The city of Nabatieh is no more important than the southern towns and villages Israel has occupied and destroyed, or those it controls by fire, nor is it an exception in the exodus of the south and the southerners such that every light should be trained on it now. Nor can the pressure on it be separated from the calculations of the confrontation in the Ali al-Taher hills- but neither can it be reduced to them.
What is happening in the Ali al-Taher hills is part of a battle whose name is Nabatieh. Herein lies the danger: that the Israeli enemy should make of its combat objectives in the Ali al-Taher hills- where it claims Hezbollah maintains strategic military installations, along with installations in the neighboring hills- a pretext for seizing the city of Nabatieh.
Whether or not the Israeli enemy takes the Ali al-Taher hills, Netanyahu will use the attempt as an electoral crossing point.
And should he achieve a visible field victory, one that residents of the border settlements can see with the naked eye, he will not stop there. He will push on toward the neighboring hills- and the graver matter is that this would enable him to besiege the city of Nabatieh.
In every case, Nabatieh lives under the threat of what develops in the Ali al-Taher battle. And with every day that a settlement stumbles and the horizon of negotiations closes further, the Israeli raises the pitch of his arrogance, and in return the Shiite duo, Hezbollah and the Amal Movement, raises its refusals. Every opportunity vanishes, the danger compounds, and the fears grow- not only about the fuse of a ferocious war being lit, but about the city's capacity to hold on, to live, and to protect what remains of it.
In all likelihood the Israeli mind grasps the city's importance, and may understand better where seizing it leads than do those who have monopolized its representation, confiscated its decision-making, busied themselves with changing its nature and its dispositions, and reduced it to what they see as permitted and forbidden- meaning the Shiite duo, and Hezbollah in particular.
But given the Israeli mind and its vengeful character, and the strategy of collective punishment it is carrying out in the occupied south- a strategy that has begun to take forms and engineering designs that make the return of residents to their occupied villages difficult or remote- Nabatieh will not be spared these policies, and it may be hard for it to escape them.
The futile wars of support have turned the city of Nabatieh, the seat of the governorate that bears its name and the stronghold of the Shiite duo's weight in Lebanon, into a line of contact and open confrontation with the Israeli enemy. The consequences and dangers of this equation are not confined to the military dimension, nor tied only to a possible battle in the Ali al-Taher hills. The Ali al-Taher installations become a merely tactical question set against the strategic danger facing Nabatieh as a city, a society, and a community- and here its particularity appears in all its detail as the real target.
The Israeli mind, possessed by the theory of collective punishment against a community it holds responsible, and not only militarily, for the attack of October 7, 2023 and for its support of Gaza and then of Tehran, will inevitably punish that community collectively in ways that go beyond what its military machine achieves.
To this day the Shiite duo, and Hezbollah in particular, has not grasped that the weakening of Nabatieh, the receding of life within it, and its conversion from one of the foremost urban centers of Jabal Amel and the center of gravity in the duo's own environment into an axis of combat and a line of contact, is a crime it shares with the Israeli enemy. If the Israeli knows perfectly well what this city means, and how important its social, economic, cultural, and political role is to the duo's own community, how can those who have confiscated its decision-making hand him his pretexts free of charge, under the heading of an Ali al-Taher symbolism inflated until it became the stuff of legend, or a citadel inhabited by the Old Man of the Mountain?
Nabatieh is larger than the Ali al-Taher hills. The crime is that it should be turned into Iran's forward rampart in a confrontation that may occupy the whole region, or left as an easy pray in the mouth of a Netanyahu who wants to use it at his electoral table and turn its downfall into a stepping stone toward another term in office.
