Australia / Israel Review

Hezbollah is hopefully on the ropes in the wake of Israel’s apparently successful campaign against it, and especially the elimination of key leaders, starting first and foremost with Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, killed on September 29. There has been a lot of public comment on what Hezbollah is, and who Nasrallah was, some of it informative, other examples less so. 

Yet one aspect that is seldom talked about is the blatant antisemitism that Hezbollah and Nasrallah spread – just as Hezbollah’s patron, the Iranian regime does, as this column has previously documented. Indeed, the New York Times’ obituary of Nasrallah falsely claimed he supported a “Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews, and Christians.” In fact, Nasrallah has repeatedly made it clear he loathes Jews, not just “Zionists”, and demands the Jews of Israel be either killed or ethnically cleansed.

Quotes from Nasrallah illustrate this – and symbolise the antisemitic sewage coming out of Hezbollah and its outlets such as al-Manar TV, on a regular basis. 

Nasrallah himself emphasised he was targeting Jews, not just Israelis, in one of his speeches on Sept. 13, 1997:

If we search the entire globe for a more cowardly, lowly, weak and frail individual in his spirit, mind, ideology and religion, we will never find anyone like the Jew – and I am not saying the Israeli: we have to know the enemy we are fighting.

A few years later, in October 2002, he made it clear that he believed God had a plan for all the Jews to gather in Israel so that Muslims can destroy them:

But I tell you, there are signs to guide us in the Islamic prophecies and not just the Jewish prophecies indicating that this Israeli state will be established and that the Jews from the entire world will come to occupied Palestine. But this will not be done for their antichrist to rule. God Almighty wanted to save you the trouble of finding them all over the world. They will gather up in one place and there will be a decisive battle…

In a previous speech, on April 9, 2000, while calling Israel a “cancerous tumour” responsible for all the “major disasters of the region,” he also said he was open to the mere ethnic cleansing of Israel’s Jews: 

Let the Yemenite Jews return to Yemen, the Moroccan Jews to Morocco, the Ethiopian Jews to Ethiopia, the European Jews to Europe, and the American Jews to America.

He also said coexistence with Jews was impossible because scripture says they are evil:

Anyone who reads the Koran and the holy writings of the monotheistic religions sees what they did to the prophets, and what acts of madness and slaughter the Jews carried out throughout history… Anyone who reads these texts cannot think of co-existence with them.

The same speech made it clear that Holocaust denial was also part of Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s worldview:

The Jews invented the legend of the Nazi atrocities… They can speak of fabricated or exaggerated massacres that occurred during the Second World War, but we must not forget the massacres that they committed against us and the peoples of the region which are documented and proven…

But of course, we do not need speeches to prove the essential antisemitism of Nasrallah and Hezbollah, because there is concrete proof – in 1994, Hezbollah, led by Nasrallah, bombed the AMIA building in Buenos Aires, the main Jewish community centre in Argentina, killing 85 people and injuring more than 300. It doesn’t get more antisemitic than that. 

This antisemitism needs to be acknowledged because it shows why those who assume diplomatic compromise and peaceful coexistence could occur if only Israel showed more goodwill and “restraint” are ignoring the reality of Hezbollah’s – and Hamas’, and the Iranian regime’s – entrenched beliefs that make this impossible. 

The PA’s contradictory take on the October 7 anniversary

A theme this column has pursued over recent months is documenting how the rhetoric coming out of the supposedly more moderate Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah appears all but indistinguishable from what Hamas has been saying. So here are a couple of examples of some rather contradictory things official PA sources had to say about October 7 in the lead-up to the first anniversary of Hamas’ murderous attacks.

A ruling party official spoke on official PA-TV to present October 7 as a memorial day to commemorate how Palestinians, not Israelis, were victimised. Fatah Revolutionary Council member Tayseer Nasrallah told PA-TV (Sept. 22): 

“[On October 7] we will commemorate the anniversary of the massacre, the new Nakba, the disaster that befell the Palestinian people, on the first anniversary. The Palestinians worldwide… need to be the spearhead of the global activity to aid the Palestinian people and of the effort to commemorate this massacre, this Nakba.” (Source: Palestinian Media Watch). 

By contrast, another official from the same Fatah party, led by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, called to celebrate October 7 as a great victory that united Palestinians in “resistance” in an interview with a pro-Hezbollah Lebanese outlet, adding “God bless it”. Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki on al-Manar TV (Sept. 14): 

October 7 has shuffled the cards, God bless it… Those who are abroad are taking part in demonstrations, and the people here are taking part in this glorious feat, either with weapons or without… It used to be forbidden to carry weapons or even a knife. But now, Allah be praised, we hear that young people are erupting – despite decisions from above – and they are acting as if we had the resources to fight that country [Israel]… I thank Allah that our people are steadfast and that our people have faith in victory, no matter how great the losses are.