“All of Palestine, from the sea to the river, must return to its people,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in Beirut Friday night in a rousing and inciting speech against the American-led “peace process.”
“No one in the world, no king, prince, sayyid, leader, president or state has the right to give up a single grain of sand of Palestine’s land,” he stated adamantly.
Supporters of Israel “want us Shia to exit the Arab-Israeli conflict and to get Iran out of the conflict,” Nasrallah declared in his public speech in 11 months.
“Call us infidels, call us terrorists, call us criminals, say what you want, try and kill us anywhere, target us any way you want, we are the Shia of Ali and we shall not abandon Palestine.”
His speech came one week after the resumption of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, under the guiding if not manipulative hand of the Obama administration.
President Barack Obama has out-maneuvered Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into accepting a process that has an end goal of forcing Israel to accept virtually all of chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ demands, with the probable exclusion of allowing the immigration of several million foreign Arabs claiming Israel as home.
Nasrallah’s threatening speech indicates Israel may be in the macabre situation of Hezbollah terrorist attacks thwarting a so-called peace agreement that would leave Israel dependent on written promises to act as a security from a new armed Arab state within Israel’s current borders.
A deal between Israel and the PA would make the United States a renewed power in the Middle East and would pose a direct threat to Hezbollah.
“Americans and Qataris have tried to push the compass away from this priority (Israel) by inventing other enemies” to incite Muslims against Shi’ite, Nasrallah said in his speech,
“There are a lot of terms being used deliberately against the Shia, and the side standing behind this language hopes that the Shias will curse and insult our Sunni colleagues,” he said. “But the two groups are on the same side, they are both fasting during Ramadan.”
Nasrallah spoke Friday on International Quds ([Jerusalem] Day, devoting a large part of his speeches to his harshest-ever descriptions of Israel and echoing remarks once made by former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Israel is “a cancerous growth” that must be eliminated, according to Nasrallah.
“The only solution is to destroy it without giving it the opportunity to surrender,” he added, For good measure, he tossed in the United States as a prop for his declared war on any American-led agreement between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
“We say to America, Israel, Great Britain and their regional tools, we say to every enemy and friend … we in Hezbollah will not abandon Palestine and the people of Palestine,” Nasrallah stated.