PATRICK LAWRENCE: Nasrallah Is Dead But Bibi Hasn’t Won

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing the U.N. General Assembly’s 79th session on Friday. (UN Photo/Evan Schneider)

Special to Consortium News

You have probably heard by now, or heard about, Bibi Netanyahu’s viciously vituperative hate speech before the U.N. General Assembly last Friday. The Israeli prime minister let it be known he hates more or less everybody now, not least the membership of the organization hosting him. 

They, we, are all anti–Semites, you see. The exceptions are the Americans. Bibi holds Americans in contempt, as he has made clear on numerous occasions, but he cannot afford to hate them because the Americans write the checks and send the 2,000–pound bombs. 

“And I have another message for this assembly and for the world outside this hall,” Netanyahu roared toward the end of his 13 minutes at the podium, the transcript of which is here. “We are winning.” And with this came Bibi’s by-now-familiar pounding of the left fist. 

A brief note arrives from Dr. Lawrence. “Is it necessary to say you are winning when you are winning?” he asks. “Or does it become necessary to say you are winning when you are not?”

But something else happened while Bibi bragged that Israel is winning its seven-front war, as he calls the terrorist state’s aggressions against its neighbors.  Moody’s, the debt-assessing agency, dropped Israel’s credit rating from A2 to Baa1. This is a cut of two notches, a not-unserious downgrade.  

A–rated debt is considered of high quality and low risk; B–rated debt is ranked “medium grade,” carries more risk, and “may possess speculative characteristics,” as Moody’s puts it. “The outlook remains negative,” the agency adds. 

You read all kinds of things in the corporate press about the who-won, who-lost consequences of Israel’s murder of Nasrallah last Friday. A decisive victory for the Israelis, Hezbollah has been downgraded, Hezbollah has been degraded, Israel has turned the tide in its war along its northern border. 

All “without evidence,” that obnoxious phrase The New York Times marshals whenever it wants to cast doubt on something that is more often than not true but inconveniently so.

My favorite in this line comes from Unherd, the online journal published in London. “Hassan Nasrallah’s death could mark the end of Hezbollah,” is the headline atop a piece by one Kyle Orton, who works for the Henry Jackson Society, a nest of paranoid Islamophobes posing as a think tank and also operating in London. 

“Unhinged” would be more to the point.

Negative Outlook  

I am with Moody’s amid all this papier mâché triumphalism. The outlook for apartheid Israel is negative in the extreme as its proceeds on its reckless way. As I turn the West Asia crisis the Zionist state has created this way and that, I cannot think of one damn thing that suggests they are winning anything. 

It should be clear by now that the Israelis, or anyone else for that matter, can kill adversaries but cannot extinguish the movements they lead or the spirit that drives such movements. This is a simple case of understanding or failing to understand fundamental human psychology. Israel, having surrendered their humanity, simply cannot grasp this.

Hezbollah was founded in response to the Israeli presence in Lebanon 42 years ago, but it represents — manifests, if you like — an identity and an aspiration that extend back many centuries. Many people now mourn Nasrallah’s death, in Lebanon and elsewhere, but Hezbollah’s existence is nowhere near in question.

A child holding an image of Nasrallah at a parade during his speech in Beirut in November 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Alastair Crooke did an interesting interview with Andrew Napolitano last week on the latter’s program, Judging Freedom. Two of Crooke’s points merit mention. 

One, Nasrallah had for years obliged all Hezbollah leaders to cultivate their successors with a view to unforeseen disasters such as has just befallen him. Can we not be confident Nasrallah followed his own orders? Two, the Israeli air attacks on Hezbollah rocket and missile installations in southern Lebanon have come nowhere near even denting the group’s military capabilities. 

Another point in this line: Nasrallah was a prudent leader, noted for, among other things, revising Hezbollah’s manifesto in 2009 in the direction of moderation. (“Times have changed and so must we.”) The argument arises that the organization will now assume or reassume a more radical character. 

Jonathan Cook appeared to suggest this in a brief piece published Sunday on “X” under the headline, “In killing Nasrallah, Israel chose to open the gates of hell. We will all pay the price.” Cook knows West Asia and its people vastly better than I, but I question this judgment. 

Since the Israelis assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader, in Tehran on the last day of July, we have had a clear and simple demonstration of what the Iranians call “strategic patience.” (I have also seen it mentioned as “revolutionary patience” the term I prefer.)

It means, if I am not oversimplifying, cultivating one’s strengths while maintaining control of a conflict’s dynamic and avoiding responses that stand a good chance of precipitating defeat. 

My post–Nasrallah surmise with the Iranians’ example in mind: Hezbollah’s new leaders will not desist in their war against Israel, but they will remain as shrewd as they proved under Nasrallah. They will not lose their heads and resort to the kind of mis– or undirected violence the Zionist military is plainly intent on provoking. 

There is another factor at work here and we must not miss it. To put this very simply indeed, in my judgment Hezbollah is likely to see things as the Iranians appear to see them: Zionist Israel is destroying itself all on its own. Letting them do so is part of any good strategy.

