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One day after his surprise appointment as Hezbollah’s new secretary-general, Naim Qassem delivered his inaugural speech from that post—his fourth speech since Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination. Qassem’s latest speech was virtually identical in tone and content to his previous three speeches, seeking to justify Hezbollah’s war effort and the suffering it has brought upon the group’s base and Lebanon and to promise his audience inevitable victory.
The underlying logic behind this repetition may be based on a Lebanese saying: “Al tikrar bit’alam al-hmar,” which translates to “With repetition, even a donkey can learn.” Qassem may seek to drill these themes into his audience’s consciousness, realizing that by maintaining Hezbollah’s hold over their hearts, minds, and grasp on reality, the group will guarantee its post-war regeneration. Qassem’s speeches—as with his predecessor’s—aim to advance this objective by providing grist for Hezbollah’s propaganda mills and other officials’ statements, reinforcing the comprehensive information environment in which the group keeps its base ensconced.
This process also serves as part of Hezbollah’s process—already underway, as demonstrated by the fawning reactions to Qassem’s speech on Al-Manar and Al-Mayadeen—to build a cult of personality around the group’s new secretary-general. This aura was lost with the death of the highly popular Nasrallah, and it was an indispensable ingredient in his ability to frame reality for Hezbollah’s followers.
The speech’s overall theme
Qassem began by framing the current battle with Israel along religious lines, drawing on classical Islamic anti-Judaism. The current battle, he said, could be understood through “what the Qur’an tells us about the experience with the Jews throughout time, [saying] ‘they cannot hurt you but for inflicting malicious harm. If they fight you, they will flee from you, and they will find no help.’” The next verse, which Qassem did not reference, speaks of the Jews collectively being fated for humiliation and dependency on the mercy of others “wherever they go” and “branded with misery” as a “just reward” for “displeasing God.”
Qassem thus promised Hezbollah’s supporters an inevitable victory, bestowed by God, despite the current sacrifices. That is why, he said, Hezbollah had borrowed “from Surat al-Israa, about the Jews ‘if the first of two warnings comes to pass, We sent against you our servants of might [lit. misery], who would ravage your homes. This is a promise that will be fulfilled’”—describing the Babylonian and then Roman destructions of ancient Jewish national polities. So, he said, Hezbollah had chosen to name this war “the Battle of the Mighty Servants,” because the group was divinely promised a similar victory over the Israelis.
Expressing continuity of command and purpose
Qassem then turned to assure his followers that he would be continuing Nasrallah’s path “in all areas—in the political, jihadi, social, and cultural fields.” Hezbollah, therefore, intended to “continue implementing the war plan which he [Nasrallah] set with the resistance’s leadership. We will remain on the path of the war—guided by the established political directions—appropriately responding to the developments in each [phase of the war].”
‘The necessity of war’
Qassem then turned to justifying Hezbollah’s initiation of a fight against Israel on October 8, 2023, by fitting the current conflict into the group’s overall metanarrative—hitting all of the required notes with claims that Israel is evil and predatory, Hezbollah’s initiation of attacks was a necessary defensive measure to repel Israel, and the West and the United States—far from upholding their stated values—are full participants in this war, which is meant to subjugate the entire region. The conclusion Qassem’s audience was intended to derive was that Hezbollah’s arms and actions—far from endangering Lebanese lives—were the only guarantor of safety and freedom in the face of these rapacious powers.
Qassem first claimed that opening a support front for Gaza was vital because Israel’s campaign in the coastal enclave was its gateway to threatening the whole region. Additionally, by doing so, Hezbollah was supporting the party in the right—and it was, therefore, Hezbollah, not its detractors, who had to answer for their lack of action on behalf of Gaza. Hezbollah, after all, was established to confront “the occupation” and its expansionist aims and to liberate land—and supporting Gaza was providing it the opportunity to fulfill its raison d’etre.
In any case, claimed Qassem, Hezbollah did not provoke Israel, which needs no “excuses” to attack. This assertion, he claimed, was demonstrated by its “75 years of killing Palestinians, displacing them, stealing their lands and holy places.” Lebanon too, he alleged, had tasted Israel’s depredations. Israel attacked in 1978 and again in 1982 before there was a Hezbollah, Qassem recounted, and it seized and occupied territory—remaining until it was finally expelled in 2000 by Hezbollah, Amal, and other parties acting on Hezbollah’s golden principle of “Army, People, Resistance.”
Israel’s occupation proved that its south Lebanon security zone wasn’t defensive, but a preparatory step to settle Lebanon and control it from within. Qassem’s narrative downplayed the fact that the Israeli incursions were prompted by Palestinian factions transforming south Lebanon into a launchpad for attacks against Israel—and the security zone was made necessary by Hezbollah’s rise to create a new threat to northern Israel amidst the 1982 invasion.
Qassem then flipped UN Security Council Resolution 1701—which requires Lebanon to distance Hezbollah north of the Litani River, disarm the group, and then prevent its regeneration—on its head. He alleged that Israel’s continued reconnaissance overflights in Lebanese airspace, prompted by Lebanon’s refusal to implement its obligations under the resolution, demonstrated Israel’s aggressive intentions and nature.
