The Party of God

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Introduction: How do you define a terrorist?

Hezbollah is today the most powerful non-state force in the Middle East. Over the roughly four decades of its existence, it has evolved from a loose coalition of Iranian-trained fighters amid the chaos of the Lebanese civil war into a transnational actor whose military capacity exceeds that of any Arab army.

This development is the product of a chain of crises, imperialist interventions, alliances, and ruptures, through which Hezbollah repeatedly reinvented itself. The following text reconstructs this metamorphosis chronologically, from the social roots of Lebanese Shi’ites to the contradictions of the Syrian intervention and the current partial loss of legitimacy in Lebanese society.

Hezbollah, properly written as Ḥizb Allāh (Arabic for “Party of God”), is designated as a terrorist organization in the majority of Western countries. Since the genocide in Gaza, it has been categorized, particularly by Western observers, as part of Iran’s Quds Force, as an extended arm of the Revolutionary Guards, or simply as an “Iranian proxy” army in Lebanon.

The Washington Institute refers to them as “Narco-Terrorists”[1], while former Turkish Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ called them the “Army of the devil”[2]. In Israeli reporting, the name Hezbollah frequently appears alongside the so-called Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and other groups that can be more confidently described as terrorist organizations. The victims of Hezbollah’s massacres in Syria would likely agree, as would large parts of the membership of Lebanon’s Christian and Sunni parties and the families of communists killed by Hezbollah’s special units.

For others, particularly the Shia population of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s fighters are freedom fighters and the only force that has been fighting against Israel’s occupation of Lebanon for decades. For those who receive care in Hezbollah’s hospitals and earn their diplomas in Hezbollah’s schools, Hezbollah is the force that has not abandoned the people of southern Lebanon. For the people of Palestine, Hezbollah is the most important non-Palestinian actor of anti-imperialist solidarity. For others in Syria, including in al-Bab and al-Bukamal, Hezbollah symbolizes resistance against the shackles of the so-called Islamic State, sometimes with genuine material successes.

And yet, which may surprise some: Hezbollah is not a pan-Lebanese popular movement; it can hardly even be described as a mass organization. The vast majority of people in Lebanon think nothing of Hezbollah: 79% of all Lebanese support the disarmament of the group; removing the Shia population from the equation, this rises to 89% – while, among Shia, 69% oppose Hezbollah’s disarmament.[3]

Hezbollah was, as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak correctly recognized, “created only by [Israel’s] presence”; it is a contradictory product of the occupation of southern Lebanon, ultimately of US imperialism in the region, and of the confessional system of the Lebanese bourgeois order, which itself produced the modern marginalization of Lebanese Shi’ites. How it has developed since then, however, requires a more complex answer, which we will address in detail in this article.

At a press conference in October 2005, the former chairman of Hezbollah’s Executive Council, Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, asked the assembled American journalists: “How do you define a terrorist?” We will not undertake this task in what follows; thus terms such as “terrorist,” “resistance,” and “fighter” are used synonymously. Whether the symptom “Hezbollah” is to be evaluated as terrorist or not makes no difference to this materialist account of the history of the Party of God.

Anatomy of a Confessional State

The political system of Lebanon, within which Hezbollah’s history has unfolded since 1982, is not an ordinary Western-style multiparty system, but a confessional proportionality regime in which political power is formally divided among religious communities.

While the French High Commissioners arbitrarily carved out the territory of “Grand Liban” in 1920 from the predominantly Christian-dominated parts of the Ottoman Bilad al-Sham in order to create a majority ratio favorable to French interests, they simultaneously embedded in its structure those confessional borders that continue to define the Lebanese state to this day. The Mandate power thereby divided a heterogeneous, predominantly Sunni and rural region and subordinated it to a Maronite central government: the “Christian” Lebanon was from the outset an artifact of colonial politics.

The oral National Pact (al-mīthāq al-waṭanī) of 1943 between Maronite President Bichara al-Khoury and Sunni Prime Minister Riad al-Solh enshrined this colonial legacy as an independence compromise: the office of head of state was permanently reserved for Maronite Christians, the office of prime minister for Sunni Muslims, and the office of parliamentary speaker for Shia Muslims.

Parliament was divided along a ratio of six Christian to five Muslim (and Druze) seats, reflecting the demographics of 1932 – the last census Lebanon has ever conducted.

Lebanese demography thus remained a political taboo zone: a state that cannot count its own citizens, because any real survey would shift the confessional power distributions on which the entire political system rests. The Taif Agreement of 1989 (discussed in more detail above) reformed the pact by distributing seats equally between Christians and Muslims at 64 to 64.

„Consequently, it was no oversight that the 1932 census was the last held by any government. The Maronites feared that their privileges in time would be stripped from them if it was confirmed that their percentage of the overall population had declined compared to that of the Sunnis and Shiites.” (Blanford 2006: Killing Mr. Lebanon)

The institutional division was not limited to the three highest offices. Down to the ministerial bureaucracy, the military, and the security apparatus, every position was allocated according to a confessional quota: directors of ministries, commanders of the armed forces, heads of intelligence services, even university presidents follow an invisible distribution pattern that determines the confession of the officeholder before it is even asked whether they are competent to fill the position.

The result is an almost absurd statification of religion: there is no Lebanese civil registrar; every marriage, divorce, and inheritance is regulated exclusively by religious courts of the respective community – in 18 recognized confessions, from the Maronites to the Alawites.

This institutional architecture produces the phenomenon that Lebanese political science captures with the concept of zuʿamāʾ (singular: zaʿīm): local notables, clan leaders, or family dynasties who function as intermediaries between the state and citizens within their respective confessional group.

Whoever needs a position in a state hospital, a university place, a construction permit, or a ministerial approval does not turn to a state authority, but to the zaʿīm of their neighborhood, family, or confession – the zaʿīm in turn delivers these services in exchange for political loyalty, votes, or direct returns.

The system has two structural consequences. First, it immunizes the political class against democratic control: since offices are distributed confessionally and not by merit, no conventional opposition can attain power through elections alone.

Second, the system reproduces confessional identities as political categories. Whoever lives in the south or in the Bekaa Valley and is Shia is addressed not primarily as a citizen of the state, but as a member of a community defined by underrepresentation, neglect, and marginalization. Hezbollah is, as shown in the course of this article, the direct product of this architecture.

Lebanese post-war capitalism (post-Taif) was shaped, like the pyramid structure around the Banque du Liban sketched above, by the oligarchic networks of the zuʿamāʾ: Hariri controlled the construction sector, Berri the state electricity company, the Aoun family parts of the telecommunications sector. The state’s failure was not mismanagement, but a business model.

Hezbollah is thus on the one hand the product of that confessional marginalization that the system has produced for the Shia community over decades. On the other hand, it has itself become part of this system, having fully internalized its logic of patronage, confessional loyalty, and instrumental use of the state – with the sole difference that it retains its own armed power as a trump card.

It has thus simultaneously remained both the most radical critic and the last guarantor of that proportionality system whose downfall it preaches.

The Disenfranchised: Shia Politicization before 1982

The living worlds of the Shia population, particularly in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, were long economically neglected peripheries. Already in the 1950s and 1960s, a massive rural exodus to the southern suburbs of Beirut began, into the so-called “Belt of Misery” (Blanford 2011: 16).

Since incomes in the capital were up to five times higher than in rural regions, tens of thousands of Shi’ites were forced to abandon their villages and agricultural livelihoods in order to seek new economic prospects in Beirut. The agrarian regions of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley remained largely excluded from the country’s economic boom. The cause was a state development policy that directed investments primarily to Beirut and the Christian-dominated areas of Mount Lebanon.

At the same time, the political and social structure of Shia society into the 1960s was shaped by a small group of powerful families, the so-called Zu’ama (Norton 2007: 14). These functioned as political patronage elites and large landowners, exercising quasi-feudal rule over the predominantly impoverished population. They secured their power through dense patronage networks in which material favors were exchanged for political loyalty, particularly in the context of elections (Norton 2007: 14):

„The lure of booming Beirut–-where earnings in the 1950s were five times higher than in the peripheral regions–-encouraged tens of thousands of Shias to abandon their farms and villages and seek fresh opportunities in the city. Most of them settled in the southern quarters of Beirut, cramming into dense and unsanitary neighborhoods. Here they labored on building sites, helping construct the new concrete high-rise buildings that were rapidly changing Beirut’s skyline. By 1971, nearly half of Lebanon’s Shias were living in southern Beirut, a “Belt of Misery” that formed a third distinct area of Shia habitation along with the Bekaa and the south.” (Blanford 2011: Warriors of God)

Only with the emergence of the Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr from 1959 onwards did the political powerlessness of the Shia peasant class begin to change. Al-Sadr politicized the apathetic community, founded the Supreme Islamic Shia Council in 1967 and the “Movement of the Disenfranchised” (Harakat al-Mahrumin) in 1974, whose military arm “Amal” (Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya, “Lebanese Resistance Battalions”) was established at the beginning of the Lebanese civil war to protect Shi’ites against the attacks of other militias (Norton 2007: 18; Worrall et al. 2016: 34).

Al-Sadr was a highly respected figure both in Iran and in Lebanon, known for his commitment to Islamic-Christian dialogue and his engagement for unity among various Islamic sects (including Alawites). Al-Sadr warned as early as the early 1970s about a possible Israeli attack on southern Lebanon.

This (perceived and actual) threat situation of the Shia population of southern Lebanon was exacerbated by the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which after its expulsion from Jordan in 1970/71 used southern Lebanon as a base for attacks on Israel and effectively established a “state within a state” there (Worrall et al. 2016: 31). The Israeli retaliatory strikes – culminating in 1978 in the “Litani Operation” (named after the river separating southern Lebanon from the rest of the country) and the establishment of an occupation zone under the allied, Christian-dominated South Lebanese Army (SLA) (Marcus 2018: 17) – hit the Shia civilian population in particular.

This created a dual resentment among large parts of the Shia civilian population: against the Palestinian presence, which was blamed for the bombardments – and against Israel, from where the bombs actually came:

„Israel’s invasion of 1978, the “Litani Operation,” though minor compared to the wars yet to come in 1982 and 2006, displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from the southern region. Relations between the Shi”a in the South and the Palestinian resistance and its Lebanese affiliates were deteriorating. Not only were the Shi”a weary of being caught in the Israeli-Palestinian cross fire, but they increasingly viewed the Palestinians as an occupying force prone to high-handedness and brutality. Amal militiamen and Pal-estinian guerrillas clashed with increasing frequency. For most Amal supporters, the overriding and immediate concern was security, and their efforts were often centered on forming local homeguards or militias that, naturally, the PLO viewed with great suspicion. Fierce confrontations also erupted between Amal partisans and pro-Iraq groups, such as the Arab Ba”th (Resurrection) Party, the Nationalist Party, and the Iraq-sponsored Arab Liberation Front, given the Iraqi regime’s often brutal treatment of Shi”i Muslims.” (Norton 2014: Hezbollah: A Short History)

Parallel to the more socially rooted grassroots movement of Amal, an intellectually shaped, radical-Islamic current developed among Lebanese Shi’ites.

Its driving force was the growing concern about the influence of secular ideologies – namely communism, represented by the Lebanese Communist Party and the communist Palestinian forces, and Arab nationalism (such as the Ba’ath Party) – on Shia youth (Blanford 2011: 25).

This current had its ideological roots in the theological seminaries (hawzas) of the Iraqi city of Najaf, where many future Hezbollah leaders were trained under central thinkers such as Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (the uncle of Muqtada al-Sadr, later murdered by Saddam Hussein) (Blanford 2011: 24). Its aim was to establish Islam as a political counterweight to secular ideologies and, in the long run, to create an Islamic state (Blanford 2011: 25).

Already in the late 1950s, leading clerics of this current participated in concrete organizational projects. Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah co-founded the Hizb al-Da’wa al-Islamiyya in Iraq in 1958 – the movement understood itself as a response to the far-reaching social reforms of the (doomed) Iraqi kingdom and the young republic (from 1958), including in particular measures for women’s emancipation. Its program combined religious renewal with political activism and was directed against the growing influence of secular and left-wing currents.

After his move to Lebanon in 1966, Fadlallah began building social and religious networks, particularly in the marginalized Shia neighborhoods of Beirut. Organizations such as the “Lebanese Union of Muslim Students” served for the ideological training and mobilization of young Shi’ites (Worrall et al. 2016: 33).

In parallel, activists close to al-Da’wa increasingly operated underground, forming secret, partly armed cells that operated under the name “Qassam” and were involved, among other things, in violent confrontations with Iraqi Ba’athists (Nicholas Blanford 2011: Warriors of God, p. 27).

In the late 1970s, a gradual rapprochement and simultaneous tensions developed between the more spiritual current and the Amal movement. A decisive turning point was the disappearance of Musa al-Sadr in Libya in 1978. Al-Sadr disappeared on his way to a meeting with Libyan head of state Muammar al-Gaddafi, at which al-Sadr was allegedly to persuade him to use his influence against the PLO’s presence in Lebanon.[4] He was last seen on August 31 of that year. To speculate about the circumstances of his disappearance would be foolish, though most fingers point to al-Gaddafi. Through al-Sadr’s disappearance, he could have eliminated an important prominent counterpart to the PLO, which was substantially supported by Libya – but this is pure speculation.

With Nabih Berri assuming leadership after al-Sadr’s disappearance, Amal adopted a more secular and politically pragmatic course (Blanford 2011: 26). This development met with resistance within the movement from radical Islamist forces. Activists from the Da’wa orbit, including the young Hassan Nasrallah, then began to influence Amal from within: through religious training, sermons, and cultural activities in mosques, they tried to push the movement toward an Islamist reorientation.

From the interplay of these two currents – the broad social mobilization enabled by Amal and the ideologically consolidated Islamist network of al-Da’wa – a new formation finally emerged in the early 1980s: Under the impression of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, parts of the Shia movement radicalized further. The Islamist hardliners definitively split from Amal and founded Hezbollah (“Party of God”), which henceforth acted both as a military actor of resistance and as the bearer of an Islamic-political project (Worrall et al. 2016: 34).

Karbala as the Present: Shi’ism and Martyrdom

What Khomeini was able to politically activate in Tehran from 1979 onwards has a centuries-old grammar in Shia Islam. The split between Sunnis and Shi’ites reaches back to the early dispute over the succession to the Prophet Muhammad and culminated in 680 CE at the Battle of Karbala, in which the army of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid I struck down a small group around Hussein ibn Ali (the grandson of the Prophet and, in the Shia reading, the legitimate Imam) in the southern Iraqi desert.

Hussein, whose body was subsequently desecrated and whose family was dragged to Damascus, has since been regarded in Shia tradition as the martyr (shahid) par excellence: the one who, faced with an overwhelming tyranny, preferred resistance even in certain death over submission.

From this historical core grew a religious system of remembrance that clearly distinguishes itself from other Islamic currents. The annual Ashura ritual on the tenth day of the month of Muharram (the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, this year beginning on June 1), in which the murder of Hussein is recapitulated in sermons (majalis), scenically reenacted in mourning processions, and in some currents physically relived through ritual self-flagellation, is not merely commemoration, but a permanent setting of 680 in the present: Karbala is not over, Yazid lives on in every oppressor, and every believing Shi’ite is a potential companion of Hussein.

The central slogan that Khomeini later had carried from Qom to the Lebanese Bekaa Valley – “Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala” (kullu yawm ʿĀshūrāʾ, kullu arḍ Karbalāʾ) – condenses this updating into a political formula.

Theologically, this tradition condenses its own conception of suffering itself. Not worldly success inspires the believer, but the willingness to fall in the name of justice. The Shia conception of “redemption through suffering” gives the historical experience of systematic defeat its own meaning; centuries under Sunni-dominated empires, later under Ottoman, French Mandate, Lebanese, or Israeli rule. As clearly as few other expressions of religion as ideological superstructure, Shi’ism in its political currents can be understood through the Marxian formula of religion as the opium of the people – the subjective justification of Shia Islam is, in its self-understanding, almost crudely materialist: I am oppressed, but in this oppression I find meaning in religion.

In the libraries of the hawzas of Najaf and Qom, the events surrounding Hussein are not merely commemorated but taught as an ethical obligation. It is no coincidence that the theological training of those men who were later to form Hezbollah in the Bekaa camps – Fadlallah, Mussawi, Subhi al-Tufayli, the young Nasrallah – took place precisely in Najaf, in the immediate vicinity of the shrine of Imam Ali and a stone’s throw from his grave.

