The British had their Queen Elizabeth, we had Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Sure, both were the spawn of a bloody legacy, sovereigns who came to occupy their mantle by virtue of a history of violence, but they were always there for their people. They talked to them and saw them through the good and the bad; the soul of a nation distilled into a familiar face.
I have known Nasrallah since I have known myself. I never met the man, but he was there, talking to me at every turning point and major national juncture, explaining his rendition of the violence that shaped my world. My parents and everyone else seemed to listen, so I did too. I even heard him die.
Cowering in my home in Beirut, I counted the successive Israeli strikes that killed him.
“That was different,” I thought to myself on that Friday, Sept. 27, while I huddled by my bathroom door and the earth rumbled around me. Although I could not see it, I felt like the sky was about to fall on our heads and shatter us into a million little pieces. Just as it had been doing next door in Gaza for the past year.
After the booms dissipated, I began the ritual that marked the aftermath of every mock raid or bombing of Beirut over the past few months. I called my family and friends and made sure everyone was alive. Then I trawled through Twitter.
The unthinkable sprawled itself all over my feed: Nasrallah was the target. Nasrallah is dead.
It felt like the world was placed in suspended animation. It would remain so until Saturday morning, when the news was finally confirmed. It was like entering another dimension, as if the globe had veered off its cosmic course into the worst possible timeline.
“Who is going to talk to us now?” my drunk best friend bemoaned later that day as we gathered around the TV in my living room, the screen on an endless loop between local news and Al Jazeera.
We watched mostly in silence, but occasionally someone would mutter, “They killed Nasrallah,” and some of us would giggle out of disbelief and horror.
In the days that followed, part of me believed he might still be alive — that he would reappear from some underground bunker and instruct us to “watch it burn” after his soldiers struck at an Israeli target, as he had done in 2006 when Hezbollah hit an Israeli warship on live television in what came to be a historic moment.
But that didn’t happen.
I expected a farewell message. Some prerecorded video of the old man saying goodbye, saying that he was happy to be martyred on the road to Jerusalem as his children had been before him, and instructing his people to stay strong in the wars to come.
That also didn’t happen.
I expected orderly succession from a group that should have been preparing for this day for decades.
Instead, he appeared to die in the dumbest of ways, targeted after meeting a senior commander who himself had barely survived an Israeli strike days before in the same area.
Instead of the organizational prowess the group had long been lauded for, we only saw chaos and disarray in the past few weeks.
It was uncharacteristic of the group. But then again, so was its entire strategy going into Oct. 7.
That day, Hamas shocked the world, its enemies and its allies. The group attacked southern Israel from Gaza, overwhelming defenses, killing more than 1,200 combatants and civilians and taking more than 250 hostages. Tel Aviv responded by invading the strip.
So far, the Israeli military has killed tens of thousands of civilians and devastated most of the area, displacing almost the entirety of its 2-million-plus population, actions which have warranted accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice.
On Oct. 8, Hezbollah joined the fight, launching rockets from southern Lebanon “in solidarity” with Gaza. But months earlier, Nasrallah had been occupied with something else.
He had set Lebanon’s queer community squarely in his crosshairs and branded gay people as traitors to the nation. At the time, he was in desperate need of political capital, his party’s coffers emptied by propping up Lebanon’s waning political system. No additional revenues were at hand.
Syria was pacified and Hezbollah were masters of the land there. Lebanon’s southern front was mostly quiet. The security threat that had perpetually plagued Lebanon’s Shiite community seemed finally to have been dealt with. Once third-class citizens behind Christians and Sunnis, the running joke around the country was that now the “Shiites have eaten us.”
Hezbollah was ascendant in Lebanon, able to impose its will on the government and cripple the political process till it had its way. The Shiite community now included some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country.
Although the sect seemed fine, its people, like the rest of the Lebanese, were miserable. Economic ruin spared no sect and came for us all, and even Hezbollah’s prowess pales in the face of the vulgar corruption of Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing system.
In the five years since the collapse of the country’s banking sector, the Lebanese pound has become mostly worthless, having lost more than 95% of its value.
The things that made Lebanon what it was have withered away. The education system is incapacitated and the health care sector is demolished. Once a regional banking hub, the industry is now seen to be run by crooks who have locked common people out of their savings while allowing the elite to transfer their wealth abroad.
Crime is rampant. A friend who grew up in the heart of Hezbollah-controlled Dahiyeh was shocked at the state of his neighborhood when he came to visit after moving abroad. A tall, broad-shouldered man who was a bit of a thug in his youth, come nightfall my buddy was now too scared to walk the streets that helped raise him.
Lebanon’s political elite preferred to see the economy collapse rather than loosen their grip on power and institute reforms that would sever the flow of money from state coffers into their hands.
Economic ruin and the trauma of the 2020 port explosion shrank Beirut from a community of worldly cosmopolitans to one of traumatized shut-ins, only venturing out when eager cousins came from abroad, keen on reliving days gone by.
Although Hezbollah was not singularly to blame, the problems persisted because of Hezbollah. The arms of the “Party of God” shielded Lebanon’s political elite and blocked any investigation into the port blast.
The group was the ultimate winner in Lebanon’s sectarian system, even though the rest of us were losing out. To stay on top, Hezbollah had to cater to and enable the corrupt machinations of its allies and rivals within the ruling class, including its closest Shiite partner and a person seen as profoundly corrupt, even by Lebanese standards — Lebanon’s Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri.
It was political imperatives, then, rather than any strategic aims that propelled Hezbollah’s rockets on Oct. 8. They were meant to remind its people why the party existed.
The group piggybacked on Hamas’ perceived victory against a mutual foe. It wanted its name included in the annals that would be written of that day because, lately, Hezbollah did not have much to contribute of its own.