Qassem claimed that, in any case, Hezbollah was only preempting an imminent Israeli military action, a claim previously made by Nasrallah as well. “On October 11, meaning four days after Al-Aqsa Flood,” Qassem said, ignoring that this occurred three days after Hezbollah began attacking Israel without provocation, “there was a serious discussion inside the Israeli Entity with the Americans to fight a war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.” “They figured they might as well, given the unlimited American support [Israel received],” he alleged, once again trying to stoke his base’s enmity towards the United States.
The problem with Qassem’s narrative is that it is based on a New York Times report that was published on October 20, 2023—12 days after Hezbollah had commenced its attacks. Furthermore, the report addressed secret Israeli governmental discussions to which Hezbollah was not privy in real-time and could not have otherwise discovered before publication. Qassem also falsely claimed this planned Israeli attack was part of a joint plan with the United States—even though Washington was consistently pressuring Israel not to expand its war effort into Lebanon and has continued to put the brakes on Israeli operations there.
As further proof, Qassem pointed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2023 UN General Assembly speech hailing the advent of a “new Middle East” as a result of then-ongoing Israeli-Saudi normalization talks. He also sought to demonstrate Israel’s nefarious designs on Lebanon by pointing to obscure groups calling for settling southern Lebanon while falsely claiming these calls were made by Israeli officials.
“So, do not say Israel was abiding [by Resolution 1701] and we harassed it,” Qassem insisted. “Do not all these facts demonstrate Israel’s aggressive intentions? Should we have waited for them to implement their project, and on their timing?” he asked rhetorically, nevertheless answering, “Thank God for inspiring us to open the support front … and thus demolishing” Israel’s plans. “We have the capability to foil Israel’s project through the Resistance,” Qassem continued, but warned that “by waiting, under the excuse of not giving [Israel] justification, we lose everything.” Therefore, despite the price to be paid, it is “better for us to have a resistance engaging in proactive defense instead of waiting idly for Israel to attack,” he insisted, since Israel ostensibly would have attacked anyway. “We, therefore, engaged in preemptive defense,” Qassem concluded.
To further deflect Hezbollah’s responsibility for the onset of the war, Qassem reminded his audience that “for 11 months prior to its onset in mid-September we consistently said we do not want war.” But “now that it has been imposed upon us, we are ready, we will confront it with all our might, and we will be victorious,” he insisted.
To raise the stakes for inaction, Qassem then recycled and superimposed Hezbollah’s narrative to justify its involvement in the Syrian Civil War on the current conflict. “We aren’t merely confronting an Israeli war on Lebanon and Gaza Lebanon,” he alleged, rather an Israeli-American-European-international war, drawing on near-infinite resources, whose purpose was “to eliminate the resistance and our peoples in the region.” Similarly, Qassem alleged America assassinated Quds Force head Qassem Soleimani in 2020 “for the sake of Israel’s goals and that he would impede their actions.”
This alleged conspiracy’s end goals—subjugation—are just as ugly as its methods of implementation, Qassem stressed, through genocide, “ugliness and barbarism and murderousness.” That, too, he said Hezbollah was seeking to foil. “Therefore, we must confront them, and yes this confrontation will be painful and require sacrifices, but imagine if there was no confrontation?” Qassem said, implying the price of inaction would be much higher. It would result, he continued, in “us becoming their servants, with them controlling our future and the futures of our generations.”
Qassem insisted that his audience should not rely on the West or its hypocritical insistence on human rights to avert this dark fate. The West, he claimed, has been revealed as a “group of liars” for siding with the “scum of humanity and the crimes they are committing.” Instead, Qassem said, “The legendary resistance in Gaza and Lebanon will ensure the future of our coming generations, God willing.”
‘Hezbollah is fighting a Lebanese, not an Iranian, war’
To further legitimize Hezbollah’s war effort, Qassem then sought to refute the charge that the group had brought an unnecessary conflict upon Lebanon on Iranian orders or to serve Iranian interests. Instead, this war was an entirely local and organic decision and was being fought by “Hezbollah and Amal” and other allied factions of their own volition to defend their lands and livelihoods.
Hezbollah has only ever implemented a homegrown Lebanese project, Qassem insisted. He claimed that Iran only happens to support Hezbollah out of a shared belief in the justness of Hezbollah’s cause, rather than using the group as its proxy. Qassem called for his audience to be “grateful” to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic of Iran for “initiating the project of removing Israel from existence.” This project, he claimed, benefits “the rightful owners of the land”—the same ones now fighting on south Lebanon’s frontlines—more than Iran. Further, he stressed that Iran knew that it would be made to suffer for undertaking the task of pursuing Israel’s destruction, but Tehran is pursuing this path anyway to be “the beacon of the free peoples.”
‘Hezbollah is winning’
Qassem then assessed the damage Israel had inflicted upon Hezbollah, claiming even one of those successive blows would have “sufficed to cripple a regular army.” He argued that Hezbollah had not only persevered, replacing the vacancies left by Israeli assassinations with either first-generation veterans or equally capable members of the second generation, but also retained the ability to fight a long war. “We have the capability to continue [fighting] for days, weeks, and months, and I will not say anything more than that,” he said.
