November 30, 2024
Nasser Kandil
• It is necessary to reflect on Hezbollah’s positions, strategies, and rhetoric following the July 2006 war, as articulated by the late Secretary-General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and comparing them to the stances of its current Secretary-General, Sheikh Naim Qassem, post-2024 war. Detractors allege that Hezbollah, without Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has shifted away from its foundations. They insinuate that such change stems from a perceived weakness after the 2024 war, and claim, maliciously, that Sheikh Qassem’s rhetoric exhibits more “Lebanonisation” – a critique rather than praise – attempting to imply a decline in resolve and strength. These assertions warrant a deeper examination of both wars, their outcomes, and their impact on Hezbollah’s trajectory.
• The scale of victory is measured against the scale of the challenge. In 2006, Hezbollah’s resistance challenged the occupying entity through a targeted operation: the capture of two soldiers to negotiate the release of Lebanese detainee Samir Quntar. The resistance acted for a localised Lebanese cause along the border. The occupying entity, however, responded with a full-scale war aimed at eradicating Hezbollah and disarming its resistance.
The war concluded with a strategic victory for Hezbollah, as the occupying entity failed to achieve its objectives and was compelled to accept a ceasefire, within the boundaries of UN Resolution 1701. In its essence the resolution ensures a coexistence with Hezbollah’s power and weapons but limits their impact and threat to the security of the entity. In the aftermath, the occupying entity rationalised its failure in 2006 by attributing it to a lack of preparedness for the strength and scale of Hezbollah’s forces. Over the subsequent years, the entity undertook extensive assessments, military drills, and strategic planning in anticipation of a potential future confrontation.
• It can be said that the 2006 war was fought based on the minimum thresholds for both sides, while the 2024 war was fought based on the highest possible stakes. Both sides had prepared extensively for a large-scale conflict. Hezbollah initiated the war not for a direct localised issue, such as prisoner exchange, but with operations spanning over 11 months, involving thousands of strikes along the border and deep into occupied Palestine. The resistance penetrated 30-40 kilometers into territories occupied in 1948, marking a significant escalation.
The occupying entity entered the conflict with the awareness that coexistence with armed resistance posed an existential threat. Not shying away, its leaders publicly acknowledged the war as a battle for survival, knowing failure would mean living with perpetual existential anxiety. This explains why displaced people from settlements in northern occupied Palestine hesitated to return. The war demonstrated that the occupying entity had prepared for it in line with this existential assessment, launching deadly strikes at the resistance, its infrastructure, environment, and leaders, culminating in the assassination of its secretary-general – each of which clearly reflected the scale of the threat.
• Simultaneously, it became clear that the occupying entity failed in two key aspects at the strategic level, marking the end of the war. The first is the inadequacy of the occupying entity’s air defenses, unable to counter Hezbollah’s missiles and drones. The entity’s constant infringement of Lebanon’s sovereignty through airspace violations, were for the first time reciprocated with the resistance control of the skies over occupied Palestine, but with greater ramifications that inflicted unprecedented fear on settlers. When the capital is at the mercy of rockets, the Prime Minister’s residence becomes an easy, unprotected target, and the headquarters of the elite Golani Brigade in Binyamina is exposed to strikes. By default, this leaves every home in the entity vulnerable. The question then arises: how can an elite brigade incapable of defending itself provide protection to others?
• The occupying entity’s leadership, military, and security apparatus suffered a profound strategic failure in their miscalculation of the resistance’s deterrence capabilities. While critics of the resistance mocked its threats, the reality proved its capabilities to be genuine, its threat to penetrate the entity’s depth accurate, and its readiness and resolve to act unmistakable. The occupying entity underestimated Hezbollah’s resilience and overestimated the effectiveness of its ‘decapitation’ strategy. Rather than collapsing, Hezbollah rebounded, adapted, and maintained both its cohesion and deterrent capacity, continuing to pose a significant threat to the entity.
Ultimately, the occupying entity was compelled to accept a ceasefire, citing its army’s exhaustion and shortages in manpower and ammunition, as admitted by Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Deterrence is a latent power typically withheld to avoid unnecessary escalation, but the entity’s misjudgment compelled it to confront this power head-on. Ultimately, it was forced into a ceasefire without achieving its objectives, returning to a precarious coexistence with a well-armed resistance capable of posing a strategic threat – without any roadmap for waging a future war under better conditions than this one.
In both wars, the entity sought to eliminate the resistance; however, their motivations differed. The victory of 2006 thwarted the entity’s objective of eliminating the resistance as a source of security threats, while the victory of 2024 defeated its aim to eliminate the resistance as an existential threat. Thus, the victory of 2006 was achieved under minimal threat, with limited objectives and capabilities, whereas the victory of 2024 represents a triumph under maximum threat, with the highest stakes, objectives, and capabilities.
After 2006, the entity had a vision of what needed to be done to win a future war, but now it lacks such a vision for anything greater or more decisive than what it attempted – and may not even be capable of repeating – in a future confrontation. Returning to the reliance on the terms of Resolution 1701, while the resistance emerges unscathed from the 2024 war, is a self-consoling effort at best. Especially considering that the same gamble failed under better circumstances to achieve lesser objectives against a weaker adversary.
• Lebanese critics alleging Hezbollah’s “Lebanonisation” as a sign of weakness ignore both historical context and current realities. Sheikh Qassem’s reiteration of the “people, army, and resistance” formula, coupled with his openness to dialogue for Lebanon’s defense, mirrors Sayyed Nasrallah’s 2006 victory speech. That speech also devoted significant attention to Lebanese political reforms, unity government formation, and the pursuit of a just and capable state.
• The claims by some Lebanese and others about Israeli violations as a sign of the resistance’s decline completely disregard what Sayyed Nasrallah stated 40 days after the ceasefire, during the victory celebration on September 22, 2006. He described similar violations to those happening today, explaining that the resistance refrained from responding to avoid being accused of breaching the ceasefire agreement. He called on the government to take a clear stance and issue orders for the Lebanese army to confront the violations, concluding with a warning that while the resistance continues to exercise patience, its patience is not unlimited. This time, however, the resistance will not wait another 40 days to make such an appeal.
• The resistance triumphed in both wars, but 2006 served as a prelude – a rehearsal for the broader victory of 2024. The triumph of 2006 was a scaled-down model of the greater triumph achieved in 2024.
