Undeniably, a core element of Middle East tension has often been the rift between the two main sects of Islam: the Sunnis and the Shiites. While they represent the two biggest branches of the Muslim religion, they are fundamentally different and adhere to contrasting ideologies. However, the line between the two sects hasn’t always been clear cut.

Hezbollah’s began as a resistance movement in 1984 against an Israeli invasion that targeted a weakened Lebanon during the 1975-1989 Civil War. In its founding manifesto, Hezbollah declared itself as a resistance movement aimed at freeing Lebanon from any foreign powers, rallied for the destruction of Israel, and pled allegiance to Iran and its supreme leader. Throughout the years, Hezbollah developed both as a party and a militia. In its former role it became a part of the Lebanese Parliament. But it has been accused of operating “as a government in the areas under its control” (CFR).

Hezbollah gained substantial support from Lebanese Shiites and non-Shiites by providing a vast number of social services to the residents such as infrastructure, healthcare facilities, schools, and youth programs. Outside of Lebanon, Hezbollah had support from many Sunnis in the Arabic world mainly owing to its support for the Palestinians and its hard stance on fighting Israel. However, as the years went on this support began to diminish, especially after Hezbollah intervened in the Syrian civil war to help the al-Assad government crush Sunni rebel groups.

During the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, Syria was engulfed by demonstrations and protests against the ruling regime of Bashar Al Assad. The unrest in Syria quickly devolved into a full-on civil war, with the government fighting against largely Sunni rebel groups. During this war, Hezbollah sided with al-Assad’s government alongside Russia and Iran. It sent in some 7000 militants in 2013 to support the Syrian Arab Army. While this decision further cemented Hezbollah’s alliance with Iran and demonstrated its military prowess, it diminished its popularity on two fronts; One, it ended most of the Sunnis’ support as many Muslim Sunnis around the world saw the al-Assad regime as an authoritarian regime that needed to be overthrown. Second, according to many Lebanese, Hezbollah’s focus on the war made it fall short in terms of its domestic duties and opened it up for Israeli strikes and penetration. Hence, the assistance Hezbollah provided in Syria caused the groups’ esteem in the Sunni Arab world to undergo a sharp decline, since people saw Hezbollah as a pawn of Iran.

“Taqrib,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Crop2Comic, 2024.

According to a survey done by Pew Research on extremist groups such as Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and Hezbollah, the latter seen a significant decline in popularity in all Middle Eastern countries other than Lebanon. The substantial reduction in popularity can be observed by comparing the percentages in some of these countries. For example, in 2007, 41% of Egyptians had a negative view of Hezbollah, but that skyrocketed to 81% by 2014. The same phenomenon is visible in Jordan where in 2007, only 44% of people had a negative perception of the movement. However, by 2014, it had risen to 81%. Only in Lebanon did Hezbollah perform more consistently and more positively. In Lebanon however, the positive feedback is carried single-handedly by Shiite Muslims. 88% of Sunni Muslims and 69% of Lebanese Christians held negative sentiments towards the group, while 86% of Shiite Muslims supported the group, which sprang from them.

If anything, this survey reflects the rift that’s been widening between the two Muslim factions and the loss in popularity of armed resistance in the Middle East. Not only that, but this rift became one of the main reasons that Hamas, the military resistance organization in Gaza, to temporarily abandon its alliance with Syria, Iran and Hezbollah, the Axis of Resistance in 2012 when the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Egypt and seemed a better fit for Hamas, which derived from it.

Yet, the recent war on Gaza and subsequently the exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah in the South of Lebanon had begun, to an extent, to heal the relations between Hezbollah and many Sunni Muslims.  Over the past year, Israel has intensified its assault on the Gaza Strip and has even begun to launch attacks on Lebanon, successfully killing the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Many Sunni groups within Lebanon feared the Israel threat and despite their caution toward and mistrust of  Hezbollah, some of them started to move closer to the Shiite-led paramilitary group.

For instance, against the atrocities happening in Gaza and for the defence of their country, the Lebanese Sunni group al-Jamaa al-Islamiya decided to join hands with Hezbollah in their fight along the Lebanese borders. The Sunni faction sent its Al-Fajr forces to support Hezbollah, and which symbolized the unified front in Lebanon. This stance is strengthened by Sheikh Mohammad Takkoush, the Secretary-General of al-Jamaa al-Islamiya, who explained that whatever the differences and disagreements they had with Hezbollah were unimportant when the country was under external threat.

