Hassan Nasrallah, announced chronicle of a global confrontation, by Gilles Kepel – L’Express

This “enemy” is not limited to the “Israeli entity” but is embodied firstly by the United States of America, and beyond by the crusader, colonialist then imperialist West to be defeated. Moscow and Beijing stand out in the background as potential allies, within a deregulated international system of which Tehran, mentor of Hezbollah, wishes to make the most of in the wake of the raid of October 7, this September 11 inflicted on Israel for making it in turn a colossus with feet of clay.

Titled “the Flood of Al-Aqsa” (the great mosque of Jerusalem under Israeli occupation), reformulating in end-times biblical-Islamic terms the Hamas offensive on October 7 and the massacre of more than 1,400 civilians – this discourse immediately imposes the hegemony of radical Shiite Islamism over political-religious expression in the Arabic language.

Yet Shiism only accounts for 15% of the world’s Muslims. But no other voice was audible with such an echo. For those who have listened to him in his original idiom, Hassan Nasrallah is striking by the effectiveness of his rhetoric, simplifying classical grammar using everyday dialectal turns of phrase to speak the language of the crowds, but resorting to a demanding vocabulary, more political as well as religious, in order to insinuate into the minds of its listeners Tehran’s ideological reading of the conflict, facing the Sunni leaders who have made a pact with the Hebrew state.

This is not his first attempt: during the devastating “33-day war” in the summer of 2006 between Hezbollah and Israel, the Party of God, after an incursion into the Galilee and the kidnapping of soldiers – who then succeeded in destroying several IDF Merkava tanks and bogging down the military operation in South Lebanon – had become the hero of the Arab street, from Sunnis to certain Eastern Christians. But in the Land of the Cedars itself, the scale of the destruction had made this war unpopular, and the memory of it remains alive – which is why the speech of November 3 does not recommend any immediate military action on the Lebanese front, a damaging adventurism to complete the war. party control over the government in Beirut – but is immediately projected on a scale of the Middle East and the world.

Against the evidence, the speaker explains that the 1,400 civilian deaths, whose atrocious images have repulsed many Internet users and viewers around the world well beyond the Jewish State, are attributable to erratic shooting by the army. Israeli. This expeditious remanence of negationism applied to the killings of October 7 makes the Palestinian victims of the current offensive on Gaza – estimated to date at some 10,000 dead, half of them children – the only ones who count, ipso facto qualifying the war carried out by Israel in crimes against humanity – and reversing the charge of genocide.

Another surprising assertion is to attribute the origin, planning and implementation of the raid to the military branch of Hamas in Gaza alone, without the knowledge of its political leadership installed in the large hotels of Qatar, as its main support, the Iranian Guardians of the Revolution (pasdaran), and their “Quds force” (Jerusalem) which arms, finances and educates the Islamic Resistance Movement (whose Arabic acronym gives “Hamas”), branch Palestinian of the Sunni International of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In addition to the multiple coordination meetings in Beirut and elsewhere between these different entities shortly before October 7, reading their Arabic sites was conclusive. Welcoming the moral and political disrepair of Israel caused by the policies of Benyamin Netanyahu, his alliance with the far-right millenarian settlers chasing the Arabs from the West Bank with machine guns, his attempts to change the Constitution to avoid legal proceedings, highlighting the immense hostile street demonstrations as well as the refusal of reservists to carry out their military periods, these sites clearly indicated that the “axis of resistance” had identified an exceptional political opportunity for a coup.

Finally, on the operational level, it is unimaginable that zeal (meaning of the term hamas) was enough for Islamist militants in Gaza to deactivate the sensors of Israel’s security barrier – the 65 kilometers of which would have cost a billion euros – and cross it at 29 points. Everything suggests that the operation required the involvement of the Pasdaran Quds force, the only ones capable of mobilizing electronic means at this level.

But Nasrallah’s telling of the story makes local Hamas a sort of Palestinian David against the Israeli Goliath, reinforcing the miraculous nature of the divine (rather than Iranian) aid provided to the breakthrough, while clearing it of the holocaust of 1,400 civilians. Subject to what the investigations will establish, the absence of any operational presence on the border of the IDF, busy protecting the settlers of the West Bank, has in fact exceeded the expectations of the attackers, and it is a crowd of border crossers who followed suit, doubling down on abuses whose monstrous nature proved embarrassing in winning over international public opinion to the cause – which explains the false attribution of the massacre to the army.

Another surprise in this narrative: the importance given to two other regional auxiliaries of Tehran, the Shiite militias of Iraq known as “popular mobilization” (Hachd al-Chaabi) and the Houthis of Yemen (belonging to the heterodox Shiite sect of the Zaydis) , despite a modest contribution to the hostilities. The former routinely harassed the American bases that remain in the Levant facing Daesh, the latter launched missiles across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, towards the Israeli port of Eilat, but they fell in the Egyptian Sinai, wounding six people, or were destroyed in flight by the IDF’s “Iron Dome”.

Message: the “axis of resistance” is the champion of the Palestinian cause, anti-Zionist and anti-Western, against the Sunni Arab states hostile to Iran, which appear implicitly as traitors – whether they have already signed the peace with the Jewish State, or have been predisposed to it, thus Saudi Arabia having officially received, and for the first time, two Israeli ministers on September 26 and October 2. The acquisition of Iron Dome technology by Riyadh would have effectively protected its territory from Houthis and Iraqi Hezbollah missiles, removing from Tehran a gigantic means of pressure on its Gulf adversary.

At a time when Antony Blinken returns to the region to strive, by negotiating truces in exchange for the release of hostages, to restore the central role of mediator of the United States in order to avoid widespread conflagration, aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and in with the Gulf in support, Hezbollah blows on these incandescent embers to impose the “axis of resistance” as the obligatory interlocutor. It is essential for him to counter the Sunni petromonarchies using checkbook diplomacy for humanitarian purposes for the Palestinian victims of the invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip, while maintaining their alliances with the Jewish state – even if Hamas was eradicated in Gaza by the IDF offensive, at the cost of a massacre of civilians. In his speech, Hassan Nasrallah recalled what support Iran has in this coming standoff – and which it can garner, like Erdogan denouncing “the war waged by the cross against the crescent”, welcoming with open arms the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs and vituperating Israel, whose diplomats stationed in Ankara have just been recalled.

*Gilles Kepel is a university professor. He has just published Prophet in his country (The Observatory), putting the situation in the Middle East into perspective.