There's a 2nd crucial lesson, which I think is much more important. Hezbollah showed not only that you can defeat Israel. It showed how to defeat Israel. It proposed a relatively simple, but to my thinking fundamental, formula. So in this speech, the last speech (09.23.2006), Nasrallah raised this issue: "what is the Hezbollah model?" He considers it as follows: "Resistance depends on planning, organization. This resistance experience, which should be conveyed to the world, depends - on the moral and spiritual level - on faith, certainty, reliance [on God], and readiness to make sacrifices." Ok, you have to be committed. You have to be willing to go the full nine yards. The next sentence I found remarkably interesting. It says: "It also depends on reason, planning, organization, armament, and, as is said, on taking all possible protective procedures.... The pious, God-reliant, loving, and knowledgeable resistance is also the conscious, wise, trained, and equipped resistance that has plans. This is the secret of the victory we are today celebrating, brothers and sisters." To most of you this doesn't sound like anything particularly profound but, in fact, it is because at the end of the day Israel always depended on the fact that its adversaries were stupid, incompetent, blowhards and windbags, and hot air baloons, and, in fact, they were right... That when they were dealing with a Nasser, he was a blowhard; a Saddam Hussein, he was a windbag; when they were dealing with Yasser Arafat, he was a hot air ballon. They were nothing of any substance... [inaudible]... That was Israel's ace in the hole. Now comes along an Arab leader who says we have to use "reason." It's a very remarkable thing to read. We have to use "reason." We have to think, plan, organize. And he didn't just say it ... [inaudible]... As I'm sure, as most of you know, that the Israelis were reporting that their [Israeli] population was waiting anxiously for each speech from Nasrallah to find out what's going on [Poll: Israelis believed Nasrallah over Peretz,Ynetnews.com, by Anat Breshkovsky, 09.03.2006]. They [Israelis] stopped believing their own media and they only believed what he had to say. No more of the Arab windbaggery -- on the second day of the war in '67 Nasser says 'we destroyed all of the Israeli Air Force.' Or when the hot air baloon Saddam Hussein, after defeat in 1991, gave out Victory Medals to the Iraqi Army. That era is over. This is a serious leadership whose commitment is matched by its intelligence and its incorruptibility. And that really is the formula. And now the United States and Israel are in living dread because they don't fear Hezbollah -- it's 3,000 fighters -- that's not what they fear. What they fear is, throughout the Arab world all the anti -- they call it American, I'll call imperialist -- all the anti-imperialist movements will now be emulating the Hizbullah model. Those who want to defeat the Americans, the American designs in the region, they're going to look for the Hezbollah model and the Hizbu'llah model says you have to "reason," you have to think, you have to "plan," you have to anticipate, and if you do that, you can win. And the fact is, it's true. If you do that, you can beat them.


Video: Finkelstein on Hamas, current crisis, Lebanon, Hezbollah
(Burlington, VT, 09.30.2006)