Glenn Greenwald notes that Iran was expected to retaliate against Israel with force, yet it hasn’t happened, with minimal damage caused so far. Norman Finkelstein explains that Iran and Hezbollah are strategic and patient, preferring long-term action rather than immediate retaliation. Hezbollah’s leader, Nasrallah, admitted Israel’s technological superiority and intelligence penetrations but still challenges Israel to a ground invasion. While Israel excels in air assaults, it fears ground invasions, and Hezbollah anticipates a land war to finally settle the score with Israel. The 2006 Lebanon war is cited as an example of Hezbollah’s strategy, where they held back rockets until the final days, signaling their resilience and strategic patience. Finkelstein predicts a potential disaster for Israel if forced into a ground war with Hezbollah.
* * *
Glenn Greenwald: What surprised me was that about six weeks ago, it was being said as though it was a fait accompli that Iran was going to retaliate against Israel, and this time for real—not with its full force, but in a way that would actually make an impact, unlike the fake retaliation they did after the Damascus bombing. And yet that retaliation never came. Even now, with a lot of missiles—these vaunted Hezbollah missiles—being shot into Israel, it’s doing a little damage to some buildings, but I think there hasn’t even been a single Israeli casualty yet.
Is the force capability and the military power of Iran and Hezbollah really as formidable as we’ve been hearing? Or do they have real fear about retaliating in a way that they might want to?
Norman Finkelstein: I have to always enter the caveat that I am not a military historian. Frankly, military matters don’t very much interest me, but having said that, I, you know, I have to make some comment on the subject since it’s so obviously germane to the situation now.
On the case of Iran: Iran is a very conservative country. And at the risk of making generalizations, which sound a little bit too abstract, there’s a very different way in which countries like Iran, which have a rich civilization spanning thousands of years— or China— and countries in the West. The Iranians and the Chinese, having this civilizational heritage, they tend to be much more long-term in their thinking. And long term also means a lot more patient. And so they don’t feel the kinds of needs for, we can use the expression, the same kinds of needs for instant gratification that Westerners tend to have.
So, Iran is confident that they will prevail because of their civilization, because of the sheer demographic weight, the geographic weight of their country, that they will prevail in the long term. And that basically means they slowly move their chess pieces on the board. I forgot the expression that’s used. It’s called something like a ring of fire, but I could be using the wrong expression. That they will surround Israel with various, the expression is, you can call it proxies, collaborators, allies, whichever term you want, and slowly but surely build up a force sufficient to—I’ll use the term not in the literal sense but in the metaphorical sense— to extinguish Israel.
And so they’ve always been very slow to react for those reasons, and also just prudence. There’s just no necessity to act right now. On the other hand, Israel is perfectly aware of that strategy. They talk about it, and so they feel they have to act now in order to disable that ring that’s being built up around them.
And so now, Iran, just like after the Gulf War, Iran knows if Hezbollah falls, they fall. There’s no question about that. The only thing that stopped the attack on Iran was that Iraq turned into a disaster. Otherwise, Iran would have been attacked by Cheney and Rumsfeld. That was very clear at the time. So Iran recognizes now it’s a moment of reckoning for them. There’s a real problem for them because they’re the third in line—Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran.
If you were to ask me about the issue of military capabilities, my guess is as follows. Number one, it’s very unusual for Hezbollah and for its leader Nasrallah, whose speeches I always follow closely because they are in many ways quite educational and quite instructive. In his last few speeches, very unusual for him, very unusual, he is very frank in his speeches. In the last speech, he said number one, “Israel has the technological edge.” It’s very unusual for an Arab leader, especially a proud Arab leader like Nasrallah, to frankly say, “They’re ahead of us.” Israel has the technological edge. And number two, he said that they did suffer a major blow with the penetration of their intelligence. He was very frank about that. So, that to me is not unusual for him. It is instructive because he is frank. He is probably by far the frankest and most impressive political leader on the world stage.
But what was surprising, almost to the point of a plea, he kept saying, “We will stop the retaliation if you agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. We will stop the retaliation if you agree to a ceasefire in Gaza.” And it was almost, as I said, I don’t want to offend him, but it almost came out as a plea: “We don’t want this war.”
So, on the one hand, when you talk about the limited damage, it may be that they’re desperately looking for—what’s the expression—an exit ramp? They’re looking for an exit ramp. I don’t believe it’s possible for the reasons I’ve already explained, but there’s a second aspect to it. It’s very easy to understand what their strategy is because Israel wins hands down in the air assault. No question about that. There’s no state in the Middle East that can compete with the Israeli Air Force.
