By Julia Kassem
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Using 85 tons of explosives, the regime jets tore the ground following a week-long genocidal campaign from southern Lebanon to Beirut to uproot the resistance that had given the Zionist entity its first taste of defeat in the ‘90s, ultimately ushering in the “Era of Victories.”
Sayyed Nasrallah rung in, for us, the “era of victories,” and instilled a sense of dignity in a community that had been historically marginalized, and a people that had internalized the defeat of Arabs in the face of the Israeli regime.
The great leader taught the world that victory could be attained despite the modest means of those resisting the well-funded and equipped occupations in the world, giving, for the first time, a sense of pride to the people who had felt disillusioned for years.
Sayyed hailed from a working-class family originally from Bazourieh, Tyre, the eldest of 9 siblings. Before the civil war displaced them to the south, he lived with his family in Bourj Hammoud. His father was a simple fruit cart seller.
He was greatly inspired by the struggle of Sayyed Musa al-Sadr, the original leader of the Amal revolutionary Islamic movement, and had the honor of studying under the tutelage of Sayyed Baqir al-Sadr, traveling to Najaf, Iraq at age 16 to pursue advanced Islamic studies.
The martyred Hezbollah leader was nurtured in the cradle of the growing revolutionary Islamic movement, which culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran led by Imam Khomeini.
Sayyed Nasrallah rose through the ranks to assume the leadership role at the young age of 32, the same number of years he blessed his people as leader of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah before his martyrdom on the fateful evening of September 27.
He was the youngest member of the Shura Council at the time and was known to possess charisma and weight much beyond his years. He was ushered in as leader following the martyrdom of his predecessor, the great leader Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi.
Sayyed Abbas’s martyrdom in 1992, when Israeli military helicopters fired at his convoy, assassinating him, his wife, and his little son, paved the way for Sayyed Nasrallah’s ascension.
At the funeral of the former Hezbollah leader, Sayyed Nasrallah reaffirmed that the enemy had tried to “kill our spirit of resistance and destroy our will for jihad,” but Sayyed Abbas’s blood would “continue to simmer in our veins, only strengthening our determination to move forward and intensifying our enthusiasm to pursue the path.”
He described the United States as “the primary enemy of this nation and the Greatest Satan of all,” and the Israeli regime as its “cancerous growth that must be eradicated,” vowing to never relinquish “a single grain” of Palestine’s sand.
This was in defiance to the Israeli headlines that sought to exploit a sense of defeat from Sayyed Abbas’s martyrdom, saying Yasir Arafat was next and gleefully claiming to have killed the movement of resistance against the scourge of Zionism.
In honoring the concept of martyrdom to the truest extent, Sayyed Nasrallah said in 1995 that “a movement whose leader is martyred will never be defeated,” drawing the clear differences between the loss of a leader and the loss of leadership, and honoring the path of revolutionary Islam set forth by martyred leaders from the time of Imam Hussein (AS) to the contemporary times – the losses of Musa al-Sadr, Sayyed Baqr al-Sadr, Shaheed Beheshti and Imam Khomeini.
As Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Arafat capitulated to US-Israeli demands following the 1993 Oslo Accords, nearly obliterating the Palestinian cause, Sayyed Nasrallah’s Hezbollah carried the core principles of the Palestinian Thawabet and resisted the Zionist entity and shredded the path of normalization the US and Israel had laid out for the region.
Sayyed Nasrallah-led Hezbollah inflicted successive defeats on the Zionist entity, fighting off the Israeli occupation in the 1993 and 1996 sieges on Lebanon, culminating in the liberation of 2000. The martyrdom of his son, Hadi, in 1997 strengthened Sayyed’s resolve and set Israel on an inevitable course of collapse.
Hezbollah remained a thorn in the eye of the Zionist entity, inflicting another major defeat on it in 2006. Since then, Sayyed Nasrallah didn’t rest one day, with the resistance growing stronger domestically and regionally. It came to be recognized as a force to reckon with.
On August 3, 2006, just weeks before Hezbollah’s victory in the July war, Sayyed Nasrallah reaffirmed that the Zionist entity would never be able to defeat either the Lebanese or Palestinian resistance movements, despite destroying their homes, their people, because the “resistance is not a conventional army,” and is “first and foremost, the people.”
Sayyed Nasrallah united the Arab world after the victory in the July War, proving that the brutal arrogance of imperialism could be overcome with unity and brotherhood. He worked to firmly hold together political unity within Lebanon, on the principle of sovereignty against occupation, and strengthening the regional and international alliances on the principle of resistance against American/Israeli occupation.
After the 2006 war, the US set its sights on destroying Syria, viewed as the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance’s lifeline of material support. Sayyed remained firm in resisting the dirty war against Damascus, disregarding the droves of public opinion and sedition at play in dividing the Resistance Axis as well as Muslim and Arab peoples.
Despite the trials and struggles Hezbollah endured in the Syrian war and emerged victorious and successful in preventing the Washington-engineered collapse of the Arab nation.
Sayyed Nasrallah’s solidarity extended regionally as well as globally, always in his messages identifying US imperialism as the primary root of aggression and arrogance worldwide in the spirit of Imam Khomeini’s identification of it as the Great Satan.
