We were supposed to release only one episode this week: the start of a three-part series about that horrible day, and the horrible year that followed. But this is the Middle East, where things change faster than you can process them.
And so this is the second episode we’re releasing this week, which will explore the fittingly-named Operation New Order, Mivtza Seder Hadash, which may have just upended the balance of power in the Middle East.
This past Friday, as Bibi Netanyahu addressed the United Nations, the Israeli Air Force was preparing to hit a target that had eluded them for decades.
This target was much stronger than Hamas. Much wealthier and better equipped than Hamas. And unlike Hamas, it took direct orders from Iran.
This target was behind the deaths of countless people around the world – including 12 beautiful, innocent children playing soccer on a balmy Saturday night this past July. Maybe you’ve even forgotten about that, because how much has happened since then. This target had smelled Israel’s weakness after the horror of October 7th, and began raining down rockets on Israel’s north a day later, sending tens of thousands of Israelis into exile and effectively shrinking Israel’s borders.
This target was Hassan Nasrallah, who led the Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah since 1992. For thirty two years, he and his organization terrorized the world.
In 1983 alone, they murdered 319 Americans in two massive bombings in Lebanon. They hijacked planes. They bombed embassies. And they made a special point of targeting Jews. In 1994, they bombed a Jewish center in Argentina, killing 85. My friend, colleague, and podcast co-host Mijal Bitton lost friends in that attack. (I’ve put a link to our joint podcast, Wondering Jews, in the show notes.)
But now, Nasrallah, and the rest of Hezbollah’s leadership, are gone. And though President Joe Biden has been urging “de-escalation” for months, his statement about the strike was unequivocal. Quote:
Hassan Nasrallah and the terrorist group he led, Hezbollah, were responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade reign of terror. His death from an Israeli airstrike is a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians. The United States fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups.
Of course, Israelis don’t need the American president to tell them that Nasrallah’s death is a good thing for the flourishing of human civilization. And that includes Druze, Arab, and Palestinian citizens of Israel – no matter their religion.
Shortly after the announcement, the Israeli-Palestinian social media personality Nas Daily posted to social media:
“Nasrallah was *my* terrorist. Each one of us grows up watching a terrorist on TV threatening to kill us. For many Americans, it was Osama Bin Laden. For me, it was Nasrallah. I grew up in Northern Israel. Every few years, Nasrallah would target us with a barrage of rockets. His rockets would be directed at nearby Jewish towns, but of course they miss and fall in Muslim towns in Israel. My town was one of them. Imagine the irony. US college students cannot understand this. *My* terrorist is dead today. It’s great news not just for me, but for many Syrians, Lebanese, Saudis, and Israelis.
I am naively optimistic. But I hope today sends a signal to people in the Middle East that moderation, acceptance of reality and coexistence is the only way. Terrorism way will always end up in failure. Always. Even if it takes 32 years to arrive.”
All over the country, Israelis are celebrating. They’re handing out sweets. They’re chilling on the beach. And no matter where they are, they’re blasting a Hebrew-language ode to Nasrallah, written during the last Lebanon war in 2006, which breezily predicts Nasrallah’s imminent demise.
We’ll talk more about those celebrations in a little bit.
But first I want to reflect on a different Hebrew-language song.
One month after the carnage of October 7th, a relatively unknown rap duo released a rap track with a slangy title.
Ness and Stilla had one hit under their belts – an ode to clubbing, with a sneaky feminist message underneath the lyrics about drinking til you can’t stand up anymore. In fact, the actual lyric references Hezbollah, as a synonym for a high so intense it’s “explosive.”
But after October 7th, no one was rapping about drinking and parties. Most of the songs released in that time were songs of anguish and disbelief, with titles like “The Last Dance” and “Homeland” and “Winter 23.”
But Ness and Stilla weren’t interested in writing about grief.
They wanted revenge.
