Juan Cole
Informed Comment / September 29, 2024
Ann Arbor – The Israeli assassination of Hassan Nasrallah has implications for the struggle of Iran and its alliance of resistance against Israel and the United States. But I would like to step back and look at how we reached this juncture.
I lived in Lebanon on and off in the 1970s, when the Civil War (1975-1989) began. Lebanon is a country full of minorities, with no majority. Christians, Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims are the major groups, but there are some smaller communities of great importance, including the Druze (an offshoot of Twelver Shiism) and the Eastern Orthodox Christians. Religious ethnicity, what the French call “confessionalism,” plays a role in Lebanon similar to that played in American society by racial ethnicity.
During the Civil War, each community threw up militias, usually more than one, and these militias often targeted one another as much as their enemies. In the south, East Beirut, and the Beqaa Valley, Shiites predominated. They were the poorest of the Lebanese religious communities, often consisting of tobacco sharecroppers and other impoverished agriculturists in the countryside. In East Beirut they did day labour. Shiites back in the 1950s and 1960s had not been very involved in Lebanese politics, concentrating on the affairs of their villages. A few great landlords were in parliament, but they had almost feudal relationships to the farmers.
In the 1970s, an Iranian cleric named Musa Sadr, transplanted to Lebanon, helped organize AMAL (an acronym for Troops of the Lebanese Resistance, but with the literal meaning of “hope”). It was a charity, a political party, and a militia. AMAL appealed to the new Shiite middle class, people who had relatives that had emigrated to West Africa or the Oil Gulf and sent back remittances. The incoming wealth allowed them to found banks and other businesses and to fund the activities of AMAL. Even after the later rise of Hezbollah, AMAL retained the loyalty of about half of the Lebanese Shiites.
The idea of a party-militia was not new. Among the Maronite Christians, the Phalangist Party had modelled itself on Franco’s brown shirts and Mussolini’s black shirts. I used to see them doing drills in the street when I lived in Chiyah, Beirut.
Sadr was kidnapped by Moammar Gaddafi when he visited Libya in search of funding for AMAL. Maybe Gaddafi felt he hadn’t delivered on some promise. Maybe Gaddafi was increasingly deranged.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution radicalized some young Lebanese Shiites. Abbas Musawi hived off from AMAL and formed Islamic AMAL. They were in touch with the Iraqi Da’wa Party and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon in a quest to extirpate the Palestine Liberation Organization, subjecting Beirut to indiscriminate shelling. Among those who were appalled was Osamah Bin Laden, who later said that he began aspiring to bring down US skyscrapers on seeing what the Israelis did to those in Beirut.
The Islamic AMAL saw the Israeli invasion and occupation as a US project, blew up the US embassy in Beirut in 1983 and then targeted the US Marines (on a peacekeeping mission) with a truck bomb, killing 241 US service personnel.
In 1984 Musawi and others formed Hezbollah. The organization mobilized the poorer and more radical Shiites in East Beirut, Tyre and the Beqaa for guerrilla warfare to get the Israelis back out of their country. Israel occupied 10% of Lebanon 1982-2000, but suffered increasing casualties from Hezbollah sniping and suicide bombing, a technique they picked up from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
In 1989, the Saudis sent Saad Hariri, a Lebanese Sunni who had made billions as a contractor in the kingdom, to try to end the war. That year at Ta’if most of the armed factions pledged to lay down their arms, which they did, and Hariri became prime minister. He began the process of rebuilding Beirut, a process that made his companies rich.
The only group that did not disarm was Hezbollah, on the grounds that it was fighting the occupation of the Lebanese south by the Israelis.
By 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew from Lebanon.
Hezbollah at that point should have followed the rest of the militias into the Ta’if accords, laying down their arms and becoming solely a parliamentary political party. Hassan Nasrallah, by then the leader, however, refused that path. He began pressing claims on the Shebaa Farms villages of Syria, which Israel had illegally occupied. These lands had been owned by Shiite Lebanese, and Syria said they could have them back if the Israelis would leave. Nasrallah had the Israeli settlements there shelled indiscriminately, which is a war crime since it puts civilians in harm’s way.
Moreover, Hezbollah planned terrorist operations, even in Europe. Had it stuck with a purely military struggle with the Israeli army, it might have avoided being listed as a terrorist group, which cost it all legitimacy in the industrialized democracies.
