Let Lebanon Live
Illustration by Paola Bilancieri.
Growing up in Argentina in the 1940s, I remember my late Lebanese father reminiscing about Lebanon in almost reverential terms. The fruits were bigger, the foods tastier, the sights more beautiful than in other places. More importantly, the people were very peaceful, as shown by the harmonious coexistence of people of different religious denominations. It was, alas, a situation that wouldn’t last.
At that time, Lebanon hadn’t yet suffered the internecine wars and the foreign interventions that would mar this almost idyllic picture. A few years after my father died in 1971, Lebanon was transformed from a land of peace into a land of war. How does one understand what provoked such a significant change?
After a visit to Lebanon, his father’s native country, Dr. James J. Zogby, the President of the Arab American Institute in Washington, D.C., explains Lebanon’s descent into chaos, “Lebanon was a country that was modern on the surface, but its forward path was hamstrung by a political system that fueled feuds born of sectarian, tribal, and regional divisions. And so, I wasn’t surprised when Lebanon erupted in civil war a few years later and these tensions exploded into full view –with devastating results for the people and the country.”
Those divisions could have been its undoing. A period of relative peace was interrupted by a multifaceted and bloody conflict that took place from 1975 to 1990. It resulted in an estimated 150,000 deaths and great number of injured. It also provoked the exodus of almost one million people.
Although internal tensions have continued until today, foreign interference –particularly from Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Israel– and waves of refugees from neighboring countries have only aggravated the situation. For the last six years, Lebanon has been in a deep economic crisis. According to the World Bank, poverty in the last decade has almost tripled, affecting 44 percent of the population, a sad situation for a once prosperous and proud country. Irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies led to a crisis that the World Bank calls among the “most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century.”
The continuous state of crisis has had a pernicious effect on the provision of public health and social services. While most people have been affected, the crises have particularly impacted women, children, migrant workers, refugees and people with disabilities, according to the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty. Large waves of refugees have strained the country’s social protection system, that has been chronically underfunded.
Social unrest, political instability, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and lack of funding have seriously affected the public health sector. In addition, daily strikes are hitting deeper and deeper into the country, killing thousands of civilians and putting tens of thousands of civilians at risk. As reported by UNICEF, immunization campaigns have been severely disrupted, as have early childhood development and nutrition services.
Children and their families have limited access to public health services, sanitation and safe water supplies. Hospitals are unable to respond to increased demand for public health assistance, and many patients are unable to pay for basic health care needs. Hospitals’ financial difficulties have led to a shortage of medications, such as antibiotics and drugs for chemotherapy treatment. Reports of anxiety and trauma have significantly increased due to displacement and relentless shelling and air raids.
Salaries for health care workers have dropped roughly 80 percent, leading to the exodus of hundreds of physicians because they are unable to feed their families. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that 49 percent of Lebanese are afflicted with some form of war-related trauma. For fear of stigma, many rape victims do no report it, thus preventing them from having proper medical and psychiatric treatment.
The educational sector has also been seriously affected as a result of teachers’ resignations, strikes, and lack of essential educational materials. According to ReliefWeb, a humanitarian information service provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA,) approximately half a million children, or 25% of all children in the country, remain without any form of education.
Women continue to face discrimination, including unequal access to divorce, child custody and property rights. Unlike men, Lebanese women cannot transfer their nationality to foreign husbands and children. There is also a demand for stronger implementation of Lebanon’s family violence law to respond to growing cases of domestic violence and femicide.
According to legend, when Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Iguazu Falls in Argentina, she said, “Poor Niagara!” In the same spirit, comparing today’s Lebanon to more peaceful, better times, one could say, “Poor Lebanon!” Reflecting on the situation of today’s Lebanon, besieged by violence, I am glad that my father doesn’t have to witness what is happening in his beloved country. He would have been destroyed by sorrow, seeing the country of his dreams become a nightmare.
Stop the spread of Israel’s genocidal war into Lebanon!
First published at IMHO Journal.
With the seeming acquiescence of the US, Israel launched the most dangerous and reckless escalation yet in its war against Palestinians and Arabs. On Friday, September 27, just hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a bellicose speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Israel launched a bomb and missile attack in the heart of Beirut, Lebanon, killing most of the top leadership of Hezbollah, the large and well-organized Shia Muslim militia. Among the dead was Hassan Nasrallah, its leader and the most powerful political leader in Lebanon.
