An all-out war between the armed wing of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia political party, and the armed forces of the State of Israel is considered by many geopolitical analysts to be inevitable. Such a conflict would cause not only the infliction of a high level of destruction on both Lebanon and Israel, but it would also invite a regional conflict involving both the United States and Iran. The Western mainstream media often portrays Hezbollah as a “terrorist” organisation which functions as the “proxy” of Iran. But the implication that Hezbollah operates on a rationale of Jew hatred and that it exists solely to menace Israel on behalf of Iran is a misguided one. Hezbollah’s origins are inextricably rooted in Israel’s 18-year-long occupation of south Lebanon. It was born out of resistance and although now a major player in Lebanese politics, its continued existence as an independent military force is arguably justified on the basis that Israel, a nation which has refused to draw its final borders, poses a threat to the integrity of Lebanon’s borders up to the River Litani. This Zionist claim to Lebanese territory is a longstanding one which pre-dates the establishment of Israel and is one which motivates Hezbollah even though its ongoing military exchanges on Israel’s northern border are consistently couched in terms of solidarity with the cause of the Palestinian people of Gaza.
Hezbollah is designated by both the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organisation. Britain has also proscribed Hezbollah. While acknowledging that it was “formed in 1982 to resist the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon'', the British position is that Hezbollah’s External Security Organisation (ESO), remains culpable for a number of acts of terrorism - most dating back to the 1980s- which involved bombings, kidnappings and aircraft hijackings. Closer in time, although not mentioned in the official British document is the claim that Hezbollah was responsible for the assassination of Rafic Harari, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, in February 2005. A UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) concluded that there was “no evidence that the Hezbollah leadership had any involvement in Hariri's murder and there is no direct evidence of Syrian involvement.” But it also found beyond a reasonable doubt that the attack had been organised and conducted by a Hezbollah member named Salim Jamil Ayyash who was convicted in absentia.
What makes Hezbollah a peculiar political organisation is the fact that it effectively functions as a state within a state. Although Hezbollah itself is a part of the Lebanese government with national governmental functions and obligations, its formidable military capacities and the deployment of such capacities lie outside the ambit of the Lebanese state. It also runs social programmes that include health care, education and youth-related endeavours. Some of these services are extended to non-Shia communities.
But the security goal which defined Hezbollah when it began functioning as a resistance movement following the Israeli invasion of 1982, namely that of expelling Israeli forces from Lebanese soil and keeping them out remains to this day. This is because Israel still occupies the Shebaa Farms which borders the Golan Heights which was illegally annexed by Israel from Syria. Although largely recognised by the international community as being part of Syria, the Lebanese state claims it.
That aside, Hezbollah is aware that Israel, a state which has never constitutionally declared what its fixed borders are, poses an existential threat to Lebanese territory; specifically that which extends up to the Litani River. Israel covets the water resources of the Litani, and south Lebanon, populated by a substantial percentage of Shias, forms part of what in the ideology of Political Zionism is “Greater Israel.” Thus, Hezbollah is fundamentally motivated to resist any attempt by Israel to expand into Lebanon and acquire territory under the cover of war.
Such fears are in fact well grounded.
The claim to Lebanon up to the Litani River was first made before Israel’s creation by David Ben Gurion during the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War. Israel made the first of many invasions of Lebanon during the fighting with Arab armies in 1948 and occupied south Lebanon until it withdrew its forces in 1949 as part of an armistice agreement.
Nonetheless, a strategy by which Israel would eventually take over south Lebanon was set by both Ben Gurion and Lieutenant General Moshe Dayan, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli armed forces between 1953 and 1958. As Prime Minister Moshe Sharett noted in his diaries, both men felt that Israel had to play a role in fomenting trouble between Lebanon's different denominations consisting of Christians, Muslim Sunnis, Muslim Shias and the Druze. Dayan went further in conceiving the idea that Israel would cultivate the loyalty of a Lebanese Christian officer who would one day declare a Christian state in south Lebanon and that after an interval, Israel would annex the state for itself. Sharett quoted Dayan as saying the following during a 1955 meeting of Israeli defence and foreign policy officials:
The only thing that’s necessary is to find an officer, even just a major. We would either win his heart or buy him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the saviour of the Maronite (Christian) population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani (River) southward will be totally annexed by Israel and everything will be alright.
