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Killing charisma.. When does assassinating leaders make a real strategic difference? | policy

Killing Charisma.. When Does Assassinating Leaders Make A Real Strategic Difference? | Policy


Regardless of the success of the Assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, what is most important about this type of assassination lies in the level of the strategic difference it makes in political and military transformations. The assassination of a central leader may be an event that leads to strategic changes, or it may be a tactical operational event, and this is related to the level of transformations.

In the course of revolutions and states there is this and that. In Israel and the United States of America – they are pAThey are two ancient schools of political assassination – they are fully aware of the level of transformations that certain assassinations may cause at a critical moment in time. But Israel's complex in its dealings with cohesive ideological and ideological movements is that political assassination did not succeed in making the strategic difference it made with other movements and countries through assassinations.

The Hamas movement represents one of the basic nodes in the Israeli security mentality, in terms of the intensity of first-line assassinations, and there have been no strategic shifts or deviations that produce internal currents in the movement that accept the relationship with Israel. However, there are many examples of Israel's success in leading strategic transformations through assassinations.

It seems that when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the leaders of his security services considered that the assassination in Beirut “if successful, it will change the shape of the Middle East,” calling it a “new order,” he was haunted by what Israel was able to do to the Palestine Liberation Organization by re-engineering its existence through assassination. The organized politician who neutralized historical leaders and replaced them with leaders with the specifications required for the stage that moved them from one square to another square that is completely different from what they grew up with. But it is a misplaced comparison.

In contemporary history, there have been assassinations that led to a radical shift in favor of the occupier. When Russia assassinated the Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov in 2005, this marked the end of the era of the Chechen rebellion, and the installation of a new pro-Russian leader, who transformed Chechnya from an enemy into a strategic ally that represented the human resource for the Russian army.

Israel also excelled in engineering internal transformations in the Palestine Liberation Organization through a series of selected assassinations since the 1970s, which led to the neutralization of a certain type of leaders and paved the way for the control of other leaders who facilitated the passage of the Oslo Accords.

This also includes the difference made by the assassination of the late President Yasser Arafat, and the fundamental change in the approach to power after the current President Mahmoud Abbas took office. Israel does not consider political assassination successful unless it leads to such transformations, otherwise it remains a tactical operational event.

Returning to the Hamas complex, despite the numerical density of the assassinations of the first row of its leaders, from the founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to the head of its political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, and his deputy, Saleh Al-Arouri, and among them a long series of the first row, this did not bring about systematic transformations in the movement, and thus the impact of the assassinations was on Hamas carried out a limited operational measure linked to rearranging organizational papers and nothing more, while for others it was the cause of an internal coup and a radical change in paths.

Therefore, the experience of transformations in the Palestine Liberation Organization cannot be dismissed as a result of assassinations of forces such as Hamas or Hezbollah. The main reason for this is that the internal differences in these forces are not at the level of ideology, view of the conflict, or method, but rather are limited to the level of tactics that can be used to deal with within the framework of one school, in addition to other organizational factors, the most important of which is the connection to the idea and not to the person, no matter how big he is. Charisma and influence.

When the former Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Ali Mustafa, was assassinated (2001), the Popular Front was at a crossroads between two approaches in electing its new Secretary-General, embodied in two different poles: the first was represented by the late Abdel Rahim Mallouh, who was classified as being closest to the path of the Palestinian Authority. And in great harmony with it, the second was represented by its current Secretary-General, the prisoner Ahmed Saadat.

The bases of the Popular Front were aware that they were facing two different approaches, so internal polarization was resolved by the election of Saadat, giving priority to continuing the line of resistance and revenge. This was followed shortly after Saadat's election by his supervision of the assassination of Israeli Minister Rehavam Ze'evi, and the Front has maintained its approach until today. This is also repeated in the case of the prisoner and leader of the Fatah movement, Marwan Barghouti.

Unlike all the prisoners, the reason for Israel’s refusal to include him in the exchange deals, including the Shalit deal, was not a security reason, but rather a political reason, because his release may bring about radical changes in the leadership of the Authority, and the Fatah movement is neutralizing leaders whose continued presence at this stage is deemed necessary by the American and Israeli administrations.

But does this disparity exist in the resistance forces currently? An objective reading of the level of trends in these forces does not indicate the existence of these areas of disparity. The assassination of the head of the political bureau of the Hamas movement was followed by the unanimous election of Yahya Sinwar, which means that there is only one school in Hamas, which is the armed confrontation that Sinwar started.

In this case, the assassination has no strategic value. Likewise, the Israeli army’s statement that “targeting Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah would change the shape of the Middle East” is an unrealistic conclusion and a misplaced analogy.

Military analyst Alon Ben David, who is close to the leadership of the occupation army, believes that “the policy of assassination leads to counterproductive results, as it works to expand the circle of violence, and will not eliminate those he described as terrorists who will be replaced by others. In the best cases, some organizations may intervene in the situation.” Chaos for a period of time if the target is a central figure in an organization whose existence depends on this character, before it recovers and perhaps becomes more powerful and organized.

The best example Ben David gives of this is Hezbollah, commenting: “When Abbas Moussawi, the former Secretary-General of Hezbollah, was assassinated and Nasrallah took office, the party transformed from a small group into an organized army.” Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist, also points out in his encyclopedic book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations that “the policy of assassinations has succeeded in removing specific direct threats, but it has failed.” In generating a long-term solution to the Israeli security dilemma.

This applies to countries with stable institutions as well. The success of the attempt to assassinate Trump, for example, weeks ago would not have made a difference in the policies of the United States of America, which is governed by a deep-rooted state that makes the difference between its president being a Democrat or a Republican, is whether you drink a cup of tea with or without sugar.

Returning to the incident of the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, Israel is betting in the logic of “changing the face of the Middle East” and by calling his assassination a “new regime” that even if Hezbollah is able to rearrange its cards internally, it will be difficult for it to control the context. ; As a result of the absence of the charismatic leader whose charisma played an important role in convincing his base to go into battle, his continuity in the battle will therefore be more difficult.

This makes us point out that Israel does not view operational success as a strategic success unless it leads to achieving the required strategic difference, and therefore a single statement from Hezbollah indicating the party’s continued adherence to the same positions that link the northern front to the Gaza front, would directly mean that the assassination – Even if it is serious, it will remain within the scope of local tactical action, despite its seriousness not being diminished, and it will not turn into a strategic success for Israel.

The opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera Network.



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Killing charisma.. When does assassinating leaders make a real strategic difference? | policy

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