For Lebanese Shi’ism, which after 1959 under Musa al-Sadr first tentatively, then radically politicized after 1979 and 1982, this legacy was a fitting shoe. What had survived as a religious mourning practice in the village husseiniyas of the south could be translated into a political language of resistance with remarkably few rhetorical shifts. Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, who played a central role in the ideological formation of early Hezbollah, built his hermeneutics exactly around this axis: the Israeli occupation and Western hegemony are the Yazids of the present, the resistance of the Shi’ites of southern Lebanon the Karbala of the 20th century.

Hezbollah’s self-staging is explained far more precisely from this semantic deep layer than from any geopolitical reading that sees in it only “Iran’s extended arm.” The funerals of its fallen, in which weeping mothers bid farewell to their dead sons as “brothers of Hussein” and “martyrs on the path of Karbala,” are not cynically calculated acts of propaganda but stand in a ritual continuity. The iconographic omnipresence of the yellow flags, the portraits of the “sacred martyrs” on the house walls of Dahiya and the villages of southern Lebanon, the annual Ashura processions in which mourning for Hussein flows directly into mourning for one’s own dead – all of this makes death in the struggle against Israel an act not of self-annihilation, but of inscription into a fourteen-hundred-year history of just resistance.

This background also explains the specific form that early Hezbollah terrorism took. The 1983 suicide attacks on the US Marines and French paratroopers were, in the Western reading, asymmetric violence; from the perspective of the fighters and the community that produced them, they were shahāda, martyrdom testimony. The attacker, whose life story and photo were later respectfully processed in Hezbollah’s media, did not sacrifice himself in a nihilistic act: that even the seemingly overwhelming imperialist power cannot defeat a movement that is willing to die. The emotional force of this model, which the later Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah generalized in his speech in Bint Jbeil with the metaphor of the “spider’s web,” can only be inadequately grasped in secular terms.

The religious substance is therefore neither a cynical disguise of political interests nor a “superstition” that could be separated from the “essence” of the movement. It is the dense, multilayered cultural soil on which the social mobilization of the disenfranchised first found its own language – and without which the ideological synthesis of Wilayat al-Faqih, anti-imperialist rhetoric, and Lebanese patriotism, still to be reconstructed later, would have remained unthinkable.

When Secretary-General Naim Qassem, after the assassination of Nasrallah in September 2024, spoke before millions of mourners of the “path of Hussein” that Hezbollah would continue to follow, this was not pathos, but vocabulary that every child in southern Lebanon has known for generations. But more on that later.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979

The Islamic Revolution in Iran provided the divided Shia community in Lebanon with an ostensibly revolutionary ideological framework. Khomeini’s concept of Wilayat al-Faqih – rule of the jurist – was not nationally limited, but was understood as a pan-Islamic obligation to fight against the “arrogant” (mustakbirun) and to show solidarity with the “oppressed” (mustadafun) (Worrall et al. 2016: 116–117).

For Lebanese Shi’ism, this meant the promise that one’s own disenfranchisement was neither unquestionable nor to be passively endured, but could be incorporated into a universal anti-imperialist struggle.

With the successful revolution in Iran, a model – and a material patron – existed for the first time, to which the radicalizing minority within the Shia community could connect. That Amal under Nabih Berri remained reserved toward this model and aimed more at integration into the Lebanese state would, a few years later, lead to the intra-Shia split.

1982: The Israeli Invasion

The immediate trigger for the founding of Hezbollah was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982: Under the code name “Operation Peace for Galilee,” the Israeli army (IDF) marched across its northern border into southern Lebanon to crush Palestinian resistance by the PLO.

The broader strategic goal of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, however, was to install a pro-Israeli, Maronite regime under Bashir Gemayel in Beirut (Marcus 2018: 19):

„Sharon was accused of manipulating the defense establishment in pursuit of much more ambitious political and military goals than those approved by the government, particularly regarding engaging PLO militants in Beirut, targeting Syrian military installations throughout Lebanon, forcing a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, and creating a Christian enclave in Lebanon. These goals were intermediary steps to achieve Sharon’s chief aspiration–-in his words, “a new political reality in Lebanon,” where a pro-Israeli regime would be installed under the helm of Maronite (Phalange) militia leader Bashir Gemayel.” (Marcus 2018: Israel’s Long War with Hezbollah)

The IDF occupied large parts of the country, besieged Beirut, and bombarded the city at an intensity that claimed around 20,000 lives over the course of the war. Around 84% of those killed in Beirut were civilians.

During the Sabra and Shatila massacre, militias of the fascist Lebanese Phalange, which cooperated with the Israeli army and administered areas under its control, killed between 2,000 and possibly over 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians between September 16 and 18, 1982. The United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre as a grave violation of international law and spoke of an act of genocide. The founding letter of Hezbollah (see below), written three years later, states:

„The Israelis and Phalangists massacred several thousands of our fathers, children, women and brothers in Sabra and Shatila in a single night but no practical renunciation or condemnation was expressed by any international organization or authority against this heinous massacre which was perpetrated in coordination with the NATO forces who, only a few days, rather hours, earlier, had departed from the camps which the defeated [Palestinians) agreed to put under the protection of the wolf in response to the maneuver of Philip Habib, the U.S. fox. Those criminal attacks came only to reaffirm our firm belief that “you will find that those most hostile to the faithful are the Jew and the idolators.”[5]

Telling for the moment was how this invasion was initially received by the Shia population of the south. Many Shi’ites welcomed the advancing Israeli troops with rice and cheers, because they were rid of the often recklessly behaving PLO fighters (and the accompanying Israeli attacks) (Worrall et al. 2016: 38; Blanford 2011: 50).

Hezbollah did not exist in 1982, and nothing in the Shia milieu was predestined for war against Israel; even the Amal leadership initially dissuaded its fighters in southern Lebanon from resisting the Israeli occupation. It was the occupation itself – its duration, brutality, and confessional blindness – that generated the resistance directed against it. The later Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak formulated it in retrospect: “We were received by the Shi’ites in the south with perfumed rice and flowers. Only our presence there created Hezbollah” (Worrall et al. 2016: 38). His Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin admitted as early as 1985 that the invasion had “let the Shia genie out of the bottle” (Marcus 2018: 23; Blanford 2011: 65).

The Bekaa Valley: Founding and Formation (1982–1985)

While the moderate Amal militia under Nabih Berri joined a “National Rescue Committee” in 1982 for rebuilding from the destruction of the Israeli occupation – in which Israeli allies also sat – more radical forces, radicalized by the Israeli occupation, broke away in outrage. Around the cleric Hussein Mussawi, “Islamic Amal” formed, which together with the Lebanese Da’wa Party and parts of the young Shia clergy constituted the early core of what would later become Hezbollah (Blanford 2011: 35).

Syria, which needed Iran as a counterweight to its Iraqi rival Saddam Hussein, allowed Tehran to send around 1,500 trainers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to the Bekaa Valley. These trainers shaped the logistical, ideological, and military backbone of the new organization from the heterogeneous coalition – the organization that would soon emerge as Hezbollah, “Party of God” (Levitt 2013: 12, 217; Worrall et al. 2016: 122).

The group only gave itself a formal political form in February 1985 with its first so-called “Open Letter”[6]. Rhetorically, the document is still far closer to the socialist currents of its time than, for example, the Hamas Charter of 1988 or the texts of Khomeini. Hezbollah addresses its supporters explicitly as “partisans and organized people,” explicitly describes the United States and France as imperialists, and Israel as their protectorate:

„We have opted for religion, freedom and dignity over humiliation and constant submission to America and its allies and to Zionism and their Phalangist allies. We have risen to liberate our country, to drive the imperialists and the invaders out of it and to determine our fate by our own hands. We could not endure more than we have endured. Our tragedy is more than 10 years old and all we have seen so far are the covetous, hypocritical and incapable.”[7]

They also formulated the self-determination of the Lebanese people as their primary concern. They would not conceal their “commitment to the rule of Islam,” but would not wish to impose it on anyone. The chapter “Friends” calls for the unity of the entire Lebanese people “to topple the American domination of the country, to expel the Zionist occupation that bears down heavily on the people’s lives and to strike all the Phalangist endeavors to control government and administrative affairs.”

Khomeini is explicitly addressed as “Leader,” with his well-known rhetoric of the downtrodden running throughout the entire document; they connect their resistance with that of Palestine and all the other “downtrodden peoples” of the world.

Islamic Jihad Organization

In April and October 1983, suicide bombers carried out devastating attacks on the US Embassy and the Marine and paratrooper barracks in Beirut, killing 241 US soldiers and 58 French soldiers (Levitt 2013: 22, 261; Norton 2007: 71–72). The attack actually forced the withdrawal of the “multinational peacekeeping force” (MNF) – which had emerged in the wake of the civil war – from Lebanon within a few months; Hezbollah regarded it as an imperialist proxy (Marcus 2018: 40).

Hezbollah later denied any involvement, as did Iran; the “Islamic Jihad Organization” (IJO) under the leadership of Fatah member Imad Mughniyeh later claimed the attack as “part of the Iranian Revolution’s campaign against imperialist targets throughout the world.”

The question of whether the IJO was simply Hezbollah’s predecessor organization, merely another synonym for the not-yet-officially-founded Hezbollah alongside the “Organization of the Oppressed on Earth,” merely a loose umbrella organization of various Shia armed cells, or had nothing at all to do with the later Hezbollah – aside from Imad Mughniyeh’s rapid rise in Hezbollah’s ranks, where he later ranked as the second man behind Nasrallah – remains unclear to this day.

The majority of Western intelligence agencies seem to be certain that the IJO was simply one of the names of those groups that merged into Hezbollah three years later. The fact is, however, that the IJO carried out attacks until 1992, when Hezbollah had long since become the status quo among the Lebanese-Shia population – and extremely successfully: During the 1980s and early 1990s, the IJO claimed responsibility for numerous extremely deadly attacks around the world, including in Copenhagen, Turkey, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and possibly Newfoundland, where the IJO claimed responsibility for the crash of Arrow Air Flight 1285R in December 1985, killing all 256 people on board. On July 18, 1994, a truck loaded with explosives drove into a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. The attack remains the deadliest in Argentine history to this day. Hezbollah denied any involvement. In 2024, exactly 30 years later, the Argentine Court of Cassation found Iran guilty, declaring that Tehran had commissioned Hezbollah to carry out the attack – allegedly in retaliation for Argentina’s cancellation of nuclear agreements with Iran.

Why would Hezbollah deny these extremely elaborate and media-effective attacks? We are talking here about hundreds of deaths, some highly targeted operations – such as the murder of Malcolm H. Kerr –, the building of a complex international terrorist network, and attacks like the one on the American embassy, which could have given the young Hezbollah an enormous media boost in the midst of the civil war. Well, enough speculation. We recommend reading up on the topic yourself – it is extraordinarily fascinating.

War of the Camps – Struggle for Hegemony

In its formative phase, Hezbollah tolerated no competition in its claim to lead the Shia community – and it did not hesitate to defend this claim with the means it had developed against Israel:

In 1984 and 1985, it conducted a brutal campaign of suppression and murder against the Lebanese Communist Party and other left-wing, secular organizations such as the Communist Action Organization and the (at the time still quite progressive) Ba’ath Party, which were competing as direct ideological rivals in the same impoverished Shia milieus for influence and recruitment. In the course of this campaign, according to Norton, “dozens, if not hundreds” of members of these parties were killed; the secular, Marxist competition in its own social base was thus systematically and violently eliminated (Norton 2007: 37–38).

In 1986, open armed clashes broke out between Hezbollah and communist forces in Beirut. The campaign reached a symbolic peak on May 18, 1987 with the murder of the Shia Marxist intellectual Mahdi Amil, who was regarded as a critic of the confessional system and as an important theoretician of the Arab left.

In the “War of the Camps” (1985–1988), Hezbollah positioned itself against the Amal militia, which in a multi-year, extremely brutal conflict attempted to break the PLO’s influence in the Palestinian refugee camps – particularly Sabra, Shatila, and Bourj al-Barajneh. Hezbollah supported the besieged Palestinian forces logistically and militarily with weapons and ammunition. This support was provided partly within the framework of ideological proximity to the Palestinian cause, but was primarily strategically motivated: the aim was to involve its main rival Amal in a costly war of attrition and thereby sustainably weaken it, in order to itself gain hegemony within the Shia community in Lebanon (Norton 2007: 72–73).

This conflict escalated from 1988 into an open conflict between Hezbollah and Amal, centered on control of the Shia heartlands – the south and the southern suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah attacked Amal checkpoints, eliminated leading cadres, and militarily pushed its rival largely out of the southern suburbs. Only a Syrian-Iranian intervention ended the fighting and consolidated the balance of power in Hezbollah’s favor, which was able to keep its weapons and establish itself as the central force of resistance against Israel (Worrall et al. 2015: 48; Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 35–36; Blanford 2011: 73–74).

Syria’s role in this phase was shaped by pragmatism and realpolitik. Damascus initially viewed Hezbollah’s rise with deep suspicion, as Syria wanted to secure its own hegemony in Lebanon against Iranian influence. It temporarily supported Amal and did not shy away from direct violence: in 1987, Syrian troops executed 27 Hezbollah fighters at the Fathallah barracks in Beirut to demonstrate their authority (Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 34; Norton 2007: 72).

Only when both sides recognized the mutual benefit did the “Damascus Agreement” of 1990 seal the cooperation and definitively establish collaboration between Hezbollah and Syria: though one should be cautious in categorizing Hezbollah as an “instrument” of Syria (or Iran) not to deny Hezbollah its own interests in internal power and external resistance against the Israeli siege. The relationship with external actors was and is, contrary to what one frequently reads in mainstream reporting, not one of equating the interests of Hezbollah and Syria or Iran, and has frequently been associated with serious disputes.

Taif, the Exception Clause, and Lebanonization (1989–1992)

The Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) claimed an estimated 150,000 lives – approximately five percent of the Lebanese population at the time – and drove nearly one million people to flee. From the outset, it was massively shaped by foreign interests: the USA and Israel exerted decisive influence on the course of the conflict in order to advance their goals in the region:

The broader goal of the Israeli action was to completely crush the PLO’s Palestinian resistance and install a pro-Israeli, Maronite regime under Bashir Gemayel in Beirut (Becker 2013: 35; Norton 2007). The USA also actively intervened in the balance of power: as early as 1976, they approved and supported the first Syrian troop invasion of Lebanon in order to prevent an imminent victory of the left-wing Lebanese National Movement and the PLO (Becker 2013: 29).

The Lebanese tragedy was thus less a classic civil war than a proxy war, whose internal Lebanese conflict lines were systematically charged, armed, and perpetuated from outside.

After 15 years of war, in which shifting alliances destroyed one another and devastated Beirut in particular, conditions for a solution crystallized in the late 1980s: the Iran-Iraq War had ended in 1988, the Soviet Union was in decline, and Syria was aligning itself with the United States on security policy. On this basis, Saudi Arabia initiated the Taif Agreement, which was imposed on Syria in 1989 with US support and fundamentally restructured Lebanon’s power order (Becker 2013; Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 37).

The agreement itself meant a shift in the confessional balance: the historical dominance of Maronite Christians was pushed back in favor of a parity distribution, the country was more strongly oriented toward the Arab world, and Syria’s “special interest” in Lebanon as protector was formally legitimized (Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 37).

Nevertheless, Taif initially remained merely a piece of paper. The Christian general and then army commander Michel Aoun (at times allied with Israel, later serving as president) refused to recognize it and continued an uncompromising war against the Syrian occupying power (Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 37–38). That the devastating civil war finally ended was less due to a grown internal Lebanese consensus than to US interests and a militarily externally backed decision: when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the USA prioritized building a broad Arab anti-Saddam coalition.

For this alliance, Washington depended on Syria’s support: in exchange, Damascus received the Americans’ green light for a free hand in Lebanon (Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 38). Syrian troops definitively crushed Aoun’s isolated forces on October 13, 1990 and forced him into French exile. The civil war was thus ended – not through internal consensus, but through an externally backed military decision that simultaneously cemented Syrian hegemony over Lebanon (Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 38; Norton 2007).