Remarkably in the 1970s during the Lebanese Civil War, the soldier whom Dayan imagined materialised right down to the rank which Dayan had suggested. Major Saad Haddad, a Christian army officer who defected from the national army of Lebanon, formed the renegade South Lebanon Army (SLA) which in 1979 declared the "Free Lebanon State".
The declaration came the year after Israel had invaded south Lebanon as a response to an attack in northern Israel by guerrillas of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). A few months after “Operation Litani,” the Israeli military withdrew from south Lebanon, and left parts of the region under the control of its proxy, the Christian Maronite-led SLA.
Israel again invaded Lebanon in 1982 with the objective of expelling the PLO which had continued to launch operations from Lebanon. But although this was achieved after the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) fought and bombed its way to Beirut which it ruthlessly besieged, Israel continued to occupy south Lebanon after it withdrew from Lebanon’s capital city.
Although Prime Minister Menachem Begin had privately assured President Ronald Reagan that Israel “did not covet one inch of Lebanese territory”, a pledge which he backed up by declaring to the Knesset in June 1982 that Israel did not want “one square millimetre of Lebanese territory”, the threat that Israel would seek to permanently occupy south Lebanon was a real one according to a secret U.S. State Department report which was leaked to the press in September 1982.
Dated September 15th, the memo concluded that there was a danger that Israel’s “logistical operations will evolve into permanent administrative agencies”. Writing in his nationally syndicated column, Jack Anderson noted that the suspicion was that Israel was “in the process of building a military-civilian government for Israeli-occupied Lebanon” and that it was using the same pattern of “infiltration” that had been used when establishing settlements on territories within the occupied West Bank.
Indeed, reports at the time indicated that the right-wing fundamentalist Gush Emunim settler movement planned to establish settlements in southern Lebanon, the group and Major General Gad Navon, the Chief Rabbi of the IDF, apparently believing that God was bequeathing south Lebanon to Israel as compensation for Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai as part of its obligation under the Camp David Peace Agreement with Egypt. But the creation of Hezbollah ensured that any Israeli designs on south Lebanon would not come to fruition. The insurgency broke the will of both the IDF and its SLA proxy force leading to Israel's withdrawal in 2000 after 18 years of occupation.
In 2006 when Israel again invaded Lebanon in response to Hezbollah’s action of killing three IDF soldiers and taking two into captivity to bargain for the release of Lebanese captives in Israel, a 34-day war ensued during which Israel was forced to withdraw its forces.
Known as the Israel-Lebanon War, the conflict saw Hezbollah's reputation and prestige surge in the Arab world. And although there were misgivings among Lebanese Shia and other denominations about Hezbollah’s involvement in the Syrian “Dirty War”, the attempt by outside powers including the United States, Turkey and Israel to overthrow the secular Baathist government by using Sunni Islamist proxies, its role in helping the Syrian Army contain and then defeat al-Qaeda and its off-shoots the so-called Islamic State and al Nusra were appreciated by Lebanese communities.
Many among the Maronite community viewed Hezbollah’s efforts as helping preserve Christendom in the Levant, while other communities within Lebanon’s multi-confessional society were grateful owing to the realisation that if Syria had fallen and become balkanised, Lebanon would have been the next target.
Although Hezbollah is conscious of its responsibility to keep the peace among Lebanon’s denominations, fear and suspicions persist over its activities which may bring a war with Israel that will almost certainly result in the devastation of large swathes of Lebanon. But this is arguably tempered by the collective memories the Lebanese people have of the role played by Israel in cynically fomenting trouble among its diverse groups in order to achieve its own national goals.
The Lebanese are now aware of the confirmation in Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First, that during their national civil war, Israeli military intelligence created a phantom terrorist organisation called the FLLF (Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners) which was responsible for carrying out a series of indiscriminate bombings which caused the deaths of hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians between 1979 and 1983. Retired Mossad officers admitted to Bergman that the FLLF had been created for the sole purpose of sowing chaos, confusion and division among Lebanon’s religious groups.
It is while bearing these aspects of Lebanon’s distant and not too distant history that an objective understanding of Hezbollah’s violent opposition to the Zionist State of Israel can be understood.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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