He never hesitated to use this as an opportunity to extend his solidarity globally and denounce the United States as illegitimate as well, drawing parallels in a number of speeches to Israel’s ethnic cleansing project to European settlers’ genocide against Native Americans and subsequent enslavement of Blacks.
His analysis of oppression crossed religious and racial lines. In 2017, he slammed the US administration’s confinement of Central American migrant children in cages, a practice taking place during Donald Trump’s administration that didn’t cease under Biden.
In 2018, Sayyed Nasrallah called the Kafala system of Lebanon an ugly “system of slavery” in the homes of the middle class and the country’s nouveau riche, where imported maids from Southeast Asia and Africa worked as underpaid, mistreated servants in Lebanese homes.
While having massive success in fostering a sense of national unity, Sayyed Nasrallah came under additional challenges amidst the US-engineered economic crisis in Lebanon and subsequent color revolution, where American and European-backed narratives, whether in billionaire-funded “independent” media or through NGOs, attempted to break the domestic unity coalition and replace the Lebanese government with an unelected American and World Bank technocracy, falsely pitting Sayyed Nasrallah as a supporter of corruption and Lebanon’s domestic problems.
These same sponsors attempted to usher in themes and discourses of normalization in Lebanon in the template of Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan.
The subsequent economic devastation in Lebanon, bringing about the most aggressive waves of poverty alongside a collapse of the banking sector, allowed the US to attempt to stoke the flames of the civil war by turning toward Hezbollah’s old domestic foes, like the US and Saudi-backed far-right Lebanese Forces militia, against the party, sometimes to the point of armed clashes, such as the October 2021 Tayouneh massacre.
Sayyed Nasrallah held firm and pulled both his party and allies to exercise extreme restraint in the face of these provocations, addressing the US implicitly as he issued firm warnings to Lebanese Forces leader and civil war-era criminal Samir Geagea.
The US-engineered economic hybrid war on Lebanon allowed a wave of espionage to once again infect Lebanon at unprecedented rates, as the Israeli regime took advantage of the engineered crisis to recruit an unprecedented number of spy networks in Lebanon to carry out various espionage activities against Hezbollah.
On October 7, 2023, Hezbollah came to the immediate defense and support of Palestine at the outset of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, conducting daily, focused operations against Israeli military sites, eventually expanding their range of fire over 70 kilometers past the Lebanese border and forcing the regime to redirect over two-third of its forces against them in the north as Sayyed refused to halt operations as long as the genocide on Gaza continued.
Israel, sensing defeat that was existential, and unable to fulfill one military objective in Gaza, whether it was defeating Hamas or recovering captives, turned its sights again on Lebanon.
With Netanyahu desperate to prolong his fledgling political career, and save face given his failures against the Palestinian resistance, he entered a suicide mission of ordering decapitation strikes against Hezbollah leaders, beginning with the assassination of Fouad Shukr.
The regime justified this through a false flag attack on Majdal Shams, killing and butchering Druze children in a soccer field in the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights and falsely blaming it on the Lebanese resistance, setting a destructive turning point in the orientation of his genocidal war’s recalibrated objectives.
Unable to fight on the ground against Hezbollah, Israel adopted novel terrorist measures against Lebanon by detonating thousands of pagers used by people in Hezbollah as well as doctors and civil workers in public areas, following up with terror bombings of whole buildings where senior Hezbollah leaders were either meeting or lived, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians, many children, in the process.
But his people held firm, carrying his message and proudly declaring, amidst their displacement, injuries, and massacres, that they would not leave Gaza and the path of resistance.
Following the assassination of Shukr, Sayyed Nasrallah forewarned that he would not stay in this world for long, prepared for his ultimate fate, devising procedures for preparation.
Just as Imam Hussein (AS) preserved Islam through his martyrdom in the desert plains of Karbala, Sayyed Nasrallah honored Imam Hussein’s martyrdom by sacrificing his life for the Palestinian cause and the preservation of Al-Quds, with a community of followers behind him refusing to abandon the Palestinian cause as they sacrificed their homes and lives on this path.
“This bastard, Israel, son of the bastard, America, has put me between being killed or accepting humiliation. I will choose martyrdom,” he said in his immortal August speech commemorating the martyrdom of his close comrade, Shukr.
The great leader lifted the spirits of hundreds of millions with his powerful speeches and charisma, giving dignity to the oppressed and hope where people felt despair and clarity where enemies sought to sow division and confusion.
Today, we mourn the martyrdom of a leader, but we don’t despair. The Qur’an was revealed when the resolve of believers began to falter at the mere rumor of the Prophet’s (PBUH) martyrdom that he is no more than a messenger; others have gone before him if he were to die or be killed, would you regress into disbelief? (3:144)
Perfecting the aspects of revolutionary Islam to his practice in leadership, Sayyed Nasrallah raised a generation through his speeches, wisdom and shrewd analysis, and grew and strengthened the coordination of the resistance, arming generations to come with the inextinguishable weapon of revolutionary spirit and firmed resolve over martyrdom.
At last, at the age of 64, Sayyed Nasrallah attained martyrdom in order to preserve the cause of the Islamic nation and Palestine and pave the way for the end of the Israeli occupation.
Julia Kassem is a Beirut-based writer and commentator, whose work appears in PressTV, Al-Akhbar, and Al-Mayadeen English. She also appears on Press TV's Expose show.
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