Comment by nixon_why69
1 day ago
Yeah, but Shia are a bigger percentage of the area that Israel is currently occupying and "turning into Gaza" in their own words. There are approximately 1.5 million homeless in the area now?
Hezbollah do see the Iranian supreme leader as the leader of Shia Islam, and they do see Iran as their key ally, but they didn't even exist before Israel occupied southern Lebanon in the 80s and abetted all sorts of massacres. They have a reason to exist besides being Iranian stooges, they're real people.
One more interesting narrative frame: Fighting in Syria for Iran? Not for Assad? Was Assad a thoughtless Iranian appendage also?
None of this explains why the Quds Force was able to command Hezbollah into Syria to besiege Sunni towns and suburbs of Damascus. It's very easy to find credible sources saying that Hezbollah is an Iranian asset, and the balance of clear evidence supports that. Like Iran itself, Hezbollah uses Israel as a political foil, but their real enemies are Sunni Arabs.
None of these observations make me a supporter of the Netanyahu government; my opinions of Likud have nothing to do with my opinions of Iran and their IRGC militias.
Yeah, I'm also not saying I'm some uncritical supporter of Hezbollah.
I'm just saying they have rational interests in addition to religious/sectarian, and we can see in the current situation that it would have been nice for them to have Assad still in charge of Syria right now. Calling them an IRGC militia isn't any more correct than calling UK/Israel a "USA militia".
It's fine that we disagree, it's fine for us to present different cases to the thread, we can do that respectfully, but just to be very clear: my case is that Hezbollah is (or was immediately prior to the "decapitation") an IRGC asset, commanded at least at a high level --- "which fights to pick, which fights to join" --- by the Quds Force commanders. Several QF elites were injured during the pager strike!
I'd be happy to see Netanyahu in prison. But the horrific death toll in Gaza is a small fraction of what the IRGC has wrought in Syria, Iraq, and especially Yemen. When the IRGC orchestrates starvation sieges, as they did at Madaya in Syria and Taiz in Yemen, they brag about it. They film videos for the besieged residents jokingly eating off banquets.
Winding back to the top of the thread, all this is just to say, Israel is not necessarily wrong about the adversaries they face outside of their borders. (They're definitely not wrong about Hamas and PIJ, but they're seemingly wrong about just about everything else that happens inside their borders.)
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