Palestinians carry the body of Basil al-Araj during his funeral in the West Bank village of Walajeh on March 17, 2017. Photo AP/Nasser Shiyoukhi/file photo.
By Sabira Abughazaleh and Dalal Zainabi – Sep 27, 2024
Throughout the course of the Battle of Al Aqsa Flood, the Zionists have made a habit of out-doing themselves in committing the most heinous and shocking war crimes against our people in West Asia. There is seemingly no end to the depths of their depravity; every week is something new and horrible. In light of the escalation of war against Lebanon, it is crucial for those opposed to this fascist-Zionist brutality to remain steadfastly principled.
The modern battlefield is not geographically limited and increasingly takes place in information spaces and psychological terrain. With fear and uncertainty rife after the terrorist attacks on Lebanon and throughout the 11 months of the glorious Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, it is increasingly necessary to turn to the wisdom of our martyrs. We must honor their sacrifice by continuously applying the gift they have given us, that of a clear lens to understand the realities of the ongoing war of national liberation against Zionism. In 2014, the Palestinian martyr Basil al-Araj laid out eight rules on the nature of this war; they remain just as relevant today as ten years ago.
Guerilla war
Basil al-Araj’s first rule provides a necessary context to understand what is happening on a strategic level today:
The Palestinian Resistance consists of guerrilla formations whose strategies follow the logic of guerrilla warfare or hybrid warfare, which Arabs and Muslims have become masters of through our experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza. War is never based on the logic of conventional wars and the defense of fixed points and borders; on the contrary, you draw the enemy into an ambush. You do not stick to a fixed position to defend it; instead, you perform maneuvers, movement, withdrawal, and attack from the flanks and the rear. So, never measure it against conventional wars.
Hezbollah has already proven that it is capable of decolonizing land and defeating the occupation. One needs only look back to 2006, and recall that its capacity has skyrocketed since this victory, through intense preparation and with support from its allies. The Islamic Resistance is fighting a guerilla war. Rather than retaliating one-to-one or missile-for-missile, the martyr al-Araj reminds us that it is always more strategically desirable to “draw the enemy into an ambush.”
The Zionist-fascist enemy’s capabilities are woefully mismatched to the forces it seeks to vanquish. Its reliance on Western-supplied arms, global impunity, and seemingly boundless resources only serve to underscore its inherent clumsiness, as it lumbers forward with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. This is not an enemy best fought in conventional warfare. Mao Zedong explains:
When it is not advantageous for our main land army to meet the enemy in large-scale engagements and we, therefore, ‘send’ out commando units or guerrilla units, which employ the tactics of avoiding strength and striking at weakness, of flitting about and having no fixed position, and of subduing the enemy according to circumstances, and when we do not oppose the enemy according to the ordinary rules of tactics, this is called employing guerrilla tactics.
Hezbollah and the entire Axis of Resistance understand this concept, and apply it to devastating effect. This is in stark contrast to the enemy’s rigidity, which, through experience, the Resistance has learned to oppose by, what the martyr al-Araj calls “living like porcupines and fighting like fleas.” He describes the Resistance like a flea that “stings, jumps and stings again avoiding hands or feet trying to stomp it. It does not kill its host (meaning it does not kill the entire functions of a dog host for example), what it does is exhaust its host.”
Following this analogy, Hezbollah is just one of the many fleas that are relentlessly attacking the rabid dog occupying the region. The martyr continues to explain that the flea creates “a constant disturbance, eventually preventing the host from being able to rest. It makes the host nervous and demoralized.” Every time the Resistance sends hundreds of thousands of settlers scurrying to their bomb shelters, now a regular occurrence, it is a victory. This concept was described by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah as an “accumulation of points.”
This strategy is part of a war of attrition. The Zionist society is a soft society; the Zionist economy and the settler-imperialist way of life is dependent on privilege and comfort while the Arab masses are willing to make great sacrifices for the liberation of their land.
The Resistance, while kept well and healthy with the aid of brotherly nations, does not have the nearly endless supply of resources that the temporary entity does. Guerilla warfare allows it to amplify the best of its qualities and skills. This type of war is slow and methodical. Hezbollah’s strategy in the north may not seem like much on a daily basis, but over the course of less than a year it has forced over one hundred thousand settlers to retreat from the land and severely disrupted the functioning of the enemy economy and the impact is growing every day. While the desire for immediate and vicious retaliation may soothe our aching hearts, it does not fit in the long-term strategy that leads us on the inevitable march towards victory.
As this “war of the flea” continues, the dog will begin to destroy anything it can in order to rid itself of these fleas. It may even get to a point where the dog causes significant harm to itself, ripping its own flesh in a futile attempt at saving itself. It is with this context that we can understand the brutality of the enemy against civilians. So-called targeted assassinations killing dozens of people, “rescue missions” that kill hundreds of people including their own prisoners, and the enemy’s strategic foolishness on all fronts as it stumbles towards its own demise.
Psychological warfare of the enemy
The second rule from the martyr ensures we are prepared for the consequences and tactics of this rabid dog in its mad rage:
The enemy will spread photos and videos of their invasion into Gaza, occupation of residential buildings, or presence in public areas and well-known landmarks. This is part of the psychological warfare in guerrilla wars; you allow your enemy to move as they wish so that they fall into your trap and you strike them. You determine the location and timing of the battle. So, you may see photos from Al-Katiba Square, Al-Saraya, Al-Rimal, or Omar Al-Mukhtar Street, but do not let this weaken your resolve. The battle is judged by its overall results, and this is merely a show.
