Peloni: Highly recommended article. In war, every advantage must be employed to secure the enemies subjugation. In honor based societies, humiliation is likely the most effective tool to achieve this point, and those who fail to acknowledge this, or worse, those who choose to not employ it, have already ceded the greatest victory possible to their enemies. The revelation of the breaking of Nasrallah was a supreme victory in the war against the Iranian crescent, and yet, if acknowledging and promoting this fact is judged to be too distasteful, the victory of this momentous event will be passed to the Barbarians, an eventuality which should be unthinkable, even as it is inevitable when Western sensitives are preferred in a war against a society which only fears the expression of being publicly shamed.
In honour-shame cultures, the end of war means one side humiliates the other.
Retired United States Lieutenant-General Ben Hodges is fond of saying, at risk of belabouring the obvious, a soldier’s will to fight is at least as important as what weapon he has. It is a wisdom as ancient as war itself, and recalls San Tzu’s famous aphorism, “To conquer your enemy, you need to conquer his mind first.” The question that follows from this is, how do you erode a soldier’s will to fight, i.e., conquer his mind? Some answers, such as the Maori Haka and the Zulu Indlamu, do so by terrifying the will to fight out of their enemies.
A recent video of Hassan Nasrallah’s children discussing the effects of Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah describes nothing less than the conquering of Nasrallah’s mind. A discussion of what this disclosure implies about the mental state of the Iranian leadership, and its implications for Israel, is here. The Hezbollah leader’s will to fight had been destroyed. He had become like a sick puppy to which anything could be done.
Before I proceed, let me make clear that what I am about to say is based on English sources only. It is very possible that with access to Hebrew sources, I might say it differently, or say something altogether different.
Hezbollah official Nawaf Moussawi, referring to the pager attack, claimed in an interview, “The annoying thing is that the Israelis believe that they did something great, but take it from me – all of Israel’s achievements against us had nothing to do with being smart. They keep bragging about these things…” Well, Mr Moussawi is wrong on two counts: firstly, if Israel’s achievements against Hezbollah were not smart, but nonetheless devastated Hezbollah as they did, including conquer their leader’s mind, then Hezbollah must be even less smart than the Israelis. Whichever way you look at it, Israel was very smart. Secondly, in a classic non sequitur, Moussawi offers proof for his claims that prove nothing of the sort:
I am saying this because Hezbollah used to be a role model for resistance groups across the world – from Latin America to Afghanistan, everywhere in Europe, and so on. Hezbollah is the top. So the fact that Hezbollah was hit like that does not mean that these were Israeli achievements. It was shortcomings and negligence on our part.
Yet, there is value for Israel in Moussawi’s claim. One needs but know where to look. The physical destruction of the Hezbollah command structure and its arsenal, plus the breaking of Nasrallah’s will to fight, before killing him, plus Hezbollah up to that point having been “a role model for resistance groups across the world – from Latin America to Afghanistan, everywhere in Europe,… the top,” amounts to a spectacular psychological achievement.
This is, potentially, the conquering of the minds of the most serious forces arrayed against civilisation. Yet, it is as if Israel has no idea what it actually means to be the frontline of civilisation, as if it is just a soundbite. In a popular joke, the Pope is tormented by being unable to tell anyone that he had hit a hole-in-one on a Sunday. Bafflingly, Israel’s stupendous psychological achievement over Hezbollah is not only one that she disowns, but eagerly disowns, for she will have nothing to do with psychological warfare. The only part of this vast, complex achievement she will acknowledge is the military part. She can do nothing with Nasrallah’s spirit having broken, let alone its effect on the regime in Iran or the diminution of Hezbollah in the eyes of terrorists around the world. Surely, surely, Israel can do better than this.
And if we look in the right places, the signs are auspicious. Here is Gadi Taub’s assessment:
In Israel, where the press is so poisonous, people don’t understand the amazing achievement of this war. It was not a success in Gaza. We have a semi-insubordinate brass in the military, but we have almost destroyed the Shi’ite Axis of Evil. So we were able to do what I thought would take ten years. I said, the next war is going to be with Hezbollah and it’s going to be terrible. It’s going to be more terrible than any war that we have experienced. That is what we thought when there were 150,000 missiles pointed at us.
To broaden the question, what are we to make of the Western, including Israeli, ideological malaise that insists that the enemy’s mind is the same as our own mind, the enemy’s broad objectives are the same as our broad objectives and the enemy’s approach to achieving those objectives are the same as our approach. The double-duped US Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, will serve as our point of entry to this issue.