This alliance between the Sunni group and Hezbollah has some benefits s for both parties. Hezbollah can earn legitimacy for its presence in Sunni villages while al-Jamaa al-Islamiya can bolster its political standing and popularity by gaining an ally in Hezbollah.

Despite the new rise in popularity, the appreciation for Hezbollah’s involvement in the Gaza War is far from unanimous. Many leaders from the Sunni and Christian communities in Lebanon warned that involvement in this war could destabilize the country and urged Hezbollah to show restraint and avoid a full-scale war with Israel. However, the recent Israeli airstrikes on Beirut and the killing of Hassan Nasrallah have raised the possibility of a large-scale war. As in 2006, despite the disagreements between the big factions of Lebanon, if a full scale war were to break out between Israel and Lebanon, these factions would rally around Hezbollah and form a unified front to expel the Israelis.

For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and despite Joe Biden’s much-touted differences with Trump, he failed to restore U.S. compliance. Instead, he tried to use Trump’s violation of the treaty as leverage to demand further concessions from Iran. This only served to further aggravate the schism between the United States and Iran, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980.

Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the United States into war with Iran. By killing Iranian military leaders and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as well as attacking Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, Netanyahu provoked a military response from Iran that has given him an excuse to widen the conflict even further. Tragically, there are warmongering U.S. officials who would welcome a war on Iran, and many more who would blindly go along with it.

Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, campaigned on a platform of reconciling with the West. When he came to New York to speak at the UN General Assembly on September 25, he was accompanied by three members of Iran’s JCPOA negotiating team: former foreign minister Javad Zarif; current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi; and deputy foreign minister Majid Ravanchi.

President Pezeshkian’s message in New York was conciliatory. With Zarif and Araghchi at his side at a press conference on September 23, he talked of peace, and of reviving the dormant nuclear agreement. “Vis-a-vis the JCPOA, we said 100 times we are willing to live up to our agreements,” he said. “We do hope we can sit at the table and hold discussions.”

On the crisis in the Middle East, Pezeshkian said that Iran wanted peace and had exercised restraint in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its assassinations of resistance leaders and Iranian officials, and its war on its neighbors. 

“Let’s create a situation where we can co-exist,” said Pezeshkian. “Let’s try to resolve tensions through dialogue…We are willing to put all of our weapons aside so long as Israel will do the same.” He added that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not, and that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to Iran.

Pezeshkian reiterated Iran’s desire for peace in his speech at the UN General Assembly.

“Yahoo-Tank,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

“I am the president of a country that has endured threats, war, occupation, and sanctions throughout its modern history,” he said. “Others have neither come to our assistance nor respected our declared neutrality. Global powers have even sided with aggressors. We have learned that we can only rely on our own people and our own indigenous capabilities. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others. We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”

The U.S. response to Iran’s restraint throughout this crisis has been to keep sending destructive weapons to Israel, with which it has devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of women and children, bombed neighboring capitals, and beefed up the forces it would need to attack Iran. 

That includes a new order for 50 F-15EX long-range bombers, with 750 gallon fuel tanks for the long journey to Iran. That arms deal still has to pass the Senate, where Senator Bernie Sanders is leading the opposition. 

On the diplomatic front, the U.S. vetoed successive cease-fire resolutions in the UN Security Council and hijacked Qatar and Egypt’s cease-fire negotiations to provide diplomatic cover for unrestricted genocide.

Military leaders in the United States and Israel appear to be arguing against war on Iran, as they have in the past. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney balked at launching another catastrophic war based on lies against Iran, after the CIA publicly admitted in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons. 

When Trump threatened to attack Iran, Tulsi Gabbard warned him that a U.S. war on Iran would be so catastrophic that it would finally, retroactively, make the war on Iraq look like the “cakewalk” the neocons had promised it would be.

But neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant can control their countries’ war policies, which are in the hands of political leaders with political agendas. Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.

Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coat-tails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.

Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.

So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote in Responsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here — avoiding war.”

Via Code Pink

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has condemned Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. However, in his official statement, Erdoğan did not directly mention Nasrallah or Hezbollah.

Instead, he criticized Israel’s actions, describing them as a “policy of genocide, occupation, and invasion.” Erdoğan also called on the United Nations Security Council to take immediate action, emphasizing Türkiye’s support for Lebanon. “We will continue to stand by the Lebanese people and government in these difficult days,” Erdoğan added.

