EUROPEAN UNION

PATRICK LAWRENCE—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.)

GEORGE HAZIM—Each Israeli or US military operation that results in civilian casualties or the destruction of homes only strengthens the resolve of these resistance groups. The more Israel attempts to crush Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon, the more popular support they gain. The French Resistance grew in response to Nazi atrocities, and Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements are continuously bolstered by the ongoing repression they face…One of the most glaring problems the West faces is its profound ignorance of history. The assumption that military solutions can bring about lasting peace or victory ignores the lessons of past wars, where resistance movements have outlasted far superior military powers…
The US and Israel are repeating the mistakes of past empires, believing their military dominance will break the will of those fighting for their freedom. But as with the French Resistance during World War II, the spirit of resistance among Palestinians and Lebanese cannot be subdued.

THOMAS FAZI—Germany’s policy vis-a-vis the European Union for a long time fit the pattern [discussed in part 1 of the interview] of national governments and national elites using the European Union to their own advantage. Germany is probably the most clear example of this, in terms of a country using the European Union and the narrative of “Europeanising Germany” and supposedly getting away from Germany’s hyper-nationalist tendencies of the past to, in fact, promote the national interests of Germany, or more precisely those of its capitalist elites, and pursue what could be described as a form of economic nationalism. For a long time, Germany’s relationship with the European Union could be described as one of “nationalism through Europeanism”.

THOMAS FAZI—Democracy has only existed — and, I would argue, can only exist — at the national level. And so, when you start to look at things from this wider historical perspective, you realise what the European Union’s project was all about: it really was a way of responding to the crisis and a way of implementing neoliberalism on an unprecedented scale, by essentially hollowing out national democracies and national sovereignties by creating this supranational institution that would prove impervious to any form of democratic pressures.

EDITOR—Garland and Laith analyse how Israel’s depraved attack on Palestinians is now generating a “long war of attrition” whereby the “Axis of Resistance”—Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, Hamas, Iraq, and Yemen’s Houthis, among others—may emerge as the victor, with a possible dissolution of Zionist Israel itself as incompatible with regional and universal values, and ultimately unsustainable from a military, diplomatic, political and economic perspective.