And in their controversial, provocative ode to the power of the IDF, they list the targets that Israel is coming for. In the past month, their words have started to seem less like revenge fantasy and more like prophecy.
Mohammad Deif was the head of Hamas’ military arm. Ismail Haniyeh was the chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau. Both had undoubtedly been part of coordinating the attacks of October 7th.
Nasrallah may not have known or helped plan the attack. But 24 hours after the worst slaughter of Jews in nearly a century, he made the fateful decision to join hands with Hamas and open what he called a “northern front” against Israel.
For 11 months, Israel’s north has burned. For 11 months, Israel has played defense – often, not very well.
Not anymore.
Watching the events of the past few weeks, it seems that the Israeli policy has officially shifted back towards deterrence. To the Talmud’s injunction that “If one comes to kill you, rise and kill first.”
FIrst it was the assassination of Fuad Shukr, Nasrallah’s military advisor, in retaliation for Hezbollah’s murder of 12 Druze children in Majdal Shams.
And then, within a matter of weeks, the IDF declared open season on Hezbollah.
They struck a weapons facility. Then they took out all of Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies – purposely low-tech devices that can’t be tracked or hacked. The explosions left hundreds of Hezbollah leaders maimed or dead, with no way to communicate, hollowing out their chain of command.
Two days later, Israel assassinated the commander of Hezbollah’s most elite strike force.
Then came the strikes on Hezbollah’s command centers and weapons depots.
This past Friday was the piece de resistance: the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, and with him, the rest of Hezbollah’s leadership. One day later, they got the guy who had been named Nasrallah’s successor. He had held the job for only a few hours.
Jewish and Hebrew Twitter accounts are having a field day. Some of the memes are funny, I have to admit. Fake job postings for “head of Hezbollah,” with caveats like “no long-term commitment required.” Reflections that “the next leader of Hezbollah wasn’t important enough to get a pager.” People jokingly begging Israel to stop with all the strikes, since they’re too hungover from the last one to celebrate properly. If you ask me, that’s a missed opportunity to quote DJ Khaled’s epic album title Suffering from Success.
But we’re Jews. And so amid the celebrations and the memes and the gifs, many of us have also been asking ourselves… should we REALLY be celebrating? Sure, Nasrallah was unquestionably A Bad Guy who did horrific things.
But should Jews really celebrate the death of another human being? As always, I turned to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who wrote, “We may be uplifted from an event because it represents the triumph of justice, while at the same time identifying with the suffering of the victims.”
In other words, cool it with the memes, guys.
Shlomo Brody, who has been one of my teachers for years, as well as a guest on this show, explains “According to some sources, this is the reason why the Bible does not call Passover “a time of joy” and why Jews do not recite a full celebratory Hallel service after the first day of the festival (Pesikta De-Rav Kahane). As the verse in Proverbs states, “When your enemy falters do not rejoice and when he stumbles do not feel glee, lest God notice and disapprove and avert His anger from him.” (24:17-18)
In fact, during the Passover Seder, it’s customary to pour out wine while reciting the 10 plagues, in order to show sympathy with the Egyptians.
But on the other hand… the book of Proverbs also declares, “When evildoers are destroyed, there is joy.” (11:10) Which leads me to a very important theological question. If King David were around today, would he be reposting Hezbollah memes?!
I’m not the only one asking that question. Well, okay, I’m the only one asking that question in that particular way. But as Rabbi Brody writes, quote:
A different approach emerges in the writings of Rabbi Jonah of Gerona, the 13th-century Spanish scholar. He believed that the acceptability of an individual’s celebration depended on the nature of his or her intent. If one’s merriment focused on the downfall of another human being, it would be morally problematic. If one celebrated the removal of evil from the world and the manifestation of Divine justice, however, it would be a laudable act of sanctifying the name of God.
In other words, you can make a case that the more tasteful memes are an act of service to God.
