Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah died for Gaza

A bottle of soil from Al-Aqsa Mosque was set to be buried with Hezbollah’s late Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. While nearly the entire world stood by and watched the Zionist entity commit the first live-streamed genocide, the Lebanese leader refused to let the people of Gaza die alone, even if that meant he would be taken with them.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah transcended the traditional role of a leader, he represented hope, provided a sense of moral guidance, and offered shrewd political analysis, and when he spoke, everybody listened; whether friend or foe. On the issue of Palestine in particular, he was perhaps the most significant leader in the Arab world, why? Because he was the man who led the first-ever Arab victory over the Zionist regime, expelling them from South Lebanon in 2000, and greatly outwitting them during the 2006 war.

In October of 2023, Sayyed Nasrallah delivered his first speech during the Gaza genocide. In that address, he pledged that the movement he commanded, Hezbollah, would never abandon the people of Gaza, no matter where it took the region. Although he did not commit to war, he set one red line and made a pledge: “Hamas will win!”

In a recent press conference, senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan recounted a conversation between the late Hezbollah Secretary-General and leaders of the Palestinian group, stating that Hamas did not request anything from Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Yet, the Hezbollah leader took the decision to immediately open a support front against the Israelis, which began on October 8 when the group fired upon Zionist military positions in the illegally occupied Sheba’a Farms area.

Hezbollah would go on to sacrifice hundreds of its men in thousands of operations targeting Israeli military positions and settlements, all of whom were given the title of martyrs “on the path to al-Quds”. Although his Israeli enemies would go on to commit civilian massacres and assassinations in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, with war seeming inevitable, Sayyed Nasrallah refused to capitulate.

In a speech 100 days into the Gaza genocide and as the fighting was intensifying on the Lebanese front, he remarked that “we fear nothing and will fight without limits and without borders,” in response to the Zionist regime’s threats. His conditions were always clear, Hezbollah does not stop firing until there is a durable ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

Throughout his life, he never backed down from supporting the Palestinian cause, providing weapons and expertise to all Palestinian groups, and helping to devise a unified strategy in order to launch a unity of fronts against the Israeli occupation.

Even down to his very last speech – which was delivered right after the Israelis launched their terrorist booby-trapped pager attack on Lebanon that killed and injured thousands, many of whom were civilians – he made the promise that Hezbollah will never abandon Gaza and will fight for the people of Palestine no matter the costs, no matter where the region heads.

Nasrallah also repeatedly imparted wisdom onto the Arab regimes that stood idly by as the atrocities were being carried out against the people of the Gaza Strip, asking them how they could watch and not act. He extended this question to the entire Arab and Muslim World, asking how it was possible for the people to go about their business as usual when Gaza was suffering so horrifically.

He also stressed that if the Arab world did nothing, the Zionist entity would expand its territorial control into their nations and would not stop only at their plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Now, as the Arab nations scramble to put together a plan that can offset the proposals of US President Donald Trump to commit a mass ethnic cleansing of Gaza, his words have more relevance than ever before. Indeed, the Zionists now occupy southern Syria, threaten Jordanian sovereignty as Sayyed Nasrallah had warned, and are even making threats against Egypt.

In the end, the main reason that the Zionist entity provided – for their decision to assassinate Sayyed Nasrallah by dropping multiple 2,000-pound bunker-busting munitions that ultimately took down a collection of civilian buildings in southern Beirut – was that he could not be convinced to abandon Gaza.

In 2006, Sayyed Nasrallah’s iconic speech in southern Lebanon – following the war – dedicated perhaps its most powerful segment to the Palestinian people, urging them to continue their path of resistance and stressing that just like the people of Lebanon, they too could achieve their liberation.

A Palestinian woman, who is from Gaza and whose identity will be hidden for security purposes, told me on the day that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s martyrdom was announced:

“His father had a dream, and in that dream, Prophet Muhammed – peace and blessings upon him – told him his son’s name was Hassan. He woke up that morning and told his wife, good morning Um Hassan (mother of Hassan), before he was even born, that’s how he was named. Allah gave us Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, so he can never be taken away. He told us, he was going to pray at Masjid al-Aqsa… He can’t be gone now, you will see, he’s alive, you will see.”

