Hezbollah and October 7: A Conditional Opportunity or an Open Dilemma? / War of Mobile Pace or Constrained War?

August 30, 2024

Nasser Kandil

                A study by Adham Saouli, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, entitled “Identity, Anxiety and War: Hezbollah and the Gaza Tragedy” was published in Omran, a quarterly journal for social sciences, published and administered by Dr. Azmi Bishara. Its abstract says “ This study explores Hezbollah’s puzzling engagement in Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. Why has it limited its war to the Lebanese-Israeli border area? Why did it not engage in a full-scale combat akin to the 2006 war with Israel? Why did the movement despite all the domestic and regional constraints it faced, enter war on 8 October? Drawing on Ontological Security Theory and primary data, the article finds that Hezbollah faced a predicament: if it abstained from supporting the Palestinian allies, it would threaten its ontological security (core being, reputation, and role as a resistance movement); conversely if it engaged in extensive warfare, it would endanger its physical security. To address this predicament, Hezbollah engaged in constrained warfare that aimed to restore its ontological security and preserve the cohesion and survival of the regional Axis of Resistance. The study argues that, in this way, Hezbollah was also constructing the future.”

       Our article is devoted to address this study by discussing its contents and refuting them based on the conviction that the study is part of an ongoing campaign to plant doubt about Hezbollah’s background, credibility, and the nature of its participation in Al Aqsa Toufan (Al Aqsa Deluge).

       The study adopts a methodology which may be appropriate for opportunistic forces, but not to forces akin to Hezbollah, whose positions match their makeup, and whose talk genuinely reflects their thinking. Perhaps the study aimed for such methodology of research about a contradiction between the principle dimension in Hezbollah’s image and reputation which mandated Gaza’s support, and interest in avoiding an existentially risky confrontation and doing all that is required to escape such existential risk and not making it part of its support to Gaza, to arrive at the theory of constrained warfare, leading the reader, who had not agreed in advance, to go along with the study’s methodology, and accept that Hezbollah is an entity opportunistic in its choices, including those pertaining to the pivotal issue of the existential struggle with the occupying entity.

       The study poses repeatedly the question considered key to the examination of the alleged anxiety, posed in the study’s abstract as

“ Why did it not engage in a full-scale combat akin to the 2006 war with Israel?” In actuality, the question is non-existent and artificial because Hezbollah did not engage in wide scale warfare in July 2006 except in response to large scale warfare on Lebanon’s front represented by destructive bombardment on Al Dahieh (Beirut’s southern suburb), the South of Lebanon, parts of the Beqaa, and some vital Lebanese installations such as power plants and airport, and an attempt of a land invasion by elite units and armored vehicles on the area before the Litani River. Hezbollah fought defensively facing this threat, and did not start the large scale war against the Occupation’s military. It is additionally confirmed in Hezbollah’s statement of going to a full scale war if the entity repeats what it had done in 2006. Furthermore, there has not been  a single occasion in Hezbollah’s history, since the liberation in 2000, that it had started a large scale war against the occupation’s army.

       A constrained war is another term fabricated to insinuate that there exists a ceiling for the war which was possible for Hezbollah to go to but is restrained from doing so, but what is this restraint?  It is the fear of exposure to harm of its human and military constitution at the hand of the occupation’s military or by American hands. A careful examination of the terms reveals that it assumes a war at a uniform pace, which is constrained warfare, while Hezbollah’s participation through the front of Lebanon’s south is not at a uniform pace, and can be more accurately described as being at a mobile pace, with open possibilities. The source of its open possibilities can be easily clarified and hypothetically proven, unless the researcher intends to drop these hypotheticals because the occupation is the party engaged in constrained warfare.

       Hezbollah’s Secretary General, Al Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, in his first speech declared Hezbollah’s methodology in waging the war, calling it winning by points, ceiling and target wise, allowing the deduction of comprehensive war being a possibility from what the speech embodied, in terms of Hezbollah’s commitment that the defeat of Hamas in Gaza will not be allowed, at a time when both the duration of the war, and Hamas’ endurance capability if the war lasted for a long time, were unknown. What would have occurred to this alleged anxiety if the war exacted a challenge named forbidding Hamas’ failure calling for a much higher level of warfare intensity? Would not it not have suited better the anxiety hypothesis, if it were in fact what dictated Hezbollah’s position, to find its translation in the declaration of support to Gaza as a principled position, without committing to a formula open to a comprehensive war without restraints, embodied in the commitment not to allow Hamas’ defeat?