So I thought about this. And I think I have my own take, courtesy of Kohelet Rabba:
רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן לָקִישׁ אוֹמֵר, כָּל מִי שֶׁנַּעֲשָׂה רַחְמָן בֵּמְקוֹם אַכְזָרִי, סוֹף שֶׁנַּעֲשָׂה אַכְזָרִי בִּמְקוֹם רַחֲמָן, וּמִנַּיִן שֶׁנַּעֲשָׂה אַכְזָרִי בִּמְקוֹם רַחְמָן,
Rabbi Shimon son of Lakish said: Sometimes, our well intentioned kindness, when directed to cruelty can lead to cruelty when there should be kindness.
In other words, being too nice to the bad guys will lead to us being bad to the nice guys.
I’m not the first person to notice a significant mismatch between how Israel perceives itself and how the western world – let’s call it the liberal world – sees it. I’ve always wondered why that is. Why the only democracy in the Middle East, with all its technological and medical innovations, with its record on gay rights, with its decades-long policy of negotiations, with its openness to the peace process, has racked up more condemnations from the UN than any other country, including North Korea, China, Venezuela, Syria, Iran… all the heavy hitters of human rights violations.
And look, I’m not blind.
I understand that Israel is occupying another people in the West Bank – no, not occupying the land, but the population who lives there, to paraphrase the great Yossi Klein Halevi.
I am not blind to the fact that Israel has made many unfulfilled promises of equality to its Arab citizens and particularly to the Arab residents of East Jerusalem. I’m not blind to the fact that, like most countries, the Jewish state has a ways to go in terms of full racial integration.
It’s a cliche at this point, to lament Israel’s bad PR. But I think that’s a tired and misguided excuse and frankly, a poor diagnosis.
And when I read Walter Russell Mead, who wrote The Arc of a Covenant, I finally understood why.
He writes: “the single most important thing about Israel that most Americans do not understand is that the jewish state was founded on a reasonable and historically justified skepticism about the ability of the liberal order to protect jews.”
He explains that liberalism and Zionism clashed with each other as far back as Herzl’s time. Liberal 19th century Jews believed that enlightened values would save them and finally allow them to live with dignity.
And then came the Zionist movement to pooh-pooh that concept. Herzl wrote: “International institutions cannot save the Jews, democracy cannot save the Jews, good intentions cannot save the Jews.”
Herzl died in 1904 – nearly three decades before the rise of Hitler. But even then, he correctly predicted a catastrophe was coming. And he knew that the only thing to save the Jews would be… the Jews. On our own terms, in our own country, as a sovereign power.
And for the past year, nothing has ever seemed truer. As Mead writes: “many Israelis believe that if the Jewish state relied on the ‘international community’ for its survival, it would have perished long ago.”
He lists endless examples:
- The UN voted for Partition, but did not try to enforce it. No one came to Israel’s aid when five Arab states invaded.
- The UN charter says that member states have to respect the territorial integrity of other states, and yet Iran and others regularly announce plans to destroy Israel. The reaction among the international community? Crickets.
- In 1967, when the Israelis asked Washington to prevent Nasser from blocking Israeli sea traffic, the US and UN were equally checked out. You might remember the searing NYT op-ed from the time that lambasted the UN General Secretary, U Thant, as having “the objectivity of a spurned lover and the dynamism of a noodle.” My favorite insult ever.
As Mead puts it: “All of this proves that Herzl was right: if the Jewish people entrust their survival to liberal institutions and liberal ideas, they will die.”
And listen. I’m an American. There’s no greater expression of liberal values than the United States, in my humble opinion. No country has been better to its Jews. I’ll always be proud and grateful to be an American citizen.
But too many of my fellow Americans are lamenting Nasrallah’s assassination, taking to the streets with Hezbollah flags. Too many blame the development of Hezbollah on Israel. And I’m not talking about pasty trolls in their moms’ basements. I’m talking about brilliant, savvy, sophisticated, charming, knowledgeable journalists like Mehdi Hassan. (I know, he sounds British. Turns out, he’s British-American!)