Special Case: Hezbollah

The Taif Agreement then obligated all militias to disarm and integrate into state structures. Under the protection of the new Syrian order in Lebanon, however, Hezbollah managed to negotiate the decisive exception: it refused to surrender its weapons and declared its armed wing not a militia, but an “Islamic Resistance” that was necessary to end the ongoing Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon (Worrall et al. 2015: 42; Norton 2007: 79, 81).

For before the question of disarmament even arose for Hezbollah, the Israeli presence in Lebanon had long since entrenched itself. After the major invasion of 1982, the Israeli army withdrew in 1985 to a so-called “security strip” in southern Lebanon, which covered approximately ten percent of Lebanese state territory.

Israel justified this occupation zone with the protection of its northern border towns from attacks and operated there together with a proxy militia financed and equipped by it – the South Lebanese Army (SLA) under the command of Antoine Lahad. This occupation was to outlast the end of the Lebanese civil war by a full decade and only end with Israel’s withdrawal in May 2000 – a circumstance that would become the decisive lever of Hezbollah’s own justification for existence. More on this later.

Unlike the other factions of the civil war, Hezbollah successfully argued that its fighters were not a domestic “militia” but a legitimate resistance that remained indispensable as long as Israel occupied Lebanese territory. Leaders of the time such as Subhi al-Tufayli and Abbas Mussawi also refused to integrate their fighters into the regular Lebanese army and submit to the orders of a Christian officer – a decision that was understandable in the context of the close entanglement of Lebanese military officers with the Phalangists.

Added to this were the interests of their regional patrons. For Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, an armed Hezbollah was an invaluable strategic instrument of pressure against Israel: as long as it entangled Israeli troops in southern Lebanon in a costly war of attrition, Syria could use this bargaining chip in peace negotiations to force the return of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Hezbollah cultivated the narrative that the regular Lebanese army was simply too weak to protect the Shia population from Israeli aggressions, so that the defense of the country fell to Hezbollah itself. There was indeed something to this argument. At the same time, retaining its powerful armed wing secured absolute supremacy within the Shia community and shielded the immense political and social power architecture that had grown around welfare, media, and religious authority in the 1980s from any serious state interference:

“Hezbollah’s security narrative, if not its worldview, suddenly became compelling, not simply for ardent Hezbollahis but even for many apolitical and avowedly secular Shiʿi Muslims. The plausibility of Hezbollah’s security narrative–-that the Shiʿa must protect themselves because the Lebanese Army is incapable of doing so and no one else will–-is a crucial explanation for the uncommon unity one finds among many Shiʿa Muslims today.” (Norton 2014: Hezbollah: A Short History)

Armalite and Ballot Box

After heated internal debates and with the blessing of the new Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Hezbollah decided in 1992 to participate for the first time in Lebanese parliamentary elections (Worrall et al. 2016: 91; Norton 2007: 98–99).

On the one hand, the armed resistance was to be politically secured in the face of growing disarmament pressure after the Taif Agreement by gaining institutional legitimacy and influence over legislative processes. Added to this was access to state resources that could be used to stabilize its own social base, as well as the aim of politically weakening the intra-Shia competition, particularly the Amal movement.

Participation, legitimized by a fatwa from Khamenei, ultimately sealed the internal debate. This process of “Lebanonization” (the gradual integration into Lebanese institutions) was thus not a commitment to the national state, but a pragmatic adaptation to politically protect the military resistance wing (Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 44–45). Henceforth, Hezbollah existed internally as a legitimate party, and externally as an army that remained beyond any parliamentary control:

„A special internal consultative council of twelve delegates voted 10 to 2 in favor of electoral participation. Khamenei pronounced that it was legitimate for Hezbollah to contest the elections and approved the council’s vote. The supreme leader had spoken, and for Hezbollah the matter was settled. Although Hezbollah was obliged by the Syrians to form an electoral alliance with Amal, the party fared well, gaining eight seats, which, along with four allies, gave it the largest bloc in the 128-seat parliament.” (Blanford 2011: Warriors of God)

The War of Attrition: The 1990s

The 1990s transformed Hezbollah from an underground group into a highly professional guerrilla army.

In retaliation for Israel’s targeted killing of Secretary-General Abbas Mussawi in 1992 (in which his wife, his five-year-old son, and four other people were also killed), Hezbollah began systematically shelling Israeli territory with Soviet Katyusha rockets (and possibly Iranian Fajr-3 rockets) (Marcus 2018: 43, 47).

Nasrallah

Mussawi at the top was succeeded in the same year by the then only 32-year-old Hassan Nasrallah, under whose leadership the group not only underwent its military transformation but also developed into a formidable political force.

Nasrallah was perceived by Hezbollah-aligned, but also non-Hezbollah-aligned, Lebanese as an extraordinarily charismatic and captivating speaker. Born into a poor family in the Christian-dominated East Beirut, he rose to become an Amal general after his theology studies in the Iraqi city of Najaf[9], before becoming a founding member of Hezbollah in 1982:

„It had been clear for some years that Nasrallah’s star was in the ascendant. His charisma and organizational skills had won him many admirers in the party. One veteran Hezbollah member recalls that even when Mussawi was elected secretary general in 1991, it was his protégé, Nasrallah, who drew the eyes of the rank and file.” (Blanford 2011: Warriors of God)

While Hezbollah under Hassan Nasrallah gained political profile, Israel intensified its military operations against the growing resistance in the southern Lebanese occupation zone.

In 1993 Israel launched “Operation Accountability”; in 1996 it followed with “Operation Grapes of Wrath” with massive air and artillery strikes. These were directed not only against Hezbollah but were also intended to pressure the Lebanese government into deploying the Lebanese army to the south (Marcus 2018: 55–66, 64). The 1996 campaign ended with the so-called “April Understanding,” which codified informal rules of the conflict: both sides officially committed to avoiding attacks on civilians, while military targets within the Israeli security zone continued to be considered legitimate (Norton 2007: 84–85).

Israel’s military calculation, however, did not pay off politically. The attempt to turn the Lebanese civilian population against Hezbollah through bombardment instead drove it directly into their arms (Marcus 2018: 64–65; Blanford 2011: 140). Hezbollah consciously began to soften its dogmatic external image of the 1980s (policy of opening, infitah): at the national level, the group deliberately organized meetings with members of other religious communities to smooth confessional differences (such as between Sunnis and Shi’ites). In order to gain the broadest possible social support, Nasrallah no longer framed the fight against the Israeli occupation as an exclusively Shia or Islamic duty. Instead, he framed the “resistance” as a patriotic achievement of all Lebanese – Muslims and Christians.

This strategic approach of “Lebanonization” culminated in a wave of pan-Lebanese sympathy for Hezbollah. The most concrete proof of Nasrallah’s effort to definitively break the group’s purely Shia image was the founding of the “Lebanese Resistance Brigades” (Saraya Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya) in 1997. This unit was open to civilian volunteers of all confessions – including Christians, Sunnis, and Druze – who wanted to fight against Israel. In a 2015 conversation with the International Business Times, a Christian member of the Resistance Brigades who works as a plumber by day reported:

„Lebanon is my country […] am patriotic. I wanted to join the resistance and Hezbollah came by and they offered the ideology of resistance, […] Saraya al-Muqawama is made for non-extremist people, […] Hezbollah has to be religious, but in Lebanon we are divided so why should Hezbollah be the only one who can resist? So Hezbollah made this [brigade] so everyone can join.”[10]

The direct inclusion of these non-Shia fighters contributed massively to consolidating the impression of a genuine, cross-confessional national resistance.

A media-effective, emotional turning point that sent Nasrallah’s reputation soaring nationwide and consolidated pan-Lebanese solidarity was the death of his 18-year-old son Hadi in combat against Israeli troops in September 1997. That Nasrallah as the political leader of the militia not only sent others into battle, but sacrificed his own son at the front, brought him enormous moral authority.

Even political opponents, such as the then Sunni Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, subsequently paid him enormous respect and trust. Lebanese of all faiths, milieus, and political camps expressed their condolences to Nasrallah:

„The “Resistance” that the Hezbollah incarnated acquired a national dimension: the liberation of the South was the liberation of the fatherland. The condolences that Lebanese of all faiths expressed to Hassan Nasrallah on the occasion of his son Hadi’s death in 1997 attested to the strong patriotic content of that message. According to Azani, on that day for the first time, Lebanese flags appeared at a ceremony alongside those of the Hezbollah.” (Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: Hezbollah: A History of the ‘Party of God’)

Militarily, Hezbollah learned from its early mistakes. The costly “human waves” of the 1980s gave way to a doctrine later codified in the “13 Principles of Warfare” (presumably authored by Khalil Harb): “Avoid the strong, attack the weak – strike and withdraw,” “Surprise is essential,” “The population is a treasure – cherish it” (Blanford 2011: 150; Marcus 2018: 71).

The group perfected the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), including charges hidden in painted fiberglass rocks that exactly matched the southern Lebanese geology (Blanford 2011: 170–175), and later deployed “Explosively Formed Projectiles” (EFPs) as well as increasingly modern anti-tank guided missiles such as Sagger and TOW. With these, it was able to destroy even the highly advanced Israeli Merkava tanks through swarm fire from 1997 onwards (Blanford 2011: 200). To escape the superior Israeli air force, Hezbollah relied on strict camouflage – “low-signature operations” – and built with Iranian help an extensive network of bunkers and tunnels, so-called “nature reserves” (Marcus 2018: 144; Blanford 2011: 310).

Al-Manar and Antisemitism

At the same time, it discovered the camera as a weapon. From 1991, its fighters filmed their attacks and broadcast the footage through its own television station Al-Manar (“The Lighthouse”). Hezbollah fighters staged themselves in guerrilla fashion as the vanguard of the Lebanese resistance against the Israeli occupation (Blanford 2011: 106–107, 180).

Starting with the 1992 elections, Al-Manar also began broadcasting general national news (with the punchline “vote Hezbollah!”). In the following years, the station developed into Hezbollah’s most important propaganda tool, but did not conceal its “non-neutral” reporting. Hassan Fadlallah, Al-Manar’s director, described the station’s role in a 2002 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg as follows:

„Neutrality like that of Al Jazeera is out of the question for us […] We cover only the victim, not the aggressor. CNN is the Zionist news network, Al Jazeera is neutral, and Al Manar takes the side of the Palestinians. […] We have news programming, kids’ shows, game shows, political news, and culture. […] At the same time Al Manar is […] trying to keep the people in the mood of suffering.”[11]

In doing so, the station repeatedly undermined Hezbollah’s previously (mostly) anti-Zionist rhetoric with openly antisemitic myths. It is interesting that Fadlallah, on the one hand, claimed that antisemitism was “banned from the station”[12], while on the other hand wanting to launch a program on the “contradictions” of the Shoah (i.e., Holocaust denial). This rise in openly Jew-hostile rhetoric, mostly in the form of myths, was similarly observable in other areas of the growing Hezbollah orbit:

In the manuals of the Hezbollah-affiliated (or, depending on the source, Hezbollah-owned) scout organization, the “Imam al-Mahdi Scouts,” Jews are described in racial-doctrine fashion for 12- to 14-year-olds in dedicated chapters on “Facts about Jews”:

“[…] scouting manual for 12- to 14-year-olds contains chapters titled ‘Know Your Enemy’ and ‘Facts About Jews,’ which describe Jews as cruel, cowardly, corrupt, and deceitful. Books for younger scouts contain puzzles with militant themes, such as a bearded Hezbollah fighter at the start of the maze, with an Israeli bunker at the far end.” (Worrall, Mabon & Clubb 2015: Hezbollah: From Islamic Resistance to Government)

In the history and school books of Hezbollah’s educational institutions, the relationship with Jews is framed primarily as a centuries-long conflict in which Israel constitutes the ultimate incarnation of a Western imperialism to be combated (Worrall et al. 2016: 80; Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 62–63). Thus the equation of Zionism and Judaism is frequently found alongside a profession against antisemitism, mostly contradictory as in the above example of Fadlallah.

The sheer reach with which this programming could be distributed grew considerably in the 1990s and 2000s (Blanford 2011: 256; Levitt 2013: 134). From the originally small local broadcaster, it became a global 24-hour satellite network; the budget rose from initially around one million to ten to fifteen million US dollars in the early 2000s, primarily financed by Iran (Levitt 2013: 134; Blanford 2011: 256). This allowed the content to be broadcast far beyond Lebanon into the entire Arab world and the global diaspora (Blanford 2011: 256). During the Second Intifada, the station dedicated around 70 percent of its airtime to the Palestinian struggle against Israel (Blanford 2011: 256).

This effect was qualitatively reinforced by the rhetoric not being limited to news and cultural formats, but being professionally woven into soap operas, music videos, and edited combat footage (Worrall et al. 2016: 85; Blanford 2011: 235). The declared self-understanding was that of “psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy” (Levitt 2013: 133). The responsible parties made no secret of this bias: with regard to the then Israeli Prime Minister, the station’s PR director stated that they did not want to interview Ariel Sharon, but to get close enough to him “to kill him” (Levitt 2013: 135)

Many on the left conveniently overlook or even deny Hezbollah’s partly open antisemitism in their assessment of the group as a resistance organization. On this note: Hezbollah is, as Ehud Barak aptly remarked, a direct product of the aggression of a state that defines itself (erroneously) as the “state of the Jews.” A subject oppressed by this state – and Hezbollah emerged precisely from the oppressed, occupied masses of southern Lebanon – appropriates this understanding. Similarly, it is observable that racisms toward the oppressor develop among many oppressed populations.

Frantz Fanon describes how the colonizer appears to the colonized as the embodiment of violence, cruelty, and moral depravity. This perception arises from the real experience of colonial rule, through which the colonizer is constructed as a homogeneous, negative figure. The oppressed subject thus reproduces the perception and narrative of the experienced overwhelming power of the oppressor in the form of representations that homogenize them (in the case of Israel, partly in Jew-hostile narratives), which in turn attempt to explain the imperialist power relationship.

The separation of the colonial world into two spheres, the “good” and the “bad,” which Frantz Fanon describes as a Manichaean structure, necessarily entails a homogenization of both sides. The violence of the colonial relationship thus produces clearly demarcated, opposing collectives. This is clearly visible in Palestine: while the Israeli occupation blanket-categorizes Palestinians as “terrorists” or “dirty Arabs,” the oppressed subject takes up this logic, adopts the collective attribution, and redirects it against the oppressor. Thus, for example, Israel’s self-designation as the “state of the Jews” is generalized and translated into slogans such as “Death to the Jews.” Frantz Fanon writes on this:

„Since they have decided to reply by violence, they therefore are ready to take all its consequences. They only insist in return that no reckoning should be kept, either, for the others. To the saying “All natives are the same” the colonized person replies, “All settlers are the same.” (Fannon 1961: 92)

Added to this is a reactionary interpretation of Shia Islam, in which selected verses and analogies are deliberately applied to Israel’s self-designation. This appropriation of religious interpretive patterns, however, also builds on the mechanism described above.

Hezbollah is and was never an internally progressive movement. Materially as well as socially, even its most progressive demand never went beyond an arch-conservative understanding of gender, culture, and state. To deny this in order to facilitate the positive categorization of Hezbollah’s external impact is absurd and dishonest, even though its ideology can clearly be understood from the material conditions of southern Lebanon (see above: “Karbala as the Present”).

May 2000: The Unilateral Withdrawal and Its Ambivalence

Parallel to the deepened military buildup, a “Society of Resistance” emerged. Through the welfare network Jihad al-Bina, Hezbollah built hospitals, schools, and reconstruction programs where the Lebanese state failed (Blanford 2011: 110; Worrall et al. 2016: 76–77). These infrastructures were deliberately established in the Shia-dominated core areas, where state provision was weakest or effectively absent.

Central locations were the southern suburbs of Beirut (Dahiya), which functioned as urban densification zones for impoverished Shia populations, often migrants from rural regions. Here, Jihad al-Bina began as early as the mid-1980s with the repair of war-damaged residential buildings and the construction of basic water and sewage systems.

In rural, infrastructurally underdeveloped areas (such as the Bekaa Valley, including regions like Hermel), Hezbollah established through the Islamic Health Organization both stationary hospitals and mobile medical services, supplemented by agricultural cooperatives. The organization’s educational system, particularly institutions such as the al-Mahdi and al-Mustafa schools, was also primarily expanded in these regions, in order to slow rural flight while simultaneously creating an ideological bond with the resistance project:

„The process continues in the Hezbollah-affiliated nationwide network of Mustafa schools, where pupils study religion and pray for Islamic Resistance fighters. Hundreds of youngsters each year pass through the dozens of summer camps held by the Hezbollah-run Imam Mahdi Scouts in valleys and hills in southern Lebanon and the northern Bekaa, where they are imbued with a sense of military brotherhood and discipline replete with uniforms, parades, and martial bands.” (Blanford 2011: Warriors of God)

This network of social provision and political-military mobilization was, however, not only the result of strategic planning, but an expression of a structural vacuum that the Lebanese state itself had historically produced.