Compared to the assassination of Hamas Political Bureau Chief Ismail Haniyeh, Turkish officials adopted a more cautious tone following the death of Nasrallah. Haniyeh’s assassination in July 2024 drew strong condemnation from Ankara, with officials referring to him as a “martyr.” Türkiye even declared a national day of mourning in Haniyeh’s honor.

This raises an important question: why has Türkiye been relatively quiet on Nasrallah’s assassination?

Background: Sectarianism and Syria

Türkiye’s desire to avoid statements that could be perceived as supportive of Hezbollah stems from sectarian differences and Hezbollah’s role in the Syrian Civil War.

Journalists Musa Özuğurlu, speaking on the pro-opposition channel Tele1, and Mehmet Ali Güller, from the pro-opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, both highlighted the sectarian differences between Hamas and Hezbollah when discussing how Erdoğan distinguishes between the two organizations.

They both noted that Erdoğan is more supportive of Hamas than Hezbollah, as Hamas is a Sunni organization, while Hezbollah is primarily a Shia Islamist organization.

Additionally, with the start of the Syrian Civil War, Türkiye and Hezbollah found themselves on opposing sides. Hezbollah supported the Bashar al-Assad regime, while Türkiye supported Syrian opposition groups like the Free Syrian Army (FSA) seeking to overthrow Assad.

Hezbollah has occasionally clashed with Turkish-backed rebel groups in Syria, and during the Battle of Idlib, a rare direct confrontation between Türkiye and Hezbollah also occurred. At that time, Idlib was the last major stronghold of the Syrian opposition. Following the deaths of 34 Turkish soldiers in a Syrian-Russian airstrike on February 27, 2020, Türkiye launched ‘Operation Spring Shield.

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During the military operation, Turkish drones and artillery killed fourteen Hezbollah members. The Jerusalem Post reported that the IDF identified several Radwan operatives among the casualties and observed the battle to gather insights. Radwan Force is an elite unit within Hezbollah known for its highly trained operatives who operate in various theaters, including Lebanon and Syria.

While Erdoğan appears to keep his distance from Nasrallah and Hezbollah, he also has been striving to accelerate normalization talks with Damascus.

How does Türkiye view Hezbollah?

Although Ankara has been at odds with Hezbollah, it does not designate the group as a terrorist organization, unlike Türkiye’s Western allies.

In an interview with the state broadcaster TRT, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan revealed that he met with Nasrallah in Lebanon shortly after October 7 under difficult conditions.

Fidan described Nasrallah as a major regional figure, noting that his death will leave a void that will be difficult to fill. He also called Nasrallah’s death a significant loss for both Hezbollah and Iran.

While Turkish officials adopted a careful tone, pro-government media harshly criticized Hezbollah’s role in the region.

On a program aired by A Haber, retired Colonel and security pundit Coşkun Başbuğ claimed that Nasrallah was working for Mossad and that Hezbollah’s leadership was “sold out.” Başbuğ argued that Hezbollah could have turned the Israeli border into a “hell” but did not due to its compromised leadership.

Başbuğ stated that Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders were discarded by those who used them. Additionally, he referred to Hezbollah’s missile attacks as mere “firework displays.”

Yeni Şafak columnist and a former Justice and Development Party (AKP) MP Aydın Ünal said the assassination of Nasrallah was met with joy and excitement by the oppressed Syrians.

Ünal said that Nasrallah, following orders from Iran, had brutally and mercilessly carried out massacres of Muslims.

“The removal of Hezbollah will not only ensure Lebanon’s stabilization but will also mean the elimination of the buffer, barrier, and obstacle in the Palestinian resistance,” Ünal said.

Solidarity with Lebanon

Erdoğan met Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati on September 25 on the sidelines of the 79th UN General Assembly. He reportedly expressed Türkiye’s solidarity with Lebanon in the face of Israeli attacks. He emphasized the urgent need for the international community to implement a solution to halt Israel’s aggression.

As Israel intensified its attacks on Lebanon, Erdoğan stated on September 30 that if the UN Security Council fails to halt Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon, the UN General Assembly should recommend the use of force, in accordance with a resolution it passed in 1950.

Hours after the Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon began, Erdoğan reiterated Türkiye’s support for Lebanon in an October 1 speech at the reopening of the Turkish Parliament following its summer recess.

He emphasized that Türkiye would support Lebanon with all its means. “After Lebanon, the next place he will set his sights on will be our homeland. Netanyahu is adding Anatolia to his dreams,” Erdogan added. Anatolia is a large peninsula in western Asia that makes up the majority of modern-day Türkiye.