In this attack and in a series of others that included the bizarre booby-trapping of thousands of electronic pagers that wounded hundreds of rank-and-file Hezbollah members, their families, and bystanders, the State of Israel has widened its genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza. There, Israel has slain 41,000 people, mainly civilians, over the past year, and has also carried out severe repression on the West Bank.
In his September 27 UN speech, Netanyahu virtually declared war on the entire region, including Iran a thousand miles (1500 km) away: “There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach and that is true of the entire Middle East.” In the next hours, as the attack was underway, apparent US complicity stuck out like a sore thumb despite pro forma denials. As the US’s most authoritative newspaper reported with a wink and a nod: “The American secretary of defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, was on the phone with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, while Israel was carrying out the strike, according to a Pentagon spokeswoman, Sabrina Singh. But she said the United States had ‘no involvement in this operation and did not have advanced warning’” (Ronen Bergman et al., “Israel Bombs Residential Site in Effort to Kill Hezbollah Leader,” New York Times, September 28, 2024). To put the icing on the cake in terms of US complicity, President Joe Biden declared that the assassination of Nasrallah amounted to “a measure of justice.”
As these lines are being written, Israel has begun intense air attacks on Houthi-controlled Yemen, and is threatening a ground invasion of Lebanon, or at the very least, turning Lebanon into another Gaza via attacks from the air. While we cannot know the future, we can be sure that the devastation of Arab lives will continue unabated and over a wider terrain, while Western politicians will continue to declare their support for “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
What does the State of Israel intend or think it can accomplish by all this? To be sure, it has shown that, unlike last October 7, when they were utterly humiliated by a surprise attack by Hamas, Israel’s vaunted intelligence agencies, working with the US and others, are capable of staging devastating attacks against their enemies. Here, their clear technological superiority, as well as old-fashioned use of spies inside Hezbollah (for how else did they know the time and place the Hezbollah leadership was gathering?) has landed a severe blow against Hezbollah’s leadership. They have also been able, so far, to block most counterattacks from the air by Hezbollah.
But what, even in colonialist terms, is the use to the State of Israel and its allies of such a tactical victory, short of sheer revenge for a series of pin-prick attacks across the Lebanon border and bellicose declarations by Hezbollah? Will it serve for long as a morale booster at a time when the stalemate in Gaza is approaching its one-year anniversary without any significant rescue of hostages despite the resort to genocide against the population?
Is the State of Israel under the illusion that it can, even if the US were to allow it the attempt, be able to “eradicate” its enemies in Lebanon along with those in Gaza? The entire State of Israel, not the Netanyahu government is the correct appellation here, because Netanyahu’s “moderate” opponents were among those who have been calling on him to “put a stop” to the minor Hezbollah attacks on the northern border. Back in August, the “moderate” opposition politician and former general Benny Gantz actually attacked Netanyahu’s neofascist government for not being aggressive enough on the Lebanon border: “We must keep up the advantage of the initiative that was taken and increase the political and military pressure to push Hezbollah away, to return northern residents to their homes safely” (Jonathan Borger, “Netanyahu faces Israeli calls for broader strikes against Hezbollah,” The Guardian, August 26, 2024). And regarding the assassination from the air of Nasrallah and the Hezbollah leadership, the Israeli public seems solidly behind the operation, considering it a major victory.
The tactically successful Beirut assassinations will buy Netanyahu time with his own public and with the US and European powers, allowing him to look like a winner, something all rulers admire. In the next months, will nuclear-armed Israel go further? Will it implement Netanyahu’s threat in his UN speech to wage war from Gaza to Tehran to “eradicate” its enemies? Will it try to go that far rather than negotiate an end to its occupation of Palestine? Will the US go along?
Israel’s grand illusion, shared by the US/UK/EU and by the Arab monarchs and dictators of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc., that the Palestinian cause had been put onto the back burner if not virtually eliminated, was shattered by the massive Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Is that illusion returning, albeit in a more violent form via the plan to “eradicate” perceived enemies of Israel?