At times, Qassem relied on mystical and, frankly, absurd explanations for this endurance. He claimed, for example, to have “read the Israelis [were] saying” that they found bullets used by Hezbollah fighters that they failed to identify. “I’ll tell you what they are,” Qassem said, as if preparing to reveal a grand military secret. “These bullets are combined with belief and dependence upon God. Of course you won’t find them on the market. These projectiles are charged with the love of [Imam] Hussain and affection for [Imam] Hussain,” he said.
In fact, far from the war breaking Hezbollah’s fighters, Qassem argued that this combination of belief and sufficient capabilities made them “eager for direct clashes with the Israelis.” But the Israelis, he claimed, had so far avoided such clashes because “they are afraid and terrified,” hinting at a common theme in Hezbollah’s propaganda derived from classical Islamic depictions of Jews as innately cowardly. Qassem then claimed Israel’s leadership was seeking an off-ramp from the war by claiming to have accomplished their war goals. “Don’t you want to reach the Litani? Don’t you want to achieve more goals?” he taunted.
Indeed, Israel didn’t, Qassem suggested, because the longer the war continued, the more Israel’s losses mounted. He claimed—without evidence—that Hezbollah had killed 90 Israeli troops, wounded 750, and “destroyed 39 Merkava tanks and four UAVs.” To further emphasize that Hezbollah retained the upper hand, Qassem said all of these losses had occurred on the frontline.” He never disclosed Hezbollah’s casualties, which the group stopped updating almost a month ago.
Hezbollah was also hurting the Israeli home front, Qassem claimed, its rockets striking various cities “according to a precise plan” and “paralyzing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israelis.”
Qassem continued to focus his audience’s attention on Hezbollah’s alleged successes, like its “ability to [hit] Netanyahu’s bedroom with a loitering munition,” which he claimed “diplomatic sources” told him left Netanyahu “crippled by fear.” Qassem noted that Netanyahu had survived “perhaps because his time has not come yet, and maybe it will happen that some Israeli may kill him … perhaps as he’s speaking at some rally”—no idle threat, considering Iran’s and Hezbollah’s recruitment of assets inside Israel.
Qassem also recalled, for the second speech in a row, Hezbollah’s loitering munition attack on an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) base in Binyamina. This time, however, he claimed the attack left “more than 80 killed and wounded,” without breaking down the numbers and contradicting his claim from two weeks ago that the operation had resulted in “70 dead and wounded.”
The Israelis will “definitely lose,” he said, “because the land belongs to us, God is with us, and our people are supporting us. Get out of our land to reduce your losses. If you stay, you will pay an unprecedented price.” Israel will not only fail to accomplish its goal of returning its citizens to their homes in the north, “but hundreds of thousands more will become displaced.”
Qassem sought to counter some of Hezbollah’s detractors, who argued that the current war demonstrated the group’s inability to protect the Lebanese. Hezbollah can’t prevent Israel from murdering Lebanese, he said—that is not what “capable of defending Lebanon” means. Instead, he argued it signifies defeating Israel by preventing it from achieving its larger goals, which would bring even more pain to Lebanon.
Additionally, Qassem claimed that Israel’s “monstrosity” made their defeat inevitable. He purported to contrast Hezbollah’s “honorable” warfighting with Israel’s tactics. “We target their barracks, soldiers, and tanks. By contrast, they kill civilians and destroy people and stones because they are cowards and weak and lack morals because their project is one of occupation and monstrosity.” Qassem said this state of affairs wouldn’t lead Israel to victory, and only signaled Israeli weakness. “It will increase our pain,” he admitted, “but because we are insisting upon continuing, they aren’t able to win.”
Qassem called on Hezbollah’s supporters to “endure and be patient” to achieve this inevitable victory. “We need your sacrifices,” he beseeched them, saying they would “help prevent future, greater, sacrifices.” Their support was also necessary to protect Hezbollah, which in turn protected them—or so he tried to frame matters. Qassem credited the group’s supporters with Hezbollah’s strength, both on the battlefield and the political scene, acting as a deterrent to “anyone betting on Hezbollah’s weakness.” “They should forget it,” he said, because Hezbollah remains politically and socially strong, and its political opponents “will be forced to curse Israel and America for lying to [them].”
Meanwhile, Qassem said Hezbollah would continue to fight until a ceasefire is achieved. However, to demonstrate that the group still possesses the upper hand to dictate terms, he insisted, “We will only accept terms we find appropriate.” A ceasefire, broadly, must bring an end to Israel’s “aggression” and “then we’ll give our opinion on the details.” As for those details, Qassem stressed that Hezbollah “and the Amal Movement are working alongside one another to confront the aggression” and “with [Parliament] Speaker [Nabih] Berri, who has become the focal point of negotiating an end to the aggression.” He said, “Hezbollah and the government and Speaker Berri have their ways of reaching an understanding regarding the preferred solutions.” Until those aims are achieved and accepted by Israel, Qassem stated Hezbollah will “not beg for a ceasefire. We’re continuing, we’re not waiting. As long as it takes.”
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