In this asymmetrical war, where the traditional metrics of military might are rendered meaningless, the enemy’s reliance on brute force only serves to mask its own strategic weakness, rather than demonstrate any genuine advantage. The horror of fleeing civilians incinerated in their cars, the relentless carpet bombing of entire villages, and the endless attempts to manipulate public opinion to justify not one, but two genocides—these are not the hallmarks of a strong and confident enemy, but the desperate thrashings of an entity being slowly drained of its strategic advantage, moving daily towards its own inevitable downfall.
In order to avoid a costly ground war against Lebanon, the enemy relies on techniques that favor its strengths in cyber-warfare, air power, and terror and displacement as weapons of war. By any definition, the pager and walkie-talkie terrorist attacks, and the recent aerial bombardment campaign are acts of terrorism and war, yet, as martyr al-Araj eloquently reminds us, “Never measure it against conventional wars.” The enemy’s idiotic pursuit of “Total Victory” is a self-defeating endeavor, similar to its strategy of “fleeing forward,” as it only creates ample surface area for the Resistance to “determine the location and timing of the battle.” The temporary entity is well aware that it lacks the capability to confront the Resistance in a ground invasion, yet it sees no option but to fling itself into the abyss, forced to escalate further and further as other options diminish before its eyes.
Furthermore, the enemy believes that, by broadcasting its crimes, this will debilitate and paralyze the people, forcing them into submission. Basil al-Araj reminds us that these “should not weaken your resolve.” Earlier this year, in order to pressure the Resistance into accepting surrender in a bogus so-called ceasefire, the enemy threatened an invasion of Rafah and Western institutions reiterated how catastrophic this would be for the civilians in Gaza. Rather than submit to these threats, Abu Obeida boldly dared them to try and promised that Rafah would be a “graveyard for the invaders.” Although the invasion of Rafah has caused immense suffering for Palestinians in Gaza, Abu Obeida has kept his promise and the Resistance has inflicted major blows on the occupation soldiers, consistently preventing them from achieving a single strategic goal. It continues to destroy occupation soldiers and material on a daily basis. Last week, Sayyed Nasrallah made a similar statement daring the enemy to invade Lebanon, saying “we look forward to your arrival” knowing that the Resistance will achieve a decisive victory.
When the enemy broadcasts television footage of occupation soldiers gang-raping Palestinian prisoners, that is part of this psychological warfare campaign. The same is true when it advertises its massacres, such as when it turned Al-Shifa and Al-Nasser Hospitals into torture and concentration camps. The horrors are endless—without an analysis of the nature of the war, it would be easy to fall into despair and believe the boasting of delusional Zionists who harbor the twisted fantasy that they can completely ethnically cleanse Gaza, the rest of Palestine, and, eventually, the entire Levant (Greater Syria region).
Hezbollah Bombs ‘Israeli’ Arms Factory, Forces Fighter Jets to Withdraw
Rather than being paralyzed by the unfathomable brutality of the enemy, the Resistance relies on the triumph of blood over the sword. The martyr Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi, the first secretary general of Hezbollah explained: “the slogan of the triumph of blood prevailing over the sword (intisar al-damm ala al-saif); that is I—through my blood—prevail; through drops of blood I am victorious even if all the enemies have greater weapons.” The sacrifices of our martyrs have not been in vain, as they are all martyrs on the road to Al-Quds, paving the way with their precious blood. The sacrifices in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Yemen, and in Lebanon have undone billions of dollars of propaganda efforts designed to promote sectarianism and division in the Arab and Islamic worlds.
The campaign to isolate Palestine from Yemen on the basis of “Sunni-Shia divide” has been undone through this sacrifice of shared blood. Similarly the anti-Resistance propaganda inside Palestine and the anti-Hezbollah propaganda that has been insidiously broadcast by major Arabic outlets like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya has also been completely upended. In front of our eyes, the blood of the martyrs is defeating the sword of a century of Sykes-Picot.
The Zionist crimes in Gaza have unmasked the United States and the Zionist enemy as bloodthirsty, irredeemable enemies of humanity—an immense Hasbara and weaponized media apparatus of imperialism is being washed away by the pure blood of the martyrs. This is a sacrifice the world must never forget. As Palestinian scholar Abdaljawad Omar writes, “Our gift to the world was given through our blood, especially for those interested in a more just, more economically equal, decolonial, deracialized world.”
The Axis of Resistance proves daily that the Zionist enemy can never truly claim victory, no matter the ferocity of its attacks or the depth of its brutality. In fact, due to a culture of resistance and martyrdom among the people, the enemy’s crimes only strengthen the Resistance and its popular support. Supporters of the Palestinian cause must remember this lesson and not promote defeatism.
At its core, Zionism is a parasitic ideology backing an expansionist settler-colonial project that is fundamentally incompatible with the existence of an unbroken Arab or Muslim population, or, indeed, humanity. Its very essence is rooted in exclusion, displacement, and an insatiable hunger for more land, more destruction, and more blood, forever dooming it to be on the defensive, its every arrogant attempt to assert its legitimacy met with Resistance and defiance. In this sense, the outcome of protracted war is already predetermined. The Resistance’s ultimate victory is a matter of when, not if.
Future parts of this series will expand on the six other rules that the martyr Basil al-Araj laid out for us. The road to Al-Quds is a long one. We all must do our part to remain principled throughout. Khalil Oudatallah said in his eulogy of the martyr Basil, “Basil did not call on us to be resistance fighters. Nor did he call on us to be revolutionaries. Basil told us to be true, that is all. If you are true, you will be revolutionaries and resistance fighters.”
OT/SA/DZ/JRE
Dalal al-Zainabi
Dalal is a contributor and volunteer for Orinoco Tribune.
