What after Israel's killing of Nasrallah?

The risks of a widening war with no limits, plus this week's MENA Academy

It’s been an exhausting few weeks, apologies for the light posting. Three weeks ago, I was in Philadelphia for the American Political Science Association’s Annual Conference, where I hosted a wonderful reception jointly with POMEPS and the APSA Section on MENA Politics. Two weeks ago, I hosted a fantastic academic workshop and public panel discussion at Ohio State's Mershon Center on the US and the Middle East after Gaza with a dozen top scholars of Middle East international relations and US foreign policy; those papers are currently being revised and should be ready for publication in November. Last week, I flew to Doha for an extraordinary conference organized by Georgetown Qatar on “Palestine Reimagined”, where an exceptional group of mostly Palestinian and Arab scholars grappled with the implications of the last year and the future of Palestine; my role was to talk about US foreign policy and the role of regional states. I apologize for not yet getting the Middle East Political Science Podcast up and running — it’s been a hectic month, but we will be launching soon.

I will be writing about the excellent discussions at the Ohio State and Georgetown Qatar workshops soon. But right now, it’s hard to not be focused on Israel’s massive bombing campaign in Lebanon and decapitation strike against Hezbollah. Generally, the academic literature and policy experience shows that decapitation strikes are not very effective against entrenched insurgencies and institutionalized militias. But what Israel has done to Hezbollah over the last days — at great cost to Lebanese civilians — has gone far beyond the typical assassination. Reports suggest that Israel eliminated not only Nasrallah but also a wide swathe of Hezbollah’s senior and middle leadership, in the wake of the pager attack which wreaked havoc among the lower echelons (to say nothing of the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, and the steady killing of IRGC commanders around the region). There is no question that this full spectrum devastation of Hezbollah’s organization without immediately taking massive retaliation has forced a significant revision in most people’s reading of the balance of power in the Middle East. That it did so through the bloody bombardment of heavily populated civilian areas should surprise nobody who has watched the last year in Gaza — or the last few decades of Israeli tactics in Lebanon — and will fill everyone with fear for what is to come for Lebanon. And as hated as Hezbollah was in some quarters of the Arab world (especially Syrians), the idea circulating among some Israeli leaders and sympathetic pundits that Arabs or Iranians who have spent the last year watching Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza will cheer for Israel or rally to its side is just delusional.

It’s hard to not be astonished by Israel’s tactical successes against Hezbollah. But I suspect that the current euphoria among Israeli circles about its successful offensive and the inability of Hezbollah or Iran to respond will soon appear shortsighted. We haven’t even begun to see how, where and whether the response will come — and it would be foolhardy to assume that it will follow the same predictable course as previous rounds of escalation and de-escalation. I’ve been warning for a while now that September and October of this year were the most dangerous for regional escalation, since Israel knows Biden will do nothing to restrain it in advance of the Presidential election, and has an incentive to do as much damage to its adversaries as possible before it might be reined in by a Harris transition…. and, if things go horribly wrong leading to full scale war and economic catastrophe it might still benefit Netanyahu short term by helping elect Trump.

The costs and risks of what follows the Israeli offensive have yet to be registered — not only in terms of possible retaliation, not only the too easily forgotten civilian deaths and destruction, but also the erasure of all targeting red lines, and the uncertainties generated by the shifting incentives for organizational and political survival by the new Hezbollah leadership. A lot of the shadow war between Israel, Iran and Hezbollah over the last several decades has involved signaling through carefully targeted strikes which communicate clear messages about escalation or de-escalation (bombing empty fields or unmanned rocket launchers vs aiming at populated city centers). We are entering an era of no limits, with new leaders whose patterns and beliefs aren’t well understood and could face unclear cross-pressures about whether and how to respond. Hezbollah retains an enormous arsenal and well-armed and trained fighters, and a history of tactical innovation which suggests that this is far from over. Dangerous times. Keep an eye out for a longer form article on this soon.