Thus it embarked on its cross-border adventure, first striking at empty plots of land in a show of force against what it saw as an enfeebled enemy. But the group, with Nasrallah at their head, miscalculated. And their mistakes killed them.
When Hezbollah launched those rockets, it assumed that it would be able to control the narrative. It couldn’t. Throughout the past year, Israel kept escalating its attacks on the group, which would respond with a calm, calculated response.
Hezbollah never set out to impede the Israeli war machine, only to scare it and pressure it. The group showed restraint, responding to every Israeli tit with its own tat. It brandished its capabilities and surprised onlookers with the depth of its intelligence capabilities, able to strike at key Israeli military installations.
But it was a reactionary show of force, nothing more. Hezbollah was reacting to Israeli attacks and never seemed to show initiative, knowing full well how little Lebanon could stomach an all-out war.
It was lauded as the adult in the room for fighting with its hands tied behind its back. Throughout the conflict, Israel demonstrated the depth of its penetration of Hezbollah’s network, killing key commanders and pushing through red lines that had been in place for decades.
Hezbollah’s response came off as meek in comparison. To me, when the group failed to respond to the killing of Fuad Shukr in July, they lost the holy grail of deterrence they had been fighting for decades to attain.
Israel killed the group’s most senior commander in Beirut and Hezbollah could not and did not do anything about it.
On a beautiful day in early September, thousands of hand-held devices beeped and then blew up across Lebanon. Nine people were killed and 3,000 injured, including Hezbollah fighters, administrators, medics and Iran’s envoy to Lebanon.
Israeli intelligence services had planted explosives in the devices and, in one swoop, incapacitated an essential cadre of Hezbollah’s apparatus. There was another attack the following day. Israel detonated walkie-talkies during a Hezbollah funeral.
It was the beginning of the end of the spell Hezbollah had once cast on all of us. The omnipotent intelligence force I had grown up with seemed compromised to its core, its weakness laid bare for all to see. The group had been penetrated completely and violently.
War is hard. Probably harder when you are up against some of the world’s most technologically advanced militaries. But today’s war was almost 20 years in the making. Since the last proper round in 2006, both sides have been preparing for the next one; for this one.
So why does Hezbollah seem woefully underprepared?
In the days that followed the pager attacks, Lebanon would suffer its single bloodiest day in the history of its conflict with Israel, when almost 500 people were killed on Sept. 23. Tens of thousands fled southern Lebanon, some spending hours on the highways to get to the capital. Some gave up and made camp by the side of the road.
Although shelters were supposedly prepared for the past year, the government response was completely lacking. People slept on the streets, by the sea and in public parks.
Civil society rushed in to fill the gaping holes left by the absence of a functioning state. Food was prepared and donations dished out, but the level of need is beyond such efforts.
Internally displaced people are now crammed into public schools and shelters, where dozens queue to use a single toilet. Some have shunned the shelters and prefer to live on the streets instead. Others have broken into abandoned apartments, spurring tensions.
I saw a family sleeping on a patch of grass by a public toilet near Beirut’s seaside corniche. Many of Beirut’s sparse green spaces are now occupied by a displaced family, lounging in a tent away from the sun. I shudder when I think about what they will do come winter.
The country’s most fragile populations, foreign laborers and Syrian refugees, are suffering the most with seemingly nowhere to go.
The Shiites went from “eating the country” to “those poor refugees.” Their displacement showed both the ugliest and best sides of Lebanon. One of the country’s grandest mosques barred people from sleeping inside, while nearby a nightclub opened its doors to pious refugees.
Israel now hunts Hezbollah wherever they go, striking in the heart of Beirut, or in Christian mountain villages, acts unthinkable months ago.
But then we had Nasrallah. Now, he is gone, along with most of Hezbollah’s commanders. Their performative act has cost them their lives.
All the blood is in vain. With deterrence now gone, the blood of Hezbollah’s many martyrs is in vain. The blood Hezbollah spilled in Syria to keep its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, in power was in vain.
Hezbollah and their allies killed hundreds of thousands to help Assad claw back control of the country. They supposedly entrenched themselves on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, promising a new front with Israel if war were to break out.
None of that happened. Bashar has been quiet and largely stayed out of the conflict in Gaza. The so-called Golan Front was never activated — was there ever one to begin with?
Invading Syria was sold as the necessary action to preserve and improve Hezbollah’s resistance capabilities. But when it came to it, these capabilities seemed nowhere to be found.
In the end, Hezbollah turned into a cliche. Across the 20th century, Arab despots instrumentalized the Palestinian cause and, under the pretext of fighting Israel, turned their guns on their own people and sowed tyranny.
The Party of God turned out to be no different; strong only against Syrian rebels and Lebanese demonstrators. The party, like the Arab tyrants before it, failed to resist or deter Israel from killing its people.
History has a dark comedy to it. Nasrallah died because Hamas decided to launch a surprise attack over which he had no control. His death was made possible because of his sins in Syria. Reports showed Israel was able to use Syria’s notoriously corrupt army as a conduit into Hezbollah’s networks.
I suspect Hezbollah will turn its guns on us soon. Sectarian tensions are brewing and Hezbollah’s rivals smell blood. The group has been defeated but is not destroyed by any means. Its rivals, sensing weakness, will act strong and seek to impose their will; Hezbollah, being weak, will be more assertive internally, more conscious of its enfeebled status and the need to defend its power.
The West is keen on seeing us killed, eager to mold a new Middle East on top of our corpses. The perpetrators and enablers of the genocide next door don’t care about us.
The war on Gaza has entrenched the Arab person’s subhuman status in the world.
Nasrallah is dead. No one is coming to save us.
We only have each other.
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