To be clear, before we start dissecting Witkoff’s weaknesses, his approach is extremely common, propounded with great self-assurance, not to say arrogance, by many who have not yet had the experience of being disabused of their self-assurance as Steve Witkoff has. Some talk about Qatar having bought off Witkoff. That’s not duping; that’s just selling your soul. There’s a different word for that. But why is Steve Witkoff double-duped? First, Hamas duped him, as he confessed in an interview to Fox News Sunday:
I thought we had a deal, an acceptable deal. I even, I even thought we had an approval from Hamas, maybe that’s just me getting, um, getting, uh, you know, duped, uh, uh, but, uh, but I thought we were there and evidently we weren’t.
But his second duping comes by his own hand, so to speak, and his mea culpa for this, if it ever comes, will be read in his biography. Clearly, he thinks he was duped over the details of this one particular deal, rather than over his basic assumptions about Hamas. How else could he possibly imagine that they are not going to dupe him again? “I certainly hope we get everybody back to the table and get the hostages home,” he continued. The man’s naïvety is surpassed only by his unshakeable belief in the correctness of his weltanschauung. Witkoff complains:
This is on Hamas.… Hamas had every opportunity to demilitarise,… and they elected not to…. It is unfortunate. Do I think, would we be amenable to a reach-out from Hamas? Of course we would be. (My emphasis)
“Opportunity”?? to “demilitarise”?? Twenty years ago, the colloquial response to this would have been, “What planet are you on?” Has there ever been a terrorist organisation for which demilitarisation was even a concept? One has to wonder whether this Middle East Special Envoy has any idea what Hamas even exists for, or any other jihad army, for that matter. Even when they fight each other, such as Hezbollah and Hizbut Tahrir al-Shams (HTS), they exist for the same reason: to impose Islam on the world. Someone like this obviously has not read the Hamas Charter, nor any of the compendia on jihad, nor the relevant Qur’anic verses or hadiths, nor, for that matter, the religious pronouncements of such organisations in connection with their deeds, nor that they almost always fall under the umbrella of either the Muslim Brotherhood or the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, as do such government as those of Turkey and Qatar.
The civil war developing inside Islam is beyond most Western observers, leaving even the best Israeli thinkers nervous about broaching this question for fear of scaring away the “moderate Sunni states,” especially now that the Abraham Accords seem so close to taking off. They do not realise that those moderate Sunni states need the Abraham Accords more than Israel does; it is their ticket out of Islam. But not rocking that particular boat at this time is probably a good idea.
Islam is a religion of war. It defines itself by war. Its war is permanent to the extent that Islam is permanent. It sanctifies that war as jihad. Its war is therefore a religious war. The division of the world into nation-states is entirely irrelevant to this doctrine and only of tactical significance. It is not states in conflict with states, but one religion in conflict with all other religions, something that was already in full swing a thousand years before the world of nation-states was even an idea. This is how disciples of International Relations and of Peace Studies end up on another planet. They are only able to process events through the paradigm of states versus states.
This is why there is so much talk of deals with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Lebanese government, the Iranian regime, etc. Thankfully, this seems now to be changing, where Israel is pre-emptively destroying weapons in Syria, rather than seeking an agreement with HTS that they will never use those weapons against Israel. And this is the second problem with the Witkoffs of this world: the resolution of any conflict, according to their dogma, is an agreement, naturally. Everyone who has ever gone to war has done so in pursuit of an agreement.
It is inconceivable that, for jihad armies and their sponsoring governments, an agreement is just a stage in the war, a stage in which advantage for the next stage is sought. Until either lost or won, the war is never over. To illustrate the point: it is a plain, simple truth that to the Muslim armies invading the West under the guise of “refugees,” they are counter-attacking in their war against the Crusaders, made possible because the Crusaders never destroyed Islam to finished the war.
Many in the West, including Israel, will respond to this as complete off-the-wall nonsense. Many Israelis will say, our enemies could not possibly be thinking such things because it is illogical, stupid, idiotic, absurd, etc., so they immediately block it before it can get a foothold in their minds and before they know it, find themselves on the slippery slope to “Messianism”. Consequently, such thoughts are never in their minds long enough for them to notice that the nonsense is consistent over vast geographical areas and has been consistent for more than a thousand years: identical wording explaining identical actions, century after century after century.
This is the mind that needs to be conquered, and you will not conquer it by denying it. In fact, by denying it, it has conquered you. All that you do by such denial is set yourself up for dupe after dupe after dupe. How many times during this war did we not hear Israeli spokespersons and commentators complain that it is Hamas that violated the agreement. “This one’s on Hamas,” laments Witkoff. They all continue to believe this demonstrates to the West Israel’s restraint and good faith “despite all the provocations,” while such proof of restraint and good faith means nothing and has meant nothing for decades. But to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the IRGC, etc., all that such restraint and good faith demonstrate is people completely out of their depth in the Middle East. Witkoff’s complaint that Hamas had “elected not to [take] every opportunity to demilitarise” is the same as every Israeli complaint that Hamas elected to build tunnels, rather than electing to build Singapore.