This state failure can be traced back to several intertwined factors. First, the unequally distributed economic development since independence in 1943 meant that state investments flowed almost exclusively to Beirut and the Christian-dominated Mount Lebanon, while the Shia peripheries – particularly the south and the Bekaa Valley – were systematically neglected. Second, Lebanon’s confessional political system reinforced this marginalization by dividing political power between Maronite Christians and Sunni elites and structurally underrepresenting Shi’ites. The Shia population thus remained not only politically weak, but also socioeconomically marginalized and dependent on clientelistic, often ineffective local elites.

Third, the Lebanese state was characterized by widespread corruption and the near-complete absence of a functioning social security system. Public services existed only in rudimentary form and concentrated on urban centers, while institutions for the promotion of disadvantaged regions often themselves became sites of inefficiency and enrichment. Fourth, the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) in combination with repeated Israeli invasions and the occupation of southern Lebanon led to a de facto collapse of state authority in large parts of the country. Hezbollah filled this vacuum.

Ehud Barak won the 1999 Israeli elections with the promise to end the deeply unpopular (within the Israeli population) occupation of parts of southern Lebanon within a year. When the peace negotiations with Syria failed in Geneva in March 2000, he decided, against the advice of many senior military officers, to carry out the unilateral withdrawal. On May 24, 2000, this was carried out hastily and chaotically; the Israeli proxy “South Lebanese Army” immediately collapsed, with many of its members fleeing to Israel out of fear of persecution by Hezbollah or the southern Lebanese civilian population (Norton 2007: 88–89; Blanford 2011: 250; Marcus 2018: 85–86).

From Hezbollah’s perspective and that of large parts of the Arab world, this was a massive triumph of armed resistance: for the first time, Israel was forced to abandon occupied territory through armed resistance and without a peace agreement. In his famous speech in Bint Jbeil, Nasrallah declared that Israel, despite its nuclear weapons and air force, was socially “weaker than a spider’s web,” because it could not endure the losses of a grinding war:

„To free your land, you don’t need tanks, strategic balance, rockets, and cannons; you need to follow the way of self-sacrificing martyrs who shook and horrified the coercive Zionist entity. You, the oppressed, unarmed, and restricted Palestinians, can force the Zionist invaders to return to the places where they came from. Make the Falasha return to Ethiopia, and let the Russian Jews return to Russia! The choice is yours, and the model lies right in front of your eyes. An honest and serious resistance can make the dawn of freedom rise. Our fellow, beloved Palestinians, I tell you: “Israel,” which owns nuclear weapons and the strongest air fleets in the region, is feebler than a spider web – I swear to God.”[13]

On the Israeli side, Ehud Barak argued that the withdrawal to the internationally recognized border would provide Israel with legitimacy and deprive Hezbollah of the justification for further attacks; the strategic aim was to transfer responsibility for future escalations to the governments of Lebanon and Syria, thereby establishing an interstate deterrence framework. In reality, it was probably the massive internal unpopularity that ultimately forced Barak to act: at the end, the occupation was regarded in the Israeli public as a protracted, costly, and politically fruitless endeavor.

In particular, the 1997 helicopter collision, in which 73 Israeli soldiers lost their lives, as well as the constantly rising numbers of killed Israeli soldiers (ultimately 559[14]), combined with the insight formulated by Barak himself that Hezbollah was precisely a product of this occupation, made the end of the imperial offensive inevitable for his own political survival. According to polls, around 70 percent of the Israeli population supported a withdrawal at the end of the occupation, while only about 20 percent wanted to maintain it.[15]

In this context, the so-called Four Mothers movement emerged, founded by four mothers from northern Israel whose sons were stationed in southern Lebanon. They demanded an immediate, unilateral withdrawal and exerted considerable pressure on the political leadership through protests, media campaigns, and petitions:

„The Four Mothers Movement primarily sought to dispel several “myths” surrounding the security zone, noting in an official press release that, contrary to IDF assertions, Hezbollah’s Katyusha fire was more effectively curtailed by international mediation than Israeli military operations. The organization noted that Hezbollah militants targeted the IDF only within Lebanon and never crossed into Israel proper (at that time), which negated the underlying utility of the security zone. Supported by dovish politicians, the group also highlighted how Syria was using Lebanon as a bargaining chip in its negotiations with Israel, and the IDF’s continued presence afforded Syria this advantage.” (Marcus 2018: Israel’s Long War with Hezbollah)

The withdrawal catapulted Hezbollah to the peak of its national and regional popularity, while simultaneously plunging it into a legitimacy crisis. With the end of the occupation, it lost its primary justification for existence as an armed militia in a country that, after Taif, was supposed to no longer have militias. Critics emphatically demanded disarmament: now the Lebanese state alone should decide on war and peace.

Hezbollah responded to this criticism in two ways: on the one hand, it focused on the still Israeli-occupied “Shebaa Farms” – a disputed border area that the UN actually attributed to Syria, but which Hezbollah declared Lebanese territory (Norton 2007: 57–58; Marcus 2018: 81). On the other hand, it developed a new strategic narrative: its weapons were no longer weapons of liberation, but weapons of deterrence, indispensable because the regular Lebanese army was too weak to protect the country from future Israeli aggressions (Blanford 2011; Norton 2007: 106–107). From the “Islamic resistance movement” had emerged a “defensive resistance” – a semantic shift that rescued its own justification for existence from the end of the occupation.

In the parliamentary elections of 2000 and 2005, Hezbollah ran in pragmatic list alliances with the once-fought Amal movement and secured a stable bloc size in parliament. In the 2004 municipal elections, it dominated around 60 percent of southern Lebanese municipalities, clearly outstripping its old rival (Worrall et al. 2016: 93–94, 97).

The military maintenance of the resistance self-understanding was taken over by calculated “memory operations” at the Shebaa Farms, which maintained the status quo without provoking a major war (Marcus 2018: 81). At the same time, the group built with Iranian help a massive underground rocket and bunker arsenal south of the Litani and began the transition from a pure guerrilla to a semi-conventional defensive army (Marcus 2018: 188–189).

The Hariri Case, Cedar Revolution, and the Alliance with Aoun (2000–2006)

In February 2005, the assassination of the Sunni former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri drastically changed Lebanon’s political dynamics and would continue to shape Lebanon to this day. On February 14, Hariri was killed along with 22 other people when a giant remote-controlled bomb (consisting of an estimated 1,200 kilograms of explosives) blew up his convoy in front of the St. George Hotel in Beirut (Blanford 2006: 139, 149–150).

An initial UN investigation commission under Detlev Mehlis quickly found “converging evidence” of the involvement of senior Syrian and Lebanese intelligence officers (Blanford 2006: 177–178). Later, however, the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) indicted four senior Hezbollah members (including senior commander Mustafa Badreddine) of having orchestrated and carried out the assassination (Levitt 2013: 217–218; Worrall et al. 2016: 101).

Hezbollah vehemently rejected these accusations as an American-Israeli conspiracy and refused any cooperation with the tribunal. Since the accused were not extradited, the final perpetratorship remains unclear to this day and is in fact extremely controversial (Norton 2007: 177–178; Levitt 2013: 218–219). We will not speculate here either; instead, here are the possible motives of the relevant actors:

Syria directly or pro-Syrian government forces:

• Hariri was regarded as the greatest threat to decades of Syrian control over Lebanon.
• Fear of a landslide victory by Hariri’s cross-confessional alliance in the 2005 parliamentary elections, which would have ended the pro-Syrian majority.
• Syria saw in Hariri the architect of the international pressure demanding the withdrawal of Syrian troops (UN Resolution 1559).
• Deep mistrust and political conflict between Hariri and the pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud, who despised Hariri’s economic-liberal visions (Blanford 2006: 49).
• The Lebanese security apparatus acted as a “state within a state” and saw in Hariri’s liberal course a danger to its own power.
• Verdict: The UN Special Tribunal found that Syria had clear motives, but found no direct evidence of involvement by the leadership in Damascus.[16]

Hezbollah:

• A Syrian withdrawal threatened to deprive Hezbollah of its political backing and logistical supply routes from Iran.
• UN Resolution 1559 explicitly demanded the dissolution of all militias and thus posed a potential existential threat to Hezbollah. Hariri and Nasrallah did, however, reach a compromise some months before the attack that was quite desirable for Hezbollah: in the event of Hariri’s (likely) renewed government leadership, Hezbollah could keep its weapons until the resolution of the “Middle East peace process” (Blanford 2006: 189).
• The Special Tribunal convicted Hezbollah-affiliated Salim Ayyash in 2020 in absentia as the principal responsible party for the assassination, but the court expressly emphasized that there was no evidence of direct involvement by Hezbollah’s leadership or Iran.[17]

Israel and the United States:

• The murder led to the extreme (!) internal destabilization of Lebanon and ultimately resulted in Syria’s withdrawal, the weakening of Hezbollah, and a general weakening of Lebanese sovereignty.
• Creating a massive wave of international outrage to definitively push Syria out of Lebanon.
• Goal of targeted destabilization by inflaming confessional tensions between Sunnis and Shi’ites.

In his book “Killing Mr. Lebanon,” Nicholas Blanford concludes:

„Hariri’s murder helped crystallise these regional divisions [„the West and Tehran”], pitting those states and factions hostile to Israel and to Western interference against the Bush administration’s goal of establishing a placid and compliant Middle East won through its formidable military, diplomatic and economic might and cloaked in a veneer of democratic values.” (Blanford 2006: Killing Mr. Lebanon)

The assassination unleashed an unprecedented wave of grief and fury, which led to the “Cedar Revolution” (or “Independence Intifada”). At a massive demonstration on March 14, 2005, around one million Lebanese (almost a quarter of the population) gathered to demand the truth about the murder and an end to Syrian dominance (Blanford 2006: 160; Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 74–75).

This massive domestic pressure, combined with international outrage, finally forced Syria to withdraw its troops completely from Lebanon by the end of April 2005, bringing to an end a 29-year military hegemony in Lebanon (Blanford 2006: 162–164).

At the same time, this event split Lebanon into two hostile camps: the anti-Syrian March 14 Alliance around Hariri’s son Saad, Walid Jumblatt, and Christian forces, which demanded Syria’s withdrawal, clarification of the murder, and the disarmament of Hezbollah pursuant to UN Resolution 1559; and the pro-Syrian March 8 Alliance led by Hezbollah and Amal, which defended Syria’s role and did not want to orient itself further toward the West (Norton 2007: 127–128, 131–132; Worrall et al. 2016: 88–89, 114; Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 74–75).

New Friends

The Syrian troop withdrawal in April 2005 deprived Hezbollah of its most important political protector. It responded with two historic steps: first, after the 2005 elections, it entered for the first time directly into the Lebanese cabinet under Fouad Siniora, and imposed as a condition a government declaration officially recognizing it not as a “militia” but as a legitimate “national resistance group” (a legal shield against the disarmament demands of UN Resolution 1559) (Norton 2007: 131–132; Worrall et al. 2016: 99–100).

Second, in February 2006, it concluded a formal alliance (Memorandum of Understanding) with the Free Patriotic Movement of the Christian-Maronite ex-general Michel Aoun. This agreement crossed confessional boundaries, secured Hezbollah the support of a large Christian party, and broke its political isolation (Worrall et al. 2016: 94–95; Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 78). The agreement was signed at St. Michael’s Church in Haret Hreik and encompassed a broad political agenda, including domestic reforms (consensual democracy, electoral reform, anti-corruption policy), national reconciliation including normalization of relations with Syria, and a common position on the Palestinian question – particularly the rejection of their permanent settlement in Lebanon. At the same time, Hezbollah’s role as “resistance” against Israel was politically confirmed by effectively subordinating its armament to these security and state-related goals.

The July War 2006 and the “Dahiya Doctrine”

The Second Lebanon War was the result of a strategic miscalculation in the grinding border war that had solidified after 2000 into an unstable “balance of terror.”

On the morning of July 12, 2006, a Hezbollah unit ambushed an Israeli patrol near the village of Zarit, killed three soldiers, and abducted Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in order to force a prisoner exchange (particularly for Samir Kuntar) and open a second front for Hamas in Gaza, which was under massive bombardment.

When the IDF immediately crossed the border with an uncoordinated rescue operation, a Merkava tank drove into a gigantic explosive trap; five more Israeli soldiers were killed (Marcus 2018, Ch. 8; Blanford 2011, Ch. 10). Nasrallah later publicly admitted that Hezbollah had expected only a limited Israeli response and had drastically miscalculated the threshold for Israel’s “red lines”:

“Upon the outbreak of war, Hezbollah’s strategic surprise was evident. In the words of Mahmoud Komati, deputy chief of Hezbollah’s politburo: “The truth is – let me say this clearly – we didn’t even expect [this] response.” Rather, Hezbollah expected “the usual limited response” since “in the past, Israeli responses to Hezbollah actions included sending in commandos into Lebanon and kidnapping Hezbollah officials or briefly targeting specific Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon”.” (Marcus 2018: Israel’s Long War with Hezbollah)

On the first night, the Israeli air force destroyed in Operation Specific Weight within 34 minutes a large part of Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range rocket launchers (Marcus 2018, Ch. 8), killing 20 Lebanese civilians. The air strikes expanded within days to Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure and the stronghold of Dahiya in the southern suburbs of Beirut (Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 83).

Hezbollah responded with a relentless rain of Katyushas on northern Israel, including Haifa, and gave Israel a psychological shock on July 14 when a sea-launched C-802 missile hit the warship INS Hanit. When air strikes alone could not stop the rocket fire, Israel ordered limited, then deeper ground offensives in late July and early August. In villages such as Marun al-Ras and Bint Jbeil, Israeli troops encountered the tenacious resistance of extremely well-entrenched Hezbollah fighters; shortly before the end of the war, an Israeli armored column fell into an ambush in Wadi Saluki, in which eleven Merkava tanks were heavily damaged by anti-tank missiles (Blanford 2011, Ch. 10; Marcus 2018, Ch. 8).

The 34-day war ended on August 14 with UN Resolution 1701, which demanded the Israeli withdrawal, the disarmament of militias south of the Litani, and the stationing of a reinforced UNIFIL force (Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 83). The Israeli attacks killed 1,191 Lebanese civilians and forced nearly one million more to flee

Militarily, Hezbollah fought for the first time as a “hybrid force,” combining guerrilla tactics with the arsenal and steadfastness of a regular army (Blanford 2011, Ch. 10). Its strategy rested on three pillars: “winning by not losing” (organizational resilience that waited out the end of the offensives); recourse to the forward network of bunkers and “nature reserves” that enabled close combat from ambush (Worrall et al. 2016: 55); and the strategic rocket arsenal. Hezbollah fired almost 4,000 rockets at Israel in the 34 days of war, demonstrating that Israel’s military superiority could not protect its own home front (Worrall et al. 2016: 53). Against Israeli tanks, it deployed swarm tactics with modern Russian Kornet and RPG-29 systems.

Politically, the war brought neither side a clear military victory. Since Israel did not achieve its maximum goals – the destruction of Hezbollah and the liberation of the kidnapped soldiers – and the militia fired hundreds of rockets until the last day, Nasrallah declared the outcome a “Divine Victory” (Nasr ilahi) (Avon & Khatchadourian 2012: 83). In the short term, the war brought Hezbollah enormous prestige throughout the Arab world (Worrall et al. 2016: 129). In Israel, by contrast, the war was perceived as a disaster: 44 Israeli civilians died

As a long-term consequence, Israel formulated the “Dahiya Doctrine”: every future Hezbollah attack would be answered with disproportionate, collective-punishment destruction of Lebanon’s overall infrastructure (Marcus 2018: 104–105). Lebanon counted around four billion US dollars in damages (Norton 2007: 144). The immediate consequence was a strategic “balance of deterrence” that provided a historically long period of calm at the border.