This is just a sample of what Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah meant to so many Palestinians, some of whom could not even accept his passing and still can’t properly comprehend it. In a world of darkness, death, and confusion, amid the genocide, there were Palestinians who had held back tears upon the announcement that their own friends and family were killed but broke down into tears over Sayyed Nasrallah.

Nasrallah lost his own son – who was martyred in a battle – along with many other members of his extended family, and in the end, he sacrificed his life for the suffering people of Palestine. He may have not been able to pray at Masjid al-Aqsa as he once told interviewers he believed he would, but as was recently announced by Hussein Fadlallah, who heads the committee organizing Sayyed Nasrallah’s funeral, a Jerusalemite managed to send a bottle of soil from Al-Aqsa, which was set to be buried with him.

As for Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s pledge that “Hamas will win,” a ceasefire/prisoner exchange was finally declared on January 19, after which the Palestinian political party emerged displaying the signs of victory.

While in the West Hezbollah is described as a “terrorist organisation”, their media and governments fail to comprehend what Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah truly represented to the people who supported him. Sayyed Nasrallah was not just the leader of an armed group, in fact, the support for him had little to do with the military organization he commanded. He was loved and trusted as a symbol of hope, a shining light that with his powerful speeches inspired the people when they most needed it, a symbol of reliability.

Sayyed Nasrallah was also a symbol of pride for a people who had been disposed of, turned into refugees, lost their loved ones, lost their homes, lost all worldly possessions and/or were humiliated physically by their oppressor. The Arab people are treated by the media and governments of the collective West as subhumans, and their lives aren’t afforded worth, they are a people spoken down to as if they are intellectually inferior and incapable of deciding their own destiny. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah gave the people a reason to feel pride in themselves. As the age-old idiom goes, the pen is mightier than the sword, and so too is the spoken word stronger than any missile.

Robert Inlakesh
Source: Al Mayadeen

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17234

Sayyed Nasrallah’s Martyrdom – the Fruit That Bore Through the Rubble

It has long been emphasized by supporters of the Resistance, including Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah himself, that the Resistance is an idea that cannot be extinguished, rather, it is strengthened and grows through martyrdom.

However, we can’t deny the gravity of Sayyed Nasrallah’s loss. In his last speech, he cautioned against both aggrandizing the enemy’s power to the point of self-inflicted defeatism and underestimating the enemy.

In remembering his words of caution, it’s critical that his understanding of the enemy extends to assessing the gravity of his impact. While our faith in the Resistance and Hezbollah remains firm after his martyrdom, the aftershocks of its impacts are undeniable, an impact of a figure who was the operational leader – along with the coordinator for the whole Axis of Resistance.

As Sayyed Nasrallah’s daughter said in the latest Al Mayadeen interview, the Master of the Ummah’s Martyrs educated and motivated his followers, like his family, to follow the path of righteousness and truth.

“We were never coerced into thinking a certain way,” Sayyed Nasrallah’s daughter Zeinab said, referring to her father’s parenting style which extended to his relationship with his community.

It was out of pure love and conviction that Sayyed Nasrallah’s children followed his path, and his followers trod the Holy Path out of love and loyalty and not fear. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was reminiscent of a leader who embodied the lessons of Imam Jaafar al-Sadiq, a popular, beloved, and charismatic leader and Imam who cautioned believers against the “slave” worship of fear and into the righteous worship of love.

The road to the liberation of al-Quds is paved with martyrdom, and, on the evening of September 27, 2024, the most precious of blood was spilled as the Zionist entity razed the Southern Suburb of Beirut through nonstop bombardment, tearing the ground amid a week-long campaign by the Zionist entity to uproot the Resistance, and especially the very leader that had given it its first taste of defeat in the ‘90s.

Nasrallah ushered in the “Era of Victories,” instilling a sense of pride and dignity in a community that had been historically marginalized and a people that internalized the defeat of Arabs in the face of “Israel” and the shame of marginalization from a deeply classist and colonized society – breaking it from his famous greetings of “ya ashraf al-nas (oh, most honorable of people)” to his people in speeches.

