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Showing posts with the label hizbullah

After Nasrallah

A good piece by Adam Shatz. “Hizbullah will slowly rebuild, and Nasrallah and his cadres will be replaced by a new and no less embittered generation of leaders who will remember the furies unleashed by Israel in Lebanon: the killings, maimings and displacement caused by one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in the 21 st  century. Nasrallah’s death is as humiliating a setback for his movement as Nasser’s defeat in 1967 was for the Arab cause. But nothing feeds resistance like humiliation .”

Lebanon: Who Wants War With Israel?

Charbel Nahas Former minister and founder of the Citizens in a State movement says:   There’s no longer a state , so asking the army to replace Hizbullah on the southern border makes no sense. For that, we’d need a census, conscription, weapons.’ He believes what’s required is to put Hizbullah’s military and social achievements under the control of a ‘strong, secular’ regime. But, he warns, the precise aim of the ‘Zionist project’ is to ‘delegitimise states in the region. For Israel, having Arab states and societies fragmented is ideal.’

Middle East: ‘Saudis and Emiratis Now Call the Shots’

"Beyond the grandiose tirades and pontificating final statements, each ‘urgent’ meeting ratifies only the league’s inaction. It is too tempting to picture this assembly (excellencies, corpulencies, marshal-presidents, rebels-turned-honourables, men elected in dubious landslides or by the slimmest of margins) at its large round table, conversing with furrowed brows before condemning Israel’s depiction of the war as ‘self-defence’ and demanding, of course, that the country ‘immediately abolish these brutal and inhumane measures’ (11 November 2023). And what else? Threats of a military response? Calls for international sanctions on Israel like those Russia faced after invading Ukraine? A motion supporting South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to stop Israel’s ethnic cleansing or even genocide in Gaza? A radical re-examination of the normalisation process and – why not? – severing of diplomatic ties? Cutting Gulf sovereign wealth fund investment in the US...