One of the questions emerging from the war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel is what lessons this can provide for sectarian relations in the country. The reason is that what we are witnessing today, we have seen before during the 1970s and 1980s.
The story, time and again, has been one of hubris—the desire of Lebanon’s religious communities to ally themselves with an outside power, and use such alliances to impose their dominance domestically. What each of the communities has learned is that the country’s sectarian system, no matter how much it has eaten away at a sense of national identity while bolstering a political class that has manipulated sectarian animosities to perpetuate its own power, has rules that are ignored at one’s own peril.
Whatever else sectarianism has done, it has created a system that is inherently pluralistic, even if it is very imperfectly democratic. This pluralism has not only allowed for the emergence of contending political leaderships within each of Lebanon’s communities (often coalescing into two competing power centers), it has also created a natural barrier against the hegemonic ambitions of any single community to rule over the others. In the past half-century, there have been attempts by all of Lebanon’s major communities—Sunnis, Druze, Maronites, and Shiites—to impose their will on all, and each ultimately failed—with the Shiite attempt apparently in the process of being undermined today.
During the 1970s, there was a joint Sunni and Druze effort to ally with the Palestine Liberation Organization to replace the Lebanese political order, which favored the Maronite community, and install a new system more advantageous to them. This took place not through the institutions of the Lebanese state, but most destructively in the streets, primarily during the first two years of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975–1976. That the Maronites, sensing the direction of events, had begun arming themselves before 1975 only added to the sinister mix that exploded in 1975.
What was the outcome? In 1976, the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad, fearing that a PLO takeover of Lebanon would provoke an Israeli response that would draw Syria into a war to its west, intervened militarily in the country. While the Maronite leadership was later blamed for having invited the Syrians in, there was also regional and international backing for such a move, most notably from the United States, which mediated the so-called “red lines” agreement between Syria and Israel. The Syrian deployment began with a short-lived conflict between the Syrian army and the PLO and its allies, before the two sides reconciled after Anwar al-Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977.
The consequences for the PLO’s Lebanese allies was generally negative. Their desire to change the system failed, the Syrians assassinated the Druze leader Kamal Joumblatt in March 1977, and for almost three decades Damascus imposed its supremacy over the Sunni and Druze communities. While it later did allow a Sunni figure, Rafiq al-Hariri, to take on a major role in postwar Lebanon, he was always kept on a tight leash, and in 1998 Hariri left office after the Syrians had brought in Emile Lahoud as president. One of Lahoud’s main duties was to contain Hariri, and the Syrian distrust of this major Sunni figure would never dissipate.
The Maronites would follow a similar path in 1981–1982, when the leader of the Lebanese Forces, Bashir Gemayel, allied himself with Israel in preparation for its invasion of 1982. Gemayel’s aim was to become president, which he succeeded in doing, even if he quickly realized the price he would pay for being elected on the back of an Israeli tank. In the end, it mattered little since he was assassinated three weeks later in a bomb explosion set off by Habib Chartouni, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.
This would be followed by years of disarray within the Lebanese Forces’ ranks, as the militia went through a series of succession struggles, in parallel to a conflict in the mountains that led to the expulsion of tens of thousands of Christians from the Shouf and Aley in 1983, and from areas east of Sidon in 1985. The culmination of the Maronite downfall would be the war between the Lebanese Forces under Samir Geagea and the Lebanese Army led by Michel Aoun in 1990. This would shatter the community, leading to the emigration of tens of thousands of Christians from Lebanon, and would cause a decline in Maronite power from which the community never really recovered.
One thing that came out of these experiences, however, was that the communities, having been injured, would develop a very different relationship with the state. The Sunnis, particularly after the Taif agreement had granted the prime minister more authority, came to see state institutions as an embodiment of their communal power. With the Maronites, the progression was different. In February and March 1989, when Aoun, then the head of a military government, tried to close the illegal ports of militias, he garnered cross-sectarian approval from many of his countrymen.
