Israel's violent escalation w/ Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Nathaniel George
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Politics Theory Other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guests today are Iskandar Siddiqui-Burujedi and Nathaniel George.

On the 27th of September, Israel dramatically escalated its war on Hezbollah by assassinating its Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah. Four days later, Iran responded to the killing of its long-standing ally by launching a missile attack on Israel, targeting military and intelligence facilities. In today's episode, I spoke with Iskandar and Nate about whether the killing of Nasrallah and the wider leadership represents an existential threat to Hezbollah and about the group's prospects in combating Israel's ground invasion. We

We also talked about the effectiveness of Iran's missile strikes and the degree to which Iran has been able to restore any measure of deterrence. And we also touched on the dire humanitarian situation in Lebanon, which comes on top of years of grinding economic and political crisis. Finally, we discussed the position of the United States and the apparent appetite in Washington for settling accounts with the US's regional adversaries.

Iskandar Sazigi-Burajedi is a historian of West Asia with a particular focus on the modern intellectual and political history of Iran and he's the author of Revolution and its Discontents, Political Thought and Reform in Iran. He teaches at the University of York. My second guest is Nathaniel George who teaches at SOAS, part of the University of London. Nate is the author of the forthcoming book, A Third World War, Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Empire in Lebanon.

So Iskandar, there's been a lot of conflicting opinions regarding the effectiveness of Iran's missile attack on October 1st, in which Iran fired 181 missiles at military targets in Israel. Both Israel and the United States characterised the attack as a failure and there were no reports of military casualties, although one Palestinian civilian in Jericho was killed by missile debris and a small number of Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians were reportedly lightly injured.

It's clear however that Iran did succeed in hitting some military targets, most visibly at the Nevratim airbase in the Negev. This seems to demonstrate that Iran's ballistic missiles can successfully break through Israel's layered missile defence. We know of course that Iran has sufficient stocks of weapons to launch a much larger scale attack if they so choose.

So what's your assessment of the success or otherwise of the operation? And what exactly do you think Iran was intending to achieve with the strikes? I mean, it's difficult to gauge exactly how successful they were. I mean, there have been claims that Iran has actually successfully knocked out or taken out a number of sort of its F-35 fleet. And the fact of the matter is that we simply do not know

I think it's to be expected that the United States and Israel is going to massively downplay this because they've invested so much

in the imperviousness of the Iron Dome. And also I'm sure there's many arms manufacturers and sort of major corporations who are kind of again, very much linked to the national security state in the United States and Israel who are invested in obviously touting the immense deterrents kind of capability of this technology.

On the other hand, obviously, Iran is similarly exaggerating, making major claims for their retaliation. And that, again, is very much part of, again, feeding into sort of reestablish a significant degree of deterrence. And so the fact of the matter is that we don't know. The thing that is interesting, of course, is that only as far as we're aware, military targets were struck.

And these military targets were significant because, obviously from the Nivoting Air Base, the strike which was basically launched earlier in the year,

against Iran's diplomatic combat in Damascus was launched from there, I believe. And similarly, the attack again, which actually led to the assassination of Hassan al-Assad and the killing of over 300 innocent civilians in that attack. Similarly so. So I think it's also just important, another thing to discuss is sort of the difference between this attack

attack and the April one, so True Promise 1 and True Promise 2. In the April attack, it was very clear that this was a direct response to an attack on Iran's diplomatic sovereign territory.

But it was one that was aptly telegraphed in advance. It was one in which Iran used far less advanced technology, a combination of ballistic and cruise missiles and various drones, which took many hours to travel from Iran into Israeli airspace. Arab countries had been warned also significantly in advance. I mean, that was obviously known to the Israelis and the United States. And there was a multinational effort to kind of repel that.

Obviously, in this instance, in this latest one on October 1st, you know, it was, I mean, again, it's not entirely clear. Some claim that there was like sort of some kind of forewarning given a couple of hours in advance, but that also might not be entirely accurate. But nevertheless, what is clear is that there was very little advanced knowledge of this.

As you sort of already said, sort of 180, in excess of 180 ballistic missiles were used. Some of these were sort of amongst Iran's most advanced arsenals, so the Fata-1. And, you know, there was a lot of talk about sort of Iran's deployment of hypersonic missiles in this instance. But again, I think the immediate message that came out, so when you listen to the incumbent president, Masoud Bezeshkian's statement, he was very clear that

Iran actually doesn't want this to escalate further and kind of wants to draw a line under this and that this was a direct response to the violation of Iranian sovereignty and the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the political head of Hamas in Tehran. I think, again, just one other point that's really noteworthy is the fact that Haniyeh's assassination took place immediately after the inauguration of the new president and a president who was very intensely concerned

extending his hand to Europe, to the broader world, and wanted to reach a meaningful kind of diplomatic settlement because of obviously various kind of issues around sanctions and the economic

distress that has caused at home. So the Israelis did that very, very intently in order to basically make that sort of outstretching of the hand, that pursuit of some kind of settlement, at least with European powers, a sort of impossibility. And then obviously the most devastating one was the

assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and obviously a brigadier general from Iran's Revolutionary Guard in which obviously 300 people were killed and the Lebanese foreign minister came and stated that actually a ceasefire had been agreed beforehand and Nasrallah had already agreed to this and then was assassinated and similarly I mean we just look back to Haniyeh a big reason why Iran didn't retaliate then was similarly because of the same reason because they thought they were told

that a diplomatic initiative, a ceasefire in Gaza was in the off thing. So that is actually what led them to kind of delay and actually patiently not retaliate in response to that.