Overall, Türkiye’s support appears to be directed more toward the Lebanese population and Lebanon as a state, rather than Hezbollah as an organization. Türkiye’s current foreign policy on Lebanon emphasizes humanitarian concerns, regional stability, condemnation of broader Israeli actions in the region, and criticism of Western support for Israel.

Note: Türkiye designates a separate Islamist group called “Kurdish Hezbollah” as a terrorist organization. This Sunni Islamist group operates primarily in southeastern Türkiye and is not connected to the Shia Lebanese Hezbollah. The two groups have distinct goals and ideological principles.

——-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Hindustan Times: “Turkey’s Erdogan Ups The Ante, Calls For UN To Use Force Against Israel Amid Lebanon, Gaza Conflict”

The October 7 attacks led by Hamas proved to be a conundrum for Hezbollah. Before that, the group had been challenged by Lebanese protesters, including by members of the Shiite community, since 2019, for controlling a corrupt Parliament and allowing Iran to violate Lebanon’s sovereignty.

The war in Gaza allowed Hezbollah to deflect attention from its domestic woes, by launching rockets against Israel, in solidarity with Hamas, but not doing enough to risk immediate Israeli retaliation. It forced Israel to keep some military forces in the north and the evacuation of civilians from there.

Nasrallah’s death will most likely lead to a significant proportion of the Lebanese public rallying behind Hezbollah. The protests in 2019 were a domestic matter. With the assassination having been carried out by a foreign state, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may end up uniting the Lebanese people in a way that has been elusive since the end of the nation’s civil war in 1991.

In 1992, the year after the civil war ended, Israeli helicopters killed Hezbollah’s then secretary general, Abbas Al Musawi, as well as his wife and six-year-old son in a motorcade. In Ronen Bergman’s book, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, he documents how some Israeli military figures had opposed the killing as “Hezbollah was not a one-man show, and [Al] Musawi was not the most extreme man in its leadership”. Indeed, they warned, he “would be replaced, perhaps by someone more radical”.

Al Musawi was succeeded by Nasrallah, who proved to be more charismatic and eloquent. At the time, Hezbollah was a small militia, employing suicide bombs as its most powerful weapon. When Nasrallah emerged, he put a military commander, Fouad Shukr, who was killed in July in a similar strike, in charge of stepping up sophisticated guerrilla attacks on Israeli forces in the south of Lebanon. These attacks, as well as rocket launches, compelled them to withdraw in 2000, marking a rare and significant Israeli loss to an Arab military force.

In this respect, history is a study of irony, of unintended consequences, as Israel’s assassination scored a vendetta, only to witness a replacement who proved to be a more adept leader – a possibility that exists with Nasrallah’s successor.

The group has a top-down, military-style bureaucracy, while at the same time maintaining a diffuse and decentralised military command structure to operate if higher-level commanders are killed during battle. Its bureaucracy, with clear chains of command, will enable it to select a new leader. It has routinised its leadership succession, whereby the secretary general is appointed by a council, so that the legitimacy of the successor derives from the position and not the individual.

Hezbollah adheres to the “Axis of Resistance” ideology, along with Iran, the Houthis of Yemen and Hamas in Palestine, based on resistance to Israel and the US. However, the group also blends Lebanese nationalism, as well as a southern Lebanese identity, invoking how the region has suffered from Israeli actions since its first invasion in 1978. The ideology does not depend on a leader for its articulation or propagation. As a set of ideas, it existed before Nasrallah became the leader in 1992.

Hezbollah earned credit for driving Israeli troops out of Lebanon as 2000. One of the factors behind this success was the willingness of the group’s members and followers to sacrifice their lives for their cause. Their propaganda focuses on seeking inspiration from the success of Iran’s revolution in 1979.

This dynamic contributes to the third factor Hezbollah enjoyed: popular support within certain communities. The group’s presence in the south of Lebanon is enabled by a network of sympathetic Arab villages, that goes beyond just its Shiite Muslim base, including some members of the Christian community.

There is an argument to be made that, instead of waging war against Hezbollah, Israel could have declared a ceasefire in Gaza as the one-year anniversary of the conflict approaches. This would have done far more damage to Hezbollah by depriving it of the rhetorical oxygen it has often used to justify its rocket attacks, which the group said it would have ceased once the fighting in Gaza ended.