Doha, the 2009 Manifesto, and the Broken Taboo (2008–2011)

Domestically, the aftermath of the war led to a deep crisis. When the pro-Western government under Fouad Siniora attempted in May 2008 to shut down Hezbollah’s secure telecommunications network, the group crossed its long-standing taboo of not using its weapons against other Lebanese.

It violently occupied parts of West Beirut and forced the government to retreat. The Doha Agreement subsequently concluded secured Hezbollah and its allies a de facto blocking minority (one third plus one seat) in the Lebanese cabinet and thus a veto right over all government decisions (Blanford 2011: 132; Worrall et al. 2016: 100–101, 105, 107).

The demand for a “consensual democracy” was the elegant name for this structural blocking power, with which the group primarily sought to prevent the international Special Tribunal investigating the Hariri murder, which it feared:

„The outcome of the May 2008 “events,” as they are euphemistically referred to by the Lebanese, broke the back of the political deadlock that had paralyzed Lebanon since the 2006 war and confirmed Hezbollah as the dominant force on the Lebanese “street.” But it came at a price. For Hezbollah, in dispatching its fighters against the Sunni supporters of Saad Hariri and the Druze partisans of Walid Jumblatt, had broken an until-then sacred taboo. How many times had Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders insisted that the arms of the Islamic Resistance were aimed only at Israel and would never be used against fellow Lebanese?” (Blanford 2011: Warriors of God)

In November 2009, Hezbollah published a new manifesto. The maximalist demand for an Islamic Republic in Lebanon from 1985 was shelved; in its place came the commitment to consensual democracy followed by the “right to resistance” against Israel and American hegemony.[20]

As the first manifesto since its Open Letter 24 years earlier, it read not only more moderate, but in parts like a regular religious-social-democratic program, with the sole exception of the particular emphasis on resistance against the United States and Israel. The manifesto argues in favor of multipolarity and against the unipolarity of the “economic-capitalist project” of the United States, which had taken the form of a “western expanding strategy” and brought misery to the region through the “War on Terror” of the “neoconservative” Bush administration. The document at times adopts an almost crudely Leninist language, which however always functions in the limited form of anti-Americanism:

„Savage capitalism forces – embodied mainly in international monopoly networks of companies that cross the nations and continents, networks of various international establishments especially the financial ones backed by superior military force have led to more contradictions and conflicts – of which not less important – are the conflicts of identities, cultures, civilizations, in addition to the conflicts of poverty and wealth.”[21]

Internally, Hezbollah demands a strong welfare state, an apolitical judiciary, freedom before the law, equal economic development in southern and northern Lebanon, the integration of women at all levels of the state (“the State that fuses the role of women at all levels”), decentralization of the political system, and Hezbollah as a separate resistance army alongside the regular army. The document explicitly mentions Iran as the “central state in the Muslim world, since it is the State that dropped through its revolution the Shah’s regime and its American-‘Israeli’ projects, and it is also the state that supported the resistance movements in our region, and stood with courage and determination at the side of the Arab and Islamic causes and especially the Palestinian one.”[22]

The group’s domestic dominance culminated in early 2011 in the collapse of the government of the Saudi-aligned Saad Hariri, which directly resulted from the escalating conflict over the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which was investigating the murder of (his father) Rafiq Hariri (Worrall et al. 2016: 107–108; Norton 2007: 163).

As Hezbollah came under increasing pressure in the national unity government, since the tribunal was on the verge of indicting senior officials, it launched a campaign against the STL as a Western-Israeli-controlled instrument and demanded Hariri end cooperation with and financing of the court. Since Hariri refused, Hezbollah and its allies collectively resigned from the government while Hariri was in Washington, causing the government to automatically collapse.

Subsequently, Hezbollah shifted the majority in parliament through political alliances (including with “Druze leader” Walid Jumblatt) and enabled the formation of a new government led by Najib Mikati, which was dominated by the March 8 Alliance and pushed the March 14 forces into opposition.

Militarily, Hezbollah massively rearmed after 2006: M-600 missiles, Kornet anti-tank systems, drones. At the same time, driven by the 2008 Mossad and CIA assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, it intensified its covert operations abroad. The secret “Unit 3800” trained Shia militias in Iraq to fight against the US-led “Coalition of the Willing”; in 2008, Egyptian authorities arrested a cell that was supposed to smuggle weapons to Hamas and prepare attacks in the Suez Canal; thwarted attack plans in Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Cyprus also emerged.

The Syrian Overextension (2011–2018)

The outbreak of the “Arab Spring” in 2011 plunged Hezbollah into the deepest strategic and ideological dilemma of its history to date. The falls of the pro-Western dictators in Tunisia and Egypt could still be rhetorically welcomed; but when the protests reached Syria, the conflict could no longer be concealed.

Syria was the logistical bridge to Iran, the transit corridor for heavy weapons. The fall of the Alawite-dominated Assad regime would have cut Hezbollah’s supply lines and effectively halved the “Axis of Resistance” (Blanford 2011; Levitt 2013, Ch. 12).

Hezbollah chose loyalty toward Damascus. Already from early 2012, it was clandestinely active in Syria; in the summer of the same year, its units were officially fighting to protect the Shia pilgrimage site Sayyida Sitt Zainab south of Damascus. By autumn 2012, they had expanded their operations to the border regions and 23 Shia villages in Syria (Norton 2007, Afterword, p. 166).

The turning point came in April 2013 with the recapture of the strategically important border town of al-Qusayr, in which Hezbollah openly fought at the front line for the Assad regime for the first time (Norton 2007, Afterword, p. 167). On May 25, 2013, Nasrallah made the intervention official in a public speech (Marcus 2018, Afterword). Battles in Qalamoun and elsewhere followed, in which Hezbollah fought against Sunni rebels and jihadist groups such as the so-called Islamic State and the today de facto ruling Al-Nusra Front (Worrall et al. 2016: 2, 132–139).

Nasrallah publicly justified the intervention with two arguments: loyalty toward the Iranian and Syrian authorities, which had supported Hezbollah militarily, financially, and politically for decades; and the necessity of an existential preemptive strike against “takfirist” terrorist groups that, without timely intervention, would long since have advanced as far as Beirut (Worrall et al. 2016: 144, 148; Marcus 2018, Afterword). The justification was not invented – the rise of the so-called Islamic State genuinely made the fight against it a strategically and existentially meaningful matter both for Hezbollah and for Lebanon as a whole – but the decisive motive was geopolitical self-preservation:

„Syria is the vital geo-strategic lynchpin connecting Iran to Hezbollah. It grants Hezbollah strategic depth and political backing, and serves as a conduit for the transfer of heavy weapons across the rugged border with Lebanon. If Assad’s Alawite-dominated regime falls and is replaced by an administration better reflecting the majority Sunni population, Hezbollah’s stature in Lebanon inevitably will diminish, even if it remains the dominant political and military domestic actor.” (Blanford 2011: Warriors of God)

This assessment has proven correct since the seizure of power by terrorist leader al-Jolani.

The consequences of the intervention fundamentally changed Hezbollah. Militarily, it transformed from an asymmetric defender to a conventional offensive actor. Through close coordination with Syrian and, from 2015 especially, Russian units, it learned complex offensive maneuvers, the use of tanks and artillery in urban areas, the integration of air support, and electronic warfare (Marcus 2018: 267, 269–270, Afterword). By early 2018, the Party of God had suffered around 1,700 dead and 5,000 wounded in Syria, including many veterans from the resistance wars (Marcus 2018: 270–271).

Politically, Hezbollah became a central actor in the geopolitical proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia (which, together with the United States, supported Sunni rebels) and Iran (Worrall et al. 2016: 134, 141). Its legitimation as a purely “Islamic resistance” against Israel suffered immense damage in the Sunni-Arab world. What had been celebrated after 2006 as a pan-Arab heroic myth in Damascus, Cairo, and Amman tipped into the perception that Hezbollah had become Iran’s Shia sectarian militia (Norton 2007: 165, Prologue/Afterword; Worrall et al. 2016: 148–149; Levitt 2013, Ch. 12).

The Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council classified the group as a terrorist organization and imposed a political and economic boycott (Norton 2007: 171). The Gulf states, which had also pursued their own Western-aligned interests in Syria, established massive media anti-Hezbollah campaigns. Among them, the (extremely) influential Qatari preacher Yūsuf ʿAbdallāh al-Qaradāwī, who summarized the change of opinion among many in the Muslim world in a sermon on Al-Jazeera as follows:

„Every Muslim trained to fight and capable of doing that (must) make himself available […] to support the Syrian rebels. […] The leader of the party of the Satan [Hezbollah] comes to fight the Sunnis […] Now we know what the Iranians want: They want continued massacres to kill Sunnis […] I defended the so-called Nasrallah and his party, the party of tyranny in front of clerics in Saudi Arabia […] It seems that the clerics of Saudi Arabia were more mature than me.”[23]

Added to this was a backlash on its own turf. Sunni jihadists brought terror in the form of car bombs to Hezbollah’s strongholds in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, confessional tensions intensified, and the until-then carefully cultivated illusion of a purely Lebanese resistance movement crumbled (Worrall et al. 2016: 135; Levitt 2013, Ch. 12; Marcus 2018, Afterword):

„For a group that has always portrayed itself as the vanguard standing up for the dispossessed in the face of injustice and that has always tried to downplay its sectarian and pro-Iranian identities, supporting a brutal Alawite regime against the predominantly Sunni Syrian opposition risked shattering a long-cultivated image. In the end, the strategic necessity of preventing the collapse of the Assad regime – which, if replaced by a regime representing the country’s Sunni majority would, at the least, be far less friendly to Hezbollah and possibly oppose it outright – took precedence over the need to maintain the party’s image.” (Levitt 2013: Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God)

Internal Decline, External Pressure

Back on Lebanese soil, Hezbollah has increasingly established itself as the “state within a state” that its opponents have conjured since 2005 (Worrall et al. 2016: 74, 104–106). It used its political power to instrumentalize state institutions for its own purposes and protect its military independence – up to the collapse of the Hariri government in January 2011 through the collective resignation from the cabinet (Norton 2007: 163).

Left-wing forces such as the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) rightly criticize the fact that Hezbollah has made itself an integral part of bourgeois rule without participating in fundamental material and social reforms or in a genuine fight against structural corruption; it co-bears the country’s institutional crisis. Habib Fares of the LCP stated in an interview with BirGün:

„Now, on the issue of anti-Israeli issues we are together with Hezbollah. However we have differences with Hezbollah when it comes to their position about the political regime, about political issues in the country, social changes. We have the slogan and the policy that liberty does not just belong to the land, it also belongs to the people. They cannot liberate just the land if you do not liberate the people that live on that land.”[24]

The overextension also took an economic toll. The intervention in Syria pulled Lebanon deep into the civil war beyond its border and led to a refugee crisis that devastated the country’s already fragile economy. The material cost of accommodating up to 1.5 million Syrian refugees cost the state around 100 million US dollars per month for water and electricity supply alone (Worrall et al. 2016: 136). The tourism sector and foreign direct investment collapsed as wealthy Arab visitors from the Gulf states avoided the country due to sectarian violence and kidnappings (Norton 2007: 169–170).

Hezbollah’s reputation as an incorruptible force suffered additional damage through internal financial scandals; the Hezbollah-affiliated businessman Salah Izz al-Din, for example, defrauded Shia investors through a pyramid scheme of up to one billion US dollars, triggering unprecedented fury within its own base (Norton 2007: 165; Blanford 2011: 446).

At the same time, the USA tightened sanctions with the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act of 2015 against banks and networks conducting business with the organization worldwide. Combined with sanctions against Iran, these measures put Hezbollah in the “worst financial condition in decades”; Iranian funds had to be cut, and criminal revenue sources were increasingly blocked (Marcus 2018: 272–273).

Israel strategically exploited the overextension. Under the name “Mowing the Grass,” it conducted in the context of the Syrian civil war a covert campaign that selectively eliminated weapons convoys, advanced rocket systems, and Hezbollah commanders (including Samir Kuntar and Mustafa Badreddine) through air strikes in Syria, thereby enforcing its “red lines” (Marcus 2018: 274–278).

Despite all these crises, Hezbollah remained by far the most powerful political and military actor in Lebanon. Militarily, it was assessed in 2016 as “stronger than any Arab army” (Worrall et al. 2016: 46); through its long years of Syrian deployment, partly in direct coordination with Russian special units, it had developed from a pure guerrilla force into an army with conventional offensive capacity (Marcus 2018: 269–270).

Domestically, it was simultaneously under greater criticism than ever before, having broken its promise never to use its weapons against Lebanese or abroad on multiple occasions (Blanford 2011: 445). Its narrative as a purely Lebanese resistance movement has taken severe damage; for many Arabs, it is regarded today primarily as Iran’s sectarian mercenary force for the rescue of the Assad regime, or now Iran itself, functioning as a means of self-perpetuation of its own rule (Worrall et al. 2016: 145). This image was to shift once more with the genocide in Gaza.

Consolidation in the Shadow of Syria (2016–2019)

The Syrian experience transformed Hezbollah from a “classical guerrilla militia” into a “quasi-army” that for the first time systematically learned to combine asymmetric tactics with the formations of a regular military force (Wahab 2019: 14).

The key to this was less its own learning process than the direct integration into those Russian command structures that Moscow had built up since its 2015 intervention in Syria. In joint operations centers in Damascus and Latakia, Hezbollah commanders benefited from Russian intelligence and planning; simultaneously, the militia received heavy weapons such as tactical long-range missiles and armor-piercing systems that technically enabled the transition from a defensive to an offensive army (Al-Aloosy 2020: 161).

Hezbollah assumed the training and operational leadership of pro-Syrian formations such as the “National Defense Force,” thereby establishing itself no longer as a mere proxy (as is often claimed in mainstream sources), but as a central co-architect of the “Axis of Resistance” – a status recognized by Tehran, Damascus, and Moscow that elevated the supply route from Tehran via Damascus to Beirut to the lifeline of the entire axis (Al-Aloosy 2020: 154; Wahab 2019: 25).

The domestic consolidation rested on a second institutional bridgehead, whose foundation had been laid ten years earlier in St. Michael’s Church in Haret Hreik (see above): the election of Michel Aoun as Lebanese president on October 31, 2016. Hezbollah ultimately pushed the political system with the infamous slogan “Aoun or a vacuum” (demonstratively executed for years by systematically preventing any other presidency) to elect its Maronite ally (Wahab 2019: 138). What was completed in 2018 with the parliamentary majority was the formalized victory of that strategy to establish Hezbollah as both a (now in many respects conventional) resistance army and a parliamentary control.

With parliamentary dominance, however, the internal criticism grew, which in the previous section could only be hinted at through the example of Habib Fares and the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP). LCP Secretary-General Hanna Gharib sharpened the tone in several interviews and texts of the late 2010s and early 2020s: his party had once co-founded the national resistance against Israel, but cooperation with today’s Hezbollah was impossible because it pursued a purely “Islamist agenda.” Under the cover of resistance, Hezbollah had effectively grown into a regional army of Iran, whose massive weapons arsenal served not Lebanon but military deployments in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen (Strid 2025: 1–3):

„When the state does nothing against the occupation, to liberate the land that is occupied, people will resist. We have a dialogue with Hezbollah. We are against the occupation, and in that way we agree with each other, but that does not mean we are with them […] Historically, we are a resistance party, a national resistance. They are an Islamist resistance. So, we cannot be together. I want the state to resist. But the problem is that it does not.”[25]

From the right-wing Christian camp, the pro-American Lebanese Forces under Samir Geagea arrived at similar diagnoses, though from different backgrounds: they denounced Hezbollah as an illegal, Iran-controlled militia that undermined national sovereignty (Wahab 2019: 94).

Together with more concrete accusations that Hezbollah deliberately profited from the decay of state institutions, accumulated wealth through smuggling and parallel economic systems, and covered up a corruption it claimed to fight rhetorically (Förch Saab 2024: 2), these voices formed that premonition of crisis that would erupt in the Thawra of October 2019.

The Thawra, the Port, and the Murder of Soleimani (2019–2020)

The welfare network described in the previous section under the keywords Jihad al-Bina and “resistance society” grew in the late phase of the crisis into a parallel state structure that extended over the country not only socially but also economically (Daher 2019: 108). At the center of this architecture was the “Islamic Health Committee” (IHC), which operated its own hospitals and clinics, organized a nationwide civilian emergency service, and took over large parts of basic medical care in several regions. Jihad al-Bina took care of infrastructure projects, waste disposal, and reconstruction after military confrontations (Daher 2019: 100, 108). These structures pursued, beyond pure welfare, the explicit goal of forming a loyal “resistance society” (mujtamaʿ al-muqāwama) and mitigating potential discontent over the severe consequences of its own deployments (Daher 2019: 109).