Yeah, I would just like to respond with a little bit about how the Iranian missile launch was received or understood within Lebanon and the Arab world outside of the purely Iranian-Israeli context and the context of U.S. statements and Israeli statements as to the failure of the attack. Well, first of all, this is an

asymmetric war where where israel obviously has incredible military power and the backing of the most powerful states in the international order with and and they're shielding them from from any accountability for their many many war crimes that we have all seen live streamed onto our phones and our desktops over the last year so what i mean here is that we can't look at it simply

in terms of military targets being hit. But there is an aspect of political communication here and the politics of these war, these moves that we have to understand. And the way that the Iranian

attack, Operation True Promise 2 on Tuesday night was carried out after a series of very strong blows that Israel carried out against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Lebanese state and society as a whole. Lebanon, first there was the Pager attacks injuring about 4,000 people, not just

members of Hezbollah, itself a war crime, an act of terror as described by the CIA director, Leon Panetta, even, and other people. You had the the walkie-talkie explosion the next day, the assassination of top Hezbollah leadership, 15 of them in one blow shortly after that,

the massive bombing campaign all across Lebanon. The next week after that, which was twice as intense as the opening days of the Israeli assault on Gaza from the sky,

and that killed about 700 people within a little more than 24 hours in Lebanon. You had a huge wave of Israeli massive aggression and then culminating with the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, which cost, even in Israeli estimates, they wiped out six major apartment buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing about 300 people in order to assassinate Nasrallah.

This was a devastating series of blows psychologically to both Hezbollah as a group, but the wider Lebanese public, the resistance axis constituency throughout the region. This was something that caused great alarm. And many Arab and Lebanese pundits that were opposed to Hezbollah were very quick in announcing that Iran has abandoned

abandoned Hezbollah, that the resistance axis is a figment of everyone's imagination and that it would soon collapse in the few days after that. And in fact, Masrallah was assassinated one week ago on Friday. On Monday, Israel announced that it was invading Lebanon on a ground operation when in fact nothing actually happened from Monday through Tuesday.

But the idea was announced there and it was clear that they were testing the waters as to how Hezbollah, the Western media, Western states would react to the announcement of a ground invasion of Lebanon. And in that context, when there was quite a strong, although not complete, sense of defeat and demoralization on the behalf of the resistance axis and its supporters,

Operation True Promise comes in with little to no warning. And you can see the videos quickly spread all over Arab social media on Al Jazeera and the Arab satellite channels. We're covering it, this massive Iranian attack, which overwhelmingly succeeded in penetrating Israeli air defenses. I mean, there's no question about it. You can see the

video after video after video of missiles raining down from the very north of Israel to the Lebanese border, to the very south of Israel, to Eilat.

So the Israelis and Americans are being less than truthful when they say it didn't succeed. And the reaction on social media, on the Arab media in general, in the streets was actually quite one of jubilance to see that they had not succeeded.

been abandoned by Iran, that the resistance axis had not been abandoned to its fate by Iran. Now, of course, it was calculated political attack, just like in that sense, it's similar, like Iskander said, to the April Operation True Promise, and that they didn't, they calculated this to be a show of force that was less than war, right? So they weren't

trying to kill civilians at all, actually. And the fact that people are surprised that Iran and other forces are not trying to kill civilians just shows how low our expectations have sunk over the last year and the delusional and criminal practices of the Israeli military in targeting civilians. So the point was not to actually

target civilians, they would target exclusively, as far as we can see, or for the vast majority, military sites. As you said, the Nevatim Air Base, which of course was the place where

the planes that assassinated Hassan Nasrallah take off from and that launched criminal attacks on Gaza and Lebanon take off from. Whether or not it was destroyed or not is not the point. The point is to show that they're defenseless in the case of a further war that Iran could at will strike Israel and that restored Iran's standing amongst

The resistance acts as public and even their enemies as well. They made them think twice. So in that case, it was quite a political success. And of course, we're going to be waiting and can only expect a further Israeli escalation after that.

Yeah, and I suppose further to your point on the effectiveness of the strikes, I mean it was notable, I thought, that there was a shift in the media narrative in the West as well from straightforwardly reporting the comments of Israeli and American politicians to the fact that the strikes had been a failure, to a few days later you started to see reports saying, well hang on, actually significant numbers of weapons did get through and did strike there.

their targets as you say just even on the night so i mean you had american journalists like really you know a stone's throw away from mossad headquarters showing like a huge huge like crater in the ground so yeah yeah i mean but you're right i mean i think also previously obviously biden in response to napalm tax sort of said to nathaniel sort of take the wind to try and de-escalate obviously this time

Jake Sullivan and various other figures in the Biden administration were sort of saying there are going to be quote unquote severe repercussions, which in turn speaks to the effectiveness of, I think, the attack despite the bluster.

Just going back to Iran's missile force itself, Iskander, could you say a bit about its history, the capabilities it has, and also your sense of the survivability of the missile and rocket arsenal if Israel were to launch major airstrikes targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps aerospace force who are tasked with operating Iran's

surface-to-surface missile systems. And of course, we don't know if such an attack would be solely conducted by Israel or whether that would be in conjunction with the United States. It would certainly be in conjunction with US intelligence. Yeah, I mean, I should preface this by saying I'm not a military expert or analyst, first and foremost. But obviously, I can tell you a bit about the history of the ballistic missile program. I think just, you know, Nate obviously mentioned that this is asymmetric

So obviously following the Iranian revolution, the US hostage crisis, I mean, Iran has basically been under US arms embargo since the Carter administration. And really since the Carter doctrine, whereby American forces are then deployed to the Persian Gulf and so on. In 1980, Saddam Hussein invades Iran. They have sort of a protracted, really, really bloody war.

a long drawn out conflict, which was to a large extent also funded and fueled by both Gulf Arab states and obviously West Germany, the United States, France and other powers. So Iran in that moment very much felt itself isolated, under siege and very much alone in the world. Obviously, the previous regime, the Shah of Iran, had access to territory

the most advanced American weapons technology throughout the 1970s. There's a great stat that in 1976 or so, the Shah was actually spending more per capita than the People's Republic of China on arms. Many of those procured from the United States. Obviously, following the revolution, that was not a possibility. So in response to that, obviously, Iran gradually stabilised

Starts developing these asymmetric capabilities. And one of the main areas where they've obviously focused in on is the ballistic missile technology, which really do serve as a deterrent, first and foremost. They're really there to actually warn powers such as the United States and so on, or Israel, from launching unilateral missiles.

on Iran. That's really their purpose. You can't launch a ground invasion. You can't do all these sorts of things with this kind of technology. It's predominantly for the purposes of deterrence and to de-escalate

So, I mean, this technology has been developed really since the revolution, since the revolution's inception, really, since the, and especially throughout the course of the Iran-Iraq war and so on, and carried on throughout the 90s all the way through to the present. I mean, the question, I mean, just to speak to what Nate was saying, which I think is completely correct, that

The fact that they got through is the key because, I mean, I think the signal that Iran is sort of saying, given that it is a nuclear threshold state, it's saying, if you really decide to, you know, go all out and try to attack some of Iran's vital infrastructure, we are capable of doing the same. I think that's the signal that they've been trying to send. And the fact that they've been able to develop...