As a tactic, Israeli assassinations do not address the underlying problems of conflict in the region. Strategically they backfire, as assassinations might lead to unpredictable outcomes, like in 1992.

In the long term, Israel’s tactical military strikes are no panacea for political violence compared to multilateral peace and development strategies. Both the US and France, permanent members of the UN Security Council, had pushed for implementing the 2006 Security Council Resolution 1701, which calls for the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers to monitor the area south of Lebanon on the border with Israel, creating a buffer zone.

A cessation of hostilities in Gaza and Lebanon would have been the best long-term solution, achieving a more sustainable security than continued conflict that only creates a new generation of Lebanese and Palestinians seeking atonement from Israel. As the one-year anniversary of the war in Gaza is upon us, it appears that Mr Netanyahu is seeking another year of conflict to maintain his hold on power.

Reprinted from The National with the author’s permission.

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Hezbollah ‘prepared’ for Israel’s ground incursion: Hezbollah deputy chief”

(The Conversation) – The death of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on September 27 has left the militant Lebanese organisation leaderless at a critical time. Two days earlier in a speech broadcast around the world, the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) northern command, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, had told his soldiers to prepare for a possible incursion into Lebanon.

There is every reason to believe Friday’s airstrike, which targeted Hezbollah’s headquarters building in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, was in preparation for a possible incursion. It came after days of strikes which Israel claims have eliminated much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership.

Halevi told his troops on September 25 that they would “go in, destroy the enemy there, and decisively destroy” Hezbollah’s infrastructure. As Hezbollah is embedded within the Lebanese population, this strategy promises the deaths of innocent civilians.

Since 2006, both Hezbollah and the IDF have sought to avoid a direct confrontation. For years, they have played tit-for-tat with the rationale of proportionality to prevent an all-out war.

Although the horrific October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas triggered a resumption of hostilities, until last week both sides were calling for restraint. What has changed? Is a ground invasion now inevitable? And if so, what would that mean for Hezbollah and Lebanon?

Israel has a track record of engaging in military adventures in Lebanon that have only ever served to make its opponents stronger in the long term. The destruction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) did not prevent the emergence of Hamas – indeed, it helped to create it. Similarly, Israel’s pursuit of the PLO in south Lebanon triggered the creation of Hezbollah. Despite five invasions since 1978, Israel has shown itself incapable of successfully occupying even the smallest sliver of Lebanese land.

While both sides have been preparing for a new conflict for years, the trigger for the escalation began on September 18, when Israel struck the first blow by detonating thousands of pagers and mobile devices owned by Hezbollah operatives, killing at least 32 and injuring several thousand people.

This technological attack had been years in the making and could be described as a strategic masterstroke to disable the enemy. The timing appears to have been because Hezbollah was becoming suspicious about the devices, so the IDF had to act or lose the “surprise”. This suggests operational considerations are taking precedence over strategic and political ones, which research suggests is rarely a good idea.

Nonetheless, these strikes are believed to have crippled Hezbollah’s command in the short term, and emboldened the IDF’s leadership. On September 18, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, told Israeli troops: “We are at the start of a new phase in the war — it requires courage, determination and perseverance.” While he made no mention of the exploding devices, he praised the work of Israel’s army and security agencies, noting their results were excellent.

A tactic used in recent days by the IDF is one that has been developed over many years on the “Blue Line” – the de facto border that divides Israel and Lebanon. Emboldened by the failure of the IDF to defeat it in the July war of 2006, Hezbollah’s senior operatives have been active and visible on the Blue Line, which is monitored closely by the IDF.

This has enabled the IDF to photograph, identify and track senior Hezbollah leadership, which is why since October 7 we have seen a succession of assassinations of its key operatives, including Ibrahim Aqeel, a commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, and more recently, Mohammed Sarour in Beirut, as well as many others.

The IDF now believes it has Hezbollah on its knees – or at least, on one knee. The escalation we are currently witnessing is because the IDF is driving home its advantage and applying the same strategy as in Gaza: bombing any area it can plausibly claim to be a Hezbollah target.

This has had devastating consequences for the Lebanese population. The Health Ministry stated on Friday that 1,540 people had been killed since October 8 2023, with thousands of innocent civilians injured. Over 70,000 civilians have reportedly registered in 533 shelters across Lebanon, with an estimated 1 million people having been displaced from their homes.

Can Hezbollah fight back?

