On a setback – Adam Shatz in LRB:

“Netanyahu’s American enablers – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin – swiftly echoed the Israeli prime minister’s celebration of Nasrallah’s death. Never mind that Netanyahu hadn’t consulted them about the bombing, which made a mockery of the American and French push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah, to which Netanyahu had privately given his approval. Never mind the Americans’ frequent warnings about the dangers of escalation, and their stated desire to avoid a confrontation with Iran. For Biden, the killing of Nasrallah provided a ‘measure of justice’ for Hizbullah’s victims, from the 1983 bombings of the US embassy and the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut to the present. Harris called Nasrallah a ‘terrorist with American blood on his hands’, as though Netanyahu and his cabinet colleagues had kept their hands clean during the killing of tens of thousands of people in Gaza and the violent displacement of more than 90 per cent of its population – to say nothing of the wave of settler attacks and demolitions in the West Bank, or the bombardment of southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and Beirut after the grisly pager and walkie-talkie attacks two weeks ago. But ‘Arab blood’ does not have the same value as American or Israeli in the moral calculus of the West.”

(…)

“Until he led Hizbullah into the Syrian war on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, attracting the hatred of many who had once admired him, Nasrallah appeared to be the last Arab nationalist, the only Arab leader outside Palestine willing to stand up to Israel. He was often compared to Nasser, but unlike Nasser, whose air force was pulverised on the first day of the 1967 war, he fought Israel to a standstill in 2006, and even treated the people of Lebanon to a televised speech announcing an impending attack on an Israeli ship, which went up in flames as he spoke (he even briefly became an improbable object of adulation in the Sunni Arab world). But though he took pride in Hizbullah’s performance on the battlefield, he was chastened by the ferocity of Israel’s bombardment, and acknowledged that his movement’s cross-border hostage-taking operation had offered Israel a pretext to destroy large parts of Lebanon, a mistake that he vowed never to repeat.”

(…)

“But no decision by Nasrallah was more damaging to his party’s standing than his intervention in the Syrian war on behalf of the Assad dictatorship: not surprisingly, some of Assad’s victims have expressed joy at Hizbullah’s recent humiliation. Nasrallah’s reasons may have been pragmatic: Assad was part of the so-called Axis of Resistance, and if he fell from power Hizbullah would not be able to transport weapons from Iran over the Syrian border into Lebanon. But Nasrallah had styled himself as a defender of the oppressed, and many were unhappy to see Hizbullah fighters assisting a ruthless war of repression.”

(…)

“After 2006, Hizbullah took part in only occasional tit-for-tat exchanges with Israel, usually involving the Shebaa Farms, a sliver of Lebanese territory still under Israeli control. Otherwise, the border was relatively quiet – so quiet that Sunni radicals in Lebanon accused Nasrallah of being one of Israel’s border guards. All of that changed, however, on 8 October 2023, when he decided to open a ‘northern front’ in support of Hamas and the people of Gaza.
Israeli commentators, on both left and right, have argued that Hizbullah had no reason to fire rockets at northern Israel, that it chose to launch this conflict. Nasrallah took a different view. Hizbullah, he believed, was ‘at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is one whole, and you cannot partition it. It is ultimately one reality.’ As he saw it, he was assuming his responsibilities within the Axis of Resistance to reduce the pressure on his ally in Gaza. Hizbullah’s attacks on northern Israel, which led to the evacuation of more than fifty thousand Israeli civilians, were denounced as terrorism in the West. But many Palestinians appreciated Nasrallah’s support, especially since none of the other Arab leaders was doing anything to defend the people of Gaza. Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, spoke for many of them when he told Antony Blinken, shortly after 7 October: ‘Do I personally care about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.’”

(…)

“Although Hizbullah had succeeded in creating a state of mutual deterrence with its neighbour, Israel had only grudgingly accepted this situation. With his attempt to link northern Israel and Gaza on 8 October, by launching rockets ‘in solidarity’ with the Palestinians, Nasrallah offered Israel the pretext it had long sought to rewrite the ‘rules of the game’ that had governed the border since 2006.
After 7 October Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, reportedly wanted to strike Hizbullah first, not Hamas. Netanyahu rejected Gallant’s advice, but the war on Hizbullah, for which Israel had been preparing for nearly two decades, remained part of the discussion, even as Netanyahu pretended to defer to the Biden administration’s warnings about a regional conflagration. He knew that Biden and Blinken would ultimately capitulate, with a feckless ceremony of ‘concern’ and ‘caution’ over ‘the best way forward’. Over the next eleven months, Israeli pounded southern Lebanon, killing several hundred people and forcing nearly a hundred thousand to flee their homes, but this troubled the Western conscience far less than the flight of Israelis on the other side of the border. Israel carried out 80 per cent of the attacks along the border, but once again this disparity was hardly remarked on in the American press, where the exodus of Arabs under Israeli violence is treated as a natural catastrophe and described in the passive voice.”

(…)

“Nasrallah’s death is as humiliating a setback for his movement as Nasser’s defeat in 1967 was for the Arab cause. But nothing feeds resistance like humiliation.”

Read the article here.

Yes, nothing feeds resistance more than humiliation. But this concept works also among the people who can be perceived as oppressors.
Israelis felt humiliated after October 7, this is important reason why Netanyahu is still in power.

And Hezbollah’s support i.e. Iran’s support for Assad was a fatal mistake, more fatal for Hezbollah than for Iran.
And by the way, Netanyahu has learned from père Assad and Hama.