For now, I thought it might be useful to highlight a few academic books for those who might be interested in catching up on Hezbollah and Lebanon. I would actually start with a book which is not about Hezbollah, per se, but instead is about the enduring transformative violence done by Israel to south Lebanon over the course of decades of intermittent occupation, bombardment and war: Munira Khayyat’s extraordinary A Landscape of War (which I reviewed a year ago on the blog here). Khayyat shifts the gaze from high politics to the concrete, physical ways in which aerial warfare and endless war affect the lives, ecologies, economies, and social relations of the people of south Lebanon. The abstractions of decapitated insurgencies and deterrent strikes fade into the background as one contemplates the realities of civilian lives shattered by mass violence. I would like to see more analysis of the Israeli-Hezbollah war which center the experience of Lebanese civilians caught in the strategic crossfires, the memories of horrific civil war, and the realities of ongoing state failure.

There’s plenty of journalistic, terrorism studies, and polemical work published on Hezbollah that are easy to find, but I’d like to point out a few books which offer some insight into the organization and its place within Lebanese society which go beyond the focus on terrorism. Joseph Daher’s Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God (Pluto Press, 2016) is a deeply researched dive into the organization’s role in the reconstruction of south Lebanon and Beirut which shows how much deeper it goes into Lebanese society than the term “militia” conveys. Aurelie Daher’s Hezbollah: Mobilization and Power (Oxford University Press 2019) examines the organization as a social movement, focusing on its legitimation and sociological foundations. Ora Szekely’s The Politics of Militant Group Survival in the Middle East (Palgrave 2017) compares Hezbollah with Hamas and other non-state actors in the region, shedding light on the foundations of its organizational resilience and place within Lebanese society. Samer Abboud and Benjamin Muller’s Rethinking Hizballah (Routledge 2016) similarly brings into focus the organization’s sources of legitimacy, weaving together its violent and non-violent strategies to explain its place within Lebanese society. Sarah Parkinson’s Beyond the Lines focuses on Palestinian organizations during the Lebanese civil war, not on Hezbollah, but it’s well worth the read — and a free, open-access Kindle download to boot. And while I’ve never loved the title, Thanassis Cambanis’s A Privilege to Die is a really well written and deeply reported examination of the lower echelons of Hezbollah’s membership.

And now for a few new articles from the MENA Academy. We feature two of the articles from our recent special issue on Islamists in Warscapes: Morten Valbjørn, Jeroen Gunning and Raphaël Lefèvre’s comparative analysis of Shi’a and Sunni armed Islamist groups, and Isak Svensson, Desirée Nilsson, and Tim Gåsste’s empirical exploration of the reasons for the long duration of wars involving armed Islamist groups. We also spotlight a fascinating review essay by activist-scholar Hossam el-Hamalawy on several books about the Egyptian revolution (he’s on Substack here if you’d like to follow his regular incisive commentary). We also have an essay by Beverly Milton-Edwards on the global protest wave over Gaza, a critical re-reading of the 2005 Cedar Revolution mobilization by Toni Rouhana, and Karim el-Taki’s analysis of the symbolic politics of the 2017 Qatar crisis. Enjoy!

Morten Valbjørn, Jeroen Gunning and Raphaël Lefèvre, “When Transnationalism is not Global: Dynamics of Armed Transnational Shi‘a Islamist Groups,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (September 2024, part Special Issue Islamists in Warscapes). ABSTRACT: Studies of armed Islamism have had a strong interest in “transnational jihadism”, “global jihad”, al-Qaeda and—more recently—Islamic State. In discussions, these three features—transnationalism, global jihad, and al-Qaeda/Islamic State—are highly entangled. This article challenges the (implicit) assumption that armed transnational Islamism is necessarily global, Sunni and mainly concerns al-Qaeda or Islamic State. First, it shows how scholarship on armed transnational Islamism, although sophisticated and multifaceted, is narrow in the sense of typically conflating “transnational” with “global” and ignoring armed transnational Shi‘a Islamists operating regionally. Second, the article demonstrates how bringing the “other Islamists” (back) in changes the broader debate about armed transnational Islamism in three important ways. It fundamentally changes the narrative of the origins, evolutions and spread of armed transnational Islamism, and which key warscapes and events shaped it (when and where). It adds important, hitherto largely overlooked causal mechanisms (how and why). And it introduces a number of conceptual innovations and nuances, which challenge existing typologies (what). Drawing on the warscapes literature, the article shows the importance of going beyond methodological nationalism to trace transnational flows and networks, extending the focus temporally to before and after conflicts formally end, and considering how different warscapes spill over into each other. It contributes to the warscapes literature by emphasizing the importance of regional “-scapes” and transnational organizations in shaping warscapes.

