Where the resistance fighters are

By Hossein Jelveh*

Israeli leaders, presiding over an occupying entity that has a military, keep pictures of native resistance leaders pinned to a board and cross out individual pictures when a figure is assassinated. Then they post images of themselves crossing out images of people they have assassinated online. (Boy, oh boy, are they the world’s largest, most barefaced, most organized criminal gang.)

Except that to their disappointment, that conceptually inverse murder wall keeps getting updated, and updated. And updated. For the people of Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, the war continues as long as Israeli occupation and American patronizing continue. The Israeli leaders who kill the natives of the land and who pose in those photos crossing out pictures of people they have killed end up looking stupid.

The Israelis like to say they have “decapitated” Hezbollah and Hamas. Can they be stupid enough to think they have destroyed either? Just in case they are, Iran’s Leader gave them a reminder on January 8.

“They killed all these people in Gaza; they deployed all those tanks, artilleries, bombs, machine guns, quadcopters; [and] martyred all those elements; yet they couldn’t destroy the movement,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. “In Lebanon, from Hezbollah, they martyred someone like Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and took out many elements. This is work done with hardware. But they couldn’t destroy Hezbollah, and they will never be able to.”

The software, to use Ayatollah Khamenei’s wording, is built into the souls of the true inhabitants and owners of the land. Children will be born and will grow up to become men and women who will fight and claim their mothers’ and fathers’ path, and land. And despite setbacks in individual battles, to think that he who owns the land will ever stop fighting for it is foolish.

Iran, another native of the land that is West Asia, is no exception. Maybe those Americans and Israelis who are in their right minds (well, relatively speaking), can explain to those who aren’t: Iran is on a tactical retreat.

*Hossein Jelveh is the executive editor of IRNA’s English-language newsroom. You can follow him on X @hossein_jelveh. The views expressed in this article are his own.