The death of Nasrallah has left Hezbollah temporarily leaderless, while the killing of several of its senior figures has deprived it of seasoned commanders, many of whom had recent combat experience in Syria. And the bombing of south Lebanon is reducing Hezbollah’s supply of rockets and other weapons.

However, Israel should not assume that Hezbollah is out of the game or underestimate the group. Hezbollah’s real strength has always lain in its ability to melt into the population – and it will be ready to commence a war of attrition with hit-and-run tactics if the IDF makes the mistake of putting boots on the ground again. The fact that all five previous invasions failed should be an indication that the outcome may be a repeat of what occurred between 1982 and 2006.

Furthermore, while Iran’s response to the escalation has been muted thus far, it is unlikely to abandon Hezbollah. A long, drawn-out, low-intensity conflict would favour the kind of asymmetric tactics used by the “axis of resistance”, which also includes Lebanon’s neighbour, Syria.

By bombing and displacing the Lebanese population, the IDF aims to reduce morale. It is now destroying private homes and public buildings on the grounds they are Hezbollah ammunition and weapons depots.

“Invasion,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024.

In Lebanon, the Palestine issue has always been regarded as the primary cause of the civil war that took place from 1975 to 1990. As such, the IDF is banking on Lebanese people turning against Hezbollah for bringing a new war down on them as a result of its rocket barrages into northern Israel, in solidarity with Hamas since the October 7 attack.

But, while there are many people in Lebanon who do not support Hezbollah and its activities in south Lebanon, the IDF should remember the past. Even if sentiment against Hezbollah is high today, indiscriminate bombing of the kind we are currently witnessing in Lebanon will not be tolerated by the population indefinitely.

It’s worth noting that in 1982, when the IDF invaded south Lebanon, some Lebanese welcomed them with rice and flowers – viewing them as liberators from the PLO. But that welcome did not last long.

In 2006, the IDF applied a similar strategy, targeting civilian evacuation convoys and UN compounds. And once again, the tide of public opinion swiftly swung back in favour of “al-muqawimah” (the resistance).

The stated IDF aim is to drive Hezbollah back north of the Litani river, to force it to comply with UN resolution 1701 and allow displaced people in northern Israel to return to their homes. But it is naive of Israel and the IDF to think that an invasion or a bombing campaign, no matter how successful in the short term, will enable Israeli civilians to live in peace along the Blue Line for the long term.

Ultimately, the only way forward is for both parties to come to the table and negotiate. The human cost of Israel’s current strategy in Lebanon is appalling to contemplate, and in all likelihood will create more hatred – fostering a new generation of anti-Israel fighters, rather than creating the basis for a durable peace.

Vanessa Newby, Assistant Professor, Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University and Chiara Ruffa, Professor of Political Science, Sciences Po

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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 Biqaa 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 labor. 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 modeled 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 Biqaa 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 Rafiq 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 favor 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.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera: “Hezbollah confirms assassination of leader”

(The Conversation) – As the violence between Israel and Hezbollah has escalated dramatically in recent days, civilians have paid a heavy price.

Hundreds of people in southern Lebanon have been killed and more than 1,600 wounded in Israeli airstrikes.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, has fired hundreds of rockets and other munitions into Israel.

More than 160,000 people have been displaced on either side of the border from the fighting, which many fear may be close to tipping into a full-scale war.

One senior analyst for the International Crisis Group said there’s been a “very worrying shift” on both sides in recent days in terms of a willingness to cause civilian casualties.

In such a chaotic environment, just what exactly are both sides obligated to do under the law to prevent civilian casualties?

What are both sides obligated to do as a baseline?

The law of armed conflict is very straightforward on this question – they must only target military objectives and military personnel. They must not target civilians.

And even when launching attacks against legitimate military objectives, all parties to an armed conflict are under an obligation to, as much as possible, minimise the risk of collateral, civilian damage.

If it becomes clear at any point in the planning or the execution of an attack that there is going to be disproportionate civilian damage, then the attack should be called off or appropriate warnings should be given.

Warnings are complicated, though. There is no strict obligation to warn civilians in the law of conflict. Rather, there is a requirement to warn civilians if the circumstances permit.

So, for instance, if it’s necessary to immediately attack a specific location because it’s the only opportunity you would have to target an insurgent leader or legitimate high-value target, there’s no obligation to give prior warning.

The other complication is that while the Israeli Defence Forces have been historically quite good about providing warnings through email blasts and leaflet drops, there are still physical constraints in places like Gaza and southern Lebanon. They are densely populated and quite geographically confined.

