Hezbollah's fatal mistake was to believe Israel was bound by the rules of war: Opinion
Thirty-two years ago, an Israeli raid killed Abbas al-Musawi, then-secretary general of Hezbollah.
At the time, Israeli newspaper front pages celebrated the event as the ultimate defeat of the Lebanese movement. The last three decades have shown that such optimism was plain wrong. Hezbollah reacted bloodily elsewhere and, in due course, it has become far stronger than it was in the early 1990s.
So far, there is no indication that Hassan Nasrallah’s killing in Beirut on 27 September might precipitate, once again, the demise of Hezbollah.
What Israel and, more generally, western democracies miss in their analysis is that their general concepts of victory or defeat cannot be easily applied to an organisation devoted to martyrdom, as Hezbollah is.
In other words, if Hezbollah wins, this event is celebrated. If it loses, it is celebrated as a martyrdom in a larger conflict against oppression (Israeli occupation of Arab lands) and injustice (western hegemony and double standards in international relations). In one word, this is called resistance.
