Thinking Citizen Blog —Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, The “North” Evacuated And In Flames
Thinking Citizen Blog — Monday is Foreign Policy Day
Today’s Topic: Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, the “North” evacuated and in flames
To be honest, I had never heard of Hassan Nasrallah until this week. I had no ide that 70,000 Israelis had been evacuated from “the North.” If I was so utterly clueless, how clueless is the rest of America and the world? Who cares? Who should? What should be done? What are you doing to solve this problem for yourself?
Today a few excerpts from a recent article on Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, and “the North.”
Plus some background from Wikipedia.
What do you know about Lebanon, Hezbollah, Nasrallah, and the “north” of Israel that the rest of us should know but probably don’t?
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
“NORTHERN ISRAEL IS ON FIRE,” 70,000 ISRAELIS HAVE BEEN EVACUATED, 21,500 ACRES HAVE BEEN TORCHED
1. “The north.” The term hangs over Israel like a black cloud. It conveys danger and hardship with no hope on the horizon. War with Hezbollah, Israelis agree, is inevitable. The question isn’t if but when, and the answer from political and military leaders is always “not yet.” But timing a war risks becoming a fool’s errand when the enemy has already opened fire.” (Elliot Kaufman, WSJ, first link below)
2. “All eyes have been on Rafah but we need our eyes on Hezbollah.The world has barely noticed how Iran’s Lebanese proxy militia has depopulated the north of Israel. “The country has been shrunk,” he says. Israel has evacuated some 70,000 civilians. they watch every day on the news, helpless, as Hezbollah pounds their homes. Who could believe that Hezbollah has fired more than 5,000 missiles since October 7 without precipitating a major Israeli attack in reply.”
3. “As the Gaza war winds down, domestic pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to defeat Hezbollah is mounting. Israelis want their homes and their country back, but the stakes are high: “Building will fall in Tel Aviv is a line I hear over and over. This war would be like nothing Israelis have seen before. Mr. Netanyahu, far from his caricature in the foreign press, has earned a reputation in Israel for being cautious with military force.”
NB: Hezbollah is estimated to have between 100,000 and 200,000 missiles.
HEZBOLLAH (“Party of Allah”) — “a Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and paramilitary group — with an army of 100,000 according to its leader Hassan Nasrallah. This would put it on par with the Lebanese Army. Hezbollah is a state within a state. Below — the flag of Hezbollah. (Wikipedia, fourth link below)
1. “Hezbollah was established by Lebanese clerics primarily to fight the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It adopted the model set out by Ayatollah Khomeini after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the party’s founders adopted the name “Hezbollah” as chosen by Khomeini. Since then, close ties have developed between Iran and Hezbollah.”
2. “The organization was created with the support of 1,500 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) instructors and aggregated a variety of Lebanese Shia groups into a unified organization to resist the former Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon.”
3. “In the 2018 Lebanese general election, Hezbollah held 12 seats and its alliance won the election gaining 70 out of 128 seats in the Parliament of Lebanon.”
NB: In the 2022 Lebanese elections, “Hezbollah and their allies lost their parliamentary majority but still won the Parliament speaker election.”
HASSAN NASRALLAH (1960 — ) the expulsion of Israel from southern Lebanon, allied with Bashar Al Assad in the Syrian Civil War, ally of Iran
1. He joined Hezbollah when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and became head of Hezbollah when his predecessor was assassinated by Israeli forces in 1992.
2. Nasrallah “is credited in Lebanon and the Arab world for ending the Israeli occupation of the South of Lebanon, something which has greatly bolstered the party’s political standing within Lebanon.”
3. His eldest son was killed in an Israeli raid in 1997.
Opinion | No Time to Fiddle as Hezbollah Burns Northern Israel
Opinion | When Should Israel Fight Hezbollah?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah
2022 Lebanese general election — Wikipedia
2018 Lebanese general election — Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah
QUOTE OF THE MONTH — Have you made your own Bible yet?
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
Here is a link to the last four years of posts organized by theme: (including the book on foreign policy)
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest or most important thing you learned in the last week, month, or year related to foreign policy.
Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in our life related to foreign policy.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. And to consolidate in your memory something important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is the key to depth of thought.
The prospect of imminent publication, like hanging and final exams, concentrates the mind. A useful life long habit.
