A friend in England, a dweller in bucolic Somerset along with the Black Angus herds and the sheep, forwards a piece by a Times of London columnist that merits careful consideration. Matthew Syed, who has distinguished himself as a ping–pong champion, titles his commentary, “Israel–Hezbollah conflict hinges on a crude question: Who do you want to win?” Syed, who has also done well writing high-end self-help books (You Are Awesome, 2018; Dare to Be You, 2020) has posed a crude question. He is right about this, if little else. And because it is crude, an essentially unserious question, we must take it seriously.
As I read Syed’s column it seemed to me symptomatic of logical deficiencies—deficiencies encouraged by those shaping and executing the West’s collective foreign policies—such that most of us have very little grasp of the world in which we live. Ours is a world, so we are urged to think, divided eternally into two. There are good guys and bad, the benevolent and the malevolent—democrats and autocrats in the Biden regime’s terms. And so there must be winners and losers, just as Matthew Syed supposes.
It is hopeless, or nearly. Such a view of our world misses the point most of humanity, 24 years in, wishes to make about the 21st century. Two points, actually. One, the 20th century, a century of binary enmities, is indeed over. We must finally leave it behind. Two, the thought of winners and losers is beyond retrograde. In our time we will all win or we will all lose. Matthew Syed is wholly representative of those who simply cannot grasp these realities. Israel must win, Hezbollah must lose. And as Israel’s long-running hostility toward Iran drifts toward the war the Zionist state has long sought, the Israelis must win, the Iranians lose.
To dispense quickly with a minor matter of logic, the intensifying conflict between terrorist Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese political party and armed resistance movement, does not hinge in the slightest on which side you or I want to emerge the victor. The outcome depends on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli and Lebanese forces, the wisdom or otherwise of their political leaders, the sense or otherwise of their military and diplomatic strategies, and, not least, the extent to which either side has the support of other powers. To suggest the great “you” Matthew Syed addresses will determine how Israel’s regional confrontations will turn out is the very height of narcissism. And the narcissism prevalent in the West is one of the problems Syed’s commentary requires us to confront.
Syed is unambivalently a clash-of-civilizations man. And like others of this persuasion, he does not think we ought to look at matters too closely. He proposes we consider Israel’s barbarities—in Lebanon, Gaza, the Occupied Territories, who knows where next—as another case of the West against the rest. Russia will invade Europe when it finishes in Ukraine. China is “an ancient and impressive civilization now run by a totalitarian clique.” Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. This is all we need to know as we address the question Syed’s headline poses, who do we want to win?
He writes:
“So perhaps you’ll forgive me for saying something that doesn’t get into the details of any single dispute, doesn’t opine on the precise logic of Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah or its broader response to the October 7 attacks, doesn’t get into the weeds of Western policy over Ukraine; instead, it makes a simpler but, I hope, not simplistic point. In the conflagration that is coming, I back Israel 100 per cent, the West 100 per cent, civilization 100 per cent, progress 100 per cent.
“There are hinge moments in history,” Syed writes to round off his point, “where simplicity is an asset.”
What a perfectly ridiculous thought in our current circumstances. Maybe the self-help books are a better read.
I am not much interested in Matthew Syed, and it is not my intent to single him out in any kind of ad hominem fashion. It is his argument, altogether his way of looking at the world in 2024, that concerns me. Syed reflects a pernicious perspective that seems nearly ubiquitous in the Western post-democracies, especially but not only in the Anglosphere. We are everywhere encouraged to eschew the complexity that always, no exceptions, informs human affairs. We cannot, in consequence, see others as they are—precisely the condition preferred by those in power. And so we resort to gross, often juvenile simplifications, just as we are meant to do. We are left backing Israel 100%, the West 100%, and so on.
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Matthew Syed’s question, “Who do you want to win?’ has been posed more or less daily since Hamas’s assault in southern Israel last Oct. 7 and the attack the Israel Defense Forces began against the Palestinians of Gaza the next day. If you oppose the IDF’s campaign of genocide and ethnic-cleansing, you are supporting Hamas, you stand with terrorists: This is the standard charge among Israel’s apologists. We are all familiar with it. We get the same now that the IDF has assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader, and escalates its attacks in Lebanon. And we will be in for it yet again as Israel’s animosity toward Iran tips over into open conflict.