Possibly. But what is certain from the September 27 assassination of the Hezbollah leadership is that another type of illusion has also been undermined, if not shattered. Iran, Hezbollah, and their allies opposed most of the mass democratic Arab revolutions of 2011, and even participated in the untold brutality of the repression of the Syrian revolution by the semi-military Assad regime. For a time, this led one of their close allies, Hamas, to move away from what became their Axis to Resistance. In their propaganda, when they weren’t denouncing the Arab revolutionaries as dupes of imperialism, Iran and Hezbollah claimed that the ultimate defeat of the spontaneous, horizontalist Arab uprisings of 2011 took place because they were not an effective means of organizing resistance. They said this despite the fact that the 2011 uprisings actually overthrew two governments, in Tunisia and Egypt, and began for a while to develop political revolutions in those countries. This does not mean we shouldn’t critique – as revolutionary Marxists rather than Islamists — these movements and their one-sided faith in spontaneism, but tighter organization and better theoretical grounding do not have to mean a hierarchical/vanguardist model either.
Especially after the defeat of all of the Arab revolutions, those like Hezbollah claimed that their own hierarchical, secretive, militaristic, and authoritarian form of organization was better equipped to fight effectively against such powerful enemies as imperialism and Israeli occupation. Hamas claimed something similar. Hezbollah’s big tactical defeat on September 27, 2024 shows that these hierarchical/authoritarian forms of organization and theocratic politics are simply not as viable as they claim, not only because the rightwing politics of these theocratic movements offer no real liberation for the masses, but also because defeating something as powerful as the Israeli occupiers will require mass involvement and initiative, including a politics that appeals to a section of the Israeli Jewish working class and progressive intellectuals. Looking back, one could also note that of all the Palestinian armed and/or mass democratic movements of the past forty years, the only one that achieved even a limited victory was the mass, mainly nonviolent Intifada of 1987-88 in the Palestinian territories.
In this sense, truly opposing Israel’s genocidal wars requires not only determined, mass action in the region and across the world, but also a rethinking of our basic premises if we are to move from protest to victory. Part of that rethinking will have to involve more discussion of our goals as well as what we oppose, as well as the means of achieving these goals.
One thing we need to consider is the need for consistency in opposing occupation and genocide, not acting as if regimes outside the US/UK/EU sphere are not also carrying out such crimes. Think of China and the Uyghurs or Burma/Myanmar’s repression of a democratic revolution. Or Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s genocidal occupation.
Such discussions need to take place amid the theory/practice framework that has been the hallmark of serious Marxist movements for more than a century. These discussions need to occur not just in reading groups or radical conferences, as important as they are, but also amid the din and fury of the struggle itself. They are not a distraction, but the very fiber that holds real liberation movements together.
But as we are doing so, we need above all, and immediately to take to the streets, the campuses, and the workplaces to demand an end to this genocidal war and to its funding and support from the US/UK/EU.
Stop Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza!
Stop Israel’s attacks on the West Bank!
Stop Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Yemen and the threats against Iran!
End military and economic aid to Israel!
Occupation is a crime, from Ukraine to Palestine!
Support genuinely revolutionary and liberationist movements around the world!
Approved as a Statement of the Steering Committee of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).
It has become quite rare to hear any meaningful accountability for Israel’s actions from Israeli citizens themselves. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy is an anomaly in Israel by today’s standards, as for his entire career he has challenged the apartheid and occupation of the Israeli state. On today’s episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Levy joins host Christ Hedges to discuss his book, The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe, and explain the spiritual destruction, both of Israel and Palestine, that the current genocide in Gaza is causing as well as the implications of new military operations in Lebanon
Israel’s cheerleaders are triumphalist about the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – which involved the mass slaughter of countless Lebanese civilians in Beirut. But what next? We’re joined by brilliant Palestinian-Dutch analyst Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya, on the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, the risk of regional conflagration, and the root of the current evil – the genocide against Gaza.
While Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah reportedly survived the attack on the densely populated area of Lebanon's capitol, one observer warned that Israel may still "get the regional war it has sought."
By Jessica Corbett
September 28, 2024
Source: Common Dreams
Israel’s dropping of massive bombs in Beirut on Friday sparked a fresh wave of global condemnation against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with critics accusing him of trying to drag the Middle East into an even bloodier conflict that could engulf the entire region.
