How can Lebanon tackle its tangled, dysfunctional relationship with Hezbollah without returning to domestic sectarian conflict? Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, who has been accused by the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court of war crimes in Gaza, claims to have the answer: the Lebanese must “free” Lebanon from Hezbollah. “You have an opportunity to save Lebanon,” he said in a video address, “before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”
Netanyahu, who dismisses the accusations of the ICC, is openly threatening to inflict the same devastating military tactics used in Gaza upon the Lebanese population. If he really wanted to help the Lebanese deal with Hezbollah, he wouldn’t order his military to invade southern Lebanon and as a result breathe new life into the organisation. Netanyahu knows his history, yet he chooses to ignore it: Hezbollah was born in part to resist Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, which began in 1982 and ended only in 2000. Give it that excuse again, and it will find a way to regroup by recruiting among a Shia community who won’t accept another Israeli occupation.
Even if Israel doesn’t occupy Lebanese territory this time around, the Lebanese cannot possibly disarm a paramilitary organisation that is much stronger than the Lebanese army. These same Lebanese, by the way, are currently being killed, maimed, terrorised and displaced (a quarter of the entire population have been forced from their homes) by the Israeli military. If Lebanese sects take up arms against Hezbollah, the return to civil war, which Lebanon experienced from 1975 to 1990, would be virtually certain.
Yet as hollow and cynical as Netanyahu’s proposal is, it doesn’t change the reality that Hezbollah has been a major liability for Lebanon since 2000.
For decades, the group has insisted that only it can protect Lebanon from Israeli aggression. Kicking the Israeli military out of southern Lebanon 24 years ago bolstered its claim. But since Israel’s departure, Hezbollah’s military role has been neither effective nor legitimate. The group has failed to deter Israeli attacks, and its actions have even invited Israeli hostilities, as evidenced by the 2006 war and the current deadly confrontation.
Hezbollah’s role, arms and influence are not all self-made. For many years, it has enjoyed the political and military support of Iran and Syria. Tehran views the group as the glue that holds together a regional network of proxies locked in perpetual conflict with Israel. Hezbollah has hardly considered Lebanon’s borders or sovereignty as constraints in its conflict with Israel. It also believes, as Iran does, that a successful struggle against Israel requires the unification of all regional fronts – in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza.
The first real application of this doctrine was in the summer of 2006, when Hezbollah crossed into northern Israel and captured two Israeli soldiers. Tactically, Hezbollah wanted to force a Lebanese-Palestinian prisoner exchange with Israel and to aid Hamas in its confrontation with Israel in Gaza. But the more strategic aim of its masters in Tehran was to force a new reality on Israel in which the Palestinian and Lebanese battlefields were one.
Hezbollah’s attack led to 34 days of vicious fighting with Israel that left Lebanon in ruins, with more than 1,100 people killed, much of southern Lebanon flattened and infrastructure across the country badly damaged.
Seventeen years later, clearly having learned nothing, Hezbollah would do it all over again – except that this time its gamble would prove to be far more detrimental to the group, and to Lebanon as a whole. Israel has punished Hezbollah for launching a front against it on 8 October 2023 by killing most of its political and military commanders, including Hassan Nasrallah, its top leader. It has levelled the group’s headquarters. It has infiltrated the organisation like never before. And it has emptied much of southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, where Hezbollah’s support base resides. Never in the history of Hezbollah has there been this much panic among its constituencies and this much uncertainty about its future.
Whether Israel will translate its tactical gains into strategic ones is unclear, but what is certain is that Lebanon cannot endure under the present circumstances. Hezbollah simply cannot continue to operate outside the confines of the Lebanese state, with no oversight or accountability, answering to a foreign power, and unilaterally making decisions of war and peace on behalf of all Lebanese. None of this is normal or constitutional in any functioning society.
Of course, changing this is all easier said than done. There is nothing in Hezbollah’s experience and philosophy that suggests it will ever fold or drastically change its ways. Hezbollah is closely linked to the supreme leader of Iran, and to dissociate itself from the Islamic Republic would mean suicide.
Yet ironically, the path Hezbollah has chosen has brought it closer to self-destruction. Like Netanyahu, it chooses to ignore basic truths. It would be dishonest or naive to say that the transition of Hezbollah to a purely political entity, in parallel with the full integration of its forces into the Lebanese army, would, all of a sudden, keep Israeli threats at bay.
However, Lebanon will always be in a stronger position to defend itself and protect its sovereignty if it speaks with one voice. This is something that Hezbollah has never bothered to appreciate or promote. Indeed, the most powerful safety valve for the group and its Shia supporters is not Iran’s missiles but rather the Lebanese people’s collective embrace. But to earn it, first, it has to lay down its arms and become an equal partner in Lebanon’s reconstruction.
Bilal Y Saab, an associate fellow with Chatham House, is the head of the US-Middle East practice of Trends Research & Advisory
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