A whole range of different missiles with different payloads speaks to the fact that, like I said, it's predominantly a deterrent, a question of deterrence. It's probably a question of actually sort of saying if the vital infrastructure is targeted, Iran can actually retaliate.

in turn. And obviously, some of this technology has been supplied to or the know-how around it has been supplied to allies such as Hezbollah and also the Houthis in Yemen. But again, I think these aren't for purposes of aggression and sustaining aggression, because actually, that's just not a feasible thing. That's not a viable way of actually waging a long protracted conflict. And this is also kind of the problem, I think, which the Israelis are

to some extent, aware of, because now I think that they are buoyed by the assassination campaign and just simply their sheer aerial superstition

superiority by virtue of the American technology that they possess to maybe kind of up the ante. And obviously we're hearing a lot of sort of rumors about what kind of vital infrastructure now that they are thinking about actually targeting within Iran. And the thing that still is unresolved is like, obviously we'll be able to strike back at Israel, but to what extent will it actually be able to

to push back and strike back at a joint American-Israeli operation. And that's still something which is kind of in the air here. As I said earlier, the point of this strike was, and the immediate comments which come afterwards are to say, okay, the latest round of assassinations and the ramping up of the conflict in Lebanon can't be left unanswered.

But again, I think Iran doesn't want this to escalate further very clearly. But again, I think that the Israelis have a very different plan and want to really kind of obviously drag the United States into a far more all-encompassing, catastrophic kind of scenario.

If there were an escalation and if we did see a more intense series of exchanges between Israel and Iran, does Iran have the problem of perhaps not being able to replace its inventory of weapons if it's a long drawn out conflict? It doesn't seem as if Iran has the sort of defence industrial capability that, say, Russia has.

that would enable it to churn out new missiles at the rate required during a drawn-out war. And of course, Israel can depend on the largesse of the United States and European arms manufacturers. So I wonder if that's a possibility and Israel would be prepared to accept

the damage that would be done. But obviously, Israel geographically is a small country. It has a relatively small population and maybe it isn't prepared to accept the level of damage that that would entail, even if it would seem to be in its interest in the long run. Yeah, obviously, I don't think the sort of industrial capacity, military industrial capacity within Iran is obviously anything comparable to Israel.

However, I do think that the ballistic missile program is something in which, like I said, they put considerable investment and store and they have huge reserves. And they have launches both sort of underground in places which are absolutely unknown. And even if there was a strike, they would still be able to counter strikes.

But yeah, if it obviously transformed the nature of the military engagement, transformed into something, you know, God forbid, was far more sort of extensive, then that could pose a challenge. But I do think by virtue of the war in Ukraine, the Iran-Russian relationship has actually been consolidated in a way which is perhaps unthinkable in the past. So what we've seen, and I think what a lot of analysts see, is that the extent of the

Military cooperation between Iran has increased several fold. And Russia, by virtue of the pressure that they found themselves under, have

have been willing to kind of extend access to certain forms of technology, defense systems and things like this, which, you know, and there's a lot of talk about that, which previously Russia wouldn't have ever have thought about actually giving Iran access to. Similarly, I mean, there's a lot of talk about whether the Biden administration would launch an attack on Iran.

Iran's oil and energy infrastructure, which of course would be devastating for just ordinary Iranians. I mean, already there are obviously sometimes shortages in electricity. There's all these sorts of things which are problems which affect people's everyday lives and could obviously stir discontent. But it does seem incredibly...

I don't know, it's sort of a once in disbelief that actually an American administration before President Electron on a razor's edge would actually target Iran's energy and oil infrastructure targets.

But they've been prepared to really just completely destroy, really all just basically travel underfoot, rather, the whole kind of international rules-based order to shield the Israeli state from any kind of accountability, even targeting its own sort of favoured institutions like the ICC and things like this. It's...

So again, I don't think actually that we should just dismiss that out of hand. I do think it is a possibility. And just as we perhaps underestimated

sort of net of the 1800 government's sort of willingness to sort of to go to the most extreme lengths like assassinating Haniyeh in Tehran or assassinating Nasrallah at the cost of 300 people. And then after apparently a ceasefire had been agreed, it was on the road to agreement. Yeah, we shouldn't probably discount these scenarios. Obviously, the other one that was floated was an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

which again, I think any serious analysis to anyone worth their salt says that this is basically not feasible option. One, because Natanz, in Iran, is deep, deep, deep underground. Fardou facility is basically in a mountain area.

I don't think they could do it even with American help, but even if they had American support in this, it would be very, very unlikely. And in one of the analysis that I was reading, it would require like a 30,000 pound bomb. And actually, Israel has no way of delivering this anyway. So it would have to basically be the Americans doing it. And then the likelihood of it working is very slim. And if anything, it would only basically drive Iran, which has always insisted that the nuclear program is for purposes of energy,

But increasingly in sort of the Iranian discourse internally, there has been a sense that if they have no other option, if the Iranians are left with no other option, if they are attacked, then they will basically get ever closer to this threshold really of developing the nuclear weapon, which previously was sort of just taboo and a red line you would never hear about. So I think that similarly is signaling to the Americans and the Israelis as well.

If I could just jump in a little bit. I'd like to bring it back to the discussion about the ballistics program and these military programs of Iran and the resistance axis is back to the political economy of these things.

You ask how long will they be able to sustain it? I mean, Iran is a large country with tens of millions of people and they've invested a huge amount in this ballistic missiles program, which is a very cheap technology comparatively to what the Israelis are deploying. They're using F-35s and other American aircraft created by the U.S. military industrial complex.

