The assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah is a cause for jubilation, and not just for Israelis. People of conscience everywhere can join Jews, Arabs, and Persians in rejoicing the death of a wicked man.
The strike came on Friday evening as Nasrallah and his top aides gathered in a bunker 60 feet beneath a Beirut neighborhood to hatch their response to Israel’s ongoing decimation of their ranks. Halfway around the world, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to deliver a speech at the UN General Assembly in New York. At some point, he was also making a quiet phone call to green-light the air strike.
Over in Beirut, more than 80 tons of heavy munitions suddenly fell from the skies over Nasrallah’s head. Timed in just the right sequence to breach his subterranean lair, the American-made BLU-109 “bunker busters” brought down several high-rise buildings on top of him. Early reports suggest he died slowly, suffocating from toxic fumes under the rubble.
When Hezbollah confirmed Nasrallah’s death the next day, celebrations immediately erupted around the region. In Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran (and Iranian diaspora communities everywhere) men and women extolled the end of an enemy of freedom.
The elation isn’t misplaced. While Nasrallah did not found Hezbollah, he was the leader who raised the Iranian paramilitary organization to regional dominance. Over a 30-plus year career Nasrallah became a hero to radical Shi’ites, and militant Muslims broadly, for turning it into the most heavily-armed nonstate actor in the Near East. “Throughout his career,” reports the New York Times, “he stuck to his central message: that Israel was a foreign and threatening presence in the region that needed to be removed, and that it was the job of every Muslim to contribute to the struggle.”
It was Nasrallah who launched a guerrilla war against Israel in the 1990s and a more conventional war in 2006, and who leveraged his massive arsenal to keep a knife at the Jewish state’s throat ever since. It was Nasrallah who led Hezbollah’s bloody intervention against the Sunni opposition in Syria to prop up Bashar al-Assad, and who helped his Iranian overseers undermine our Arab allies across the region. It was he who facilitated the murder of US soldiers and citizens.
“Hassan Nasrallah and the terrorist group he led…were responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade reign of terror,” announced President Joe Biden. “Hassan Nasrallah was a terrorist with American blood on his hands,” added Vice-President Kamala Harris. “Across decades, his leadership of Hezbollah destabilized the Middle East and led to the killing of countless innocent people in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and around the world. Today, Hezbollah’s victims have a measure of justice.” Jared Kushner, ostensibly speaking on behalf of Donald Trump, published a similar reaction in a long post on X, saying, “September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough.”
Some Christians have a different take. Not surprisingly, many of Lebanon’s corrupt Christian elite lauded the terrorist with whom they’d enjoyed such a profitable alliance. Calling Nasrallah an “honorable friend” and “distinguished and honest leader who led the national resistance on the paths of victory and liberation,” former Lebanese President Michel Aoun mourned the dead jihadist even as Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros Al-Rai—who is often bold in his condemnations of Hezbollah—mourned that Nasrallah’s “martyrdom” had caused a “wound in the heart of the Lebanese.”
The Patriarch no doubt senses the position of his superior in the Vatican. Asked for his thoughts on Nasrallah’s death, Pope Francis raised the importance of “proportionality” and hinted at Israel’s violations of that norm. “When there is something disproportionate, a domineering tendency that goes beyond morality is evident. A country that, with its forces, does these things—I’m talking about any country—that does these things in such a ‘superlative’ way, these are immoral actions.” It would not be the first time the current Pope has contradicted the Catholic Church’s own teachings on Just War.
Thankfully, most Christians see the truth: Nasrallah was a bad man who used power to kill and terrorize all who opposed him. His destruction at the hands of a power greater than he marks an act of divine justice. Indeed, it was precisely to destroy such men that God ordained government—a grace for which we ought to ceaselessly give thanks. Discoursing to his friend Job, Eliphaz the Yemenite may have said it best:
Even as I have seen, they that plow evil
And sow wickedness, reap the same.
By the blast of God they perish,
And by the breath of his nostrils are they consumed. (Job 4:8-11)
Naked military power can never be enough for those who worship a humble messiah—at least until his own kingdom comes en dunamei—but power itself, even the carnal death-dealing kind, is an essential aspect of the Christian worldview, being the source of civic obligation and the terrestrial instrument of God’s will. When evildoers threaten the innocent, state-sanctioned violence is a moral good that benefits the wider world. An armed police officer responsibly protecting his community is a sign of justice in any land.
Rarely in the chaos of world events do we see justice meted out clearly and correctly, but Israel’s crushing blow against Nasrallah and his Iranian masters certainly qualifies. Israelis had every right to demand military action from their prime minister after decades of Hezbollah provocations and a year of daily attacks. And Mr. Netanyahu had every right to respond.
“Israel seeks peace,” Netanyahu said in his Friday UN speech. “Israel yearns for peace. Israel has made peace and will make peace again. Yet we face savage enemies who seek our annihilation, and we must defend ourselves against them.”
The rest of us should laud Israel’s decisiveness and applaud an act of justice, recognizing that often the “breath of God’s nostrils” is released through human hands.