So the degree to which people can actually physically flee when they’ve been given a warning is debatable. How effective can a warning be if there’s nowhere for them to go?

Distinguishing between civilian and military targets

All parties in a conflict are bound by the same obligation, which is to distinguish between civilians and the military.

That said, the law of armed conflict does allow for some collateral damage – which is defined as unavoidable incidental civilian casualties. The parties to a conflict need to take this into account in a proportionality assessment.

This places obligations on parties to a conflict to perhaps choose a different time or method of warfare to make the attacks more specific.

There are some aerial drone attacks and missile attacks that can be highly discriminate. For example, there are missiles that can be timed to only detonate inside a particular apartment, so that only the residents in that apartment are injured or killed. It does not bring down the entire building.

Where you start coming into problems are bombardments of entire buildings in order to target one really high-value individual – does this justify a much higher number of civilian casualties?

There is an element of the IDF using this justification because Hamas and Hezbollah are non-state groups and don’t engage in regular tactics.

Is Hezbollah bound by the same rules?

Hezbollah is absolutely bound by the same rules as states. Nearly all the rules of the law of armed conflict are customary. This means everyone is bound by the law, even if they haven’t been a signatory to a treaty like the Geneva Convention.

This means, for example, that Hezbollah must prevent casualties among Lebanese citizens, as well as Israelis. Under the law, Hezbollah does not only have to distinguish between civilians and the military in their active attacks. They also can’t attempt to immunise their military assets by placing them in dense civilian areas.

And they need to do their utmost to remove civilians from areas where there are going to be military attacks.

Again, part of the complication is these are very enclosed spaces. So the question becomes exactly how far away do civilians need to be?

This is not just specific to Gaza, Lebanon or Israel – it’s a question for most places that have densely built-out areas. Urban warfare is one of the really difficult areas for the law at the moment.

Where to from here?

The tactics being used by Hamas and Hezbollah are nothing new. There’s always been a fairly consistent disregard for the law and brutality in a lot of their activities.

But if it can be proven the pager and walkie-talkie attacks on Hezbollah were carried out by the IDF, that’s a new level of brutality for Israel, because that’s an absolute violation of the protocol on booby traps and landmines. Israel is a party to that protocol.

The laws always get broken in times of armed conflict. But this has been quite unprecedented.

For legal and political reasons, there is value in actually acquitting yourself in a conflict with restraint. Parties to a conflict are still operating on the basis that eventually normal international relations have to resume. And it’s far better to have those international relations resume without the other side believing you capable of barbarism.

Emily Crawford, Lecturer and Co-Director, Sydney Centre for International Law, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Has Israel broken international law with its attacks on Lebanon? | Al Jazeera Newsfeed

She said that the airstrikes had left 35 children dead from violence, more than in the previous 11 months combined. (Israel and Hezbollah have been engaged in low-intensity tit for tat strikes since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023).

She added that the 1,645 Lebanese wounded on Monday included women and children.

Higgins added, ““Any further escalation in this conflict would be catastrophic for all children in Lebanon, but especially families from villages and towns in the south and the Bekaa, in Eastern Lebanon, who have been forced to leave their homes. These newly displaced add to the 112,000 people who have been displaced since October.”

Higgins continued, “87 new shelters are accommodating the increasing number of displaced people in the South, Beirut, Mount Lebanon, Baalbek – Hermel, Bekaa and the North governorates.”

CNN reports, “Israel said it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure, but video shows destruction of residential areas and the large death toll reflects the scale and intensity of the strikes. The nearly 500 killed on Monday alone is roughly half the number of Lebanese killed throughout the entire 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.”

One of Israel’s justifications for its current attack is that tens of thousands of Israelis have been displaced from their homes in the north. It is seldom noted that even before Monday 112,000 Lebanese had been displaced from southern Lebanon by Israeli air strikes. Of the cross-border Israeli-Lebanon attacks since October 7, 80% have been launched by Israel.

People need to see this. Israel has perpetrated over 80% of the cross-border attacks with Lebanon during the past year. Hezbollah has shown remarkable restraint. pic.twitter.com/iu9JB0oaYr

— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) September 20, 2024

Higgins lamented that UNICEF would have to scramble to provide Lebanese children with food, and that the country had just had its worst day in 18 years.