Iran can actually strive towards a sort of strategic parity by using ballistic missile technology and hypersonic missiles, the Iron Dome, David Sling, all of these very high-tech AI-powered Israeli air defenses.

are extremely expensive to operate and Hezbollah for its part has been firing extremely cheap anti-tank missiles across the border which Iron Dome can do nothing about and has caused the depopulation of northern Israel.

at a very low military cost and at a low intensity whereas israel's strikes in lebanon for the whole year have been you know three four times more what has balla has achieved much of the same results with much less effort much less fiscal investment and yeah they can't compete in terms of

shooting down these aircrafts, which can basically just penetrate Lebanon at will. But when you look at Iran, it becomes a bigger war. Iran is so far away from Israel that to launch an air attack on Iran extensively, Israel alone, it just totally stretches their own technology as

and analysts have written about it, in terms of refueling capacity, to be able to fly to Iran, drop these bombs and come back, will stretch their capabilities to the limits. And like Iskandar said, those kinds of aircraft can't deliver the enormous weapons that are needed to actually cause strategic setback for the nuclear program on the one hand,

And then you even have the way that the missile systems are easily exportable. We see that Houthis in Yemen have even claimed these hypersonic missiles that have reached Israel. And

You have to wonder how useful the most expensive American aircraft carriers are if they're sitting ducks in the ocean that can be shot with some cheap missiles, comparatively cheap missiles. Of course, the political ramifications of such an attack would be, we haven't seen anything like it, but if this comes to an all-out war,

the missiles provide a level of strategic parity with the most advanced military that we haven't seen in warfare before this.

So let's turn to the situation in Lebanon then. So we've already touched on this a little bit, but Nate, could you say something just on the scale of the humanitarian crisis that people are facing in southern Lebanon and Beirut in the wake of what has been described as one of the most intense air attacks in modern history, coupled with now the Israeli invasion of the country, which has led to this extraordinary loss of life and material destruction in a very short space of time?

Over the last year of hostilities, Israel has now killed over 2,000 people. Yesterday, the Ministry of Health announced that there were 1,974 people killed, and we don't even know the results yet of the massive bombardment of heavily populated southern suburbs of Beirut. Again, last night, it was the attempted assassination of

of what many expect to be the next leader of Hezbollah, Hashim Safiuddin. We don't even have that number yet, but certainly now over 2,000 people, over almost 10,000 people have been injured over the last year. 97 paramedics and firefighters have been killed in the conflict, 188 wounded. And just in the last decade,

Three days as of yesterday, there was 40, and there's even more today. On top of that, that's just the killed and wounded, extraordinary numbers. Lebanon has a population of about 5 million people in its borders right now. So these are extremely large numbers, and most of which has happened in the span of the last two weeks. On top of that, we have 1.2 million Lebanese protesters

predominantly from the south of the country, displaced. Right before this Israeli escalation, there was about 100,000 displaced. And after the bombing campaigns and the Pajar attacks and the incredible escalation, you have now 1.2 million, the Lebanese government is announcing. This is 20% of the Lebanese population. It's incredible.

The Israelis are even targeting journalists, medics. These are war crimes against, it's against international law to be doing this. It doesn't matter if these people actually are connected or in Hezbollah affiliated divisions or they have medical care facilities, medics, they have their own information

and media teams and as international lawyers are very clear on it, only combatants actually involved in active hostilities

are legal to target. And it doesn't matter if they're on some kind of terrorist list of the US or Israel. This is just a horrific scene. And just today, I saw the Lebanese Minister of Transport and Public Works has announced that Israel appears to be trying to impose a blockade on Lebanon. So we're seeing a horrific situation that's only getting worse

And in fact, they even just this morning destroyed one of the main public hospitals in Marjahun or rendered it inoperable, forcing everyone to evacuate. And that's one of the main public hospitals in the south. So they appear to be copying and pasting the Gaza strategy in Lebanon, just as they threatened to do last year.

Lebanon was, of course, already in the midst of a severe economic and political crisis before October 7th. Could you say something on the position the country was in prior to Al-Aqsa flood and its bearing on the situation that we see now today?

Yeah, so Lebanon has been in a series of extraordinary crises since late 2019 when there was initially an uprising, a very hopeful and positive citizen-led spontaneous uprising at the end of 2019, October 2019, against this tax on WhatsApp that the government was going to introduce, which affected

the poor and the rich alike. And it's an extremely popular means of communication that actually helped people survive the extremely high cost of telecommunications there, which was a catalyst for massive mobilization.

which quickly, after a few months, petered out because of the lack of the agreements of what these protesters were actually demanding. And in the midst of that, the banks used the crisis to close down and to limit withdrawals because at the very same time of the October 2019 uprising, there was an economic crisis brewing where the value of the Lebanese economy

lira, which had been artificially pegged to the dollar since 1997 or so.

this policy just completely failed because nobody needs Lebanese lira to buy Lebanese goods because Lebanon exports hardly anything and imports almost everything. And there was basically a Ponzi scheme to artificially peg the lira to the dollar, which finally led to the bankruptcy essentially of Lebanon's central bank. And

and the total collapse of its currency. Now, the majority of Lebanese have lost much of their savings and are now under the majority of Lebanese are under the poverty line. And on top of that, you had the port explosion

in 2020 as a result of grave massive governmental neglect and this massive storage of ammonium nitrate that had been there for years just sitting as a threat to everybody that killed over 200 people, wounded many thousands. And so yes, there's been a series of extremely intense crises in Lebanon and

no government action to actually address any of these policies because many of the people in government benefit from the cartels of control that exists in Lebanon. And now we have in Lebanon extremely little government electricity providing just a couple hours a day of public electricity.

Water is undrinkable. You have to buy electricity privately from a generator. You have to buy water privately, either bottles in the shop or get them filled. Daily life in Lebanon was reduced to a daily improvisation where people are just improvising every day to just meet their basic needs. All this before October 7th, 2023 and Al-Aqsa flood.

