Hassan Nasrallah’s death was announced on Saturday, 28 September, the anniversary of the death of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the father of pan-Arabism. Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, three years after his humiliating defeat in the Six Day war, the Naksah or setback that led to Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and Sinai. Nasrallah was killed under a fusillade of eighty bombs dropped by the Israeli air force on his headquarters in Haret Hreik, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. A few hours earlier, Binyamin Netanyahu had addressed the UN General Assembly, denouncing the organisation as a cesspool of antisemitism and vowing to press on with his war in Lebanon. ‘He wasn’t just another terrorist. He was the terrorist,’ Netanyahu said, after it was announced that Nasrallah was dead.

For US president Joe Biden, the killing of Nasrallah provided a ‘measure of justice’ for Hizbullah’s victims, from the 1983 bombings of the US embassy and the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut to the present. Vice-president Kamala Harris called Nasrallah a ‘terrorist with American blood on his hands’, as though Netanyahu and his cabinet colleagues had kept their hands clean during the killing of tens of thousands of people in Gaza and the violent displacement of more than 90% of its population – to say nothing of the wave of settler attacks and demolitions in the West Bank, or the bombardment of southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and Beirut after the grisly pager and walkie-talkie attacks two weeks ago. But ‘Arab blood’ does not have the same value as American or Israeli in the moral calculus of the West.

Among his supporters in Lebanon, and for many outside the West, Nasrallah will be remembered differently: not as a ‘terrorist’, but as a political leader and a symbol of defiance to American and Israeli ambitions in the Middle East. Although Hizbullah remained a military organisation notorious for (...)

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Adam Shatz

Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books and author of The Rebel’s Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2024. A longer version of this article is published in the London Review of Books, vol 46, no 20, 25 October 2024.