Time & Perspective Quote by Ahmed Yassin

The sentence reads like a mild procedural note, but it’s doing the hard work of political repositioning. Ahmed Yassin isn’t just comparing two “resistances”; he’s drawing a boundary around what kinds of violence, governance, and legitimacy can be defended as inevitable, even respectable, and what kinds can be dismissed as reckless or counterproductive. The key word is “conditions” - not ideology, not morality. It’s a strategist’s frame: outcomes depend on terrain, state capacity, public mood, and the degree of external pressure, not merely on conviction.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Hizballah operated inside a fragmented but internationally recognized Lebanon, with room to embed in communities, build institutions, and calibrate confrontation with Israel while keeping a foothold in formal politics. Palestine, by contrast, was shaped by direct occupation, intense surveillance, disrupted geography, and a Palestinian Authority that both competed with and policed armed factions under heavy Israeli and international constraints. Yassin’s point is that tactics aren’t portable; what “worked” in southern Lebanon can misfire in Gaza or the West Bank, where control over borders, movement, and resources is systematically denied.

Subtext: don’t judge us by someone else’s playbook, and don’t demand the discipline of a quasi-state actor from a movement operating under siege. It’s also a quiet rebuttal to critics who asked why Palestinian armed groups couldn’t mimic Hizballah’s model. By shifting the argument to circumstances, Yassin seeks permission for variation: different methods, different timelines, and a different definition of what “effective” resistance even looks like.