Amid the state bankruptcy from 2019, Hezbollah also massively expanded its economic offerings: it expanded its own banking sector, operated lucrative exchange offices, controlled the sale of fuel for generators, and systematically acquired real estate and companies (Förch Saab 2024: 4). A central instrument was the party-owned microfinance institution Al-Qard al-Hasan, which provided interest-free or subsidized loans and significantly helped Hezbollah economically bind its Shia base through the hyperinflation (Daher 2019: 108):

„Hezbollah aids the poorest through a micro-finance institution, al-Qard al-Hasan (the Good Credit). Founded in 1983 to keep the Lebanese victims of the Israeli occupation from “becoming refugees in their own land”, 47 today it offers loans of up to 5,000 USD, repayable over a maximum of thirty months. While at its debut this initiative participated in fostering a – imited – class of small craftsmen and merchants, the economic slumps in the 1990s and the 2000s expanded the spectrum of what these loans were used for: 50 per cent went to meet daily subsistence needs; 27 per cent to repay previous loans; 6 per cent for housing; 5 per cent for hospitalization, school, or university costs; and 3 per cent for household needs.” (Daher 2019: Hezbollah Mobilization and Power)

What carried Hezbollah as a continuous social architecture over the republic crumbling between 2019 and 2020 simultaneously faced an uprising that called the Lebanese republic into question for the first time entirely. Die Thawra („Revolution”) des 17. Oktober 2019 entzündete sich an einer Kabinettsentscheidung, die kleinlicher kaum hätte sein können: einer Sondersteuer von sechs US-Dollar[26] im Monat auf WhatsApp- und ähnliche Internet-Anrufe; in einem Land, in dem das offizielle Telefonnetz ohnehin nur noch als Beute der konfessionellen Eliten wahrgenommen wurde und in dem zwei Drittel der erwerbstätigen Bevölkerung im informellen Sektor arbeiteten (Salloukh 2020).

The structural causes of the Thawra reached back into that economic model which had been staged after the Taif Agreement as the “Lebanese economic miracle”: a rentier capitalism built on high-yield bonds, foreign investments from the Gulf states, and a pyramid around the Lebanese central bank (Banque du Liban, BDL) under its long-serving governor Riad Salameh. The Lebanese lira had been artificially pegged to the US dollar since 1997; to maintain this exchange rate, Salameh attracted foreign currency for years with double-digit interest rates, which he had to finance from ever new bonds. A Ponzi scheme on a state scale, which the World Bank retrospectively classified as a “Ponzi finance scheme” (World Bank 2021; Achcar 2020).

The banks that promised these returns to middle-class savers simultaneously made their deposits available to the state, which in turn channeled them back to the same political families that had set up the system: Hariri, Mikati, Salam, Frangieh, Berri, Aoun, and their respective clientele networks.[27]

When after 2016 the foreign currency flows from the Gulf states dried up as a result of Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria and Saudi sanctions, this pyramid collapsed. The banks no longer had dollar capital to guarantee withdrawals; the lira began losing value below its official exchange rate, and a parallel black market rate emerged. Already in the summer of 2019, gas stations stopped supplying fuel, bakeries rationed flour, and power outages expanded to twelve, then sixteen hours daily (Salloukh 2020; UN-ESCWA 2021). Die WhatsApp-Steuer, in diesem Zustand verkündet, erschien als das, was sie war: das routinemäßige Gefäß einer Klasse, die selbst noch die letzten Cent aus den Taschen jener kratzte, von denen nun rund ein Drittel unter der Armutsgrenze lebte und dessen Jugend zu 37% Arbeitslos war.[28]

Thawra

In November 2019, over two million people (almost half the Lebanese population) took to the streets for weeks: in Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, Tyre, Nabatiyeh, Baalbek, Hermel, and Akkar. For the first time since the civil war, Sunnis, Shi’ites, Maronites, Druze, Greek Orthodox, and secular citizens came together under the same slogans. „Kullun yaʿni kullun” („alle, das heißt alle”) richtete sich gegen die gesamte herrschende Klasse, ohne Ausnahme: gegen Saad Hariri ebenso wie gegen Nabih Berri, Michel Aoun, Samir Geagea, Walid Dschumblatt – und gegen Hassan Nasrallah (Tricontinental 2020; Bayoumi 2020).

They demanded the payment of frozen savings, prosecution of corrupt elites, abolition of the confessional proportionality system (offices & seats tied to confessions), and the formation of a technocratic transitional government. The popular uprising demanded the end of a model that had structured the Lebanese republic since its founding in 1943 and which in Taif in 1989 had merely been confessionally rebalanced, not overcome. The Middle East Research and Information Project concluded on December 19, 2019:

“The uprising is a broad-based revolt against Lebanese-style neoliberalism […] The uprising is the first time since the end of the civil war in 1990 that large numbers have protested against both the ruling sectarian elites and the financial elites and banks they see as responsible for the crisis. Hundreds of thousands of protesters are speaking an increasingly class-based “us versus them” language: The few in power are seen as ruthlessly suffocating the many for their own benefits and interests. […] Prior to 2019, sectarian divisions were maintained even as exploitative neoliberal policies and a mounting economic crisis threatened to connect the dispossessed across sectarian lines. […] The revolution of October 2019, however, marks a turning point, as the escalating financial crisis made the economic situation appear irreparable to Lebanese across wide sectors of society. A broad swath of Lebanese citizens saw that the neoliberal sectarian system was unsalvageable and took to the streets, aiming to force a major turning point in the post-1990 Lebanese political and economic order.”

Prime Minister (and Saudi-aligned multi-billionaire) Saad Hariri resigned on October 29, 2019; the movement continued beyond this, until the pandemic and the further accelerating economic collapse of spring 2020 made a physical presence in the squares impossible.

Only in January 2020 did a new government come together with the Sunni Hassan Diab (a technocratic figure without his own power base), substantially supported by Hezbollah and its allies [29] and which fulfilled none of the Thawra’s demands in any of its dimensions (L’Orient-Le Jour 2020).

This structural continuity was the result of an active defense of the status quo by the established forces – above all by Hezbollah. Already on October 25, 2019, supporters of Hezbollah and Amal had stormed the protest camp at Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, destroyed tents, and beaten demonstrators under the battle cry “Shi’a, Shi’a” – an image difficult to reconcile with the group’s self-staging as a cross-confessional resistance movement (Achcar 2020; Daher 2024: 107). Meanwhile, Hezbollah accused the United States of trying to prevent government formation.[30] It must be noted that the parliamentary power of Hezbollah through a Hassan Diab government was obviously contrary to the interests of the United States and Israel, whereby interference (to whatever degree) in the protest movement was not improbable, but ultimately changed nothing about the material conditions of the Thawra.

The attacks by Hezbollah and Amal supporters were not limited to the Martyrs’ Square camp in the capital, but continued equally in the southern Lebanese city of Nabatiyeh – that is, in the heart of a Hezbollah core area where even the Shia base itself had taken to the streets (Daher 2024: 107). Through the violent defense of the status quo, the party transformed in the perception of many from the erstwhile defender of the disenfranchised into the physical protector of precisely that ruling political elite it had rhetorically denounced for three decades (Daher 2024: 107).

The shock that the Thawra and Hezbollah’s obviously contradictory behavior had on its own Shia base can be observed in opinion research from this period. A study evaluated in Middle East Transparent shows how the “very positive” assessment among Lebanese Shi’ites fell between 2017 and 2020 by almost 20 percentage points to 66%.[31] In the same period, it received the lowest ever recorded values among the country’s Christians and Sunnis:

„At the same time, Hezbollah’s popularity has plummeted even further among Lebanon’s Christian and Sunni communities. Just 16% of Christians and 8% of Sunnis now report even a “somewhat positive” view Hezbollah. That sentiment seems the same among the country’s tiny but disproportionately influential Druze minority as well, of whom a mere 14% report a favorable attitude toward Hezbollah at this time. However, this subsample is too small, in line with its proportion of the total population, for firm statistical conclusions.”[32]

The Port Explosion

On August 4, 2020, the already reeling republic was shaken by the catastrophe at the Port of Beirut. At exactly 6:07 PM local time (Majdalani 2021: 124), around 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate detonated in the strongest non-nuclear explosion of the 21st century – and one of the most powerful unintentional detonations in modern history (Majdalani 2021: 3, 121).

The immediate effects were apocalyptic: 200 dead, 150 missing, 6,000 injured, and 200,000 destroyed residential units (Majdalani 2021: 121), while final reports later spoke of at least 218 dead, over 7,000 injured, 300,000 homeless, and material damage of around 15 billion US dollars, as the pressure wave shattered half of Beirut (Human Rights Watch 2021; Amnesty International 2021).

The ammonium nitrate originated from the Moldovan-flagged freighter MV Rhosus, which was impounded in Beirut in September 2013 on its way to Mozambique and simply abandoned by its Russian owner Igor Grechushkin along with the cargo and unpaid bills, before the ship sank in the harbor basin (Majdalani 2021: 121).

One must pause to consider the absurdity of this fact: the explosive cargo was stored from March 2014 without significant safety precautions in Hangar 12 of the port (Majdalani 2021: 121). Various offices, ministries, and finally the highest government levels had received memos and warnings about the danger in these six years, which were however ignored with complete indifference (Majdalani 2021: 121):

„Nobody cares, or only vaguely, and memos, but only memos, are sent by various offices to their overseeing ministries, without ever being taken any further. Some of these memos do reach the highest levels of the government, which accords them no attention whatsoever, and the cataclysmic cargo continues sleeping there for six years in the most perfect indifference.” (Majdalani 2021: Diary of the Collapse)

Responsibility was an entangled web of Russian-Cypriot shipowner, Lebanese customs, General Security (Sûreté Générale), port authorities, and intelligence services – and ultimately the country’s political elite, including President Michel Aoun and Prime Ministers Saad Hariri and Hassan Diab, who had demonstrably been warned about the risks (Majdalani 2021: 121, 124).

The question of whether the storage served operational purposes beyond negligence remains unresolved to this day. In his book “Diary of the Collapse,” Charif Majdalani speaks of the noted quantity of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate having had to cause an even far larger explosion:

„A portion of the ammonium nitrate might have been taken away and used in between times, which would mean that the cargo was not forgotten, was not sleeping, but was actually being used by a party whose identity remains a mystery, and used thanks to the complicity, corruption, collusion, political calculations, or strategies of a countless number of people.” (Majdalani 2021: Diary of the Collapse)

It must be noted that the port was under Hezbollah’s control, meaning a gradual removal of the ammonium nitrate (which is, among other things, frequently processed into IEDs) could only have taken place through Hezbollah or Hezbollah-affiliated forces. This is, however, ultimately speculation – what is certain is that the Lebanese state had failed in its complete architecture, and the catastrophe was the apocalyptic synthesis of thirty years of corruption across all branches of government and parties.

Every serious legal investigation in Lebanon since 1990 founders on the structural immunity of the political class, which has made itself systematically untouchable since the end of the civil war through mafia practices, a deeply rooted clientele system, and a self-granted amnesty.

Already in September 2021, Hezbollah security official Wafiq Safa directly approached investigating judge Tarek Bitar and openly threatened him with consequences if he continued the indictment against the group’s political allies.[33] That the demonstration in front of the Palace of Justice on October 14, 2021 subsequently erupted into a shootout also has a precise geographical location and a second conflict party: the fighting concentrated in the Beirut district of Tayouné, on whose front lines during the civil war Christian and Shia-Palestinian forces had once faced each other. In 2021, it was supporters of Hezbollah and Amal on one side, and militiamen reportedly close to the right-wing Lebanese Forces on the other (Daher 2024: 107). For several days, the country was gripped by the justified fear of a return of the civil war.

Despite the massive outrage over the explosion and widespread skepticism about Hezbollah’s role, its general popularity seemed not to decline further. In the 2022 parliamentary elections, they achieved their strongest result to date with 18.56% of total votes (16.44% in the previous election)[34]. While they lost the coalition-based absolute majority, they remained the largest faction in the Lebanese parliament. This can be explained by the fact that Hezbollah’s welfare offerings – financed through Iranian funds and its own revenues from drug and arms trading – were de facto the only ones that large parts of the Lebanese population could fall back on during the most precarious times of the crisis. The same applies to jobs: around 50,000 Lebanese work in Hezbollah’s facilities (excluding the army), making Hezbollah Lebanon’s largest employer.[35]

The Eve of October 7th

The period between 2021 and the eve of October 7, 2023 in Lebanon was characterized by massive domestic tensions, the blockade of the judiciary, and steady military escalation and mutual threats along the Israeli border.

Israel regularly violated Lebanese sovereignty through reconnaissance flights with surveillance drones and combat aircraft that crossed the airspace almost daily and were repeatedly the subject of complaints to the United Nations. In 2022 and 2023 as well, this practice remained constant: UN and Lebanese reports document ongoing violations of Lebanese airspace, territorial waters, and the border by Israeli forces.[36] Between November 3, 2022 and February 20, 2023 alone, the UN report lists 182 airspace violations by Israeli aircraft, 73% of which were unmanned (drones).[37]

In addition, Israel built a massive deterrence posture by publicly revealing alleged Hezbollah facilities for precision-guided missiles located beneath densely populated urban residential areas of Lebanon and threatening their destruction (Levitt 2024: 540). In parallel, Israel continued its so-called “shadow war” and regularly attacked weapons convoys and bases of Hezbollah and Iranian forces on Syrian territory in order to prevent weapons transfers to Lebanon (Levitt 2024: 540).

Additionally, Israel’s continued control over disputed border areas such as the northern part of the village of Ghajar remained a permanent point of conflict and an expression of unresolved territorial questions.

In the summer of 2022, the dispute over maritime gas fields escalated massively: Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah threatened in July 2022 to attack the Israeli offshore gas platforms in the Karish field if Israel began illegal extraction before a maritime border agreement was signed with Lebanon (Levitt 2024: 545). Hezbollah then sent three drones toward the Israeli platform, whereupon Nasrallah emphasized this was “just the beginning” and openly threatened a war over the gas (Levitt 2024: 545). This risk-taking was partly motivated by domestic and economic pressure in Lebanon, but was also based on Nasrallah’s calculation that Israel would yield to these threats and not respond with a comprehensive war (Levitt 2024: 546).

In 2023, the situation at the southern land border (the so-called Blue Line) finally escalated dramatically and reached a level of tension not recorded to this extent since the war of 2006 (Levitt 2024: 548).

Hezbollah erected new concrete military outposts and conducted military exercises with live ammunition. At the same time, the Israeli military presence along the border also remained highly active: reconnaissance operations, technical surveillance systems, and selective military activities further reinforced the escalation dynamics.[38]

These years of mutual aggressions, military posturing, structural sovereignty violations, and permanent border violations created a highly unstable equilibrium and prepared the highly explosive ground for the immediate escalation that was to follow after October 7, 2023 and the Israeli genocide in Palestine.

October 7th and the “Support Front”

October 7, 2023 marked not only the beginning of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation of the Palestinian armed movements, but immediately confronted Hezbollah with the decision that had always accompanied it since its founding in the fire of the Israeli invasion of 1982: how far does solidarity extend, without tearing apart one’s own movement and the society from which it emerges?

A Statistics Lebanon poll from October 2023 showed that 73 percent of Lebanese decisively rejected a war with Israel, an anti-war stance that encompassed not only Christian and Druze population groups, but also the majority of Shi’ites, including those in the heavily affected south Lebanon.[39] It is this inner tension between ideological mandate and material consideration that shaped Hezbollah’s actions in the following years.

On October 8, 2023, one day after the start of the offensive in Gaza, Hezbollah assumed its historically grounded role as a resistance movement and opened the so-called “Support Front” with (limited) rocket and artillery attacks on the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms.

This decision was the prelude to a gradually escalating strategy based on a sober assessment of the situation: by opening a northern front, the attention and military pressure of the occupation forces was to be split in order to give the Palestinian groups in Gaza operational breathing room. The primary goal was to divert Israel’s full military focus from Gaza and thereby reduce the pressure on Hamas and others.

Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, whose leadership style since taking office in 1992 had always been characterized by a sense for the limits of what was politically achievable, pursued an extremely nuanced strategy in this phase. He carefully calibrated the approach, avoiding a comprehensive war while simultaneously signaling constant readiness for full-scale intervention (Duman 2025: 262).

Through deliberately limited, calculated strikes, Hezbollah attempted to minimize the risks of massive Israeli retaliation, far-reaching infrastructure destruction, and significant civilian casualties, while simultaneously keeping its operational capacity and deterrence posture intact:

„Engaging in a full-scale war with Israel posed substantial risks, including severe military retaliation, widespread destruction of infrastructure, and significant civilian casualties. Consequently, Hezbollah’s initial decision to limit its engagement constituted a strategic ma- neuver aimed at mitigating these risks while preserving both its deterrence posture and operational capacity.” (Duman 2025: Hezbollah’s Escalating War Strategy)

Israel responded with a massive bombardment campaign that swept across the entire south Lebanon (Förch Saab 2024: 2). These attacks on towns and villages drove 92,000 Lebanese civilians to flee in the following months, who had to leave the border region to seek shelter in areas further north (Förch Saab 2024: 2). The pattern was familiar from the summer of 2006: Israel did not rely on the military annihilation of the opponent alone, but on the targeted destruction of civilian infrastructure as a pressure tool against the population – a doctrine named, as outlined above, after the Dahiya district of Beirut, which had already strengthened Hezbollah’s welfare state as a catch basin during the reconstruction after 2006, but now repeated the same game under more severe conditions.

In the first week after October 7, the Israeli army fired internationally prohibited phosphorus bombs into the southern Lebanese border region of Dhayra[40], shot with tanks directly at Reuters and Al-Jazeera journalists[41] and fired with machine guns, according to the Lebanese army, into the crowd of recording news teams at the Lebanese border.[42] By October 24, the Israeli army had killed five Lebanese civilians and nine Hezbollah fighters, who in turn killed four Israeli soldiers.

The internal Lebanese reaction precisely mirrored those fault lines structurally embedded in the country’s confessional system since 1943 and repeatedly cracking open over the decades: the Lebanese government did not support the decision for military solidarity with Gaza. In particular, the pro-Western Lebanese Forces and other opposition parties used the situation to frame the relationship between Hezbollah and Hamas (now to be deepened through the establishment of the Hamas-Hezbollah cooperative “al-Aqsa Flood Vanguards unit” on Lebanese state territory) as an attack on Lebanon’s sovereignty and the Taif Agreement (see above).[43]

Parts of the Free Patriotic Movement under Gebran Bassil, that faction which in 2006 had sealed a historic alliance with Hezbollah through the “Memorandum of Understanding,” also increasingly expressed criticism of the military actions. Hezbollah operated with the awareness that entering an unlimited war would severely damage its political reputation in Lebanon, and therefore had to constantly balance its ideological identity as a resistance movement with geopolitical and domestic Lebanese realities. Bassil wrote on Twitter:

„We categorically reject the creation of this unit by Hamas and believe that any armed action originating from Lebanese territory as an attack on national sovereignty, Lebanon has rights and its ‘national resistance’ against Israel empowers it to defend itself, but the creation of a Hamasland in the South weakens it”[44]

State Terrorism and the Limits of the Decapitation Strategy

In the summer and autumn of 2024, Israel’s decapitation strategy – aimed not primarily at the conventional military defeat of the opponent, but at the systematic destruction of its command and leadership structures – reached its peak.

This campaign had begun in January 2024, when Israel carried out an air strike on the Dahiya district in the heart of Beirut on January 2, killing Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy chairman of Hamas’s political bureau – in the middle of a densely populated civilian area of the Lebanese capital, in the midst of a nominally still “limited” conflict.[45] The strike came one day before Hezbollah marked the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. On January 8, the targeted killing of Wissam al-Tawil followed, the deputy commander of the Radwan elite unit – the same special unit whose leader Ibrahim Aqil would also fall victim to an Israeli air strike months later (see above). What followed was a step-by-step working through of target individuals with massive civilian casualties.

On February 14, 2024, the deadliest day of the conflict to that point, Israeli air strikes in Nabatiyeh killed seven members of a family, including a child; in the town of al-Suwana, a woman and her two children were murdered.[46] The strikes were formally directed against Hezbollah infrastructure; what was hit were civilian residential buildings. At the end of March 2024, Israel attacked a paramedic center of the Lebanese Ambulance Association, killing seven paramedics – volunteers, as Lebanon’s Health Ministry noted and publicly condemned.[47]

Shortly after, on March 27, the Israeli military again bombed a rescue center in Hebbariye, killing seven people it described as fighters; Hezbollah contradicted this and stated they were first responders. On February 23, a Hezbollah-affiliated health center in Blida had been struck – two civilian paramedics and one fighter died.[48] Die gezielte Zerstörung medizinischer Infrastruktur war dabei ihr integraler Bestandteil der Anschläge; as explained above, Hezbollah’s civilian facilities were a central concern in its stable poll ratings despite growing rejection of its military capacities.

On July 30, 2024, the senior military commander Fuad Shukr (alongside five civilians) was assassinated in an Israeli air strike on Beirut [49]. Kurz darauf fiel auch Ibrahim Aqil, der stellvertretende Kommandeur der bewaffneten Kräfte und hochrangige Anführer der Eliteeinheit Radwan, am 20. September 2024 einem weiteren gezielten israelischen Luftangriff auf die dicht besiedelte Hauptstadt zum Opfer. Bei dem Angriff auf Aqil wurden mindestens 29 Zivilisten getötet, darunter mindestens drei Kinder und sieben Frauen.[50]

On September 17 and 18, 2024, Israel detonated thousands of pagers and radios across Lebanon in a coordinated attack. These attacks claimed the lives of dozens of civilians, severely mutilated countless others, and put an estimated 1,500 Hezbollah fighters out of action due to injuries.[51] Insgesamt wurden bei dem Anschlag mindestens 4.000 Menschen getötet oder verletzt.[52] Die weitreichende Sabotage der Kommunikationsinfrastruktur was intended to sow chaos and paralyze Hezbollah’s operational capacity. A large number of UN special rapporteurs, together with the High Commissioner for Human Rights, concluded that the attacks could potentially be classified as war crimes, because they appeared to be aimed at deliberately spreading fear among civilians (which is after all the point of the Dahiya Doctrine).[53]

The climax of this decapitation strategy was the assassination of Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah on September 27, 2024 through the heaviest Israeli bombardment of Beirut. Nasrallah had led Hezbollah for over three decades, steering it through the summer war of 2006, the Syrian intervention with its massive losses of over 1,700 dead, the financial sanctions, and the internal Lebanese crises after 2019. His funeral was attended by 1.4 million Lebanese[54] besucht, entsprechend rund 30 Prozent der libanesischen Bevölkerung (rund 30% der libanesischen Bevölkerung sind Schiiten).

Nasrallah’s death – much like the death of his son decades earlier (see above) – was to change the general attitude of Lebanese society toward Hezbollah, as well as the Shia population’s stance toward Iran: a poll published in April 2025 by Information International and Annahar found that now 50.7% of the Shia population in Lebanon would hold a negative attitude toward Iran [55]; ein massiver Anstieg im Vergleich zu den Daten der 2020 von Middle East Transparent veröffentlichten Studie, in der sich noch 94 % der schiitischen Libanesen für „gute Beziehungen” zum Iran aussprachen[56]. Als zentraler Grund für diesen deutlich dokumentierten Stimmungswandel gilt die verbreitete Auffassung, Teheran habe Nasrallah faktisch im Stich gelassen, um eigene machtpolitische Interessen in der Region zu wahren.[57]

Despite the decapitation strikes against its leadership and the immense destruction, Hezbollah demonstrated remarkable resilience during the 57-day Israeli ground invasion that began in September 2024: it absorbed the heaviest losses and lost an estimated 5,000 fighters. Nevertheless, Hezbollah’s units mounted massive resistance, successfully stopping the advance of the Israeli occupation forces and preventing any significant territorial gain by Israel. The decapitation strategy thus had the same result as its predecessors in other conflicts: it destroyed people, but not structures:

By November 2024, 1.4 million Lebanese had been driven from their homes by the Israeli air strikes and ground invasion. They killed between 3,000 and 4,017 people[58] und zerstörten 42% aller Gebäude in denen von ihn eingenommenen Gebieten Südlibanons.[59]

The IRGC Reboot

After the de jure ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel of November 27, 2024 (agreed by the Lebanese government with Hezbollah’s consent), a phase of secret but intensive reorganization began under Israeli siege, in which the Iranian IRGC orchestrated a far-reaching restructuring of Hezbollah:

Under the terms of the “ceasefire,” Hezbollah as well as the Israeli occupation were to withdraw from southern Lebanon (south of the Litani River) within 60 days. However, Israel decided after the agreement was concluded to retain five control points in the south[60], whereupon Hezbollah also did not withdraw completely south of the Litani.

Around 100 Iranian officers were dispatched to Lebanon to fundamentally restructure Hezbollah’s classically hierarchical command chain, which had been struck by Israeli blows.[61] Unter ihrer Aufsicht wurde das bestehende System durch eine dezentrale „Mosaic Defense” nach iranischem Vorbild ersetzt, die auf kleinen, operativ isolierten Zellen basiert, um absolute Geheimhaltung zu gewährleisten:

„Changes implemented at their behest included replacing a hierarchical command structure with a decentralised one, comprising small units with limited knowledge of each other’s operations, helping to preserve operational secrecy. They said IRGC officers also drew up plans for missile attacks against Israel that would be launched simultaneously from Iran and Lebanon – a scenario executed for the first time on 11 March.”[62]

The lesson Hezbollah drew from September 2024 was that the integration of modern communications technology had made the organization vulnerable. To evade Israel’s far-reaching electronic surveillance, it banned mobile phones at the front and relied on human couriers for important messages.[63] Der Pager-Angriff hatte damit eine organisatorische Rückbesinnung erzwungen, die die Bewegung für künftige elektronische Sabotageakte schwerer verwundbar macht.

Meanwhile, Israel continued its attacks regardless of the de jure ceasefire. The occupation regime flew nearly daily[64] Luftschläge, die explizit darauf abzielten die verbleibende Infrastruktur und jeglichen zivilen Wiederaufbau im Südlibanon im Keim zu ersticken. Dabei töteten die israelischen Angriffe mindestens 397 Menschen.[65] Unter anderem in Schlägen gegen Flüchtlingslager[66], dicht besiedelte Wohngebiete[67] und einem Massaker nahe der Grenze, bei dem israelische Soldaten 22 Menschen töteten und 124 verletzten, die zurück zu ihren Dörfern im Südlibanon reisten.[68] Hezbollah accused the Lebanese government of having failed to force Israel to comply with the ceasefire.

At the same time, Hezbollah came under increasing pressure at the internal Lebanese political front, as political opponents tried to exploit the post-war period of weakness. President Joseph Aoun and parts of the government pushed the demand for a state weapons monopoly and issued a ban on Hezbollah’s military activities. Hezbollah resisted these efforts, as disarmament would have left Lebanon de facto defenseless on paper and exposed it helplessly to the ongoing Israeli destruction and occupation.[69]

Excursus: The Fall of Assad

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The Turkish-financed Al-Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) began its advance on Aleppo on the day that Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon. The weakening of Hezbollah through the Israeli war was a necessary condition for the success of the lightning offensive.

Russia was militarily tied down by the Ukraine war and had significantly reduced its ground troop presence in Syria since 2022. Iran had gradually scaled back its military presence in Syria in previous years, as focus had shifted to Lebanon and the other regional proxy fronts. And Hezbollah – the lost third pillar of the Syrian regime – was militarily incapable of intervening in Syria after the massive losses of the preceding months.

For Hezbollah, Assad’s fall meant the loss of an infrastructure that had underpinned its military capacity for decades. Syria was the land corridor through which Iran transported weapons, missiles, and equipment into Lebanon; the network of Syrian intelligence services and the joint operations centers in Damascus and Latakia no longer existed.

„Yes, Hezbollah has lost the military supply route through Syria at this stage, but this loss is a detail in the resistance’s work […] A new regime could come and this route could return to normal, and we could look for other ways […] We also hope that this new ruling party will consider Israel an enemy and not normalise relations with it. These are the headlines that will affect the nature of the relationship between us and Syria.”[71]

Hezbollah lost its positions in Syria, from Qusayr to Hama and Eastern Ghouta. At the same time, the smuggling networks through which Hezbollah together with Assad-aligned actors had controlled the Captagon economy and financed millions thereby also collapsed.

The loss of Syria hit Hezbollah on three levels: militarily through the interrupted weapons supply, geographically through the elimination of strategic capabilities, and economically through the collapse of parallel revenue sources.

„With Assad gone, Hamas weakened, Iraqi factions fractured, and the Houthis consumed by their own battles, the engine that once sustained the axis no longer exists. Hezbollah cannot play the same regional role without that structure around it.”[73]

Israel exploited the resulting power vacuum immediately. That very weekend of Assad’s fall, the Israeli government declared the 1974 ceasefire agreement between Syria and Israel null and void and advanced onto Syrian territory.

The Israeli air force flew over 130 strikes across Syria and, according to its own statements, destroyed 70 to 80 percent of Syrian military capacity within 48 hours, including almost the entire Syrian air fleet.

The Salam Plan: Offensive for Disarmament (2024–2026)

The ongoing ceasefire, beyond Hezbollah, laid the groundwork for a radical restructuring of Lebanon’s security architecture. While the Israeli security cabinet internally regarded the agreement as a strategic breathing space for reorganization, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam (elected in January 2025) used Hezbollah’s geopolitical weakness for a far-reaching political push.

The core of the agreement stipulated that Israel would withdraw from southern Lebanon within 60 days, while the Lebanese army (LAF) together with UNIFIL would take control south of the Litani.

This dynamic was drastically exacerbated by the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 (see above), which severed Hezbollah’s most important logistical lifeline. In this moment of strategic weakness – after the leadership losses, rocket depletion, collapse of Syrian supply chains, and under international pressure – the Lebanese government under Prime Minister Nawaf Salam presented in December 2024 the so-called “Salam Plan,” an ambitious phased plan for the gradual disarmament of Hezbollah.

Despite the demonstrative walkout of Shia ministers – such as Labor Minister Mohammad Haidar – from the cabinet session, the plan was pushed through with 18 to 4 votes. Supported by massive international financing pledges (Saudi Arabia: $1.5 billion; EU and USA: additional billions each), the plan was to be implemented in five phases:

Der Plan war in folgende Phasen unterteilt:

• Phase 1 (by 31.12.2025): Complete clearance of the area south of the Litani to the Israeli border. This included the destruction of tunnels and rocket depots in over 50 border villages such as Aitaroun and Kfarkela.
• Phase 2 (March 2026): Extension of inspections and weapons confiscations to the area north of the Litani as far as Nabatiyeh.
• Phase 3 (June 2026): Advance into the central bases in Beirut’s Dahiya district.
• Phase 4 (September 2026): Dissolution of the Iranian depots in the Bekaa Valley and Baalbek.
• Phase 5 (end of 2026): The complete integration of the remaining fighters into the LAF under the granting of a general amnesty.

Hezbollah responded to this plan with a mixture of public contempt and military pragmatism. While Naim Qassem branded the disarmament as “betrayal of the Axis of Resistance”, zwang die Realität die Führung zur Kooperation in Phase 1.

By January 7, 2026, the LAF reported completion: over 200 kilometers of the tunnel network (including 196 identified strongholds) were cleared or blown up, and around 5,000 rockets were secured.[77] Hezbollah confirmed it no longer maintained any military presence south of the Litani.

This retreat was, however, less a commitment to the state than the result of Hezbollah’s weakening through the ongoing Israeli attacks.

By March 2026, the arsenal was noticeably depleted, but the organization still possessed relevant rocket stockpiles and launch capacities. Contrary to some assumptions about a total collapse of Hezbollah’s military capabilities, the organization remained fully combat-capable during the March 2026 war phase as well.

It must be noted that reliable data is barely accessible: information from the Israeli side, Lebanese government offices, and Hezbollah itself frequently contradicts itself massively.

Hezbollah’s cooperation with state plans served the organization primarily as a tactical breathing space to regroup according to its strategy of “denial.” The transition to Phase 5 of the Salam Plan was de facto stopped by the re-entry into war in March 2026.