However, Israel loses hands down in a ground invasion, and Israel dreads a ground invasion for the very simple reason that, believe it or not, Israelis don’t want to die. They like to kill. It’s fun to kill Arabs. It’s more fun than shooting fish in a barrel. They are positively exhilarated and euphoric at the prospect of killing Arabs, including children. They like to shoot children in the skull, as was fairly common according to physicians who served in the hospitals in Gaza the past year. They said children came in without any shrapnel on their body, just bullets to their head. And during the Great March of Return in 2018, as the UN report—an exhaustive 250-page single-spaced report—said, Israel targeted children. And in particular, when it didn’t kill them—because killing too many unarmed children doesn’t fly too well in the press, to the extent that it’s covered—they targeted their kneecaps and below their kneecaps to inflict what are called life-changing injuries.
In any event, Israelis like to kill Arabs, humiliate Arabs, degrade Arabs, torture Arabs, but they don’t like to fight them. In particular, they don’t want to fight the Party of God. Nasrallah said in his speech a couple of months ago that there are over 100,000 militants now in Hezbollah. I can’t say with any certainty whether that figure is accurate, but obviously if it’s true, it’s a very large number.
So, what Israel does is it goes in and it annihilates, it decimates, it pulverizes, but it doesn’t launch the ground invasion. If you recall, on October 7th, they started massing troops on the border the day after, beginning October 8th. But if you recall, they didn’t actually launch the ground invasion until October 27th because they needed two weeks, well closer to three weeks, to totally decimate everything in front of them, to reduce it all to dust so there would be no resistance. If you look at the actual numbers—and in case you haven’t noticed, Israel never gives out its casualty figures. This past year, how many soldiers were killed? You couldn’t find that anywhere. They did say a couple of weeks ago that they have now had more soldiers killed in the past 10 months than were killed on October 7th. On October 7th, 313 Israeli soldiers were killed. The estimate was 800 civilians. Well, that would mean if you do very simple math, that would mean about one Israeli soldier was killed every day. There was no ground war in Gaza; there was an aerial annihilation in Gaza.
So, Israel is hoping it can knock out Lebanon by air. The Hezbollah strategy is perfectly obvious. They will keep shooting rockets at Israel. However, they’re not going to let out a huge blitz. Every time Israel declares victory over Hezbollah, they will fire more rockets. Israel will then inflict more aerial destruction, declare victory, and then Hezbollah will fire more rockets in order to make the situation politically untenable for Israel, and they’ll have to launch the ground invasion.
Now, if you listen to Nasrallah’s last speech, he said literally, “Please invade, please invade, we welcome the invasion.” Which is true. If it’s 100,000 or it’s 75,000, the Party of God longs for, yearns for that invasion so they can finally settle the score with that satanic state man-to-man, in hand-to-hand combat.
So, the Israelis dread the aerial assault—excuse me, dread the land war. Hezbollah longs for it. And the only way it can force the land war is to keep its rockets and missiles in reserve and deny Netanyahu the chance to declare victory. That’s what happened in 2006. Israel amassed the troops on its border with Lebanon, and it wasn’t until 72 hours before the war was over—33 days into the war—that the troops entered Lebanon, the Israeli troops. And already, Condoleezza Rice had gotten a UN resolution through, ending the war, because Israel begged the U.S.: “Get that resolution, get that resolution, because we don’t want the land invasion. It will be a disaster.” And speaking as a complete military ignoramus, I would say with 100% certainty, if it comes to pass, it will be a catastrophe for the state of Israel because those people have no fear, no dread of giving their lives to finally settling the score with that monstrous state that has inflicted so much death and destruction, agony and anguish, with all the haughtiness and arrogance of the übermensch.
Just as the Soviet Red Army inflicted those final wounds on the Nazi übermenschen that had invaded their country, it was very ugly for Germany at the end of the war. As you know, there were mass rapes of German women. The Red Army was going to settle the score with those monsters who had murdered 30 million of their people, and it’s the same thing with the Party of God.
So, the question is: How much death and destruction will Israel inflict from the air? And secondly, whether they will be forced—because Hezbollah will deny Prime Minister Netanyahu the ability to declare victory—into a ground invasion.
I should note that in the 2006 war, Hezbollah, on the very last day—on the 33rd day—fired more missiles and rockets than on any other day in that 33-day war. I think—I could be wrong, so correct me—I think it was 10,000 missiles and rockets. They wanted to transmit the message: “You lost.” And I think they’re going to do the same thing this time. They will hold back. That’s my guess.
