[nixon_why69]

It turns out Hezbollah and Hamas are not Persian and don't speak Farsi. Hamas are Sunni.

Most importantly, both groups exist as a direct result of Israeli persecution of their civilian populations. They weren't created by Iran, they're a predictable result that happens when you occupy people's land and oppress them, you get resistance groups.

[FireBeyond]

And while Arafat was responsible for many abominable actions and many, many casualties, let's not forget that one of the first supporters of Hamas was ... oh yes, Netanyahu. Because Arafat, for whatever reason or reasons in his final years softened and the PLO was increasingly being seen by the world as the one willing to negotiate while Israel didn't want to, which made for uncomfortable questions of "why is a terroristic organization willing to figure out how to get to peace while a supposedly peaceful nation is not".

Netanyahu and his ilk realized that rather than a rapidly moderating, rapidly gaining sympathy and support PLO was not the enemy they "needed" for their own agenda - "from the river to the sea", which, let's not forget, was actually Likud's official election slogan in the 70s and 80s (a "hilarious" irony when certain people try to point to Palestinian usage of this as a "gotcha" - "See, they want to exterminate us!"), and that IDF intelligence showed that Hamas was likely to be more extremist and thus garner more sympathy for Israel, so Israel started supporting Hamas' rise.

[tptacek]

Over the last 10 years Hezbollah has spent more manpower fighting in Syria for Iran than it has confronting Israel. I don't know how to take seriously the idea that Hezbollah is anything but an appendage of the IRGC.

As a reminder: Shia are a minority in Lebanon; it's not even close.

[nixon_why69]

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?

[tptacek]

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.

[nixon_why69]

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".

[tptacek]

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.)

[nixon_why69]

I think you're underrating how much you've bought the framing from US/neoliberal media, though. Try to put yourselves in Hezbollah or the Houthis' shoes, you wouldn't think of yourself as a pawn, you'd think of yourself as full-agency humans with interests and allies. Sunni power is against you so you ally with the Shia power.

For example, Iran never directly intervened in Yemen, they limited themselves to sending weapons, but the Saudis did a SHITLOAD[1], to the tune of 10k troops, hundreds of sorties and a "war crimes" section on the wiki page. Yet somehow the IRGC is the most salient group in this conflict to you, despite not doing any direct fighting?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi-led_intervention_in_the_...