In 2004-5 a crisis unfolded in Lebanon over Syrian political meddling in the country. Hariri and most Maronite Christians demonstrated against the Syrians, and Hariri was killed in a truck bomb in February 2005 — probably by Hezbollah, or by Hezbollah field officers working for Syrian intelligence. The March 14 coalition managed to convince the Syrians to pull their troops out of the country. Nasrallah’s March 8 coalition, joined by Michel Aoun’s Christians, held huge counter-demonstrations in favour of Syria but lost.
In 2006, Hezbollah attacks on Israel for the sake of getting the Shebaa Farms back were taken as a pretext by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who launched a wide-ranging war on Lebanon. Israel of course won, but it did suffer setbacks owing to Hezbollah guerrilla tactics. In the aftermath Nasrallah apologized for dragging the country into a destructive war that set back its economy.
In 2008, Hezbollah fought Lebanese Sunnis over a number of issues, including control of telecommunications at Beirut Airport. Nasrallah had earlier pledged never to use his arms on fellow Lebanese, but he reneged on that promise.
From 2012 on, Nasrallah sent Hezbollah fighters into Syria to help keep Bashar al-Assad in power, allying with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Russia against the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and more radical, al-Qaeda-adjacent groups. Hezbollah’s name became mud among many Sunni Arabs, as it lost the popularity gained in 2006.
Hezbollah as a party did well in Lebanese elections and played an increasing role in the national cabinet.
Hezbollah built up a rocket arsenal with Iran’s help. It was only useful for defensive purposes, as a deterrent against Israeli aggression. Few rockets have guidance systems and so can’t be used in a targeted way. The US Iron Dome anti-missile batteries made these rockets relatively useless and so removed their deterrent effect.
The outbreak of war after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel put Nasrallah in a difficult situation. His only source of popularity and legitimacy was resistance to Israel. Iran pressured him to keep a low profile and avoid provoking another war. Although 80% of the attacks at the Israeli-Lebanese border were launched by Israel, Hezbollah was baited into a tit for tat. Tens of thousands of Israelis were displaced from the north, just as tens of thousands of Shiites were displaced from the Lebanese south by Israeli airstrikes.
The fascist Israeli government of Netanyahu-Ben-Givir-Smotrich, receiving unstinting backing from the Biden administration, has adopted a policy of Miloševićism. Slobodan Milošević aimed for a Greater Serbia after the break-up of Communist Yugoslavia, coveting much of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo and being willing to deploy the tools of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Jewish Power government of contemporary Israel aims at a Greater Israel, ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank and southern Lebanon in preparation for Israeli hegemony.
Despite Biden’s feeble and risible cautions against a wider war, the Miloševićist Israeli government had long been determined to go into Lebanon and to wipe out Hezbollah– and perhaps to reoccupy the Lebanese south. Unbeknownst to Nasrallah, his high council had been penetrated by agents working for Israel, so that the latter could booby trap their pagers and could determine Nasrallah’s whereabouts in real time.
Nasrallah left behind a Lebanon in shambles, its government so corrupt that it let the port explode and allowed the chairman of the National Bank to embezzle all the country’s money. Poverty skyrocketed to 40% of the population in what had been a prosperous country.
In the end, Nasrallah led a small organization of some 45,000 fighters that was attempting to punch above its weight. Lebanon is a small country; its citizen population is probably about 4.5 million, a third of those Shiites. A base of a the non-AMAL portion of million and a half people or so is inherently limited. The Syrian intervention overstretched its resources and made it vulnerable in the Lebanese south. Its closer links with Iran and Syria, both of which were highly penetrated by Israeli intelligence, exposed it. Its rockets were rendered ineffectual by the Iron Dome. Its expanding cadres grew corrupt and open to Israeli shekels. It transitioned from a light, mobile guerrilla group with no return address to a quasi-governmental body with an HQ that could be struck by bunker-busting bombs.
Possibly Hezbollah will be forced now to go back to its guerrilla roots and a more secure cell structure. The Jewish Power and Religious Zionism fanatics who dream of re-occupying southern Lebanon and siphoning off the waters of the Litani River will likely discover, if they do so, that the potential for guerrilla resistance has not been and cannot be eradicated.
Bonus video added by Informed Comment:
Al-Jazeera: “Hezbollah confirms assassination of leader”
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