The Israeli attack supposedly targeted Hassan Nasrallah, head of the political and paramilitary group Hezbollah. Multiple media outlets reported that the leader survived, though hundreds of others are feared dead in the “complete carnage” from the bombing that leveled several buildings. While the death toll from Friday is not yet clear, over 700 people have been killed in Israel’s strikes in Lebanon since Monday.
As The New York Timesreported:
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said that there had been a “complete decimation” of four to six residential buildings as a result of the Israeli strikes. He said that the number of casualties in hospitals was low so far because people were still trapped under the rubble. “They are residential buildings. They were filled with people,” Mr. Abiad said. “Whoever is in those buildings is now under the rubble.”
Social media and news sites quickly filled with photos and videos of massive plumes of smoke and smoldering rubble.
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon, said Friday that she was “deeply alarmed and profoundly worried about the potential civilian impact of tonight’s massive strikes on Beirut’s densely populated southern suburbs. The city is still shaking with fear and panic widespread. All must urgently cease fire.”
However, the bombing is widely expected to worsen this week’s escalation, which came after nearly a year of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) trading strikes with Hezbollah over the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 41,000 Palestinians.
“For Israel, it may not matter if Nasrallah was killed. Either way, it believes it’ll get the regional war it has sought,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said of the Friday attack.
Citing an unnamed Israeli official, NBC Newsreported that “Israel expects Hezbollah will attempt to mount a major retaliatory attack” in response to Friday’s bombing of the group’s command center.
As Reutersdetailed:
Israel has struck the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut, known as Dahiyeh, four times over the last week, killing at least three senior Hezbollah military commanders.
But Friday’s attack was far more powerful, with multiple blasts shaking windows across the city, recalling Israeli airstrikes during the war it fought with Hezbollah in 2006.
In a video posted on social media, IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari described the Friday attack as “a precise strike” on what “served as the epicenter of Hezbollah’s terror,” adding that the group’s headquarters “was intentionally built under residential buildings.”
During Netanyahu’s United Nations General Assembly speech on Friday—which was met with a walkout from several diplomats and other officials—the prime minister said that Hezbollah has stored rockets “in schools, in hospitals, in apartment buildings, and in the private homes of the citizens of Lebanon. They endanger their own people. They put a missile in every kitchen, a rocket in every garage.”
In response, Middle East expert Assal Rad said, “So he’s claiming there’s no civilian spaces in Lebanon and Israel has a right to destroy all of it.”
Jason Hickel, who has positions at multiple European universities, also sounded the alarm over those lines from the Israeli leader’s speech.
Netanyahu is “effectively arguing all homes are a military target,” he said. “This is 100% genocidal and this maniac must be stopped.”
Hours before the attack in suburban Beirut, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) strongly condemned “Israel’s brutal bombardment of Lebanon, another reckless escalation in the Middle East on behalf of the Benjamin Netanyahu regime that risks further destabilization in an already fragile region.”
“The Israeli bombardment of Lebanon is the latest dark chapter in a series of disproportionate displays of force. Its ongoing genocide in Palestine over the last year has proven beyond any doubt that its willingness to commit horrific acts knows no bounds,” DiEM25 said. “Rather than seeking a peaceful and just resolution, Israel’s government has consistently chosen the path of militarism, often with international support from the European Union and the United States.”
“The international community, including the E.U., has a critical role to play in promoting peace rather than enabling violence,” the group added. “Peace and security in the Middle East will not come through bombs and military strength. It will come through diplomacy. We remain committed to working towards that aim and stand in solidarity with the Lebanese people, as well as all others suffering from this violent escalation.”
Image by Hamed Talebi, Creative Commons 4.0
On Monday, Israel engaged in its most deadly attacks in Lebanon since its 2006 invasion of the country, striking heavily populated areas throughout southern Lebanon—including hitting medical centers and ambulances, according to the Lebanese health minister—and expanding its attacks to Beirut and the Bekaa Valley in the east. The Israeli strikes included the targeting of a high-rise building in the Beirut suburb of Dahieh, reportedly aimed at killing Ali Karaki, a senior commander in Hezbollah. The group released a statement saying Karaki was “in full health and wellness and has moved to a safe place.” By evening local time, the death toll in Lebanon reached 492 people—including at least 35 children—with more than 1,600 injured, as some Israeli officials threatened the prospect of a Gaza-style war of annihilation against Lebanon.