It is, instead, Israel that elects not to take every opportunity to engage in psychological warfare. Israel could easily have destroyed Hamas’s will to fight using one photograph alone: Yahya Sinwar lying dead in the rubble with a huge hole in his head, but she elected not to. She could have had a trained dog drag his body through the dust in front of all the cameras, but the idea never came up. And in the same vein, the golden egg of Nasrallah’s children disclosing their father’s breakdown will go to waste.
All this because even the very best in the military still think that the only war worth fighting is one restricted to forces and armaments and battlefields. Who does not have the highest respect for Brigadier General (Res) Amir Avivi? As inspiring as he is, even he does not escape this narrow thinking:
[The Middle East] is our area of expertise and this is the only area we collect meaningful intelligence. Israel has some advantage in the ability to focus on the Middle East, on Iran and Hezbollah. We saw how deep we went into Hezbollah and also the ability to bring the archive from Iran and other operations that show how much we know [about] what’s going on inside Iran. And yet, this is not enough. Intelligence is never 100 percent. We always have to take into account there are things we don’t know.
Indeed. But the “things we don’t know” are a prior confined to the narrow spectrum covering “maximum pressure, sanctions, discussions, military attack.” Anything outside of that spectrum serves no purpose to know. So, for example, “The IDF is preparing for decisive attack on Gaza. The government needs to choose the right timing.”
Will any factors outside of these technocratic limits go into determining this timing? One can wager that they are not considering, for instance, why the Arabs attacked on Yom Kippur and on Simchat Torah, and the lessons from that for how to time attacks for the most devastating effects on the enemy are never learnt. A great deal of critical input can be made here.
Let us consider how World War II ended in Japan. According to an early 20th-century magazine, the strictest protocol was observed around the person of the Japanese emperor.
It is of course well known that all service before their majesties has to be performed on the knees, and it is not etiquette to approach them except on the knees. Even the physicians who attended on the late emperor during his last illness were not exempted from this rule. It is also common knowledge that no one may touch the imperial person with ungloved hands. Last July Drs. Miura and Aoyama obtained permission for the first time to take the imperial pulse without inter-position of a piece of silk between their fingers and the patient’s wrist, while for the first time on record medical instruments were applied to the imperial body. (Mariposa Gazette, Volume LIX, Number 14, 30 August 1913)
The World War II Japanese soldier’s readiness to fight to the death for his emperor, rather than face the humiliation of surrender, is legendary. It took two atomic bombs to bring Western military victory, but one photograph of General Douglas MacArthur casually towering over the rigid and formal Emperor Hirohito, to bring humiliation to the Japanese. Without this, the war might well have continued for decades, with suicide-bombers in crowds detonating explosives on their person, knife attacks on soldiers and vehicles ploughed into foreigners. Thankfully, their will to fight had been broken.
In honour-shame cultures, the end of war means one side humiliates the other. The pager attack, the killing of all their leaders and the destruction of Hezbollah’s arsenal had humiliated Hezbollah and broken Nasrallah. They had lost and it was time to annex territory from them to complete their humiliation. But Israel never pressed this humiliation, indeed, she did everything to disown it. Instead of seizing “Muslim land” from Hezbollah, she offered a ceasefire, the ultimate mixed message.
In the Arab mind, the one who sues for peace is the weaker one, the one who is losing and would rather submit now than later, when the humiliation will be worse. This is why, despite their leader going to pieces, there are still Hezbollah terrorists fighting. To win in the Middle East, you must humiliate in the Middle East. The one thing without which there cannot be victory for Israel is the one thing that Israel will not countenance.
Picture credits:
Gaetano Faillace – https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-299-152/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=148473624
Screenshots from https://x.com/HamasAtrocities/status/1843585869061743042
Comments:
On 29 March 2025 at 00:22, Jalal Tagreeb wrote:
Hi Anjuli,
Thank you for this fantastic article!
In honour-shame cultures, the end of war means one side humiliates the other. The pager attack, the killing of all their leaders and the destruction of Hezbollah’s arsenal had humiliated Hezbollah and broken Nasrallah. They had lost and it was time to annex territory from them to complete their humiliation.
Totally agree. Also, after the toppling of the Assad regime Hezbollah is now completely isolated, even Iran cannot help because it has been harnessed by the US and the West. Israel can now bring Hezbollah to complete surrender if they want.
In the Arab mind, the one who sues for peace is the weaker one, the one who is losing and would rather submit now than later, when the humiliation will be worse. This is why, despite their leader going to pieces, there are still Hezbollah terrorists fighting. To win in the Middle East, you must humiliate in the Middle East.
That is true, only when this happens they will embrace defeat. I can also tell from personal experience that this is what happened to me. It ended all the confusion and loops that I was going into in debates trying to defend something that cannot be defended. Being treated by my own medicine (humiliation) is what cured me.
Ramadan Mubarak … or is it this year for me!
Kind regards,
Jalal.
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