Isak Svensson, Desirée Nilsson, and Tim Gåsste, “No End in Sight? Trajectories of War Terminations in Islamist Armed Conflicts,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (September 2024, part of Special Issue on Islamists in Warscapes). ABSTRACT: We know that Islamist armed conflicts tend to become intractable. Yet, we have very limited knowledge about the various ways in which such conflicts are brought to a halt. In this article, we address this research gap. By combining insights from the warscapes literature with research on conflict terminations, we provide a more nuanced picture of how Islamist conflicts terminate, and the trajectories that they follow. Our findings – based on a global analysis of terminations in Islamist armed conflicts, 1989–2019 – demonstrate that these conflicts rarely terminate entirely but rather change and take different forms, or are followed by violence involving other armed actors, either continued or renewed cycles of violence.

Toni Rouhana, “A Critical Juncture Lived Otherwise? The Case of the ‘Cedar Revolution',” Ethnopolitics (September 2024). ABSTRACT: The article presents a unique case of coalition formation and mobilisation across sectarian differences between February 14 and March 14, 2005, after the assassination of PM Rafik Hariri in Lebanon. I show that sectarianism as an analytical tool is of little use in explaining sect-based manifestations. I propose sect habitus as an alternative: where the concept of sectarianism has mainly led to investigations of its roots, the notion of sect habitus leads to study how sect identities manifest and are reproduced in daily life. Using ethnography and discourse analysis, I analyse changes in the sect habitus at the popular level.

Beverley Milton-Edwards, “Protest Wave Palestine: “We are All Palestinians”,” Protest (September 2024). ABSTRACT: The attack of October 7 2023 by Hamas and other Palestinian Armed Groups (pag) on Israel and the retaliatory war on Palestinians since then have led to a massive wave of protest across the world. These protests have been variously received by governments and local authorities, particularly in Europe and North America, and by Israel’s allies as threats – even to national security – in and of themselves. These governments, authorities, along with the mainstream media largely fail to see the protests as part of a massive global siren call for ceasefire, or for ending acts which may constitute war crimes, including genocide and starvation. What I wish to address in this essay are the ways in which these protests have proven dynamic, unprecedented in size and sheer geographic spread, and as a vast repertoire of action. In this essay I also argue that, before we even speak of the import of this moment of global solidarity we need to acknowledge that, in so many ways, it is mimetic of a long history of Palestinian protest all-too frequently overlooked or deliberately ignored. For this reason part of this essay seeks to re-centre such protest.

Hossam El-Hamalawy, “Revolution and Counterrevolution in Egypt,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (September 2024). ABSTRACT: Why did the Egyptian revolution happen? How did it happen? Was it planned? What did it achieve? Was it defeated? These are some of the questions that usually surface in January each year, and during grim anniversaries of the infamous massacres that Egyptians witnessed after the 2013 military coup against Egypt's first elected president. [Review essay]

Karim el Taki, “Sanctions and Stigma: Regional and Global Ordering in the Gulf Crisis,” Middle East Critique (September 2024). ABSTRACT: The Gulf Crisis (2017-21) witnessed Qatar facing sanctions by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain, self-proclaimed as the ‘Anti-Terror Quartet.’ Accusing Qatar of sponsoring Islamist terrorism, the Quartet broke diplomatic relations with Doha and imposed an embargo. In reaction, Qatar affirmed its sovereignty yet sought in parallel to expand and make permanent the US al-Udeid airbase—a marker of US imperialism in the region. To understand such a paradox, this article argues that we must study sanctions in tandem with the stigmatization narratives that legitimate them. Sanctions and stigma work together as performances of norms, which themselves serve to bound an order. This article conceptualizes the Gulf Crisis as an episode of regional order-making reproducing the hegemonic repertoire of the US-led global order. The Quartet employed US-inspired practices of sanctioning ‘rogue’ actors and hegemonic narratives on the fight against terrorism, while Qatar sought to counter this stigma by scaling up the al-Udeid airbase to showcase its pro-US, anti-terror credentials. By attending to the deployment of hegemonic norms—through sanctions and stigma—as tools of regional ordering, this article underlines that the Gulf Crisis ultimately contributed to bolstering the normative architecture sustaining the US-led global order.