I’m not even calling Mehdi disingenuous. I think he believes what he says. And I know as well as anyone that teaching history is a complicated process and a difficult game.
Anyone who listens to my podcast knows I have no problem criticizing Israel’s record. questionable. Yes, I love the Jewish people, but that does not mean I am blind to our weaknesses and our historically dangerous decisions. I am not blind to Deir Yassin, to Kfar Kassem, to Qibyeh, to Sabra and Shatila. I’ve shared all those stories.
But I look at people like Mehdi Hasan blaming Israel for the rise of Hezbollah, and I’m just… intellectually thrown off. I was going to say horrified, but I held back. I look at people who say we deserve what we get, who go so far S to mourn Hassan Nasrallah’s death, and I just… don’t understand how we inhabit the same universe.
When did the war between Israel and Hezbollah start? It’s a question that determines the narrative we’re each telling.
If you ask me, this is my bias, the answer is 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah in Iran and declared:
“Islam has been dying or dead for 1,400 years. We have resurrected it with the blood of our youth…very soon we will liberate Jerusalem and pray there.”
And then he charmingly described the United States of America as “Great Satan,” and Israel as “the Little Satan.” But how do you liberate Jerusalem all the way from Iran? The two countries don’t share borders. And Iran has never actually marched, with an army, on the tiny Jewish state. For the first 8 years of the regime, they were too busy fighting their next-door-neighbor, Iraq.
But Khomeini was a big thinker, and he was savvy. He knew that he would never quote unquote liberate Jerusalem without help. So he built a second arm of the regime. The more fronts he could build, the more the revolution would spread, and the closer he’d get to “liberating Jerusalem.”
In his fabulous book Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman recounts that even before he took over Iran, Khomeini had his eye on exporting the Shia revolution all over the Muslim world. He sent his buddy Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, as well as others in his inner circle, to scout the best locations.
Lebanon seemed like a no-brainer.
Yes, he chose one of the most diverse countries in the Middle East as the new front in his Islamic Revolution. A country that was 30-ish% Christian, 31% Sunni, and 31% Shia, with a few other minorities sprinkled in there. Alawaites, Ismailis, Druze – back then, there were even a handful of Jews in the country.
But Lebanon was also burning.
It was in the middle of a nasty sectarian civil war.
The government had more or less lost control. Syria had been meddling in the war for years, hoping to extend its own influence.
So once Khomeini came to power, he made a very, very smart move. He appointed Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur as his ambassador – not to Lebanon, but to Syria. Syria’s leader, Hafez al Assad, was a secularist and an Alawite. He wasn’t in love with Iran’s revolutionary Shia Islamism.
See, this is all very confusing. Sometimes people are, and if you’re listening, be kind to yourself, you might not know the difference between Shiites and Sunnis. You might think that all Muslims are necessarily best friends with each other. But there’s divides.
And I want to remind everything that the Saudis are really the leaders of the Sunni world, and Iran are really the leaders of the Shia world. And Palestinians are Sunnis, and Hezbollah is Shiite.
It’s different, but he and the Iranians – meaning Mohtashamipur and the Iranians – had a mutual enemy. But he – Assad – and Mohtashamipur – had a mutual enemy. Iran and Syria, Shiite and Sunnis, and Alawites, had a mutual enemy at this point.
But he and the Iranians had a mutual enemy. An enemy that Iran called Little Satan. An enemy that had utterly destroyed Assad’s beloved airforce back in 1967, when he was commander of the Air Force and Minister of Defense. So in July of 1982, Assad okayed a military alliance with Iran that would allow Mohtashamipur to operate in Lebanon.