Just going back to Israel's attacks on Hezbollah's leadership, and in particular the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, just how severe a blow is this to the group, in your opinion? And do you see this as a really sort of existential moment for Hezbollah? Or would that be to misunderstand the social depth of the party and the degree of support in Lebanon, especially amongst the Shia populations?

Well, I think it's an extraordinarily important moment. Hassan Nasrallah has a reputation amongst his supporters and his adversaries alike as being a larger-than-life, charismatic folk hero that lived and now died by his beliefs and actions.

He's been the secretary general of Hezbollah for 32 or so years. That's actually half of his life. And he had evaded assassination throughout all of this, including the incredible aggression against LeBron in 2006.

So I think that it was undoubtedly a major shock to as well as constituency and its adversaries alike that in the worst case scenario, people were worried about the extraordinary type of

Israeli invasion of Lebanon and attacks and a full-scale war, people were talking about that and the consequences for the last year. But within all that, hardly anybody expected that Hassan Nasrallah would be assassinated, that he would survive and lead the party through such a war. Now,

That was a crushing blow on the one hand, and the very popularity and support that Hezbollah and its policies are so much stamped with his personality, which is one of intelligence restraint. He was very, of course, austere on the one hand. He lived under a bunker for the last decade.

as far as we know has been living underground or mostly underground since 2006 rarely making any public appearances so he's sacrificed

His life, his son was sacrificed in the struggle. His son was a martyr fighting against Israel in the late 1990s. So he's seen as a clean, uncorruptible figure that delivered on his promises. He delivered the liberation of southern Lebanon. He defended it in 2006. So, I mean, he was a larger than life figure for many people.

whether you liked it or not. And he came from the most humble segment of Lebanese society. He grew up in the slums of Maslach and Karantina, slums that were ethnically cleansed by right-wing Christian supremacist militias in the Lebanese Civil War in 1976. So he lived this displacement. He lived the brutality of both Israel and its Lebanese allies in the Lebanese Civil War.

It's a big loss. Now, however, he's been leading this organization for 32 years.

He's delivered endless amounts of speeches. He set policy for 30 years. There's a path that he has set the party on and it's a major institution. It's grown immensely since even 2006, as we can see here in sustaining of the war effort. And that was ultimately confirmed, has been so far confirmed in the last week

when Israel launched actually its ground invasion after the Iranian Troupamas II on Tuesday night, the next sort of mornings. And every day since then, Israelis have been attempting to infiltrate Lebanon with their top commando units in preparation for a larger invasion. And then every single point, they have been...

pushed back. Hizballah claims to have killed 17 Israeli soldiers yesterday. Israel confirmed the previous day that they killed eight, and we're talking about tens more wounded on top of that, 80 or more wounded. We've seen this footage of the wounded soldiers being evacuated. The command and control structure on the ground in South Lebanon appears to be operating at an extraordinary level of competence.

Hezbollah, of course, is not uniformly popular within Lebanon. You mentioned the 2019 protest movement and the massive explosion in Beirut's port. The group was accused of crushing the protest movement and of preventing an investigation into the explosion.

Do you think Israel's assault on Hezbollah and the invasion will embolden Hezbollah's opponents or will it have the opposite effect and rally support to the party, even amongst those who do not share their politics and religious outlook, but who, like Hezbollah, are fiercely opposed to Israel's incredibly violent intervention in the country?

Yeah, that is correct. Hizballah is a very, in its arms and its purposes, is a hotly contested issue in Lebanese politics. But how that will play out really depends on the events on the ground. Primarily, Israel's own actions, which so far, and we can expect to see the following.

When Hezbollah is doing poorly in the field, such as when it took all these succession of blows leading to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, its opponents were ready to jump at the jugular. And as the tide turned in the last week, the Iranian attack, the performance of Hezbollah on the ground in the south, you have seen

those feelings subside and more solidarity now than ever before in any Israeli invasion at the beginning. We're seeing that in Lebanese society right now.

Because there's a different context than it had been the case in Lebanon. The civil war to a large extent was about whether or not Lebanese would be committed to a policy of resisting Israel and supporting Palestine or aligning with Israel with the US. The sort of big picture has been the real division of Lebanese politics over the last century.

pitting anti-colonial and phylo-colonial forces. Now, yes, Hezbollah lost popularity, not amongst its own considerable constituents in Lebanon, but amongst people who were either wavering, that supported them greatly after 2006,

There is a retreat in support from people outside of the Shia population because of intervention in Syria and the response to the 2019 protests for sure.

But now, Lebanese have sat and watched the extraordinary genocide unfold in Gaza for the last year. Hezbollah was quite clear in announcing that it was not seeking to fight a total war and that it maintained quite a cautious policy of doing nothing that would be too provocative. So there's a balancing act that's going on. And you can expect it to be a volatile situation.

At the moment, though, every act of obscene Israeli brutality, these crazy bombings of the southern suburbs, densely populated areas, is felt physically in the bones of people all across Beirut. And they know that it's terror.

So Israel is doing actually the best job it could at rehabilitating the group's image amongst its detractors. But what happens will depend on the fate of the conflict, really. And it's hard to imagine how Israel could fully deliver a complete and total, convincingly clear defeat on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Yeah, I just think it's okay if I just add something there. I mean, Hezbollah from the start said that it would actually stop its attacks on the north, which are really sort of trying to preoccupy, obviously, at least part of the Israeli army. They said they would cease doing that the second there was a ceasefire in Gaza, right? So they've clearly offered a political way in order to bring this...

to a close. But the fact of the matter is that we have seen sort of unceasing

destruction and death unleashed on the civilian population in Gaza and then now as Nate outlined in Lebanon and basically recycling that very same kind of strategy. And I think Israeli analysts have similarly commented on this insofar as the complete destruction of Hamas, the complete destruction of Hezbollah is not a strategy

It's not a feasible strategy. It's not one that can ever be actually realized or won. Within a very short time, even Nasrallah, the sort of unparalleled, charismatic, strategic visionary of Hezbollah being assassinated,

they were able to completely hold the line and actually prevent Israel from actually entering Lebanese territory. And at the moment, they sort of did step foot in at a huge, huge cost and many, many casualties, which I don't think Israeli society is willing to bear. So it just shows actually how resilient the organization is, how it does transcend even its most charismatic leadership,

Again, this is sort of just not to understate the significance of these figures. I mean, similarly in Iran, when the Prophet Sulaiman was assassinated in 2020, of course he was quickly replaced. But then the question, you know, then immediately, you know, it's very evident that the person he replaced him is not obviously, it doesn't have that...

charismatic or strategic sort of acumen equivalent to his predecessor. And I'm sure, you know, Hezbollah will take time to regroup, to rethink, to actually return to full strength. But I mean, as sort of the lesson of 2006 shows, I mean, Hezbollah was able to kind of regroup and actually increase its strength several fold, actually.

