Nasrallah: Only God doesn't err
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Rally in support of Hizbullah (Archive)
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Nasrallah admits again: We misjudged in last war
Hizbullah leader tells Egyptian researcher that his group failed to properly assess Israel’s response to the kidnapping of its soldiers. ‘We may have erred in our judgment, but only God doesn’t make mistakes’, Nasrallah says, adding: ‘Iran aids Hizbullah through Syria, everyone knows that’
Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah
once again admitted that he erred in his management of the conflict against Israel leading up to the recent war in Lebanon.
The researcher, chairman of the Ibn Khaldun center for strategic research in Egypt, Saad a-Din Ibrahim, told the newspaper that during his conversation with Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader
admitted that his group received military and financial aid from Iran.
Kuwaiti newspaper al-Rai al-Aam reported Saturday that during a meeting with an Egyptian researcher, Nasrallah said, “We may have erred in our judgment, but only God doesn’t make mistakes. We have already apologized to the Lebanese people, and we paid a heavy price in blood. In spite of this, we wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice our sons for our cause.”
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“Iran helps us out of religious solidarity and ethnic identification,” Nasrallah explained. “The aid comes through Syria and everyone knows it. Hizbullah is strengthened by this aid, and will also welcome any similar aid from any Arab or Islamic source, such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia,” he added.
Ibrahim further reported that Nasrallah did not have aspirations to govern Lebanon. “His agenda focuses on efforts to put an end to discrimination against Shiites in Lebanon, and put them on the same plane with the rest of Lebanon’s peoples, so they will be equal in wealth, representation and internal status,” he explained. “He is also trying to free them from the yoke of the enemy and the Israeli occupation.”
Nasrallah clarified that “Lebanese prisoners jailed in Israel, the continued occupation of the Shebaa Farms, and the blockage of Lebanese farmers’ water sources are the reasons we did what we did (against Israel).”
According to Ibrahim, “When I asked him – Are you not behaving like a state within a state? He answered: Yes, so it appears. But when a state cannot fulfill its duties to free its lands and return it prisoners, do not the people have the right to try themselves? Is that not why the armed popular resistance was established against the external occupation in the first place? … Is this not how other nations succeeded, like in Vietnam or Algeria?”
This is not the first time the Hizbullah leader has admitted that he erred in his prediction of Israel’s response to his group's attack and kidnap of IDF soldiers, which sparked a severe Israeli response.
In an interview with Lebanese news network New-TV a few weeks after the conclusion of the war, Nasrallah said, “We did not assess, not even by one percent, that the kidnapping operation would result in such a wide-scale war. Such a war has not occurred in the history of all wars. Had we known that the operation would result in such a war, we would not have carried it out at all.”
