US Authoritarianism

Last Friday, Israel attacked a meeting of Hezbollah leaders in the southern Beirut neighborhood of al-Qaem. It was an assassination operation following the detonation, days before, of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that had been packed with explosives.

In al-Qaem, the Israeli military boasted of a “precise strike” in the “heart of Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut.” The language conjured images of a brazen operation against a well-protected military compound, a Pentagon of its kind, a wholly valiant endeavor.

In reality, this was a massive strike that completely leveled a residential building, one that killed Hezbollah leaders just as much as it did countless families inside. Many of those families remain under the rubble, with others still missing.

Almost every time news emerges from south Beirut, the Western news media parrots the language of the Israeli military, as if “Hezbollah stronghold” is part of the neighborhood’s name.

Defenders of this kind of language may point to the usage of “strongholds” to describe bases of support for the Democratic Party or U.K.’s Labour, but these are usages in a Western context, a use nobody is confused by. In Lebanon, the connotations are obvious. And they directly serve Israeli interests.