One of the consequences of writing for a religious Jewish newspaper is that when a renowned Arab hater of Israel chooses to deliver a very important speech on Friday afternoon, especially in winter, I am engaged in candle lighting and Kabbalat Shabbat, and have to wait for Sunday to make sense of said Arab leader’s speech. I’m not complaining, only sharing…
Except this time, I didn’t miss anything, thank God. The secretary general of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah (you guessed I was referring to him, right?) went out of his way to establish that he had no intention of coming to the aid of his suffering brethren in the Gaza Strip, he had nothing to do with their suicidal idea to poke the Zionist bear so hard, there was no way the bear wasn’t going to hunt all of them down and destroy their city. As he put it, the October 7 massacre was “100 percent Palestinian,” and was hatched in “great secrecy.”
Then he said something that everyone in the Middle East and elsewhere knew was the lamest attempt to save face. He proclaimed: “Some claim Hezbollah is about to join the fray. I tell you: We have been engaged in this battle since October 8,” followed by, “I tell the Israelis, if you are considering carrying out a preemptive attack against Lebanon, it will be the most foolish mistake you make in your entire existence.”
To continue with our angry bear metaphor, little Hassan Nasrallah is perched high on a tree top shaking his fist at the bear wearing the blue and white yarmulke – from a safe distance. He knows bears can climb trees, but he’s betting this bear is too busy mauling Hamasniks to make the effort.
What else could Nasrallah say? That he was officially opening a second front against Israel? Are you crazy? Did you see what they did to Gaza? You want them to level Beirut, too? They did it before, you know, and it wasn’t fun.
Needless to say, most Arabs reacted with disappointment mixed with ridicule to Nasrallah’s show of belligerent standoffishness. The Arab Center in Washington DC, a known supporter of the terrorist leader, desperately sought something positive to say about the speech and was forced to conclude:
“Indeed, the long weeks of waiting for Hezbollah’s official position on the Israeli war on Gaza have ended with a reaffirmation of the status quo ante preceding Hamas’s operation on October 7. To call Nasrallah’s speech a decisive moment for Hezbollah regarding the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip would be a colossal mistake. But to also call it a whimper would ignore the General Secretary’s allusions to a reserved power that now constitutes a great deterrent to Israeli transgressions. For now, Nasrallah appears to have chosen to keep his options open but to send messages that he is not interested in an escalation with Israel, or the United States, pending developments on the ground.”
Or, our boy is a coward, but don’t write him off yet, he’s going to hit the gym and jog.
Saudi Prince Abdul Rahman bin Musaed commented on Saturday that the “resistance axis” that supposedly connects Hezbollah with Hamas and the Huthis under an Iranian umbrella “is a lie.”
“The so-called resistance axis has been dealing with the Palestinian issue for years and is nothing more than an agent to implement the Iranian agenda in the region… Hassan Nasrallah’s speech in which he stated that Operation Al-Aqsa flood was a purely Palestinian operation and that the resistance axis was surprised by it, and everything else that was stated in the speech, made all the masks fall and all the illusions based on strong slogans are assumed and high-sounding speeches will fall with him,” the prince noted.
He pointed out: “This is confirmed by a simple comparison between the intensity of Nasrallah’s speech toward the events in Syria and his fierce participation in them, his skirmishes under the rules of engagement during the last month, and the softness of his speech, which is almost a journalist’s detailed coverage of what has happened in Gaza last month since the launch of the Hamas operation a month ago and more.”
Prince Abdul Rahman concluded with a verse from the Quran: “Glory to Him who said: O you who have believed, why do you say what you do not do?”
Turns out the prince observes our sages’ advice (Berachot 31a): “A person should neither take leave of another with conversation, nor with laughter, nor with frivolity, nor with vanity – one should take leave of another with a matter of halakha.”
Ben Caspit quoted a senior Israeli military source who said about Nasrallah, “He seems to be folding. He apparently understood that this event was too big for him. The American presence here also helped.”
On August 27, 2006, Nasrallah confessed in an interview with New-TV: “We did not estimate even by one percent that the act of capturing (two Israeli soldiers) would lead to a war on such a scale since such a war has never happened in the history of wars. If we had known that the act of capturing (the soldiers) would lead to this result, we would not have resorted to it at all.”
On July 14, 2006, IDF planes attacked Dahieh, a predominantly Shia Muslim suburb, located south of Beirut, the main stronghold of Hezbollah, where the organization’s headquarters, weapons warehouses, and homes of Hezbollah leaders were located. The planes bombed Hezbollah’s headquarters and the bridges leading to the neighborhood. A power station was also attacked in southern Beirut. Israel went on a rampage that devastated Beirut as well, teaching the Lebanese a long-lasting lesson on what the Zionist bear can do if you poke it.
Lesson learned.
