Hamas and Hezbollah’s Political Spectacles
A Birdseye view of Hassan Nassrallah’s funeral. Credit: AP
On Gazan landscapes of genocide, domicide, and educide, Hamas emerged, as if from the rubble, after the ceasefire to deliver showstopping releases of Israeli hostages. To the loud cheers of thousands of spectators, one group of hostages after the other climbs the podium, by turns smiling, waving to the crowds, and thanking their captors.
On Lebanese landscapes, last Sunday the 23rd, Hezbollah, whose resistance Israel severely tested and whose communities it hammered and displaced by the hundreds of thousands, threw a showstopping funeral for its martyred leader, Hassan Nassrallah. In unison, the huge mass of supporters chanted, fists raised high, labaika ya Nassrallah, we are at your command, Nassrallah.
The stage was practically all Israel’s for the duration of the two-front war. You couldn’t possibly outdo––and who with an ounce of humanity would want to?––genocide, bunker busting bombs, assassinations, and exploding pagers playing to a worldwide audience.
It became, then, imperative for the two resistance movements to mount political spectacles as a response. Since Israel’s declared aim was to spectacularly wipe out its two enemies, theirs was to spectacularly deny it precisely that. Facts matter, of course; their survival being one of them.
It’s expected that commentators would obsesses about Hamas and Hezbollah’s obvious messaging. Their resilience aside, the two resistances took a very serious pounding, and their people have had to endure unimaginable suffering. A show of strength was therefore necessary.
But perhaps, by such impressive curations, the Palestinian and Lebanese hegemons were less concerned with a display of force than with signaling their enduring presence at a time in which overt political dominance can no longer be theirs. In Gaza, it has long been evident that Hamas is rather keen to cede the formal levers of power. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has relinquished the political lead it has held for two decades. They both do so for practically the same reasons: extreme postwar local distress and external animus.
It was, therefore, left for the two parties to demonstrate heft at a moment when the pain and exposure are very acute and insulation only skin-deep.
For their diehards, the spectacles were, no doubt, very reassuring. For the rest, they were anywhere between provocative and puzzling. Not surprising. The two movements were loudly affirming their presence as they discreetly prepare to exit. When the stage is set up to accomplish two such diametrically opposed goals, confusion is very likely to set in. The choreographers tend to overdo the theatrics to crude levels, and the emphasis on the community’s ‘asb, its distinct identity and purpose, is liable to grate on outsiders and become easy fodder for adversaries.
All of which has served to distract us from the much larger state of play in the region. It’s one of those very interesting coincidences of history that Hezbollah and Hamas decided in 2005-2006 to be both non-state and state actors: to resist and govern at one and the same time. The first, which had members in the Lebanese parliament since 1992, entered the government in 2005; the second ran in and won the 2006 parliamentary elections. Very quickly, they both began to wield huge political sway, thinking that governance brought more protections than risks. The tensions between the two roles, in very difficult political environments, would in fact prove very costly to them and their Gazan and Lebanese habitats.
So now they decamp away from the center of politics. But in this ever heaving Levant, the opportunities are always presenting themselves. And when they do, they invariably come courtesy of Israel. On multiple fronts, Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, and Jordanian, the Jewish state appears to be aiming for a new order framed by expansion and fragmentation. The methods are outright genocide, ethnic cleansing, invasions, conquests, and occupations of yet more land and people.
Fertile soil for resistance!
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On Another Note
Correction to the narration: In citing Pankaj Mishra’s seminal essay, “The Shoah After Gaza,” I mistakenly skipped the 2 in 2003 or 2004. I’ll blame it on a very rough week. The essay was actually published in March 2024.
On February 12, the editor of Foreign Policy, Ravi Agrawal sat down with Pankaj Mishra, one of the world’s preeminent public intellectuals, to discuss Mishra’s latest book, The World After Gaza: A History.
The interview is unmissable. Elevated conversations that are rich in nuance and sensitivity are a rare occurrence nowadays. Agrawal’s with Mishra is one such outstanding exception.
Here’s an excerpt from one of Mishra’s interventions:
“…as a writer, one thing I can do is respond to that moment by retreating into books, into sentences, into thinking, into making sense of it on the page. That was the initial impulse behind the book.
I was seeking to answer several very baffling questions. How did a nation founded to house the survivors of the Holocaust end up committing such atrocities on another population of stateless people? This is one of those large historical questions that has to be answered in all its complexity, whether that’s moral or geopolitical. We tend only to look at the history of the Middle East or Palestinian history or the history of European Jews. But I think there are larger moral questions lurking there.”
Have a listen!