Among Christians especially, there were many who had backed the Lebanese Forces previously, but then shifted their allegiance to Aoun, seeing in him a representative of a state that many had yearned for during the civil war. What allowed them to make this jump was that Aoun was also perceived as a strong Maronite leader, so that abandonment of the militia did not necessarily threaten the community’s status. Therefore, embrace of the state was contemporaneous with the war, whereas the Sunni attachment to the state was most evident after the war ended in 1990.
Today, the question is whether the Shiite community is following a similar direction? In the aftermath of the Syrian military withdrawal in 2005, the party began laying the groundwork for a hegemony it would manage on Iran’s behalf. After the war with Israel in 2006, the Iranians would reinforce and expand their military aid to Hezbollah, even as the party’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, would in the subsequent decade come to play a growing role in Iran’s network of regional alliances, from Iraq to Yemen.
In 2023, this culminated in Hezbollah’s entry into a scheme that, from the beginning, courted disaster, namely the “unity of the arenas” strategy. What this meant was that if Israel attacked one of the members of Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, the others would come to its assistance, effectively surrounding Israel with a ring of fire. When Hezbollah opened a front against Israel on October 8, 2023, it was mainly to bolster this strategy after the Hamas attack of October 7, even though the risks were high that Israel might not play along. Completely disregarded by the party was squaring this act of war with the Lebanese state or the other communities. With supreme arrogance and recklessness, Hezbollah carried Lebanon into a conflict which it knew the country, still reeling from the economic collapse of 2019–2020, could not sustain. The Israelis accepted a low-level confrontation for almost a year, until they hit Hezbollah with tremendous violence, showing that the deterrence equation on which Hezbollah and Iran had relied was largely inadequate.
Since then, the Israelis have engaged in the systematic destruction of mostly Shiite areas, along the lines of what they did to Gaza in the past year. They have annihilated Shiite centers throughout Lebanon, killed Hezbollah’s charismatic leader and his likely successor, dislocated the Shiite community, with some 1.2 million displaced, destroyed many of the institutions that bound it together, and have completely altered the environment in which Hezbollah exercised its authority. It may take decades for the Shiite community to recover from the devastation it is now facing. Even though Hezbollah still has thousands of combatants, and the support of a large community, it seems highly improbable, not to say impossible, that it will be able to engage in any kind of effective military activity against Israel for years to come, since the cost of the Israeli onslaught has been so incredibly high.
Hezbollah will be unable to return to the status quo ante of October 8 after the Lebanon war ends, even assuming it ends in a clear way. The other sectarian communities appear to be no longer willing to bend to the party’s dictates, the horrific human cost to the Shiite community will mean that much of the party’s attention in the coming years will be focused on managing and reviving communal affairs, and the latter will impose on Hezbollah a new relationship with the state, which alone may be expected to bring in the vast sums of money needed to rebuild Shiite areas.
Some political leaders have indicated that Hezbollah may be forced to engage in a dialogue on its weapons, something it has resisted doing until now. That’s far from certain as the party continues to show resilience in combating Israel in southern Lebanon. But if some sort of international agreement is imposed on Lebanon, with the Lebanese army given the latitude to implement Resolution 1701, the party may face the prospect of either having to accept such a settlement in all its characteristics, or entering into a confrontation with the army, any international force backing it, and the other sectarian communities, who want nothing more than to see Hezbollah disarmed and its weapons integrated into the state.
Is such an outcome likely? Will it represent a moment of truth for the Shiites, in the same way that previous communal cataclysms represented nemesis for the hubris of the Sunnis, Druze, and Maronites? Will it bring Shiites back to the state? Only time will tell, but Hezbollah may have to accept that if it continues to ignore the sectarian rules of the game, the blowback might be severe, with Shiites increasingly isolated at a time when their community is most dependent on the goodwill of fellow Lebanese.
