Hezbollah: How Iran got a bridgehead in Lebanon

Hezbollah launched a deadly drone strike on an Israeli military base near Binyamina, killing four soldiers and injuring over 60 others, including seven critically, on October 13, 2024. Israel had recently eliminated Hassan Nasarallah, who had been the face of Hezbollah for more than three decades now, in heavy bombardment at Dahieh, a Shia Muslim-dominated suburb south of Beirut.

Hezbollah has a Janus-faced existence as a political party in Lebanon and an internationally designated terrorist organisation. It describes itself as a resistance group of Shia Muslims of Lebanon, though civil war had ceased in that country way back in 1990, followed by the unilateral and complete withdrawal of the Israel Defence Force from Lebanese soil on May 24, 2000.

Last year, when Hamas launched a multi-pronged attack on Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023, Hezbollah immediately hailed the cruel operation codenamed “Al Aqsa Flood” in glorious terms. “Rifle of Resistance is the only option in confronting the occupation,” it had stated in its congratulatory message and called for united action by the Arab and Islamic community against Israel.

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The Lebanese politicians, apprehensive that Hezbollah’s adventurism could draw Lebanon into the orbit of war again, had advised the Shia body to keep away from muscle flexing. Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Foreign Minister Adallah Bou Habib had clarified that Lebanon did not want to be involved in the war between Israel and Hamas.

Public opinion in Lebanon was against being embroiled into the war due to Hezbollah’s bellicose stance. Prime Minister Mikati deplored, in a controversial statement, that the decisions of war and peace were not in the hands of his government. Fadi Karam, MP, Lebanese Forces Party, completed the statement by saying that the decision on war (in Lebanon) was in the hands of Iran. Prominent Shia opinion in Lebanon, more diverse than one generally thinks, also came out against Hezbollah’s position. These included the Taharror Movement, which opposes both Hezbollah and Amal, the two mainstream political parties of the Shias in Lebanon.

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Despite these criticisms, Hezbollah started targeting Israeli targets from southern Lebanon. Soon it came to notice that they had been avoiding Shia habitations but rather choosing Christian, Sunni, and Druze areas for launching their rocket attacks, which led to retaliatory firing from the Israeli Defence Forces on those targets. The people of those villages/towns had to flee from their houses to escape retaliatory firing. The discovery of rocket launchers a few days after Christmas in the Christian majority town of Rmeish, on the Lebanon-Israel border created a furore.

As Hezbollah was too clever by half, its enterprise backfired on itself. On July 27, a heavy Hezbollah rocket landed in a Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights region, killing 12 children and young people playing football, whereas around 30 more were wounded. The Druze are an eclectic and mysterious sect of Islam found in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, etc. Golan Heights is a territory that Israel wrested from Syria during the Six Day War, 1967. Whereas initially Hezbollah had claimed credit for attacking an Israeli army base in proximity, it washed off its hand from the incident when the news of the disaster trickled in. Since it was a Falaq-1 rocket, of Iranian origin, with a 53-kilogram warhead, Hezbollah’s hand could not remain hidden. The Majdal Shams incident provoked Israel to act decisively against Hezbollah in the current conflict.

Hezbollah refuses to settle down as a political party in Lebanon, where it has been fighting both parliamentary and municipal elections successfully since 1992. The biggest achievement of the Lebanese civil war (1975–90) was retaining the governance/representative structure without the state going to the seeds. Under an unwritten agreement going back to 1943, multi-religion Lebanon has a Maronite Christian President, a Sunni Muslim Prime Minister, and a Shia Speaker of the Parliament. Admittedly, the Shias do not enjoy executive power or authority comparable to the Christian or Sunni community, despite allegedly being the single largest community. This might also explain why Hezbollah appears reluctant to give up war as an option for peace. However, on the other hand, war with Israel could hardly be converted into any achievement for Hezbollah, not counting though money and munitions from Tehran that might flow in increased volume.

The reason could be found in history, which the organisation holds close to its heart. There is a dichotomy about the origin of Hezbollah, ideological and circumstantial. While it is true that Hezbollah arose as a resistance force in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (1982), it is equally true that it was incubated by the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution and fostered by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) of Iran. “Even if Israel had not launched its invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982," says A R Norton in his eminently readable Hezbollah: A Short History (2014), “the young would-be revolutionaries among Shi’a would have pursued their path of emulating Iran’s Islamic Revolution” (P. 33).

Ali Akbar Mohtashmipur, Iran’s ambassador to Syria in the early 1980s, played an important role in incubating Hezbollah. While initially Israel was clueless about the origin of Hezbollah, they finally zeroed in on Mohtashmipur as its brainchild. In 1984, Israel tried to kill Mohtashmipur at his embassy office in Damascus with a parcel bomb, which, though failed in its purpose, left the Iranian Ambassador maimed. It took the Covid pandemic to sweep Mohtashmipur away almost four decades later.

