Shlomo Ben-Ami

TEL AVIV – Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is an event of historic proportions in the Middle East. As can be seen from Iran’s response to Israel’s attacks on its Lebanese-based proxy, the shock waves are spreading throughout the region and are likely to reverberate around the world.

Nasrallah was on a mission to destroy Israel. It was a mantle he had taken up from countless other Arab leaders, from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who met with Adolf Hitler in 1941 to discuss the destruction of the Jews, to Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League who described the Arab invasion of the then-nascent Israel in 1948 as a “war of annihilation.” Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser – an icon of pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s – pledged more than once to “destroy Israel.” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who founded Fatah, nurtured their own dreams of liquidating the Jewish state.

There was always a touch of hubris in such dreams. Hussein harkened back to the Iraqi caliph al-Mans?r – meaning “the victorious” – who founded the kingdom of Iraq in the eighth century, even naming his superyacht after him. Nasser and Arafat competed to be the modern reincarnation of Saladin, the “redeeming ruler” who defeated the Crusaders and liberated Jerusalem in the twelfth century.

All four leaders – Al-Husseini, Nasser, Hussein, Arafat – failed to achieve their grand pan-Arab dream. But Arab intellectuals – many seemingly blighted by a perverse attraction to failure – sustained........

© The Korea Times