The morality of killing Hassan Nasrallah

There is nothing good about killing in self-defence, but tragically there can be worse sins

A poster of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah who was killed this week

After Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, there was hope that the Jewish state would not be blamed for any further violence coming from the Strip. Ariel Sharon, the prime minister who ordered the evacuation, did so in the belief that giving the Palestinians the territory they wanted would place Jerusalem beyond reproach. Be reasonable: what justification would there be for criticising Israel if rockets flew after that?

As it turned out, this was a prime example of Israeli naïveté. Even after the Holocaust; even after the attempt by the Arab world to strangle the country at the very moment of its birth; even after the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign that led to the “Zionism is racism” resolution of 1975; even after the UN’s “world conference against racism” conference of 2001, which dissolved into an orgy of Jew-hate; and after many other examples of downright bigotry, Jerusalem continued to believe that the world would be on its side if it would only do the right thing and be seen to be doing so. Nobody believes this today.

This is the lens through which the world’s baffling response to Israel’s campaign in the north this week should be viewed. Hezbollah – widely recognised as a savage jihadi organisation – began its rocket campaign against its democratic neighbour on October 8. This was entirely unprovoked. The two countries have no territorial dispute, Israel having withdrawn from Lebanese territory years ago, and the first missiles flew before a single IDF boot had hit the ground in Gaza.

In the months that followed, more than 60,000 Israeli civilians were displaced as hundreds of miles of territory became uninhabitable, a price that no country would suffer. Yet while rockets rained down on deserted towns and villages for almost a year, Jerusalem responded only tactically and maintained strategic patience, keeping its war plans in a locked drawer until all diplomatic avenues were exhausted.

Fast-forward to the global reaction to this week’s escalation, when enough was finally enough. First came the astonishing pager operation, which pinpointed thousands of Hezbollah terrorists while limiting civilian casualties in a way that no other country had ever achieved. Yet the international community erupted in condemnation, accusing Israel of breaking “international law” and – quite absurdly, given that only combatants had the pagers – acting “indiscriminately”. (Tell that to the former American special forces officer I met last month who confessed that Britain, the US and other allied forces had killed 60 civilians for every combatant when crushing Islamic State in the Battle of Mosul.)

Then, whereas the media had all but ignored the plight of the thousands of Israeli families that have become refugees in their own country, it joined in a chorus of sympathy for the Lebanese civilians fleeing the battle zone ahead of an Israeli assault. For all the lip-service paid to Israel’s right to defend itself, when it comes to the crunch, the Jewish state is not allowed to conduct pinpoint operations or heavy bombing, assassinations or arrests, air campaigns or ground invasions. It is allowed to do only one thing. It is allowed to die.

The most egregious example of topsy-turvy reporting came in a notorious story headlined “Hezbollah has been provoked like never before by Israel and may be tempted to unleash its firepower”. This was an exact inversion of reality, presenting Israel as the provoker rather than the provoked. The line could have been lifted from the terrorist group’s propaganda material. Another headline ran: “West left powerless as Israel claims its biggest victory yet against Hezbollah,” belying perhaps the true locus of the reporter’s sympathies.

Nasrallah holds a weapon aloft in a poster near Beirut (picture: Giorgio Montersino)

However, these stories and many others reflected the attitude of the public after a year of dezinformatsiya pumped out relentlessly by the liberal media. On Question Time, the BBC’s flagship current affairs debating programme, one member of the audience displayed the consequences of this brainwashing when she erupted in indignation. “I’m fed up and sick to death of hearing about Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’,” she spat. “It’s obscene, what I’m seeing on the TV.” The room erupted in applause.

That was a most revealing moment. The woman admitted that her fury was based not on facts but on the pictures to which she had been subjected by the television. What were these? We all know the answer to that: endless footage of suffering Palestinian civilians in Gaza, presented without any mention of the fact that Israel is killing proportionately fewer non-combatants than any other country in the history of warfare, or indeed that it is fighting a war of self-defence against a savage jihadi foe which would kill us all if it could and started the conflict in the first place.

Nobody ever acknowledges that Hamas censors all the reporting that emerges from Gaza, effectively blocking the world from seeing a single picture of a dead or wounded terrorist, creating the impression that Israel is waging war on civilians. Does our broadcast media make this clear to viewers in a health warning before airing the propaganda footage? It does not. This alone places it hand-in-glove with the jihadis.

