Hezbollah's Silverback Nasrallah is Netanyahu's Alter Ego

Looking pale and downtrodden, the silverback Hassan Nasrallah of the Hezbollah criminal entity delivered a speech yesterday that clearly showed signs of weariness and defeat. He did not holler and yell his usual threats with his finger wagging up in the air. He rarely smirked, a sign that his usual arrogance is waning. The man lives underground, fearing for his personal safety while innocent people and his fighters are getting killed. He is a disgrace to whatever cause he pretends to fight for. This is not how leaders lead, not by hiding like cowards.

Along with the obvious physical signs that the pagers and walkie-talkie explosions had dealt a blow to his ego and to his hubris, his threats were much more muted than in previous speeches. Still, he drilled the canard that his "resistance" is dragging the Zionist on a path of collapse and disintegration. He also repeated his threats that Israel's northern residents won't be coming back soon to their colonial settlements, and that if required, his "resistance" will cause hundreds of thousands more to be displaced.

He couldn't do otherwise. Despite the blow to everything he has stood for up to now, he could not admit failure, let alone express anything approaching a compromising posture. He has hyped up his entreprise to his "environment", i.e. his Shiite herd, so much that any sign of retreat could cause upheavals within that environment. How long can the Shiite community keep sustaining losses and making sacrifices for an objective that seems farther and farther distant? All the other Lebanese communities (Christians, Sunni Muslims, etc., except for the Druze chameleons) have clearly said they've had enough of Nasrallah's "resistance" on behalf of Iran, and not really in defense of Palestine.

In the 1980s, Hezbollah and its sister Shiite organization massacred upwards of 5,000 Palestinians in the so-called "War of the Camps" with the objective of wresting control of the "resistance platform" from the Sunni Palestinians and their Arab backers (Saudi etc.) to the benefit of Nasrallah's Persian Shiite breastfeeding mother back in Tehran. Clearly, Palestine is a secondary objective to Iranian hegemony.

Bottom line: No major threats of immediate retaliation. Expressed empathy for Palestinians, and more importantly, maintained the link between the war in Gaza and his war in the south of Lebanon. He claimed that his harassment of Israel is helping reduce the pressure on Gaza - a contradiction since Nasrallah remains bound by the rules of engagement to which he has agreed with his enemy Israel. He desperately wants to appear extremist and going all the way - remember his threat to bomb "Haifa and beyond Haifa" - while he is equally desperate to avoid engaging in a full frontal war with Israel.

One thing to keep in mind is that Hezbollah's biggest fear is to lose the leverage it has with its weapons. The fact of holding the weapons as a threat is more important than using the weapons themselves. It in fact may not have the hundreds of thousands of missiles it claims it has. But the moment Nasrallah is made to cross the line in which he uses his weapons in the cataclysmic manner he has always threatned to do, he knows it will be the end of him and his organization. Which is why he will never cross that line. He can really scare Israel and cause it significant damage, but he cannot defeat it. He knows that. Therefore Netanyahu's tactic of drawing Nasrallah to war, beyond all other considerations of internal Israeli politics or even of an international nature, is intended to force Nasrallah's hand into revealing the true nature of his threats. Netanyahu wants to know how bad a war with Hezbollah will be.

Which is why Nasrallah looked injured yesterday but not suicidally angry. The longer this otherwise insoluble problem drags on, the longer he remains in power and holds Lebanon hostage. Just like Netanyahu in Israel who is holding his country hostage to his own political survival.