He himself hailed from modest beginnings – a working-class family of 10 headed by a simple fruit seller originally from Bazourieh, Tyre. He was an early disciple of Sayyed Musa al-Sadr, the original leader of the Amal revolutionary Islamic movement and an early student of Sayyed Baqir al-Sadr, traveling to Najaf, Iraq, at the age of 16 to further his Islamic studies. He was nurtured in the cradle of the growing Revolutionary Islamic movement, which culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the seeds of Revolutionary Islam planted in Lebanon years prior.

Sayyed Nasrallah showed how victory could be attained despite the modest means of those resisting the most well-funded and equipped occupations in the world, giving, for the first time, a sense of pride in a people who had spent years internalizing their own humiliation.

The Sayyed was an original leader who, in the vein of Sayyed Musa al-Sadr, fulfilled, expounded on, and furthered a legacy of the original holy sheikhs and leaders of Jabal Amel, such as Sheikh Sharafeddine, whose booming anti-colonial speech at the 1920 conference of Wadi al-Hjeir called to action an anti-colonial movement from the same valley that dealt “Israel” its “massacre of the Merkavas” in 2006.

His shrewd command of religious knowledge equipped him with the basira (deep insight) to understand society, politics, and most importantly, the enemy. In contrast to American exceptionalist understandings of the Israeli-American relationship, such as the Mearsheimian emphasis on the “Israel lobby” as the decisive, driving factor of American foreign policy, Sayyed Nasrallah kept the focus on American imperialism as the primary root of international arrogance worldwide – in line with Imam Khomeini, who identified America as the Great Satan.

Defying Western characterizations of Hezbollah or Islamic Resistance as irrational, dogmatic, or backward, Sayyed Nasrallah was a brilliant analyst and orator who spoke to many different global segments, and through his religious dimension, his analytical dimension, his role as an anti-imperialist icon, and a scholar, he garnered a global following of those who loved and revered his service to the oppressed.

While having large success in fostering a sense of national unity, Sayyed Nasrallah came under additional challenges amid the US-engineered economic crisis in Lebanon and the subsequent color revolution, where American and European-backed narratives, whether in billionaire-funded “independent” media or through NGOs, attempted to break the domestic unity coalition and replace the Lebanese government with an unelected American and World Bank technocracy, falsely pitting Sayyed Nasrallah as a supporter of corruption and Lebanon’s domestic problems. These same sponsors attempted to usher in themes and discourses of normalization in Lebanon in the template of Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan.

Dialectic philosophy is dictated by the unity of opposites, and the truth lies in this unity. By uniting different segments of society – Muslim and Christian, Sunni and Shiite, secular and religious, toward a common effort of national and regional sovereignty, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah masterfully seamed together the sectarian and social fissures inflicted by ages of imperialist divide-and-conquer counterinsurgency.

The populist developmentalism of Hezbollah cemented under Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, through credit union Qard al-Hassan that provided low-cost loans; Dar al-Hawraa, an affordable community clinic providing a wide range of services; and Jihad al-Binaa, which immediately and expediently moed on the postwar reconstruction of homes in Dahieh and the South, at a speed and efficiency that baffled civil engineers. Jihad al-Binaa also supports farming and beekeeping, including workshops, seed distribution, and technical assistance, embodying Hezbollah’s commitment to industry and agriculture as the labor-oriented backbone of building Lebanese society, a contrast to the finance-capital oriented economy that otherwise comprises Lebanese state institutions.

The US, shaken by the colossal challenge imposed by the Palestinian Resistance at the outset of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, sought to salvage itself against the existential threat the Resistance dealt it and the Zionist entity, moving from soft power to hard war tactics to enforce (and force) their consensus of normalization, which Sayyed Nasrallah spent his life to fight and keep out of Lebanon. Referring to the Camp David Accords in speeches, Sayyed Nasrallah articulated a structuralist understanding of the relationship between normalization, neoliberalism, and what he always referred to as an “imposition of a humiliating political process on the Palestinians and Arabs,” under the guise of empty promises of political stability and prosperity that otherwise ushered in further pauperization of population that siphoned state assets for US financial capital, enriching itself and the Washington-aligned comprador class.