Even many senior editors working at these outlets – and I’ve met them – have fallen victim to their own Kool-Aid. In a candid moment, one executive suggested to me that he believed that Israel was meting out the same persecution that the Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis; that the IDF was as bad as Putin’s orcs; that the savagery of Hamas was a response to years of Israeli oppression; and that Jerusalem was waging war in Gaza out of a spirit of vengeance.

Given the tone of the coverage, the fact that the folks holding the levers harbour views such as these will come as no surprise. But their dogged adherence to falsehood in defiance of the truth is a sobering indictment of the condition of mass journalism today.

Which brings us to the facts of the matter. In recent years, IDF chiefs have focussed on gaming out a war with Hezbollah — by far the more dangerous adversary — rather than with the junior foe of Hamas. In the meantime, Benjamin Netanyahu’s overarching security strategy has been one of containment. Israel has concentrated on economic, military and diplomatic development at home while using its military superiority to slap down its enemies when needed, otherwise letting them be in the hope that they would collapse under the weight of their own oppression.

In retrospect, this looks like more naïveté. It is true that during the years of Hamas rule in Gaza, Israel’s economy doubled in size, its military power increased dramatically and it signed the Abraham Accords, a historic diplomatic success. Meanwhile, Jerusalem allowed Qatari money to flow into Gaza and up to 20,000 Gazans a day to work in Israel, with many receiving medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. This was designed to blunt Palestinian ill-will and persuade Hamas that there was nothing to be gained by aggression.

Hezbollah anti-tank missiles and optical equipment found in Maroun Al-Ras

October 7 undermined this doctrine, making it look inexcusably naive — not just with regard to Hamas but also towards Hezbollah. The single lesson was that if an enemy wishes to kill you and prepares to do so, sooner or later he will find a way to make his move. The day after the pogroms, defence minister Yoav Gallant argued that the Hamas campaign should be placed on pause and Hezbollah, the more deadly enemy, should be defeated first in a surprise attack. He was overruled by Netanyahu, backed by the Americans. There followed 11 months of tactical airstrikes in Lebanon while the Israelis desperately pursued diplomatic routes to pressure Hezbollah to back down.

Now, having neutered Hamas in Gaza, the diplomatic options have been exhausted. UN resolution 1701, which dictated in 2006 that Hezbollah should disarm and withdraw from Israel’s border, was never obeyed and never enforced. With international will to defend Israel at sub-zero levels, if the country’s north was to be repopulated, there was no option but military force, even in the knowledge that such a move – which would incur Lebanese casualties, not just Jewish ones – would provoke a newfound outrage from the international community.

So the IDF’s long-term plan was unleashed. It has been devastating. Tehran is freshly afraid, not of Biden or the West but of Netanyahu, who lured his enemy into complacency as he delivered a speech in New York while authorising the killing of its leader, and immediately his successor. Israel’s deterrent, which was severely degraded by October 7, is on the way to being restored. In a region in which security flows from perceived strength, the war in Gaza had made the Jewish state look weak; if it took this long to beat the small enemy of Hamas, what about the much larger foes to its north? Now Israel looks weak no longer.

So we arrive at the moral question. Given the relentless condemnation of Israel’s actions, is it possible to defend the killing of Nasrallah and the escalation in Lebanon on moral grounds?

From one point of view, taking a life is a sin. So much is clear from the Jewish tradition of spilling a drop of wine for every plague suffered by the Egyptians in the Passover story. But which is the greater sin, to kill a jihadi aggressor or to allow your family to be massacred? And which is preferable, to pinpoint Hezbollah members and their leaders for death or to hold fast for all-out war, which would involve the killing of many civilians?

Such grim arithmetic is not the province of the privileged West. But these are the calculations with which the Jewish state has been cursed, and it is forced to make a move one way or another.

All those accusing Jerusalem of destabilising the region, therefore, must answer the following challenge. Imagine if Israel had not launched the pager attacks, not destroyed so many Hezbollah munitions, not killed its leadership structure, not blown Nasrallah away. Would regional conflict be closer at hand or further away? Or to put it another way: if not this, what?

Western finger-waggers have the luxury of warm beds, secure borders and a dearth of rockets pointed at their homes. Israel has no such privilege. It is time to let go of fantasies of how we wish the world to be and recognise the stark reality: the Jewish state is on the front line of a war between an alliance of autocracies and the overly-docile free world. We democracies must find our mettle and soon. There is nothing pleasant about killing in self-defence but tragically there can be worse sins.