Has the death of Hezbollah’s leader brought Israel any closer to victory?

Shortly after Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the UN in New York on Friday, in which he claimed that his country “yearns for peace”, the Israeli air force launched a devastating airstrike on a building housing Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Today, Hezbollah confirmed that Nasrallah was killed in the attack, along with several other of the group’s commanders.

Unlike references 40 years ago to the IRA’s grandiosely self-titled “general staff”, treating Hezbollah’s forces as an organised military makes sense, even as that military hierarchy seems to be in the process of decapitation.

Nasrallah had become a hate figure for Israelis – a modern Hitler hiding in his bunker. Until now, the Israelis had shied away from targeting him personally, probably for fear that his surviving lieutenants would see no reason to restrain their supporters from a mass martyrdom attack on Israel.

Killing Nasrallah is another coup for the IDF, on top of the exploding pager and walkie-talkie attack at the start of this crescendo of crisis. But will a dead Nasrallah collapse resistance, as Hitler’s death led German forces to fold? A headless army soon collapses. But will Hezbollah disintegrate or revert to its guerrilla past? Only a ground incursion by the IDF can test that in practice.

Netanyahu often compares Hamas and Hezbollah to the Nazis. Indeed, on one infamous occasion he claimed it was the grand mufti of Jerusalem who had persuaded Hitler to launch the Holocaust against occupied Europe’s Jews – as though the murderously antisemitic Nazi leader needed advice!

But Netanyahu is right to say that the Islamic militants reject the right of Israel to exist – and they will appeal to the IDF’s way of war since 7 October to justify their “denialism”. The Israeli prime minister also has a point that the head of the Palestine Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has called for the UN to expel Israel, making a mockery of his commitment to a “two state” peace deal.

The comparison between the attitudes of Nazis of 80 years ago and today’s militant Islamist enemies of Israel falls down in light of the cruel reality that, after Germany’s capitulation amid the rubble of Hitler’s Reich, most Germans admitted – silently perhaps – that their regime had brought war and destruction on themselves (as well as everyone else).

By contrast Palestinians in particular, but Arabs in general – including their political leaders, as Mahmoud Abbas’s comments at the UN conference show – don’t really accept reconciliation with Israelis, because they see themselves as the victims of 75 years of occupation and expulsion.

Outsiders who condemn excessive, indiscriminate use of military firepower can share Netanyahu’s condemnation of terrorist attacks like the one which took place on 7 October. But Palestinians see it as payback for decades of being beaten down.

However, like revenge everywhere, it does not discriminate between those who did them harm and guilt by association. Sources such as Al Jazeera frequently echo Lebanese and Palestinian voices, which refer to the Israelis in the north of their country under fire from Hezbollah as “settlers”, delegitimising their rights as if they were the same as the illegal occupants of West Bank settlements.

Until Israelis can acknowledge that they have spawned some of the grievances that have rallied Palestinian and Shiite Lebanese support for terrorist attacks on them – and unless Arabs can accept Israel’s right to exist and the need to moderate their opposition – resistance will revive among the teenagers bloodied in the last months.

Israel has repeatedly shown that it knows how to defeat its enemies, but it has yet to show them it has a strategy to persuade them to accept defeat. As much as their rhetoric may suggest they believe otherwise, 2024 is not 1945.