And I think the lesson of kind of the origins of Hezbollah sort of does, you know, speaks to this too. I mean, again, we shouldn't forget that the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1922 to vanquish, you know, the PLO. And that gave rise to the emergence of Hezbollah, the 2006 assault. Similarly, as I'm sure we might recall, I mean, the Bush administration basically gave the go-ahead

to say, use this opportunity now to destroy or break the back of Hezbollah. And it was a complete failure. And I think we can be fairly confident that we'll see something similar in this instance too. And the same for Hamas, like the assassination of Ismail Hani, who was again, who was seen as relatively, you know, relatively pragmatic in the

As a result of that, the leadership was then devolved to Yahya Senwar, who is seen as the chief architect with Mohammed Deyf of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Just this whole idea that you can just... It's a very colonial, obviously, idea as well, that in a sense you take out the heads and just through, basically through sheer brutalization and murdering all of the leadership, that you think that the population or the popular forces which back these movements

will basically renounce them. And that's, you know, I think that's a profound misunderstanding of the historical and social context out of which these movements arise. And again, I mean, we see this again, just the whole sort of Israeli understanding of this. So people like Nathalie Bennett, the former prime minister, sort of coming out and say this is a great opportunity to sort of to remake the Middle East that it used to be.

sort of an all-out attack on Iran and this is going to remake the region and Iran is this sort of evil octopus with its tentacles throughout again it's a fundamental kind of misunderstanding in how sort of the power circulates in this network and different nodes of resistance you

Whether you like their cultural and social politics or not, I think there's just no doubt that these movements emerge out of popular movements, out of mass mobilizations, out of the social fabric of their various societies, which doesn't mean, of course, that they're not profoundly contested and detested by some quarters of the population.

But the fact of the matter is that they do have immense resilience and popular support. And that's why they've managed to, in a sense, outlast, you know, untold violence being visited upon them. I mean, one can also just look at the Houthis as well. Similarly, he faced, you know, an outright American-backed Saudi man-made famine against

against the population. And they've managed to obviously survive and hold on to power there. So the whole model, the lens by which the Israelis and I guess the Americans up to an extent understand this is fundamentally flawed. It's a fundamentally colonial one. And it won't work. I mean, it's just even if you want to talk in terms of effectiveness, it's a fundamental just misunderstanding, misconstrual of the situation. And that's the issue.

On that, on the lack of a really sort of viable long-term strategy on the part of the Israelis, I mean, you know, I wonder if there was a more pessimistic reading, which is that Israel has fully accepted that it has no interest in a political settlement. It accepts that it is a garrison state. It's an apartheid state. And

Because one often sees people making comments to the effect that, oh, don't the Israelis understand that they're just setting themselves up for wars and counterinsurgency endlessly? And given the nature of the sort of internal ideology in Israel, is that a problem?

And when it comes to Iran, I mean, I wonder if the calculus is, well, Iran is, you know, the only sort of major economy that is an adversary at this point. And if Iran could be brought closer to the situation of something like Syria or Iraq, where sure, there would be militias and armed forces based there that would be contending with Israel. But it

that it would no longer be a major sort of functioning economy. Maybe the Israelis see that as a reasonable outcome and they are prepared to just accept this situation for decades to come on the basis that they will continue to have an outside sponsor. Yeah, I don't know what you both think about that.

I think actually that is very well put. And it is, I think, what they are pushing for ultimately. I think, yeah, like you said, they would to some extent be content with trying to heighten the contradictions and civil discontent in Iran and sort of keep it, I guess, preoccupied with its own internal struggles to then sap its ability and willingness to then support Iran

various different forces outside which are directly obviously engaging with the Israeli military. I think that's absolutely what they are pushing for because obviously I think the whole remaking of the Middle East narrative, I think that's something they put out there and it's constantly been recycled by Netanyahu probably first and foremost and obviously various kind of neoconservative ideologues since the 1990s, right? And we've seen it kind of repackaged but I do think actually underneath that

maybe the more steely and sort of more cynical amongst them would absolutely be content with that kind of situation. But I mean, whether that will work as well is, you know, at the moment, the Iranian state, for all its shortcomings, it is powerful. It doesn't, you know, it's extremely resilient. And there's very, very little chance, I think, of that actually happening. I mean,

One of the things that isn't in doubt with respect to the rainy season is its capacity to actually repress internal challenges and control its kind of sovereign touch. So I don't think that's really, at least at the moment, despite obviously economic discontent, political discontent. Yeah, I don't think that is on the cards. But yeah, I do think that is a scenario which they might ever increase, like you said, in the sense they've reconciled themselves that they are going to be this pariah garrison state.

And they're just going to focus their wrath on trying to bring these contradictions into Iran. But like I said, for the moment, I don't think whether I think there's any close to remotely close to that. And I mean, I mean, even speaking to people in Iran, to be honest, again, mixed opinions, very much like Lebanon, you know, you've got people who absolutely find, detest the regime, you've got people who are profoundly sympathetic, you've got people who are nationalists, and I think will, you know, who will support the

the state in defense from foreign threats. So that is contested. But I mean, speaking to people just this morning, the air was that actually people were getting on with their lives. People that you wouldn't necessarily expect were actually quite supportive of Iran's show of strength.

