September 02, 2024
Nasser Kandil
The theory of winning by points devised by Hezbollah’s Secretary General, Al Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, will enter the history of innovative war theories and strategies. The preceding week was crowned by the big event of the announcement of an open strike to reach an agreement which ends the prisoner dossier, organically tied to Netanyahu’s government ending the war and agreement on full withdrawal from the Gaza strip. The basis for such repercussions were embodied in Hezbollah’s qualitative response targeting Unit 8200 in return for Israeli crossing of the red line by its infringement on Al Dahiyieh’s (Beirut’s southern suburb) security, and the assassination of Al Mukawama Commander Fuad Shukr, with the war on the West Bank intervening between the two events, and adding more complexities to Netanyahu’s dilemma.
The discourse about winning by points with which Al Sayed Nasrallah inaugurated his strategic approach to the war after Al Aqsa Toufan (Deluge) meant for some an evasion from what they believed was the way to support Gaza, her people, and resistance, exemplified in striking with missiles the entity’s depth and its vital structures. They described this innovative strategy as a way of avoiding blame, while ignoring that Al Sayed Nasrallah put “open possibilities” as a condition for following this strategy, in other words the possibility of big escalation to the point of a large scale war in defense of civilians, in the event the entity infringed on the rules of engagement by targeting the civilian and infrastructure depth of Lebanon, or if the Hamas Movement faced defeat in Gaza.
The discourse about a big war coming at the beginning also implies a poor intellect, failing to take into account the power elements accumulated in favor of the entity, impossible to disperse except with a winning by points strategy, particularly in view of the magnitude of the domestic consensus favoring war, and the size of international support amassment on the streets and by governments in the West, now being dispersed, with the entity losing in both domains, and entering the dilemma of impotence in cashing in on the West’s power in its war, and the domestic eruption reaching a boiling point with the announcement of the open strike.
Those who took the winning by point strategy lightly were ignorant that what lies behind it is a solid intellectual base forged by Al Sayed Nasrallah a quarter of a century ago, when he announced in the square of Bint Jbeil, on the day of the liberation of southern Lebanon, his famous formula “Israel is more frail than a spider’s web” which was not a mobilization slogan or a political equation as much as it was an in-depth reading of the lack of proportionality and symmetry between
Al Mukwama’s popular internal front and that of the occupation entity’s, and an understanding of the methodology that should be adopted in war with the entity which should lead its leadership to despair in two matters, the ability to cash in on the West’s power in this war, and the ability to take away the deterrence power from Al Mukawama’s hands. Here is the entity reaching despair in both matters, while the ability of the domestic front to tolerate the consequences of war and its ramifications is reaching the stage of impotence. This explains the coolness in administration to preserve the pressure exerted by the dossiers of the prisoners, the displaced settlers of the north, and blocked vessels in the Red Sea, and their transformation into challenges which have no military solution, but the mandatory pathway of coming to an agreement acceptable to Al Mukawama in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s flight to the West Bank war came as an expression of the failure of playing the deterrence power game with Hezbollah on the edge of the precipice, and a flight from negotiations, and preparation for such return from a position of strength allowing, on the one hand, a more favorable shift in the negotiation equilibrium, and on the other, preserving cohesion in the government triad of Benyamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich, through offering the complete control over the West Bank in exchange for an agreement on Gaza. However, what occurred in terms intractability of the realization of an achievement in the West Bank, and the emergence of the possibilities of a big explosion, the control over which is hard to imagine, and the co-occurrence of the return of the corpses of the killed prisoners from Gaza, heralded the beginning of the web’s unraveling, and exposed the entity’s fragility.
What the war announces with the current developments in the entity are the accomplishments for Al Aqsa Toufan, and the fruit of the precious blood given by the people and Al Mukawama in Gaza, and their resilience, sacrifices, and heroism, as well as an achievement through the resilience of Al Mukawama Axis, particularly Syria’s endurance and Iran’s support and acceptance of challenges, and a victory for Yemen whose missiles and drones crossed the seas, and whose squares are regularly filled with millions crying out for Palestine. But the winning theory is Al Sayed Nasrallah’s theory of winning by points, a theory infused with the blood of commanders and resistance fighters, offering their souls for the victory of Gaza, her Mukawama, and people, and with them, the victory of Palestine.
