As Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel escalates, the party is in a bind. Its capacity to maintain its deterrence capacity vis-a-vis Israel has been severely constrained by its unwillingness to provoke an all-out war that would wreak further havoc on Lebanon, undermine the party’s hegemony, and further aggravate domestic tensions around Hezbollah’s role in the country. In what shape the party will emerge from the rubble of Lebanon’s destruction is unclear, as is what this would mean for Lebanon’s internal dynamics.
Reactions by Lebanon’s religious communities to Israel’s onslaught have been multilayered, marked by Hezbollah’s complex and checkered history within the country. Direct attacks against Hezbollah members, such as the Israeli exploding pager terror attacks last week, which left twelve people dead and close to 2,000 injured, generated a nationwide blood donation drive. At the same time, many Lebanese, in private conversations and through public memes, expressed a sense that Hezbollah was reaping what it had sowed. In recent days, populations displaced from southern Lebanon by Israel’s relentless bombardments that began on September 23 have been received with open arms across the country. But even as the Lebanese have displayed solidarity in the face of Israeli actions, there is simmering anger that Lebanon is again being dragged into a war in which most people in the country want no part. Even long time Hezbollah allies, such as Lebanon’s former president Michel Aoun, have criticized its involvement in the Gaza conflict.
These tensions have also been driven by Hezbollah’s outsized influence in the country, its expanding role in regional conflicts, and its appetite for deploying military force and political capital internally to obstruct reform and protect its interests as well as the status quo. Such strains began to emerge in the aftermath of the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, and Hezbollah’s insistence on maintaining its weapons to resist Israel.
Following the war with Israel in 2006, Hezbollah garnered widespread support across the Arab world. Hezbollah was able to partly assuage domestic discontent with the conflict, which its own strategic miscalculation triggered, by building political alliances beforehand. Most prominent among these was its partnership with Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement. Hezbollah subsequently developed a relationship, albeit a sometime uneasy one, with the Future Movement of former prime minister Saad Hariri and a fluctuating cooperation with the Druze leader Walid Joumblatt. However, any lingering domestic goodwill has largely eroded over the past decade due to Hezbollah’s actions.
In November 2006, Hezbollah withdrew its ministers from the government, trying to topple it, while orchestrating a sit-in around the Grand Serail, the office of then prime minister Fouad al-Sanioura. In May 2008, the Lebanese were alarmed by Hezbollah’s willingness to turn its weapons, which were supposedly held to resist Israel, against the party’s fellow Lebanese. Armed men took control of western Beirut for a week, triggering a mini civil conflict. This was in reaction to a decision by the Lebanese government to disable Hezbollah’s private communications network, a move that Hezbollah saw as undermining the resistance.
In 2011, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which was established after the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri in February 2005, found Hezbollah members responsible for the crime. Many Lebanese believe the party was also behind the string of assassinations that followed Hariri’s killing, which included parliamentarians, journalists, and public figures critical of Hezbollah, some of whom were leading figures in both the Sunni and Christian communities.
Since 2019, resentment toward Hezbollah among significant segments of the Lebanese population has also increased because of the party’s role in obstructing reform and protecting the status quo. Such behavior was most apparent in its reactions to the anti-establishment demonstrations that swept the country in October of that year and assaults on protestors. Suspicions of Hezbollah’s involvement in the storage of perhaps over 2,000 tons of ammonium nitrate in the Beirut port, which destroyed half the city on August 4, 2020, and its subsequent blocking of an investigation of the port explosion also intensified anger against the party, further deepening sectarian tensions. This anger was evident in several incidents, including a military confrontation between Hezbollah and a Sunni tribe in August 2021 in Khaldeh, and at around the same time an altercation with members of the Druze community in Chouaya, who prevented Hezbollah from firing rockets from their village. Politically, such tensions have led to calls for Lebanon to adopt a federal system, a view increasingly popular among the country’s Christians.
Regional support for Hezbollah also eroded after the partly used its weapons against fellow Lebanese. This was exacerbated by the party’s intervention in the Syrian conflict in 2012 in defense of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, as it slaughtered thousands of mainly Sunni Syrians and forcibly displaced millions of others. Hezbollah’s support for Ansar Allah in Yemen further aggravated the poor relations with Saudi Arabia, historically a key player in Lebanon. This came in a broader regional context of deepening competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran. For many Lebanese and others, Hezbollah’s alliance with Iran has brought it great benefits, while weakening Lebanon significantly.
The question today is that, while the Lebanese are once more displaying remarkable solidarity and support in the face of Israel’s attacks, the significant loss in lives and widespread destruction underline the failure of Hezbollah’s deterrence equation with Israel. This failure is in part due to the changing nature of contemporary warfare. Hezbollah’s approach to conflict is a 20th century perspective that has not taken into consideration the tectonic shift in the nature of war enabled by new weapons and technological advancements, in which Israel has a clear superiority. Hezbollah also underestimated the open-ended Western military and political support for Israel in the conflict.
All this creates significant challenges for Hezbollah in the future. While the party will remain a viable part of Lebanon’s domestic scene, it will have to adjust to new circumstances in which its margin of maneuver will be much more limited. Even though the outcome of the conflict has yet to be determined, Hezbollah will need to contend with the death and destruction visited upon its members specifically, and Lebanon more broadly, and will seek to mitigate any challenges to its past hegemony. The party’s significant number of casualties, evidenced by numerous targeted attacks, Israel’s deep penetration of its security apparatus, and now the widespread destruction in Lebanon have struck at the heart of the party’s narrative of resistance and deterrence, which are cornerstones of its identity. There is no doubt that Hezbollah will seek to protect its political gains and position as the representative of the Shia community within the Lebanese system.
How it will do so remains to be seen. Will it double down on its sectarian identity, as it has done in the past when faced with similar challenges, and rally the Shia community to its side, despite the suffering the community has endured? Or will it seek to reinvent itself and perhaps support a reconfiguration of the governance system in Lebanon in ways yet unseen?
Moreover, the party’s discomfort may have been reinforced by the mixed messages coming from Iranian officials at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly this week in New York regarding their support for Hezbollah during the current conflict. Time will tell whether Iran is willing to sacrifice Hezbollah, now that its deterrence capacity has been impaired, in return for direct gains to Tehran’s own interests. Inside Lebanon, many are wondering who will pay the billions of dollars required to care for the Lebanese injured by Israeli bombings and rebuild what Israel has destroyed, especially in mainly Shia areas where the bulk of the damage has occurred. Reliance on the international community for reconstruction will likely come with a political price tag that Hezbollah may be asked to pay. This could conceivably affect the outcome of the presidential election to the party’s disadvantage, while others might try to put Lebanon’s defense strategy and Hezbollah’s role in it on the table, which the party has opposed.
While the shape of the diplomatic agreement that will end this round of conflict has yet to be determined, what is certain is that the path forward for the party is one that is fraught with obstacles. How it will overcome these remains to be seen.