       The second supposition which Al Sayed Nasrallah tied to the open possibilities is the targeting of civilians, and here, would it not be accurate to say that Hezbollah was able to prove such deterrence equation and to impose it on the occupation’s military, itself adopting constrained warfare because of being stuck between its ontological security and its material security? If the entity stood silent about Hezbollah’s opening of Lebanon’s front, it stood to lose its image which had already sustained enough damage on October 7, and if it risked moving on Southern Lebanon, bombing, killing, and invading as it had done in Gaza, it will expose its army to destruction.  Meanwhile, Hezbollah is engaged in a mobile pace war based on rules of engagement which he fashioned and has succeeded in moving their ceilings and imposing based on his reading of the course of the war in Gaza and what is required for its support from Lebanon for 11 months. Hezbollah drew up a clear strategy which does not exclude the possibility of large scale warfare if civilians are exposed to big attacks, or Hamas becomes at risk of failing, but was clear that he will not start a large scale war, which was and continues to be a subject of criticism by many, perhaps because what is desired is for Hezbollah to go to a war on cities and civilians with the entity and lose, and have Palestine and Gaza lose with him. Is it for Hezbollah to lose a double loss only to please some hot heads, or those looking for ways to attack Hezbollah’s credibility? One loss is the loss of the  Lebanese domestic support constituting a cohesive front, in contrast to a domestic front in the entity dividing and fragmenting, which on its own is a deterrence formula, and a vital component in the balance of power, with Hezbollah knowing that he has a domestic authorization of responding with no ceilings and no constraints if the Lebanese interior is exposed to danger. The second, and even more perilous for Al Mukawama front, at its head Palestine and Gaza, is the loss of the street outpourings in the West in support of the Palestinian Cause.

       The question about reputation and what the author labels as the ontological security,  i.e. the core being, reputation, and role of Hezbollah, is not subject to question for the simple reason that Hezbollah approached Al Aqsa Toufan (Al Aqsa Deluge) as an opportunity and not a dilemma, but as an opportunity conditional upon good management, which Al Sayed had named as the equation of patience and discernment, and implies the possession of a strategic vision of how to disperse the power which the entity had accumulated after Al Toufan (Deluge) on the one hand, and on the other hand, opening a window for the entity’s retreat, called an agreement with

Al Mukawama in Gaza, in order to arrest the collapse when the entity  ascertains the loss of its power sources, along with Hezbollah’s  readiness to escalate tensions gradually, including the possibility of a large-scale war, in accordance with the formula of open possibilities related to the course of the war in Gaza and the security of the Lebanese interior and civilians. As for what was classified as dissipating the entity’s accumulated power, it includes the international political, popular, media, and military mobilization in support of the entity, and domestic cohesion of political elites and public opinion behind the entity’s government and military, and their choice of war without ceilings. It is possible for a study to be worthwhile if it concerned itself with tracking the graph lines for these sources of power and how they have dissipated during the 11 months of war, by virtue of the winning by points strategy, and success through transforming the challenge into an opportunity requiring good management, just like Hezbollah viewed Al Toufan (the Deluge), and not as a dilemma calling for anxiety about a full and deadly engagement and avoidance of humiliating defeat as the study posits!

       Accurate judgement is reflected in results, and the simple question is whether Hezbollah has not succeeded in causing continuing losses and exacerbated crises difficult to adjust to, militarily, economically, and demographically, starting with the freezing of forces, attrition of capabilities, displacement of settlers, and ending with hitting the deterrence capability in its core, which led to the entity’s slogan of preparation for war on Lebanon as the only political response to the challenge, but a response which cannot be put into practice because of the inverse relationship between the graph lines of sources of moral, political, and material power for the entity, and for Hezbollah, over the course of the days and months of war. When the occupation wanted to test the hypothesis of regaining deterrence by the assassination of Commander Fuad Shukr, feeling empowered by the American swelling, there came the response, the efficacy of which is measured by its political results, and not by the entity’s claim of a preemptive strike proven not to have preempted anything, since what had been planned was executed, and half an hour after the air strikes which were supposed to have preceded and ended any possibility of a response. It suffices that the response imposed on Yuav Galant, the War Minister and most prominent disseminator of the calls for a war today and not tomorrow, which drives Hezbollah behind the Litani, and brings the Lebanese back to the Stone Age, to state following the response, that a war on Hezbollah is not now but in the distant future.

       The question about Hezbollah’s anxiety because of the American amassment is misplaced for the simple reason that Hezbollah distinguishes with precision between holding on to the winning by points methodology and what it entails in terms of dispersing the entity’s accumulated power sources through attrition and the well-studied use of the time element, with the mobilization of governments and armies and streets in the West in general, and in America in particular being at the head of the entity’s  power sources, at the beginning of Al Toufan (the Deluge), and not giving importance to this amassment in the decision about strategic positioning. Al Sayed Nasrallah’s words were clear about the American threats to prevent the opening of any front additional to Gaza’s, when he said that your threats do not concern us, we give them no importance, and they do not scare us, and as for your carriers, we have readied for them their implements, and we know you, and you know us, since 1982. Here is the American, finding himself in a double bind, on the one hand a military amassment futile in influencing Hezbollah’s decision to respond, and on the other hand, politically acknowledging that Lebanon’s front, which he came the first time to prevent its opening, to say what Hezbollah had said, that it will not be closed except with an agreement that ends the war on Gaza.

       Hezbollah is a sagacious political force, but is also principled, a wise force, but also moral, a force which calculates with precision but has a strategic project at its essence the dismantling of the entity, from which there is no retreat.                2