To impose this very political reality on Lebanon, the Zionist entity bombed – over 80 times – the apartment buildings over Sayyed Nasrallah with American Mark 84 multi-ton bombs. The gravity of the force that they unleashed to kill one man was a testament to the weight of the figure he was, and despite the damage meant to turn mountains into craters – with bombs known to evaporate bodies – Sayyed Nasrallah’s martyred body remained intact.

Ideologically, spiritually, and institutionally, Sayyed Nasrallah built a Hezbollah that ensured a loss in leaders did not mean a loss in leadership. The Sayyed’s spirit pushes through the concrete rubble, where the fruits of Resistance naturally bear through a history of siege and martyrdom. Mourners are arriving, putting their personal lives on hold or politically motivated obstacles in transit to attend the funeral of a leader matched by so few in his impact and level of resonance worldwide. Millions came to attend the funeral of the man who changed the world, challenged Israeli and American arrogance, and won the hearts of millions. Where “Israel” tries to bury a martyr, a thousand more warriors and followers rise from the rubble – from the ideological and spiritual seeds Sayyed Nasrallah planted.

With Sayyed [Nasrallah’s] planning, Hezbollah grew step by step, patiently, logically, and naturally […showing] the effect of its existence on enemies in different stages: ‘a pure being like an immaculate tree whose roots are firm in the ground and whose branches are in heavens, yielding fruit in every season by permission of its Lord? Allah draws such comparisons for men so that they may take heed” (Quran 14:25) – Sayyed Khamenei.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17177

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the Revolutionary Who Fought For The Oppressed

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is a revolutionary who, until his last breath, fought to liberate the oppressed who fought for freedom, for justice, and for dignity.

What can be said about our beloved leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the revolutionary, visionary, and iconic leader who held a highly revered status among his people?

A man who, through his words and actions, became an inspiration to the oppressed across the globe, a man whose honor, morality, integrity, deep compassion, and empathy shone like a beacon of light in an increasingly dark and evil world.

How many heroes have we lost, too many, too soon, and too young?

The fascist and racist Zionist cabal that infests Palestine brutally assassinated Sayyed Nasrallah. His martyrdom stood as a testament to his unwavering support for justice for the oppressed.

He was martyred in the service of his people, for the liberation of others, with him being a soldier on the battlefield, a warrior in an eternal struggle of right vs. wrong, just vs. unjust, and morality vs. immorality. Faced with occupation, he chose freedom, he took a stance to make a difference, struggling with every fiber of his being to end tyranny and to bring peace to the world through the strength of his character.

This is how I remember Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. He has taken his place among the legion of fallen martyrs stretching from Lebanon through Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, Ireland, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Sayyed Nasrallah, like Che Guevara, Allende, Patrice Lumumba, Chavez, Mandela, Connolly, and Gandhi, lives on in the hearts of all those who rail against injustice, the enslavement of people, and the inequality shown through corrupt practices of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism.

The movement, led by Sayyed Nasrallah, was a reaction to the Zionist occupation of his country, the colonial occupation of Palestine, and Western hegemonic interference in West Asia.

Sayyed Nasrallah became the hero, fighter, and liberator he was under the harsh conditions imposed upon him and his country.

He is not just a huge loss to his family, community, nation, and region; he is an irreplaceable loss to the Axis of Resistance, his global comrades, and humanity.

I mourn his passing but take solace in knowing he was martyred as he lived, leading the battle to liberate the world from evil and end people’s suffering.

He died in the fight against fascism. He died in the fight for humanity. He died for freedom. He died for justice. He died for you, and he died for me.

“Without dignity, there is no liberty, without justice, there is no dignity, and without independence, there are no free men,” Patrice Lumumba once said.

“So long as there is imperialism in the world, a permanent peace is impossible,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah

I will miss his intellect, humor, humility, compassion, and empathy for the oppressed, the marginalized, the isolated, the downtrodden, the poor, and the occupied.

Most of all, I miss his speeches. His words defied the empire, shook the imperialist centers of power to their very core, and embodied the voice of resistance for all to hear.

My hero is this eternal legend who is Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, whom we may not see his like again.

We loved his wisdom, and we shall honor his legacy.

Even in death, his vision to liberate West Asia from foreign interlopers may yet come to pass. That would be our inheritance, a world that he envisaged as one of peace and justice, thus being worth struggling for.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17123