2026 – Operation “Eaten Straw”

When Hezbollah on March 2, 2026, five days after the start of the internationally unlawful war against Iran, fired rockets for the first time since the November 2024 “ceasefire” at an Israeli missile defense system, bezeichnete sie den Angriff selbst als Reaktion auf die Tötung Ali Khameinis und die den de-jure Waffenstillstand andauernden Angriffe Israels.[81]

The movement wanted to force Israel to withdraw from occupied Lebanese territories that the Israeli military continued to occupy despite the ceasefire conditions (see above). Of course, one must also include Hezbollah’s connectedness with Iran and the Palestinian struggle for justice as a motivating factor.

„Hezbollah finally ended this uncertainty when it attacked Israel. In the first statement issued by its Islamic Resistance, the group framed the operation as “retaliation the criminal Zionist enemy cruelly and treacherously shedding the pure blood of…Khamenei.” The statement then also described the barrage as a delayed act of self-defense against Israel’s ongoing operations in Lebanon, which is how the group has since tried to reframe its decision to attack Israel.”[83]

In response, Israel bombed over seventy targets in Dahiya and southern Lebanon, more than fifty villages were evacuated, and Hezbollah intelligence chief Hussein Makled was killed. Virtually overnight, 870,000 Lebanese were displaced.

Prime Minister Nawaf Salam responded to Hezbollah’s re-entry into the war with a complete ban on all military activities of the movement. Hezbollah’s response states:

„We understand the Lebanese government’s impotence in the face of the brutal Zionist enemy, which violates national sovereignty, occupies land, and poses a continuous threat to the country’s security and stability […] However, given this clear weakness and deficiency, we see no justification for Prime Minister Salam and his government to take such aggressive measures against the Lebanese who reject the occupation.”[86]

Already on March 3, Israel resumed ground operations. The Israeli air force attacked weapons depots, command centers, and communications infrastructure, and destroyed the studios of Hezbollah-affiliated media Al-Manar and Al Mayadeen.

Separately, Israel killed Davoud Alizadeh, the commander of the Quds Force Lebanon Corps, in Tehran itself. When on March 4 residential buildings in the village of Yohmor went up in flames, it emerged that Israel had once again deployed internationally prohibited phosphorus bombs there.[87]

That same day, the first Hezbollah special units marched back south of the Litani; the disarmament was over – the war between Hezbollah and Israel officially reopened by the illegal attack of the United States and Israel on Iran.

Medical Services, Bridges, Journalists

On the night of March 7, the Israeli military carried out a covert illegal “commando operation” in the eastern Lebanese village of Nabi Chit in the Bekaa Valley. Officially on the pretext – described as false by Israeli accounts – of the presence of an Iranian commander who, according to Hezbollah and the Lebanese Foreign Ministry, was not even in Lebanon at that time.

The Israeli unit then allegedly attempted to advance toward the eastern quarter of Nabi Chit. Hezbollah fighters stated they had detected the Israeli troops during the incursion and the command, according to Israeli news sites, tried to evacuate amid confusion – but too late.

After spotting the Israeli troops, Hezbollah units opened fire, whereupon Israel deployed massive air support. In the subsequent Israeli “fire belt” attacks (a massive artillery and air strike that completely encircles an area) on Nabi Chit, 21 civilians were killed and dozens wounded, according to Lebanese government figures.

The following day, the Israeli navy struck a hotel in central Beirut, killing several senior commanders of the IRGC’s Quds Force Lebanon corps. The targeted elimination of Iranian commanders on Lebanese state territory once again escalated the confrontation between Israel and Iran on Lebanese soil.

On March 13, an Israeli air strike hit a health center in Burj Qalaouiyah, killing almost the entire medical staff of paramedics, doctors, and nurses; only one survivor was pulled from the rubble.

The pattern was familiar: already in the preceding months, the Israeli military had systematically attacked rescue centers, hospitals, and paramedic teams, destroying dozens of schools, hospitals, libraries, and mosques in southern Lebanon.

In March, Israel destroyed the Qasmiyeh Bridge, the most important bridge over the Litani River and central connecting axis between southern Lebanon and the rest of the country. Defense Minister Israel Katz described the destruction as a legitimate operation; critics saw it as a deliberate attack on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure.

At the end of March, an Israeli air strike in Jezzine killed two journalists: Ali Choeib, who worked for the Hezbollah-affiliated broadcaster Al-Manar, and Fatima Ftouni from the Hezbollah-affiliated Al Mayadeen.[92] Das israelische Militär bezeichnete Choeib als Mitglied der Radwan-Einheit und veröffentlichte ein Foto als Beleg – ein Foto, das ein Militärsprecher anschließend als „photoshoppt” einräumte:

„The Israeli military also posted a photograph of Shoaib dressed in military fatigues, but when asked by Fox News to provide the image, a spokesperson said: “Unfortunately there isn’t really a picture of it, it was photoshopped.””[93]

By the end of March, Israeli attacks had killed over 1,100 people, including at least 200 civilians.[94] Eine Zahl, die bereits von der ersten Woche Aprils übertroffen werden sollte.

Government, Hezbollah, and the Question of Sovereignty

The Israeli offensive provoked not only a military response, but a domestic political crisis of historic dimensions. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam banned Hezbollah from all military activities; the Lebanese government condemned Hezbollah’s attacks:

The Lebanese Justice Minister called on the public prosecutor to arrest those who had fired rockets from southern Lebanon. The cabinet resolved to expel all IRGC officers present in Beirut from the country.

At the end of March, the Lebanese government declared the Iranian ambassador persona non grata, stating that he had dragged Lebanon into the American war against Iran through his support of Hezbollah.

„The ministry said in a statement that it had summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires in Lebanon and informed him of “the Lebanese state’s decision to withdraw approval of the accreditation of the appointed Iranian ambassador, Mohammad Reza Sheibani, and declare him persona non grata, demanding that he leave Lebanese territory no later than next Sunday”.[97]

The Information Minister issued a directive banning all state and private media from continuing to refer to Hezbollah as “resistance.” Parliamentary elections were postponed by two months to August 18, 2026.

Hezbollah responded to these measures with open threats. Hezbollah security official Wafiq Safa declared that the movement would make the government reverse the ban, “whatever it costs.”

“An indirect confrontation with the political establishment is inevitable after the end of the war […] the Vichy government arrested and executed resistance fighters before it was overthrown.”

The right-wing Lebanese Forces even raised, in conversation with French President Macron, the topic of rearming their own party armies to supplement state security capacity deemed insufficient – a proposal that conjured up the historical ghosts of the civil war.

Operation Eternal Darkness

On April 8, Israel and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire in the Iran war. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stated that the agreement encompassed all fronts of the conflict, including Lebanon.

Hours after the ceasefire announcement, the Israeli military launched Operation “Eternal Darkness”: within a few minutes, according to Israeli statements, over a hundred targets were simultaneously bombed, including power plants, water works, bridges, and communications infrastructure.

The attacks of April 8 (the “Black Wednesday”[107]) were so decisive in their atrocity and brazenness on the part of the Israeli army that, alongside the port disaster of 2020, they were to become the defining trauma of a generation.

In mid-April, Trump announced a ten-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon after conversations with Netanyahu and Aoun. Israeli troops retained their positions in southern Lebanon, and the area south of the Litani became a militarized zone between the Israeli and Lebanese militaries.

What followed was documented in detail by journalists and UN observers: artillery fire, drone attacks, house searches, the laying of booby traps, and systematic burning of forests. In several cases, returning civilians were shot at.

In Bint Jbeil, the main combat zone of the ground offensive, residential areas were systematically razed to the ground. Netanyahu visited the Israeli troops in Lebanon and declared that Israel would “stay as long as necessary.”

A French UNIFIL soldier was killed in an attack in Deir Kifa, three others were wounded. France held Hezbollah responsible, which denied it. The Israeli military published images on social media of soldiers posing in Lebanese private homes.

An Israeli soldier smashed a statue of Jesus in the southern Lebanese Christian village of Debel a few days after the ceasefire took effect; an event documented by a video that went viral and triggered international outrage.

At the end of April, Trump extended the ceasefire by three weeks[110] – after a meeting of the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors in Washington, which was itself remarkable in being the first direct conversation between official representatives of both states in decades.

That one now sits at the table with Israel ultimately also has to do with the fact that this war is becoming increasingly unpopular even within the Shia base. The Dahiya Doctrine works. The Amal movement has demanded in an open letter to Hezbollah to cease military activities and agree to diplomatic solutions.

How popular the policy of talks with Israel has become is shown by a Gallup poll from September 2025: approval of the Lebanese leadership had risen by 60% in spring 2025, just a few months after the massive losses of the war – historically an extraordinary increase.

On the battlefield, Israeli attacks killed dozens more people in early May. The ceasefire existed on paper. On May 10, the Israeli army destroyed 85 infrastructure projects in southern Lebanon within 24 hours – roads, water pipes, bridges – that had been rebuilt by the LAF under the Salam Plan.

On the other hand, the IRGC restructuring of Hezbollah (see above) is manifest in a qualitative and quantitative increase in Hezbollah strikes. Between March 2 and 30, Hezbollah fired 1,200 rockets at Israel according to Israeli figures, averaging 40 rockets per day. For comparison: in the 34-day summer war of 2006, it was around 120 rockets per day.

The military significance of these figures lies less in the absolute level of Israeli losses than in the fact that Hezbollah remains operationally capable despite years of air strikes, the killing of large parts of its leadership, and the damage to its logistics chain.

How things proceed for Hezbollah will ultimately not be decided on the battlefield, but by the Lebanese population itself. The growing domestic pressure on Hezbollah, expressed in the historically positive assessment of the Salam government despite the war, shows that the Dahiya Doctrine works: the systematic destruction of infrastructure not only displaces people from the south, but also successively erodes the material base of Hezbollah, which rests on the goodwill of its population.

Conclusion: Bonapartism of Occupation

The Party of God is – this can be said with some certainty after four decades of its existence – not an Islamist intelligence service, not an exported revolutionary project, not a mere tool of Iran, and not a classically religious movement actor. It is the product of a specific imperialist formation: the Israeli occupation in the context of American hegemonic strategy in the Middle East.

The decisive proof lies in the historical sequence. The Shia population of southern Lebanon welcomed the advancing Israeli troops in 1982 with rice and flowers. They had no will for confrontation, no organized resistance movement, and no ideological program derived from Iran.

What the occupation made of the population of southern Lebanon was summed up by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak himself: “We created Hezbollah through our presence there.” This sentence – from the mouth of the man who finally ended the occupation in 2000 – is the most concise commentary on Hezbollah’s genesis that history has produced.

The Imperialist Foundation

US Middle East policy in the post-war era pursued a consistent goal: the securing of the Israeli state as a strategic outpost of Western hegemonic interests in an oil-rich and strategically decisive region.

The support for Israel’s invasions of 1978 and 1982, the approval of the Syrian occupation as a quid pro quo for Arab support in the Gulf War of 1991, and the green light for Sharon in his devastating campaign of 2006 all followed the same imperialist logic that had ultimately produced Hezbollah.

The causal connection is not limited to the founding phase. The chronology of this article shows how every Israeli escalation reproduced Hezbollah where it was supposed to destroy it: 1993, 1996, 2006, 2024 – each of these wars strengthened Hezbollah’s narrative as the only effective force against the occupation and reproduced support among the Shia population, where it had already begun to erode.

From Resistance to Establishment

Hezbollah’s internal history is more complicated than its external one. A movement that emerged from the misery of the Shia periphery, from the social mobilization by Musa al-Sadr and the radicalization through the Israeli occupation, has transformed over four decades into a powerful political-military formation – and in doing so has increasingly betrayed the class character of the Shia population from which it emerged.

Marx described Bonapartism as that form of rule in which a strong state – or a movement with state ambitions – appears to float above the class conflict, because none of the social classes is strong enough to dominate the other. Hezbollah embodies a Lebanese variant of this: it has profiled itself as a defender of the oppressed without eliminating the structures of oppression; it fights against imperialist occupation without touching the internal imperialism of the zuʿamāʾ classes; it mobilizes the poor of the south without calling into question the wealth of its own leadership level.

Left-wing forces, above all the Lebanese Communist Party, identified this contradiction early: Hezbollah fights with weapons against the occupation, but not with politics against exploitation. This criticism is justified, but incomplete. For Hezbollah fights against an occupation that is real; and it fights in a society in which the state that should properly assume this task has been occupied and ruined by the same elites that a left alternative would need to fight against.

The Symptom and Its Cause

The question of whether Hezbollah is a terrorist organization or a resistance movement does not answer itself in this framework through classification, but through contextualization. It is the symptom of an imperialist wound that does not heal as long as imperialism continues.

The Salam Plan, the talks with Israel, the withdrawal of IRGC officers, the ban on military activities: these are not signs of Hezbollah’s end, but signs of a possible shift in its form. Hezbollah has already transformed once – after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 – from a military into a hybrid political-military force. Whether the current period of weakness initiates a renewed transformation or is simply another transitional phase will ultimately depend on whether the fundamental conditions of the Israeli occupation persist.

Whoever wants to overcome Hezbollah must remove the soil on which it grows. That soil is the occupation. And the occupation is the ongoing project of the power that calls most loudly for enlightenment and democracy in the Middle East.

---

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[10]https://www.ibtimes.com/christian-sunni-shia-meet-hezbollahs-non-denominational-military-branch-defending-2169257

[11]https://web.archive.org/web/20080516070556/http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/a\_reporter\_at\_large\_in\_the\_par.php

[12]https://web.archive.org/web/20080516070556/http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/a\_reporter\_at\_large\_in\_the\_par.php

[13]https://english.alahednews.news/14178/446

[14]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South\_Lebanon\_conflict\_(1985%E2%80%932000)

[15]https://www.inss.org.il/publication/annexation-and-the-withdrawal-from-lebanon/

[16]https://www.dw.com/de/tribunal-kein-beweise-gegen-hisbollah-und-syrien-bei-hariri-attentat/a-54605862

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[18]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle\_east/5257128.stm

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[21]https://www.hintergrund.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/15-The-New-Hezbollah-Manifesto-Nov09.pdf

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[27]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-economy/lebanon-banks-suck-in-dollars-to-maintain-peg-but-economy-stagnates-idUSKBN1L11IR/

[28]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-50293636

[29]69 der insgesamt 128 Mandatsträger

[30]<https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/hezbollah-accuses-us-of-meddling-in-lebanons-crisis-idUSKBN1XW1YH/>

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[42]Houla

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[64]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/world/middleeast/imperial-israel-in-the-new-middle-east.html

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[66]https://news.sky.com/story/israeli-strike-on-palestinian-refugee-camp-kills-13-says-lebanon-13472484

[67]https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/28/middleeast/israel-strikes-southern-beirut-intl

[68]√

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[77]https://www.mena-watch.com/wie-geht-es-im-suedlibanon-weiter/

[78]https://blog.prif.org/2026/03/06/hezbollah-is-weak-but-not-yet-defeated/

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[82]https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/03/06/why-hezbollah-joined-the-iran-war/

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[88]https://www.alquds.com/en/posts/230679

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[100]https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1504143/unacceptable-threat-condemnations-after-hezbollah-official-compares-aoun-and-sadat.html

[101]https://www.lebanondebate.com/article/805213-%D8%A8%D8%B9%D8%AF-%D8%AA%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%88%D9%84-%D9%83%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%AE%D8%B7%D9%8A%D8%B1-%D8%B9%D9%86-%D8%A5%D8%B9%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%82%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B7%D9%8A-%D9%8A%D9%88%D8%B6%D8%AD-%D9%88%D9%8A%D9%86%D9%81%D9%8A

[102]https://www.elnashra.com/news/show/1768621/%D8%A5%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%8A%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%88%D9%85-%D9%82%D9%88%D9%89-%D9%84%D8%A8%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%B7%D8%B1%D8%AD%D8%AA-%D8%AE%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%AA%D8%B5%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%83%D8%B1

[103]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/8/netanyahu-says-us-iran-ceasefire-does-not-include-lebanon

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[107]https://www.france24.com/en/video/20260409-black-wednesday-lebanon-declares-day-of-mourning-amid-ongoing-israeli-attacks

[108]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8\_April\_2026\_Israeli\_attacks\_on\_Lebanon\#Reactions

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[112]https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/ausland/israel-libanon-angriffe-nahost-100.html