Earlier in the day, local residents began receiving text messages and calls with audio recordings warning them to leave their homes and villages. The Israeli military maintains that its assault, which it claims hit 1,300 “targets,” is aimed at destroying Hezbollah’s weapons supplies and rocket launch facilities. The roads out of the south were jammed on Monday afternoon as people attempted to flee Israel’s bombs. The Associated Press called it “the biggest exodus since 2006.” Schools and universities have closed throughout the country and Lebanese authorities are opening up educational facilities to shelter the displaced.
The IDF’s Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee also posted several ominous messages on Twitter, also known as X, instructing people to leave their homes, including in the Bekaa Valley region. “If you are inside or near a house containing Hezbollah weapons- you must leave it and move away from it within two hours to a distance of no less than 1,000 meters outside the village, or go to the central school near you and do not return until further notice,” he wrote, adding, “Anyone who is near Hezbollah elements, facilities, and weapons is putting his life and the lives of his family members at risk.” Israeli forces subsequently bombed the area.
Civilians cannot be expected to know where weapons stores might be—adding to the sense that Israel is carrying out a “psychological war,” as Lebanon’s official news agency called it, in addition to a harsh bombing campaign. While the IDF has portrayed these orders as humanitarian-motivated evacuation warnings, it has issued identical communications throughout its 11-month war against the Palestinians of Gaza only to later bomb areas to which it told residents to flee.
“People have seen what’s happened in Gaza and they know that the Israelis are fully capable and they understand that basically the West has given up even pretending to do anything about it,” said Karim Makdisi, a professor of international politics at the American University in Beirut. “There’s no reason to believe that the Israelis will not go ahead and basically try to empty out a large section of the south and try to make the whole place totally uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.”
As Israel resumed its attacks on Monday, Hezbollah escalated its own operations, launching hundreds of rockets at the Ramat David base and other military sites across northern Israel, while claiming to have attacked an industrial complex near Haifa. Videos on social media also showed Hezbollah missiles striking east of Tel Aviv near several illegal settlements in the West Bank, farther than the group has targeted in any previous conflict. Israel’s Home Front Command declared an internal state of emergency known as a “special situation,” citing the “likelihood” of attacks on civilian areas allowing the government to exert expanded authority over civilian life for the next 48 hours.
After an entire day of intense and sustained attacks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video on social media. In his “message for the people of Lebanon,” Netanyahu claimed that “Hezbollah has been using you as human shields” as it fires rockets at Israel. The Israeli prime minister also characterized the massive bombings in Lebanon Monday as defensive. The “IDF has warned you to get out of harm’s way,” he said in the tenor of a governor issuing a warning about a hurricane, rather than the leader of a nuclear power overseeing a massive bombing of villages. “I urge you – take this warning seriously. Don’t let Hezbollah endanger your lives and the lives of your loved ones. Don’t let Hezbollah endanger Lebanon.”
Israel has launched numerous brutal military campaigns in Lebanon in prior decades. Its claim today that it is aiming to protect civilian life with evacuation messages was widely rejected by Lebanese and other observers—and fed suspicion that Israel is attempting to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon of its residents to establish a military buffer zone inside Lebanese territory.
“This is not the first time Israel has warned hundreds of thousands of civilians in Lebanon to flee before ruthlessly bombarding them,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, an international humanitarian law expert, and the executive director of the human rights group DAWN. “Warning civilians to flee does not free Israel from the most basic rule of the laws of war, and that is not to deliberately or indiscriminately fire on civilians. As the death toll in Lebanon has made clear, this is not a rule that Israel is willing to follow.”
Green Light
There is no indication that the U.S., Israel’s major military backer, has any plans to pull back the Israeli government in its expanding attacks in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank.
The Pentagon announced on Monday that the U.S. is deploying an unspecified number of American troops in addition to the 40,000 troops already in the region. In the readout of a call with Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reiterated the U.S.’s standard posture that Israel is acting in self-defense. “The Secretary expressed his support for Israel’s right to defend itself as Hizballah extends its attacks deeper into Israel, and stressed the importance of finding a path to a diplomatic solution that will allow residents on both sides of the border to return to their homes as quickly and safely as possible,” it stated.