Of course, you know, we have seen civil unrest in Iran and we have seen like the repression of in the Women, Life, Freedom sort of mobilization. We've seen in various kind of on the border regions in Iran. We've seen in response to the removal of subsidies on fuel and things like that, which were met with a lot of violence. But I think the Islamic Republic has shown itself able and willing to actually to contain those. So, yeah.

So, yeah, I don't think that's at the moment, that's really a viable option. However much, you know, these kind of, I would say quite delusional figures in both the US administrations and Israel. I honestly think that they believe too much of sort of the nonsense that circulates and disinformation that circulates on Twitter. I think they absolutely are uncritical in the information they receive from various sources.

informants and, you know, various people who are willing to collaborate with the Israeli regime and sort of tell them it's been this narrative that, you know, very much like we had before the Iraq war that, you know, people will probably give flowers and sweets to sort of invading soldiers, which turned out to be obviously complete and utter nonsense. So I think they believe their own propaganda. And that's actually not a smart thing, because it means that you underestimate your own adversary. And I think that would be a huge mistake on their part.

Yeah, and I think you've spelled out a scenario, yes, that's quite likely. That seems to be, that is the position of this Israeli government to have total control of Palestine, total apartheid, no problem, genocide, no problem, kick out as many Palestinians as we can to have total sovereignty over the land from the river to the sea and to reimpose

wars on enemy territory. That has been the Israeli military doctrine since the founding of the states and has been the case that wars would be fought in Lebanon, would be fought in Syria, in Egypt, and Jordan, which then they took over the West Bank, they took over the Golan Heights, the Sinai, and they took over Lebanon, got kicked out by the resistance.

That's the way that they've usually experienced war on somebody else's territory. And that changed with October 7th and the expulsion of Israelis from the north imposed by Hezbollah was the first time any sort of Israeli security belt has

has been imposed on Israeli territory and that was a matter that they were not going to live with. As we see, they made that an official war aim from their perspective to return those settlers to the north. Now to think about what that actually means is really quite crazy. There's first of all an extraordinarily obvious way to achieve that which Iskandar mentioned.

and that is to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza. Hezbollah from day one, Hamas from day one said we're ready to make a deal to make a ceasefire and of course those terms were unacceptable to Israel and they've instead prosecuted a genocide in Gaza and now they're bringing it into Lebanon possibly further into Iran. So as long as that mind numbingly obvious off-ramp exists

Iran and Hezbollah, the resistance axis, have credible reason to look like the reasonable, rational actors here, despite all of the Western propaganda to the contrary.

And yes, the United States is backing Israel's adventures in Lebanon right now. And then apparently in Iran too. Israel has got them in a strategic corner in this election period. They know that neither the Democrats or the Republicans can be seen at this time as restraining

the great benevolent state of Israel that represents the pinnacle of Western civilization and the construction of Israel in the American and Western mind, this representation of it. No one can be seen as abandoning Israel because they see this

racist endeavor of Israeli settler colonialism as anti-racism. And they understand that their own goodness and benevolence has been tied up in the existence of Israel. So this is another bigger cultural, hegemonic cultural perception that's preventing people from, preventing Western governments from imposing limits on Israel. But in the events of a serious war with Iran,

when that's a major oil producing country and when those supplies are made scarce, the price of oil is going to go up. In the biggest bombastic rhetoric of the Iranian regime, they say if you bring us the war to our home front, then we will launch our missiles and destroy the oil installations of American allies in the Gulf.

Will this actually happen? Is that bombastic rhetoric? Maybe, maybe not. But do we want to find out? Does the United States want to find out? Do American and British and European people want to pay more money at the gas pump for protection years? Because there's no end in sight here. Israel has gone into Lebanon many times before with the goal of fighting and destroying completely.

any resistance that exists, whether it's Arab nationalists, Marxists and communists and socialists that were leading the resistance in the Fidei years, in the PLO, the years of Lebanese civil war. They invaded in '82.

They threw out the PLO. They got Hezbollah eventually, but even within about a year of 1982, they installed their Lebanese ally, Bashir Jameel, as president of the country. He got assassinated shortly afterwards. They forced Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty onto Lebanon, which was canceled with

within a year because it was so politically explosive and so opposed by the, at that point, quite disorganized Lebanese opposition. They couldn't even hold it in the 1980s when you had actually extremely strong militarized pro-Israeli militias in Lebanon and political parties. The Falange and the South Lebanese army, Israeli proxy forces in the south,

They couldn't impose their project in Lebanon. In fact, got kicked out many years later and you got the expanded power of resistance. That whole scenario will just repeat, except if they really want to go in and try to completely uproot Lebanon.

Hezbollah, it will not happen. It hasn't happened in Gaza with the extraordinary destruction of a besieged territory where they control every entry and exit, where they've killed a huge number of the population, hasn't given up or collapsed. If they impose such a war on Lebanon, it'll be years-long conflict. We'll be talking about

Vietnam at length of a struggle. Afghanistan and Iraq, we're talking about decades of occupation that they cannot sustain. And neither will the United States want to eventually. As belligerent as the United States can be, at some point they lose the appetite of wanting to support these unmanaged,

unsupportable, unsustainable colonial ventures. And right now in the United States, you have less of an appetite amongst American society to want to sustain such a war. It's not 2003. It's 2024. The hurricanes have destroyed a swath of the United States. The American social welfare system has collapsed. It's unable to handle those things. People are not thinking about

Sending a multi-year occupation of thousands of Americans or financing Israeli actions forever, especially when the new threat is China and Russia. China can just sit back and watch the U.S. implode in this case.

Just regarding the US position and the position of the Biden administration. So at an earlier stage, officially the line was that the administration was opposed to any escalation in Lebanon. Then that shifted. It seemed to be that airstrikes were okay, but a ground offensive was not. Now they're apparently prepared to accept this, you know, sort of quote unquote limited ground offensive, which isn't limited at all. And we can imagine they will accept a much broader offensive that we're seeing.

Do you think that the Americans were always being disingenuous and that they preferred not to be so open about their support for Israeli aggression, given how extremely unpopular Israel is around the world and even amongst American allies and increasingly within America itself? Or do you think that there's been a shift over time and that they initially opposed escalation and regionalization of the conflict?

