parasite, and not to be lured into wasting time and resources on secondary squabbles. In the struggle against the main enemy, Iran and Syria and Palestine were on the anti-imperialist side and were friends to be defended at all costs; while Arab governments collaborating with imperialism, to say nothing of the jihadi tools of imperialism, had to be opposed by whatever means were likely to be effective.
True to its mission, Hezbollah expressed support for the Al-Aqsa flood, the Palestinian resistance’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel which triggered Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Hezbollah’s support was not limited to words, but also involved armed assaults on Israel that caused towns and villages in northern Israel to be evacuated, to which it is still not safe for Israelis to return.
This is the context in which Israel determined, with the undoubted support of US imperialism, to track down Hassan Nasrallah and kill him, regardless of how many innocent civilians had to be killed to achieve that aim. The 2000lb bunker-buster bombs rained down on where he happened to be destroyed four residential blocks and damaged two others. Every two seconds bombs were dropped, some 100 in all. The bombs are thought to be American-manufactured BLU-109 bombs that had initially been withheld from Israel by the Biden administration who did not want them to be deployed against civilians in Gaza.
The US imperialists and their Israeli lickspittles have killed a great man, a great fighter for justice, a great statesman and military leader, but they will soon find that his spirit lives on and will live on forever. Today every Lebanese freedom fighter is Nasrallah, while Israel, now engaged to reducing Lebanon to rubble, will soon find that it has only been digging its own grave.
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