Makdisi said the Israelis would not have launched such large scale attacks without a “green light” from the U.S. “I think they’ve been given a kind of clear understanding that they have until the elections to do what they want,” he told Drop Site News.
Over the past several weeks, U.S. officials have made public statements claiming that they would like to see a “diplomatic resolution” to the standoff between Israel and Hezbollah that began after October 7 of last year. Some officials have also claimed that the U.S. has been working to prevent an escalation, with U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby telling ABC News on Sunday that the U.S. was trying to prevent “all-out war” between the two sides and that the Biden administration disagreed with Israel’s policy of expanding the conflict into Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Barak Ravid, a journalist for Axios known for his insider access to Israeli and American officials, reported over the weekend that U.S. officials had privately said that they supported an Israeli policy of “de-escalation through escalation” – a contradictory stance that would permit Israel to ramp up the destruction of Lebanon and open the path to a broader conflict.
“Israel’s shocking attacks on Lebanon over the past week are the entirely predictable result of the Biden administration’s continued coddling of the unhinged Netanyahu administration, rewarding him with a bottomless supply of weapons no matter how often he rebuffs American pleas to rein in the conflict,” said Whitson, the former director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch.
A Single Front
Israel has said it will announce its “next phases” for its Lebanon operations in the coming days. On Monday, Daniel Hagari, the IDF spokesperson, was asked if the military was prepared for a ground invasion. “Is the army prepared? Yes, the army is in full readiness and we will do whatever is necessary to bring back home all our citizens to the northern border safely,” he said.
Makdisi assesses that the U.S. wants to separate the Gaza and Lebanese fronts in an effort to force Hezbollah to end its attacks against northern Israel. Hezbollah has maintained that it will not do so until a ceasefire is reached in Gaza—a point which Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general, emphasized in a speech last Friday. “Whatever the sacrifices, whatever the consequences, whatever may happen, we will not cease our support for Gaza, and Lebanon’s front with Israel will not stop until the aggression on Gaza stops,” Nasrallah said.
It was Nasrallah’s first speech following Israel’s surprise attacks last week, when thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously, killing more than a dozen people and wounding hundreds more. Last Wednesday, walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah forces detonated in similar fashion killing more people, followed by a massive air strike on Friday in the Beirut neighborhood of Dahieh that killed at least 45 people. Hezbollah confirmed that the air attack killed senior commander Ibrahim Aqil and 15 other significant officials from its elite Radwan force. The U.S., which denies any involvement or foreknowledge of these strikes, had placed a $7 million reward for information about Aquil for his alleged role in the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983. “Nobody sheds a tear for him,” said Brett McGurk, President Biden’s Middle East envoy. “That said, we have disagreements with the Israelis on tactics.”
Makdisi said the recent Israeli attacks represented “a severe blow, but not a critical one” for Hezbollah. He said the group’s relatively muted military responses of the past week are “not necessarily an indication of weakness, but more that it is still disciplined, that they still have that discipline that they’re not going to be sucked in and drawn into what Netanyahu wants, as of now anyway.”
Israel has said its stated objective in attacking Lebanon is to ensure the return of tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from the north of the country since October 7. “You will not be able to return the settlers and usurpers of land to the north,” Nasrallah said Friday. “The only way to return them is ending the onslaught and aggression on Gaza and the West Bank.”
Makdisi said that since its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Israel has aimed to demilitarize the south of that country, including through its 2006 ground war. Hezbollah is widely seen as having defeated Israel in the 2006 conflict by forcing it into a ceasefire. Makdisi assesses that Israel – with U.S. backing – believes that it can achieve its goal this time by smashing Hezbollah’s military capabilities in the south and imposing its will on the region.
“They can’t coexist with any country around them or any people around them without them accepting defeat. That just is a prerequisite. So this just has to be contextualized not just in the history of Lebanon, but Zionism itself,” Makdisi said. Israel “needs the Palestinians to give up, needed the Egyptians to give up. It needed the Jordanians to give up and it needs the Lebanese to give up. That is the context.”
How Strong Is Hezbollah?
In the years since the 2006 war, Hezbollah’s military capacity has strengthened and the size of its fighting force has grown. Hezbollah is considered the most powerful non-state military force in the world, with an estimated stockpile of between 150,000 and 200,000 short and long-range missiles, a rapidly expanding fleet of unmanned vehicles, an advanced network of tunnels and underground facilities, and tens of thousands of trained fighters.
