On 17 September, across Lebanon, several small explosions caused widespread panic. The Israeli military booby-trapped hand-held pagers somewhere along a supply chain that ended in Lebanon. Two children were killed. 2,800 individuals were injured. Israel and its Anglo-American cheerleaders hailed their ability to maim thousands from a distance. The next day, the same attack is repeated, this time with walkie-talkies.
On 22 September, the Israeli government warned Lebanese people to ‘get out of harm’s way’. The following day was the deadliest in Lebanese history. Israeli strikes killed over 500, injured thousands and displaced millions. Families rushing to escape the bombardment choked the Southern Tyr-Beirut highway, turning a two-hour commute into an eight-hour nerve-racking trudge.
On 27 September, residents heard loud bangs across Beirut. Eighty bombs were dropped on one neighbourhood. The intended target was the General Secretary of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. The bombs that killed Nasrallah weighed approximately 2,000lb each.
In the following weeks, a rapid escalation of strikes coalesced into an explicit US-Israeli war strategy. In the words of US Department of State spokesperson Mathew Miller, the goal of the attacks is ‘to break the grip that Hezbollah has had on the country’. In a videotaped address, Netanyahu warned residents of Lebanon to rid themselves of Hezbollah or else face the wrath his military already inflicted on Gaza. Excited by the prospects of a Lebanon without Hezbollah, financial markets rallied behind the country’s near-worthless dollar bonds.
Israeli force and the rationale of resistance
Excitement for the expulsion of Hezbollah from Lebanon is not new. Since its formation in 1983, during Israel’s second occupation of Lebanon (1982-2000), many have called on the Islamic resistance group to cease its armed struggle against Israel. To the chagrin of detractors, every election since 1992 Hezbollah increased their share of seats won in parliament. Even after the mass uprisings in Lebanon in 2019 and 2021, Hezbollah would eventually increase its share of the vote as its allies slid in popularity.
A strategy premised on expelling Hezbollah from the Lebanese body politics through bombardment fundamentally misunderstands why the Islamic group maintains its standing.
Israeli strategy hinges upon altering the calculus of Hezbollah and Lebanon so that abandoning Gaza becomes worthwhile. Already, the calculus of pain and benefit is overwhelmingly in favour of abandoning armed struggle. Estimates place the ongoing cost of Israel’s bombardment at $20 billion, 111% of its annual GDP. The human cost of Hezbollah’s leadership is incalculable. Any rational actor would have decided that seeking a peace treaty like that negotiated with Jordan and Egypt was inevitably a more dignified option.
What the Zionists misjudge, is that this calculus is not a rational weighing of costs and benefits. Hezbollah, and their constituents, the Shi’as of south Beirut, the Beqaa and most of South Lebanon, gained their footing as a political force because of Palestine. It is a decision based on a history borne out of how Hezbollah and the occupants of the Palestinian-Lebanese borders, primarily Shi’as, have forged their identity.
Palestine and the history of south Lebanon
Indeed, before the emergence of Hezbollah, the south and Beqaa were under the thumb of feudalist families and absentee landlords. Most of its (poorer) residents were farmers, illiterate and politically passive, with the worst poverty rates in Lebanon. Powerful families controlled swathes of land as absentee landlords. Their scions lived in Beirut accumulating further wealth through government positions and contracts.
All that changed after the catastrophic displacement of Palestinians when Israel was founded. In 1948, Northern Palestinians displaced by what became known as the Nakba flowed in droves to the closest place of shelter in Lebanon.
My grandmother would remind us of my late father often asking her, ‘How could you sleep at night while the Palestinians are homeless?
After 1948, the feudalist families of Lebanon were in crisis. In Beirut, fascists organising under the leadership of the ascendant Gemayel family sought to Lebanon’s identity as a Christian, pro-Western, and anti-Palestinian country. In Marjayoun, a small town a few kilometres away from the occupied Palestinian border, officer Saad Haddad founded the South Lebanon Army with a similar mission: keep the South free of Palestinians.
For most of the Shi’a residents of the South, the arrival of the Palestinians was a god given gift. Southern Lebanese farmers recently dispossessed by the privatisation of agricultural holdings found a common cause with these newly arrived refugees. The landowning families who dominated the South stood little chance against an insurgent alliance between dispossessed Palestinians and impoverished Shi’as.
My grandmother would remind us of my late father often asking her, ‘How could you sleep at night while the Palestinians are homeless?’ He and many like him became part of a gathering political momentum across Lebanon. Small coalitions organised by the Communist Party and the Nasserist al-Mourabitoun joined the Lebanese National Movement. LNM was an umbrella group that fought alongside the Palestinians against feudalist totalitarianism and the pro-western political bloc that dominated Lebanese politics at the time.
Israeli invasion and Lebanon’s liberation
Before 1975, Palestinians and their allies were ascendant. To ensure Haddad and Gemayel were not quashed, Israel invaded Lebanon twice. In 1978, a quick invasion failed to push Palestinian militias back. In 1982, Israel launched a larger invasion, reaching Beirut in days and forcing Palestinian forces out.
After Palestinian forces left, the Israeli military oversaw the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The camp, home to Palestinian families and Shi’as escaping war in the South, saw three days of killings, leaving 1,700 dead –mostly women and children. This aggression reinforced solidarity among Shi’a and Palestinians.
In 1983, Israelis retreated to South Lebanon, facing immense resistance. By 1984, on average two daily attacks targeted Israeli forces; rallies, strikes, and roadblocks began as popular resistance galvanised the South.
Hezbollah emerged amid this milieu. In its foundation manifesto, the group denounced the world’s apathy to Israeli war crimes: ‘We appealed to the world’s conscience but heard nothing from it and found no trace of it.’
Throughout the 90s, an on-and-off insurgency would culminate in Israel’s withdrawal in 2000. The withdrawal is hailed by Hezbollah as the first-ever victory by the Arabs in the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
The liberation of the South did not only bring freedom from occupation. It heralded a foundation for the political and economic ascendancy of the Shi’as. Displaced Shi’as who first fled the economic dislocation and war now make up a majority of Dahiye, a major suburb of Beirut. Both the Dahiya and the South experienced a profound economic rejuvenation, punctured only by Israeli attacks in 2006 and of course now.
Tomorrow’s resistance
The current Israeli American strategy aims to bomb Lebanon until it tires of Hezbollah. It is the same strategy they mistakenly thought rid them of Palestinians in the seventies and eighties. When the Palestinians left, they were almost immediately replaced. If Hezbollah were to somehow forfeit today, there’s every chance the victims of today’s war will inherit the struggle.
