Mick Hartley

Nasrallah's death – now confirmed – is a huge blow to Hezbollah, but above all it's a huge blow to Tehran in its efforts to surround and eliminate the state of Israel. Not that you'd know that from the news coverage. Daniel Bel-Ami at Spiked:

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was killed last night in an Israeli air strike on Beirut, as part of its ongoing offensive in southern Lebanon.

Nasrallah’s death exposes the glaring omission in most of the media coverage of the conflict. Few outlets seem willing to recognise the fact that Israel faces an annihilationist threat from the Iran-backed terrorist group and its Islamist allies.

At best, media reports will acknowledge that Hezbollah has fired thousands of missiles into northern Israel since 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas pogrom. This of course is why Israel has had to evacuate 60,000 of its citizens from its northern communities. In rare instances, the media might mention that Hezbollah has flagrantly flouted a UN resolution to stay at least 12 miles from Israel’s border. But Israel’s deeper motivations for its conflict with Hezbollah and allied Islamist groups are rarely taken seriously.

Instead, the media paint a picture of Israel as a malign, irrational actor wilfully slaughtering innocent civilians. This is demonstrated most clearly on Al-Jazeera, an international TV channel based in Qatar. It consistently portrays Israel as indiscriminately attacking Palestinian and Lebanese people, seemingly just for the sake of it. The BBC and Sky are not far behind when it comes to the demonisation of Israel.

The annihilationist stance of Israel’s Islamist opponents ought to be hard to ignore. The absence of discussion about it is one of the strangest aspects of the coverage of Israel’s wars. Hezbollah, literally the ‘party of god’, is very open about its ultimate aim. Its foundational document, the 1985 ‘Open Letter’, states that:

‘Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognise no treaty with it, no ceasefire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.’

Here Hezbollah states that its goal is the obliteration of Israel, the ‘Zionist entity’. This is not a statement about Lebanese sovereignty, or a call for Palestinians’ freedom. Hezbollah has no interest in either concept. Rather, it frames its project in terms of the umma, the global Muslim political community.

Although this programme is almost 40 years old, the leaders of Hezbollah have made countless similar statements over the years. In July this year, the late Nasrallah repeated a common Islamist metaphor when he called Israel a ‘cancerous tumour that must be eradicated’.

Which is why Israel is doing what it must do to ensure its survival. It's just a shame that the UK has chosen this time to put a partial block on arms sales to Israel – though they seem to be doing well enough without our help or support.