Hezbollah also enjoys extensive military and logistical support from Iran and relationships with regional governments and networks of allied militias. The rise of the Axis of Resistance—a loose coalition of nations and armed resistance factions, including Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansarallah in Yemen, and others who have vowed to confront Israel militarily—also presents a new dynamic that Israel must consider as it weighs what type of wars it believes it can fight and win.
Amal Saad, an expert on Hezbollah told Drop Site recently: “Basically everything that Iran has, all the weapons Iran has, you can be certain Hezbollah has them, too. That’s what we know. And that’s aside from the things that Hezbollah is manufacturing domestically, like it’s drone technology—it’s manufacturing its own drones now. So, we’re talking here about a vastly different military creature than 2006.”
Makdisi said that, to date, Hezbollah has not deployed its most advanced weaponry, nor launched large strikes at major civilian targets, such as Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv or the large port in Haifa. If that happens, he said, it could be an indication that Hezbollah is shifting into all-out war mode.
“They’re not going to panic. And they can see that what the Israelis want to do in terms of trying to empty out the south and hit this kind of infrastructure in the south, that itself will also have several stages. So they’re going to wait and see what’s going to happen,” he said. “If they launch a massive attack on civilian areas or on the airports, if they change the way in which they’re launching and if they unleash the [more advanced] technological capabilities that they have, then that would be an indication. But I think that would be towards the end of their tether and their tether is a lot longer than what we think.”
The role that Iran may play amid an escalation of the war is a major concern of all parties, as questions arise in Lebanon over why Hezbollah’s major backer has remained passive despite the spread of the war. “There is now more of this kind of sentiment like, ‘Where the hell is Iran?’ They keep on coming up and threatening this and threatening that. But when Lebanon is now under this condition, nothing has happened yet,” Makdisi said.
In particular, Tehran has not responded militarily to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in August. Haniyeh was killed in a guest house controlled by Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps. Despite heavy promotion of the notion of an Axis of Resistance, Tehran has not overtly attacked Israel since April when it launched a large-scale—though largely symbolic—series of air attacks.
In comments given to reporters ahead of the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, newly-elected Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian said that the killing of Haniyeh would “not go unanswered,” but added that Iran did not wish to have a larger regional war at Israel’s instigation. The Iranian president, who represents the reformist bloc inside Iran, also struck a conciliatory note by suggesting that Iran would deescalate in the region if the U.S. also tempered its support for Israel. “We are willing to put all of our weapons aside, so long as Israel is willing to do the same,” he said. “But we cannot have outside actors come in, arm one side to the teeth and prevent the other side from having the means to defend themselves.”
Iran’s regional foreign policy is largely considered to be the domain of the country’s hardline security establishment, and particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. In his own comments to reporters, Pezeshkian referred to Israel as committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip. In response to a question as to whether Iran would intervene to defend Hezbollah from Israeli attacks, he said that Iran “will defend any group that is defending its rights and itself.”
One day into Israel’s expanded aerial campaign, hundreds of Lebanese civilians have already been killed and thousands more wounded. Those numbers will almost certainly rise in the days to come.
Israeli officials have made repeated statements in the past months indicating that they view the population of Lebanon as synonymous with Hezbollah itself and threatening violence against Lebanese civilians.
In July, Israel’s education minister Yoav Kisch said that “Lebanon, as we know, will not exist,” after a future war, adding that “there is no difference between Hezbollah and Lebanon,” and that the country faced “annihilation.” Israel’s minister of diaspora and combating antisemitism Amichai Chikli called this week for the creation by the Israeli military of a buffer zone in South Lebanon, “free of enemy population,” adding that Israeli military control over Lebanon “must be expanded and the enemy population removed from the area.”
“Hezbollah=Lebanon,” former Israeli prime minister Bennett wrote, even more bluntly, on social media. “Hezbollah controls the Lebanese government, and cannot survive without popular support.”
Jeremy Scahill has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill has served as the national security correspondent for The Nation and Democracy Now!. Scahill's work has sparked several congressional investigations and won some of journalism’s highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for “Blackwater.” Scahill is a producer and writer of the award-winning film “Dirty Wars,” which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.
