History Footnotes Getting Crowded With Hezbollah Leader Names

A distraction in the main paragraphs but incorrect to ignore entirely.

Beirut, November 4 – Scholarly documenters of events for posterity observed today that the body text of works analyzing the goings-on in the Levant during the first half of the twenty-first century occupies an increasingly small space on the page, now that the lower margin of that page must contain treatment of the personalities in charge of Iran’s chief proxy in the region, but whose short tenure and impact on those events, owing to their elimination so soon after assuming the role, and the growing number of such personalities, render them of only marginal importance in the grander scheme of events – but whose existence nevertheless necessitates mention somewhere in those margins.

Historians acknowledged in several discussions with journalists that the fleeting lifespan for anyone appointed to a leadership position in Hezbollah and related groups, as they get appointed and soon assassinated, makes identifying them by name a distraction in the main paragraphs discussing the 2023-24 Israel-Hezbollah conflict, but incorrect to ignore entirely, should the reader seek more detail. As a result, they explained, the footnotes to the paragraphs have become crowded with that growing litany of slain terrorist chiefs.

“Hassan Nasrallah obviously deserves extensive discussion in the main text,” explained University of Pennsylvania Professor of History James Wilson, referring to the longtime Hezbollah chief whom Israel eliminated in late September. “He oversaw, and in many ways pioneered, Iranian proxy militia methods against Israel and the subordination of local, in this case Lebanese, concerns to the agenda of Iranian imperialism. He earned his place as a figure of note in the dynamics of the region over the course of decades. No account of Middle East history can ignore his impact on the affairs of any of the states in the region, either in terms of Iran’s efforts to establish and maintain regional hegemony, or in terms of sectarian tensions in Lebanon and elsewhere.”

“Not so for any of his successors,” continued Wilson. “They deserve anonymity, richly – even after thorough immersion in the source materials, I couldn’t, with any confidence, name them, or even tell you offhand how many there were. Their exact identities are of such marginal importance, and so numerous, that they don’t belong in the body text. But that footnote section listing them is getting a little cramped. We might have to devote an entire page, pushing the main body text to the next one.”

Researcher have observed the same phenomenon with the leaders of Hamas.

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