But once Israel decapitated the Hezbollah leadership, they opportunistically came to this view that in conjunction with Israel, they now do have this opportunity to strike very definitive blows to their major opponents in the region. And to touch on your final comments there, Nate, this of course is all occurring at a time of heightened anxiety about China's global rise and the possibility of the PRC at some point expanding its role in the region.

Yeah, I think it's the latter case. I think that from the reports that we have, and we won't know the history of this for 100% for sure until we have these documents about American decision making. But from everything that we can see, actions and words of the United States over the last year, it

It does seem to be that they initially opposed an action in Lebanon. Yoav Golan is said to have wanted to strike Lebanon first, even before they went to Gaza, because Hezbollah is the serious strategic threat rather than Hamas. Americans reportedly told them, "No, no, we can only go on what reports we know." But it makes sense.

that Israel had the, with all the genocidal propaganda and manufacturing consent for that,

for the assault on Gaza that happened. It was consent that was manufactured for Gaza. That's where Hamas came out of and that's where they took the hostages. That's where it made sense to strike to have global public opinion be behind them or the opinion of the Western states that actually matter to be more accurate behind them. I think it was absolutely the case that they, you know, Americans

Like Iskandar said, they're buying into their own propaganda. Americans have a very short memory when it comes to most foreign policy issues in history. But the actual American state, the State Department, the CIA, has a very long memory only when it wants to remember its own defeats and its own setbacks. And they still...

hold Hezbollah responsible for the 1983 barracks bombing that killed over 200 American Marines. And they're never going to forget that. And in the statements by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, both they were just like, this is justice.

Israel has brought justice to the world by assassinating this terrorist leader. They didn't say anything about the hundreds of civilians killed. Just all Arab lives do not matter. So that sense of momentum has built and they're kind of boxed in because of the election too, if they're seen as...

now restraining an Israel that's on the offensive, that's capable, that's striking, cutting the head off the terrorist leaders, then they'll be assaulted by the hawks in both the Democratic parties and the Republican parties. And the Israel lobby as well will go into an extraordinary mobilization against anybody. So they're kind of strategically back there. So that's where I think it stands.

Yeah, just to come in on that. I mean, it seems to me that it wasn't obviously because of moral considerations that they might have restrained, obviously, the idea of going into Lebanon or undertaking attacks against Iran or Iraq and so on. It seems that actually, and I think that this past year has shown that

The IDF has always invested, and the same with the Mossad, of presenting themselves as this impervious, untouchable super force which has no peer, no rival whatsoever in the region. And I actually think the reason why the Americans didn't want immediate regionalization is exactly because they're actually probably far better apprised of the IDF's actual capabilities

So as you've seen, they've only been able to really dismantle a fraction of even Hamas's actually military infrastructure in Gaza, let alone sort of Hezbollah. Similarly, in April, in the April following sort of Operation True Promise, it does seem that the Americans did destroy

to some extent, try to actually contain sort of Netanyahu, at least sort of say, you know, as Biden said, take the win. But that comes from actually quite serious doubts about Israel's ability to actually mount a multi-pronged, multi-front kind of attack. And we saw this in True Promise 1 as well, the fact that it was an international coalition that was defending Netanyahu

Israel in that instance. So, you know, everywhere from Jordan to Britain, to France, to the United States, of course, first and foremost, all had to, in a sense, participate in order to defend Israel's ability to carry out an ongoing genocide in Gaza. So it does appear just to, you know, as Nate was saying, that following the assassination of Nasrallah, the

They do think that maybe there is a window to...

potentially escalate further. And as they always tend to frame it, Iran is this exemplary kind of rogue state, quote unquote, and it must be disciplined and be brought back into line. But I think actually, as well as ability to kind of regroup so quickly actually has shown, they might have to actually restrain their ambitions in this respect.

And I think, yeah, we're going to have to wait and see actually what is the nature of the US-Israeli response to Iran. Because I do think that after a year of waging a war, I mean, again, we were sort of saying that you can't compare Iran to Russia, but you can't compare Israel to Russia either insofar as

Of course, it has this sort of almost unqualified backing and it gets repeated, huge amounts of military and so on from the United States. I mean, I think that's obviously a given. But it doesn't have a huge, massive military industrial complex on a path from Russia to kind of obviously to kind of mount an ongoing year-on-year campaign of aggression of this nature. It just doesn't have that capacity. And I think...

Well, as Nate was sort of saying, I do think after an extended period of time, we will see, I mean, we've already seen sort of public opinion, quite remarkable shifts of public opinion in the United States amongst even democratic voters and so on, not only because of the horrors that they're witnessing,

but also for these other reasons that I mean, why does the United States have this anomalous, like really exceptional relationship with the Israeli state? And I think it's getting harder and harder and harder for them to actually to justify that situation.

But yeah, just to reiterate my main point, I do think there are real doubts about actually Israel's capabilities. And I think that's what actually led to them trying to exercise restraint. Because otherwise, the reality of it is that they haven't been willing to. And this is the reason why we are where we are at crucial moments. And Netanyahu very much has been banking on that because he...

I mean, again, we don't know what goes on in his mind, but it does seem that he's first and foremost concerned with one, appealing to his own constituency, holding his own extreme far-right coalition together. And as we saw, when he basically ramped up the aggression against Lebanon, his approval ratings actually went up.

So I think, and obviously he's got, as many have said, he's got sort of these four corruption cases against him. And he knows that the minute he's sort of out of power, he might be held accountable by all sorts of international bodies as well as internally within Israel. So he has an incentive to obviously to up the ante, to continue to, even if the Biden administration was willing to exercise, which I don't think it is. If anything, actually, I think President Biden is basically incapacitated.

And really, we're dealing with people like Secretary Blinken, Sullivan, who are really extremely amateur.

extremely just incompetent. And really, they're sort of moving again from one crisis to another, and they've got no really idea of how to actually bring it to an end. So I mean, I wouldn't also bet against Netanyahu doing something quite extreme to then continue to up the ante and really also impose fair, complete on the environment, which then they in turn will just simply go along with ultimately, you know, they might express some concerns, but ultimately, they will go along with it.

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