Killing Hezbollah’s Nasrallah Is a Key Step. More Is Needed | Opinion

Much of the media coverage and official reaction about Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and its possible reaction to Tuesday’s massive missile attack has fixated reflexively on fears of “escalation.” That is wrongheaded, because the criminal regime in Iran and its marauding proxies across the region have been tolerated for far too long.
Yes, it is possible that Israel’s efforts to strike back at its tormentors will compel Iran to even further up the ante, and down that path lie great dangers. But sometimes there is no choice but to stare a bully down. I know that much of the global audience considers that Israel is the bully, because of the ruinous war in Gaza—but they’re not thinking straight.
When calculating which protagonist is to blame for an awful situation, consider what would happen if each were removed. If Israel were gone, the Palestinians might or might not have their state (when Jordan and Egypt controlled the West Bank and Gaza, until 1967, it was not even considered)—and the rest of the Middle East would be the same disaster area, including Iran. The world would be missing some serious innovation, including much of the tech behind cellphones, internet telephony, cyber and nanotech, and more.
And if the Islamic Republic were gone? Well, consider what it’s been up to, without any connection to this week’s ballistic missile barrage, which despite being repelled by air defenses was one of the most concentrated in history.
In addition to violently brutalizing its own people, the Islamic Republic pursues nuclear weapons and has deployed proxy militias throughout the region bringing ruin wherever they tread. Hezbollah terrorizes Lebanon, picks fights with Israel, helped the war criminal Bashar Assad retain power in Damascus and has sown terrorism around the world. The Houthis have caused the deaths of almost a half million Yemenis and cost Egypt $6 billion by impeding maritime trade through the Suez Canal.
The outrageous list goes on—and there is relatively little protest on the streets of Western capitals, on progressive U.S. campuses, in global human rights institutions or among apologist media circles. The latter rankles me most, for that was long my patch: When it comes to seeing clearly the dangers of jihadism, many of my colleagues are blind, alas.
Hezbollah began bombarding Israel on Oct. 8—the day after Hamas, another Iran-backed terrorist group, invaded Israel from Gaza and massacred 1,200 people, sparking the current war. This was not about Israel’s counterstrike, which had not even begun. It was about piling on in hopes of badly injuring the Jewish state—en route to its destruction.
They did all this without any fear of provoking a democratic country that is a nuclear power, and which has a higher per capita GDP than Britain, Germany, and France. I’m talking about Israel—not the United States. They seem to heed America even less; after Oct. 7, President Joe Biden warned them to desist, famously saying “Don’t!”; they went ahead and did.
Why they are so fearless is one of the main questions of our era. After all, Osama bin Laden was wealthy and had many options in life; when he decided where to devote his energies and time, did he not know his end would be a sad one? The answers vary. Some of them are stupid or fanatical enough to drink their own jihadist Cool-Aid; others actually do use this version of a mafia to gain fame and sometimes fortune; and often they are banking on the weakness of the West.
Consider the Western response to the Houthis’ year of attacks on commercial traffic headed past Yemen toward the Suez Canal, which potentially affects about a third of global container traffic. The United States and Britain have conducted several ineffective airstrikes against the group, which were literally scoffed at. Thus emboldened, the Houthis have started firing long-range ballistic missiles from over 1,000 miles away at Tel Aviv. One of them killed a man in his sleep; another was shot down by air defenses. So, on Sunday, the IDF attacked Houthi-run power plants and a port that is used to import oil. More is probably coming.
And as for Hezbollah, the group’s relentless rocketing and shelling has left many of Israel’s border communities in the north in ruins and caused 60,000 people to flee their homes, in addition to quite a number of deaths. Hezbollah was also known to be planning an Oct. 7-style invasion of its own.
Israel has been demanding implementation of UN Security Council resolutions 1559 (from 2004) and 1701 (from 2006)—which call for Hezbollah to vacate the border area and to ultimately be disarmed.
The basic idea is that Lebanon should control its own territory—but the world has stopped even pretending that it expects anyone to comply. Lebanon basks in its haplessness, with officials too scared to say a word and somehow trying to wash their hands of Hezbollah’s actions. I assess that game is over: southern Lebanon will either be secured by Israel on the ground, by the Lebanese military taking its role seriously at last, or by a multinational force.
The world—and Western media—has mostly treated all this as a case of skirmishes and tit-for-tat attacks. Mainly it seems to fear “escalation”—which is another way of saying that the ayatollahs have deterrent power. Imagine how much more of it they’ll have once armed with nukes.
Much of life these days is about narratives, and in the Iranian regime’s, its aggression upon the region is somehow A-OK. But there is no doubt that they are emboldened in this direction by the Western cowering before the terrors of escalation. One wonder’s whether today’s weak-kneed Western officials would have urged Winston Churchill not to escalate in 1940.
So, now the escalation has indeed arrived. The Iranian missile attack was justified by Iran as a response to Israel’s action of recent weeks. Israeli airstrikes have wiped out most of Hezbollah’s leaders, and last Friday they took out Nasrallah, who through blustering TV appearances—sometimes accompanied by a mischievous smile—has become the voice and face of the Iran-engineered “axis of resistance.” Since Hezbollah is purposely embedded in homes and in bunkers under residences, civilians have been killed; much of the world, of course, blames Israel.
Hezbollah had repeatedly promised that their attacks on Israel will continue as long as the Gaza war goes on. That war is now at a low ebb but it will probably continue until Hamas surrenders or is fully wiped out, which may or may not happen anytime soon. But the promise was associated very much with Nasrallah himself; his departure may offer everyone a dignified way out. But Israel will insist on more than just an end to the attacks.
The world community is tired of Middle East wars—but there is a strong argument that the situation requires one more intervention. The UN resolutions must be enforced, if necessary, by force. Rarely has a multinational force been as justifiable as in south Lebanon. And, as I have written in these pages with the security expert Robert Hamilton, the West should read the riot act to the criminals in Tehran: No more nukes, no more proxies, and no more normalizing the abnormal and accepting the unacceptable.
I understand that the world community has little appetite for doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and I realize it would have to wait until after the November election. Clearly it would be better if Israel were led by a less divisive and duplicitous figure than this sadly resilient politician (who possibly annoys his critics in Israel even more than he does the exasperated world community). Netanyahu has a blank space where his strategic understanding should be, but he’s not wrong about Iran and its “axis.” As the cliché goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
If the West wants to appear evenhanded, there is a useful way. Israel needs to end its self-defeating settlement project in the West Bank, and now. It needs to end its idiotic march toward becoming a binational state and it must stop tolerating extremist settlers tormenting the West Bank Palestinians. The independence of Israel’s democracy is not an argument; these actions are creating a non-democratic reality.
So, when it comes to cleaning up the phenomenal Middle East mess, there is a conversation to be had with Jerusalem as well, after the one with Tehran. I’m sure Israel’s automatic critics won’t mind. Neither would most Israelis who understand what’s going on.
Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former Chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
This column was updated on Oct. 2, at 11 a.m. to reflect current events.