Iran’s Ali Khamenei leading prayer at the funeral for Haniyeh on Aug. 1. (Khamenei.ir, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

The reality at work in West Asia, this is to say, is that Israel has no alternative course at its disposal that is not self-destructive.

The strategies and objectives it has set for itself, notably since the Netanyahu regime brought leaders of Israel’s fanatical right into government, will inevitably lead to the demise of the Israeli state.

No other outcome appears possible so long as Netanyahu allows people such as Itamar Ben–Givr and Bezalel Smotrich, respectively the security and finance ministers, to influence policy to the extent the prime minister has so far let them. 

Ilan Pappé had an excellent piece on this question in the June 21 edition of the “Sidecar” feature of the New Left Review. In “The collapse of Zionism,” the Israeli scholar now in exile argues that the Zionist project entered the beginning of its end with Israel’s response to the events of last Oct. 7. While one may applaud this progression, Pappé does not paint a pretty picture:

“We are witnessing a historical process — or, more accurately, the beginnings of one — that is likely to culminate in the downfall of Zionism. And, if my diagnosis is correct, then we are also entering a particularly dangerous conjuncture. For once Israel realizes the magnitude of the crisis, it will unleash ferocious and uninhibited force to try to contain it, as did the South African apartheid regime during its final days.”

Pappé marks this down to two broad developments, the first bearing directly on the second. When Netanyahu named his cabinet of freak-show zealots at the end of 2022, it was effectively the triumph of those who view Israel as a religious project, “the State of Judea,” as Pappé puts it, over those who see it as fundamentally a nationalist endeavor, the State of Israel. 

“While Jewish identity in Israel has sometimes seemed little more than a subject of theoretical debate between religious and secular factions,” Pappé writes, “it has now become a struggle over the character of the public sphere and the state itself. This is being fought not only in the media but also in the streets.”

As has been well-reported, the corruption of Israel’s courts has been one theater in this conflict. As less well-reported but there if one looks for it, a very considerable proportion of Israelis now applaud, on the basis of the most racist interpretations of Zionism, the Israel Defense Forces’ unconscionably brutal assaults on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Pappé seems to think there is no turning back from the grotesqueries — social, political, ideological, of course military — of post–Oct. 7 Israel. If I read him correctly on this point, I agree without reservation. It seems a matter of time before this ghastly undertaking implodes. 

Pappé, who now lectures and writes at the University of Exeter in southwest England, also thinks “the breakdown of public institutions, which become incapable of providing services to citizens,” will cause — is already causing —the economy to collapse. This is what the people at Moody’s with pencils behind their ears are looking at. 

Economy in Danger  

Bank of Israel in Jerusalem. (Avishai Teicher, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5)

Economic growth cratered as soon as Israel began its assault on Gaza last Oct. 8. Gross domestic product dropped 21 percent in the final three months of last year. In July the Bank of Israel cut its 2024 growth forecast nearly in half, to 1.5 percent; a month later JPMorgan put the figure at 1.4 percent. These forecasts are almost certainly optimistic. 

Foreign investment has dried up, defense spending is nearly out of control, and tens of thousands of businesses have closed because (1) there is little business to do and (2) the IDF has called up too many employees to serve in Gaza.

The Washington Post had a good piece on the resulting desperation in its Sept. 26 editions. “It feels like if a significant change doesn’t happen soon, the economy will crash,” Shelley Lotan, who owns a technology startup, told the Post’s Rachel Chason. 

We come to the incompetence of the Netanyahu regime’s leadership on the economic side. Smotrich — a yeshiva-trained Zionist, an ideologue obsessed with expanding illegal settlements and making Eretz Israel a reality — seems to understand economics and finance about as well as an entry-level manager in Cleveland with a subscription to Forbes.

“The economy is in serious danger unless the government wakes up,” a think tank researcher named Dan Ben–David told Chason. “Right now they are completely disconnected from anything that is not war, and there is no end in sight.”

Or as Ilan Pappé puts it:

“The crisis is further aggravated by the incompetence of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who constantly channels money to Jewish settlements in the West Bank but seems otherwise unable to run his department. The conflict between the State of Israel and the State of Judea, along with the events of October 7, is meanwhile causing some of the economic and financial elite to move their capital outside the state. Those who are considering relocating their investments make up a significant part of the 20% of Israelis who pay 80% of the taxes.”  

“The most responsible thing to do is to start planning a way out,” Shelley Lotan, the business owner, said when the Post interviewed her. It is not an original thought. Pappé reckoned last spring that half a million Israelis, mostly young, mostly professional, a lot of them technocrats — have already expatriated. 

That is 500,000 out of a population of 9.5 million, and that was Pappé’s figure some months ago. It is not difficult to imagine that the Israel of the not-distant future will be substantially devoid of expertise, leaving untrained ultra-orthodox Zionists to run ministries and government departments. A failed state, in short.    

I do not know what is being said, with Hassan Nasrallah gone, inside Hezbollah’s political and military councils. It is impossible to anticipate with certainty how the organization will react in what amounts to a new era in its story.

But the Israelis are winning nothing a year into Netanyahu’s seven-front war. Of this one can be more certain.

Time is on the side of those Israel has made its adversaries: This, too. 

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