Mohtashamipur was savvy. He didn’t just enter Lebanon shouting TIME TO GET ISRAEL! WHO IS WITH ME?! Like Hamas’ spiritual founder Ahmed Yassin, he started out providing social and religious programs for Lebanon’s long-neglected Shia community. Only after he started building schools, mosques, welfare programs, medical clinics, and the like did he begin recruitment into the “party of God” – aka Hezbollah.
From the start, Hezbollah was radical. Not like Teenage Mutant ninja turtles, rad. A very different type of rad.
One of their religious leaders, Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, wrote in a February 1983 essay, “Jihad is bitter and harsh; it will well up from inside, by virtue of effort, patience and sacrifice, and the spirit of willingness to sacrifice oneself.”
That spirit of self-sacrifice took the form of suicide bombs.
A lot of them.
On April 18, 1983, Hezbollah sent a suicide bomber to the US Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, including 8 CIA officers. Among then was Lebanon’s CIA station chief, Robert Ames, who the CIA director described as “the closest thing to an irreplaceable man.”
The hits continued, masterminded by a man who some called “the ghost.” The United States claims that Imad Mughniyeh was responsible for more American deaths than anyone in the world – at least, until 9/11.
Mughniyeh was a founding member of Hezbollah. From the start, they made it clear: they were dangerous. You can’t kill a man who isn’t afraid of death.
And yet, somehow, a decade after its founding, Hezbollah managed to become more extreme.
After the Lebanese Civil War ended, of Hezbollah’s co-founders, Abbas Mussawi, took charge of the organization. Mussawi wasn’t exactly a teddy bear. He hated Israel. He was cool with suicide bombings. Many believe that he was the guy behind the kidnapping, torture, and murder of UN Marine Corps colonel William Richard Higgins, who had joined the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.
Israel assassinated Mussawi in 1992.
But here is the complication. Is the devil you know better than the devil you don’t know?
Because after Mussawi was assassinated, his protege Hassan Nasrallah took power. Even by Hezbollah’s standards, he was extreme. His first order of business was to unleash Mughniyeh – who many described as an “uninhibited psychopath” who was beating up prostitutes– to export his reign of terror across the globe, targeting Israelis and Jews in particular.
FIrst he bombed a synagogue in Turkey.
Two weeks later, he set off a car bomb in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people, including 20 children. Hezbollah dedicated the bombing “in the memory of Hussein,” Mussawi’s son, who was killed along with his father.
Nasrallah and Mughniyeh were very open about why they were doing all this.Ready? Quote: “This is one of our continuing strikes against the criminal Israeli enemy in an open-ended war, which will not cease until Israel is wiped out of existence.
When Israel killed 50 Hezbollah trainees, Hezbollah retaliated by murdering 85 people at an Argentinian JCC.
Top Israeli brass started to wonder…. Had they made the right decision in killing Mussawi?
Major General Uri Sagie later said: “I did not accurately foresee Hezbollah’s reaction. It was too hasty a decision making process.”
But then Chief of Staff Ehud Barak saw it differently: “The question is how did things look at the time of the act. It was difficult to see he would be replaced by Nasrallah. It was also difficult to know that Mughniyeh would become his number 2, who turned out to be super talented at operations.”
None of us know what would have happened if Israel didn’t assassinate Mussawi. It’s one of those historical what ifs I love so much. And none of us know what will happen now that Nasrallah is gone. Is this the end of Hezbollah? After all, Israel didn’t just get rid of the top guy. They took down most of the chain of command, too.
But there’s a bigger question at play here. Ronen Bergman writes that since WWII, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country, developing, quote, “the most robust, streamlined assassination machine in history.”
How should we think about that? How should we feel?
In Bergman’s words, quote, “of all the means that democracies use to protect their security, there is none more fraught and controversial than “killing the driver.”
Are these killings effective? Do they make the world a better place? Was killing Mussawi a net positive, considering it unleashed Hassan Nasrallah on the world?
What about killing Osama Bin Laden, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or Imad Mughniyeh? Do assassinations bring justice to all the people they killed?