Lebanon is a country of some 5.8 million residents, though a good million and a half are refugees from Syria and elsewhere. It has seen its economy contract every year for the last 7 years, with the gross domestic product falling dramatically from $50 billion a year to only $20 billion a year.

The country was wracked by anti-corruption protests in 2019. In 2020, the Beirut port exploded because of criminal lack of oversight by port authorities. COVID struck the same year, deeply harming tourism and remittances, two of the country’s sources of income. Then the head of the country’s national bank stands accused of having embezzled much of the country’s reserves. The Lebanese pound has lost 90% of its value. The percentage of the population below the UN poverty line increased from 12% in 2012 to 44% in 2022. There has been intermittent exchange of fire between Israel and the Hezbollah party-militia in Lebanon since October 7.

The U.N. has characterized the Lebanese economic crisis as one of the worst in the world. The Economist estimates that the current Israel-Hezbollah will cause the economy to contract between 10% and 25% this year, depending on how long the Israeli campaign continues. If 44% of the Lebanese were already in poverty, an economic crash of that magnitude would likely make half the country poverty-stricken.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Israel and Hezbollah trade intense fire as thousands flee south Lebanon”

( Commondreams.org ) – The ongoing “bloodbath” in Lebanon fueled Monday calls for the United States to cut off weapons to Israel, a demand that people around the world have made for nearly a year, as the country has massacred tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“An immediate arms embargo on the far-right Israeli government is urgently needed to stop American weapons, paid for by our nation’s taxpayers, from being used in the latest slaughter in Lebanon or in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which apparently now includes an ‘extermination zone’ in which all living beings will be subject to killing,” said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell in a statement.

Mitchell cited CNN, which reported Sunday that “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering a plan to force all Palestinian civilians out of northern Gaza, including Gaza City, in order to lay siege to Hamas and force the release of hostages.”

Israel—which faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice—has killed at least 41,455 Palestinians in Gaza and injured another 95,878 in a nearly yearlong retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7 attack. Most of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced and are struggling to access food, water, shelter, and medical care.

“Restoring the credibility of President Biden… rests on his willingness to act decisively to forge peace, especially in light of the latest escalations in Lebanon threatening to plunge millions more civilians across the region into crisis.”

Throughout the assault on Gaza, Israel has exchanged strikes with the Lebanese political party and paramilitary group Hezbollah. In recent days, Israel has escalated fears of a regional war by detonating thousands of electronic devices across Lebanon and with a bombing campaign that has killed at least 492 people and wounded 1,645.

As Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain reported Monday for Drop Site News, people in southern Lebanon have received warnings to leave their homes via text messages, calls with audio recordings, and social media.

“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,” Karim Makdisi, a professor of international politics at the American University in Beirut, told the pair. “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.”

Makdisi also said that Israel wouldn’t have attacked Lebanon at this scale without a “green light” from the Biden administration, saying, “I think they’ve been given a kind of clear understanding that they have until the elections to do what they want.”

Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden dropped out of this year’s content and passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris in July, after his disastrous debate performance against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump. Harris continues to frustrate critics of the Israeli assault on Gaza with what the Uncommitted National Movement described as her “unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human rights law.”

However, regardless of who wins the November election, Biden is set to remain in the Oval Office until early next year, meaning anti-war voices continue to target him wth calls to stop sending Israel weapons and do more to secure a lasting cease-fire in the region. The president is set to address United Nations members on Tuesday.

“In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly tomorrow, foremost we need to hear one thing from President Biden: how he will use his power to end Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and ensure its compliance with international law in both Gaza and the West Bank,” Oxfam America president and CEO Abby Maxman said in a statement Monday. “To do so, he must commit to finally stopping lethal arms sales to Israel and applying the leverage necessary to stop a spiraling conflict with dire humanitarian consequences.”

“Restoring the credibility of President Biden—and the United States—on the world stage rests on his willingness to act decisively to forge peace, especially in light of the latest escalations in Lebanon threatening to plunge millions more civilians across the region into crisis,” Maxman argued, highlighting that the U.S. is in “a unique position” to sway Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The American leader “must use his influence to achieve a full and permanent cease-fire, the safe return of all Israeli hostages and illegally detained Palestinians, full access for humanitarian aid, and accountability for war crimes committed,” she argued. “As long as President Biden continues to obscure Israel’s flagrant violations of international law and provide the means for Israel’s unrestrained bombardment in Gaza, his legacy and the U.S. credibility will be utterly squandered.”

Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Jessica Corbett