US Moves Blocking Gaza Peace Puts Hezbollah Under 'Tremendous Pressure'
19:12 GMT 05.11.2023 (Updated: 09:23 GMT 05.12.2023)
© AP Photo / Nabil al-Jurani
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From the first hours of the October 7 crisis, US officials have tried to goad Hezbollah into joining Hamas’ war against Israel to give neocons the pretext they need to bomb Iran. Political analyst Ajamu Baraka told Sputnik why Hezbollah has so far been able to resist the pressure, and why doing so is becoming more and more difficult with time.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah gave a fiery speech Friday condemning Israel for its war in Gaza and accusing the United States of bearing full responsibility for the crisis.
“America is entirely responsible for the ongoing war on Gaza and its people, and Israel is simply a tool of execution,” Nasrallah said in a speech in Beirut. The US “impedes a ceasefire and the end of the aggression,” he added.
Emphasizing that Hamas’ surprise October 7 incursion into Israel was the result of a “100 percent Palestinian decision,” Nasrallah warned that Tel Aviv would make the biggest mistake in its history if it attacked Lebanon, and said that Hezbollah is tying down a third of the Israeli military, even if back-and-forth attacks haven’t crossed the threshold into a full-scale war. “If Israel continues to hit our civilians, I say with constructive ambiguity: all options are on the table on the Lebanese front,” he said.
Nasrallah went on to dismiss the positioning of US warships in the region in what the Pentagon has characterized as a “signal” to Hezbollah and “other actors” not to get involved in the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. “Threats against us are pointless. Your naval forces in the Mediterranean do not frighten us and have never frightened us. These ships you threaten us with, we have prepared a response to them,” Nasrallah said.
Separately on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Tel Aviv to speak with Israeli officials and give an update on the war.
“Days after Hamas’s attack on October 7, I came to Israel, followed soon thereafter by President Biden, to make clear that as long as the United States stands, Israel will never stand alone. Today, in my fourth visit to Israel since October 7, I reiterated that in all my discussions with Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, the security cabinet. I reiterated and made clear our support for Israel’s right to defend itself, indeed, its obligation to defend itself,” Blinken said.
Blaming Hamas for the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and accusing the militia of “cynically and monstrously” using people as “human shields,” Blinken urged Israel to show restraint in its military operations to “minimize civilian deaths while still achieving its objectives of finding and finishing Hamas terrorists and their infrastructure of violence.”
Hezbollah Facing Tremendous Pressure
“I think the Palestinian resistance and Hamas in particular are hoping that there will be a more aggressive response, a deeper penetration into or an attempt at least to address the presence of Israeli soldiers along the border and actually in parts of Lebanon,” international human rights activist, organizer and political analyst Ajamu Baraka told Sputnik, commenting on key points of Nasrallah’s address.
“I think there may be some dissatisfaction with that, but I think Hezbollah is very much concerned about the domestic situation in Lebanon and would like to avoid a deeper commitment since the situation that they are facing and the situation facing Lebanese citizens is so unstable right now,” the observer added, pointing to Lebanon’s years’ old political and economic crisis, which has threatened at points to explode into a new round of sectarian violence.
The Gaza crisis “is putting significant pressure on Hezbollah to become more aggressive, not just from Hamas, but from elements within Lebanese society and from elements across the so-called Middle East,” Baraka said.
“People are really outraged by what they see. Many people are concluding that with the diplomatic channels being blocked by the US – and the criticism that [Nasrallah] raised was in fact true, that when you have the US blocking any attempts to come to a ceasefire or to have a more effective humanitarian corridor, it’s quite clear that the US is fully implicated in the slaughter of Palestinians. So it’s putting tremendous pressure on everyone to act, and to act, at this point in a military fashion since the diplomatic and peaceful channels seem to have been preempted,” the observer emphasized.
Baraka expects to see “political blowback” against Washington across the world and inside the US itself, suggesting that America’s credibility has been heavily damaged through its stalwart support for Israel throughout the present crisis. “In terms of the rest of the real world, outside of the 10 percent that represents Europe and the US, it’s quite clear to everyone who the real perpetrators are in this conflict, and in most of the conflicts that have occurred since the end of World War II. It is in fact the US and the US empire, along with their vassals in Western Europe, first attempting to maintain their colonial possessions, and then secondly to consolidate and expand the power of Western imperialist capital through war, subversion, assassination, sanctions and all of the tools they have readily available to in fact do that,” he said.
Today, the observer noted, even inside the US itself public opinion is starting “to catch up with the rest of the world,” and “people are beginning to understand that they in fact live in a rogue state and that they are not the good guys, and they definitely are not innocent. That’s some of the points that were made by the leader of Hezbollah. Unfortunately, some of that sounds very, very accurate.”
The Gaza crisis may turn into an important “turning point” in the US’s justifications for empire, Baraka believes, since it robs Washington of a key tool previously used to justify attempts to set up a global “rules-based international order.” Today, he said, the US move to give a “green light to the slaughter” in Gaza robs the US of the ability to “frame their policies” in “positive humanitarian terms.”
4 November 2023, 19:00 GMT
“It means that we have crossed a threshold, so that the US, in not being able to effectively use these ideological tools, will find it in their interest to just replicate what the Israelis are doing and engage in the most horrendous violent activity, and not caring about the response, if the response is not a response in which there’s a real exercise of power that can constrain them,” Baraka warned.
As for Blinken’s trip to Tel Aviv, Baraka suggested that the secretary was merely playing the role of running “PR interference to buy time so that the Israelis can continue with their military operation,” which the analyst stressed cannot succeed because the resistance is not Hamas, but the Palestinian people themselves.
5 November 2023, 12:32 GMT
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