More importantly – what does this mean for the future? Does the end justify the means? If it cripples Hezbollah, if it deters future attacks, if it brings tens of thousands of Israelis back to their homes – is it morally justified?
In a previous episode, I said:
“You can and should ponder the ethics of a targeted assassination. Of bioweapons. Of enticing agents to betray their countries. Of entering sovereign countries uninvited and killing its high-profile residents. And all of those questions are valid, and whatever response you have to them is valid too.
But I hope you’ll remember the following, as you’re considering the ethics of a targeted assassination.
A government has a responsibility to keep its people safe. And as a nation, we’re still getting used to the idea that we might have some power after 1,900 years without collective power. If that power is deployed carefully, strategically, with the intent of keeping us safe, then I am comfortable standing in the gray area. I actually love it. And I’m grateful, and I think we should all be grateful, for all the agents who shoulder the burdens and make the tough decisions that we might not be able to make.”
Menachem Begin once famously told Joe Biden – a senator at the time – I am not a Jew with trembling knees. In other words, I’m not afraid of my own power. Jews are no longer afraid of their own power.
40-some years later, that lesson stands.
Israel made a commitment, all those years ago, to keep the Jewish people safe.
Let’s be clear about this. The State of Israel failed its people by not keeping to that hallowed commitment on October 7th.
But these attacks on Hezbollah, and to a lesser extent Hamas, are restoring its deterrence – one assassination at a time.
Will this work? Will this be the thing that finally makes us safe?
I don’t know. I am not Nostradamus.
But, here is one enduring lesson as I see it.
We’ll have to wait and see. Given the circumstances, I’m hopeful. But for now, one of the biggest threats to the U.S.A and Israel has been eliminated. And even though I won’t make jokes or share funny memes, I think that counts as a good day.
Within the week of October the 7th, Micah Goodman, the Israeli philosopher said something that was more prophetic than philosophical. There are two competing goals for Israel – to be loved by the west and feared by its neighbors. In some ways, these goals are mutually exclusive.
We want two things. We want love and we want fear. We want love from the West. We want fear from the Middle East. But here’s the problem, Amanda. There is a zero-sum game between these emotions because here’s how it goes: Everything that we are going to do to restore the fear is going to erode the love. Everything we do that will guarantee that the Middle East is afraid of Israelis, of these crazy, unpredictable Israelis, everything we do in order to build that myth back again is going to make people in the West not like us, not love us.
The other way around, if we try to keep the West loving us and writing songs about us, we will not restore the fear of the Middle East from us. So it’s a zero-sum game. If people are asking questions about what they can do to help us, here’s what you can do: Break the zero-sum game.
And what Goodman meant is the following Don’t force a scenario where we can’t take care of ourselves in order to gain love from you. Allow us to defend ourselves. Allow us to take the agency into our own hands. Allow us to be Zionists. Allow us to stand up for ourselves. Allow us to take care of the business that we need to take care of. Allow us to eliminate the greatest terrorist that was alive today. Allow us to do that. Break the zero-sum game.
Since then Goodman changed the formulation of the zero-sum game to deterrence vs. legitimacy, and for Israelis, they’ve made their decision. They’ve gone for deterrence.
One addendum to these thoughts from Goodman. Perhaps by demonstrating how far they were willing to go, the Sunni Muslims and the west will come to maybe not love Israel more, but have a bit more respect.
Nevertheless, wherever anyone stands on assassinations or where you stand on whether fear or love should be the priority or whether deterrence or legitimacy should win the day, I will always believe that it’s about the education. The head of the snake may have been killed, but if the educational worldviews remain the same, who knows, maybe the next leader of Hezbollah will be more extreme than Nasrallah. Maybe. But maybe there will be a moderating force within Iran and Hezbollah that says, enough is enough. Israel is here to stay, and we will put down our guns and make peace.
And so we pray.