“I don’t think anyone is mourning the loss of Hassan Nasrallah,” John Kirby, the Biden regime’s national-security spokesman, told Jake Tapper on CNN last weekend. “Having decimated the command structure of Hezbollah is good for the region, good for the world.” Lots of people accept this as so. Matthew Syed buys into Kirby’s perspective “100%.”
What is Kirby selling here? What is it Syed encourages us to accept as… as the simple truth? Let us enter upon a few of those complexities both of these people forbid us.
Straight off the top, the project here is to make Israeli aggression appear normal and to transform genocide, ethnic-cleansing, assassinations, and terrorist operations — “Israel has a right to defend itself” — from crimes against humanity into acceptable conduct. It defies all logic, of course, to depict the bombing of apartment buildings and the sniper-murders of children, innocent men and women, aid workers, journalists, and others as self-defense, but this is as it should be: We are meant to leave logic behind as we reduce our understanding of these events to simplicities that border on the idiotic. Matthew Syed puts Israel’s barbarities in the same sentence as “civilization” and “progress.” What is more logical? Or less?
John Kirby doesn’t think anyone is mourning the loss of Hassan Nasrallah. This is a very striking assertion. Many, many thousands of people in Lebanon, Iran, the West Bank, and as far away as Pakistan and India have publicly mourned Nasrallah’s death since last Friday. But these people must not count as “anyone.” They are “no one.” Can you think of a clearer assumption, altogether unconscious, of the West’s superiority over those of the non–West — of those who count over those who do not? I can’t. As striking as this primitive thought is the extent, so far as I can tell complete, to which this kind of talk goes unnoted. This is what I mean by the narcissism abroad in the West.
Now you know why the non–West urges as we speak that it is time for humanity to leave the 20th century behind. Or the past 500 years, better put.
The murder of Nasrallah was good for the region and the world, was it? This is brutishly insensitive, the very inverse of insightful. But the American government calls Hezbollah a terrorist organization and, as John Kirby asserted plainly and very simply, its leader was a terrorist, and so the judgment holds. Atop this, there is the imagery. Nasrallah had a full beard and wore the traditional turban of Shi`ite officials. The photographs of the reaction in various West Asian cities as featured in Western newspapers: Most showed distressed people in disorderly gatherings. These people live beyond the boundaries of “civilization,” we are meant to conclude. “Progress” left them behind.
Tell me, I would love to know: How much does anyone who accepts these cartoon renderings of Hassan Nasrallah and those who mourn his passing actually know about the man the Israelis just murdered and what he meant?
Nasrallah assumed leadership of Hezbollah in 1992, a decade after its founding. He never dropped his opposition to Israel as a threat to Lebanon, but he was in his political milieu unquestionably a measured, moderating force. As Alastair Crooke pointed out Monday on Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom podcast, Nasrallah had long earlier emerged, for millions of people well beyond Lebanon, as “a symbol of national liberation, of anticolonialism, of justice.”
In November 2009 Nasrallah advanced a new party manifesto that was perfectly forthright as to dangers of American hegemony and the hostility of the Zionist state, while also moving the organization in a decidedly pluralistic direction. “People evolve. The whole world changed over the past 24 years. Lebanon changed. The world order changed,” Nasrallah said as he read out the new document during a national broadcast. Hezbollah’s objection to the Israelis, he said, “is not that they are Jews, but that they are occupiers who are raping our land and holy places.”
A lot of Islamophobia — again, unconscious Islamophobia, undeclared but evident Islamophobia — lies behind Kirby’s flippant dismissal of Nasrallah and Matthew Syed’s “100 per cent” for Israel. As they exemplify, the complexities of politics and culture in the Islamic world are almost entirely invisible in the West, so thoroughly are these nations fenced off from view. The nuanced relationships between church and state, the mosque as an institution—religious, social, political, economic—around which much of life is arranged: There is no room for any of this in the wholesale simplifications people such as Kirby and Syed urge upon us.
Who do I want to win? I decline the question because it is unserious, nothing more than a propagandist’s parlor game. I am well prepared to say who I want to lose, and my reply to this ought to be obvious.
“We can’t afford to doubt the West’s moral legitimacy,” Matthew Syed writes in his comment for The Times. “It is the steel we need to face down enemies of liberty.” What is he saying here? The West’s moral legitimacy? Wow. The West dares not question itself or this legitimacy? Why is this some kind of imperative, and why now? Is this an expression of confidence or of weakness?
These are serious questions. And as I often find, in the questions lie the answers.