Though Hafez al-Assad, a secular Arab, initially had no interest in Mohtashmipur’s Islamic project, he later had a change of mind after facing military reverses in the civil war of Lebanon, informs Ronen Bergman in his seminal book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (2018). After the Israel Air Force dealt an unexpectedly high lethal blow to the famed Syrian Air Force in Beqaa Valley in Lebanon on June 9, 1982 (Operation Mole Cricket 19), al-Assad agreed to the formation of Hezbollah that would act as a blood sucker for Israel. “Assad Senior,” Meir Dagan, the late Director General of Mossad, used to say, “was to my [his] great regret, a clever man. He built up an apparatus for squeezing the blood of Israel without paying a penny”.

Hezbollah was a product of Lebanon of the 1980s, torn by the civil war (1975–90), which upset the delicate communal balance of that Levantine country between the Christians and Muslims. “By the 1970s”, says Thomas Friedman (1989), “rapid demographic growth among Lebanon’s Muslims had turned Lebanon upside down. The Christians had shrunk to a little more than one-third of the population, and Muslims and Druse had grown to roughly two-thirds, with Shiites becoming the single largest community. When the Muslims demanded that political reforms be instituted to give them a greater share in power by strengthening the role of Muslim Prime Minister, the Maronites resisted.

They wanted Lebanon on its original terms or none at all. In order to support status quo, the Maronites formed private armies. Most notable among them were the Phalangist militia, originally founded by Pierre Gemayel and later led by his son Bashir, and the Tiger militia, founded by former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun and later by his son Danny; the Lebanese Muslims and Druse established similar private armies to enforce their desire for change” (From Beirut to Jerusalem, P. 13).

The influx of the Palestinian refugees, expelled from Jordan in 1970, upset the applecart of Lebanon’s fractured demography. It was one of the direct contributing factors of the Lebanese civil war. King Hussein was compelled to take an extreme step after he found the armed cadre of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, were calling for his dethronement and establishment of a republic. He thus got rid of the ungrateful guests, living in Jordan since the West Bank and Gaza fell under Israeli occupation in 1967. Jordan’s relief, however, turned into Lebanon’s headache. Thousands of armed Palestinian guerrillas moved to Lebanon, where the Palestine Liberation Organisation—informs A R Norton—would challenge the authority of the Beirut government and establish a virtual state-within-state encompassing west Beirut and much of southern Lebanon (Hezbollah: A Short History, P. 14).

Musa al-Sadr, the most charismatic Shia cleric of Lebanon in the 1960s and 70s, who mysteriously disappeared from Tripoli (Libya) in 1978 and was believed to have been eliminated by Muammar Gaddafi’s henchmen, was against the armed PLO operatives setting up a state within the state in Lebanon, although sympathetic to the Palestinian issue in principle.

This dichotomous attitude towards the Palestine issue was characteristic of even Hezbollah (estd. 1982). Hezbollah has always displayed a complex attitude towards the Palestinian problem. As a Shia group of Lebanon, which is a sovereign country, it could neither identify completely itself with Palestinians who are Sunnis from the West Bank and Gaza (or Israel proper), but as fellow Arabs it could not completely dissociate from their struggle either. Further, it could not abandon its image of a resistance group and loathe settling down as a parliamentary/municipal political party.

The US Library of Congress publication Lebanon: A Country Study (1987) attributes the establishment of Hezbollah to the labours of Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Lebanese Shia cleric educated in Najaf, Iraq. It reports that in 1987, Hezbollah followed strictly “the theological line of Iran’s Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini and called for the establishment in Lebanon of Islamic rule modelled on that of Iran” (P. 162). Hezbollah, at its foundational stage, earned international notoriety in 1983 when press reports linked it to attacks against the United States and French facilities in Lebanon, to the abduction of foreigners, and to the hijacking of aircraft, though the Hezbollah spokesperson denied any involvement in those anti-American attacks (P. 162).

Eitan Azani, in his detailed work, Hezbollah: The Party of God—From Revolution to Institutionalisation (2009), informs that Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (1982) shook the Lebanese Shia community and sparked a poignant internal debate. This debate raged between followers of the pan-Islamic approach, who approached Khomeini’s leadership and did not recognise the validity of the Lebanese state, and the Amal movement, which perceived itself as a national-secular Lebanese movement operating within the framework of the Lebanese political system.

In 1982, when Amal leader Nabih Berri (Speaker of Parliament of Lebanon since 1992 and currently the world’s longest serving head of a legislature) decided to join the Lebanese National Salvation Front, a split occurred within the ranks of Amal. His own deputy Hussein al-Musawi retired from Amal. These dissidents, in full agreement with Shia fighters and a group of young clerics who graduated from the religious seminary of Najaf, formed Hezbollah in the summer of 1982 with Iranian assistance (P. 47).

Hezbollah, though committed to Islamic rule in Lebanon, has remained firmly with the Ba’athist Socialist regime of al-Assads through thick and thin. The civil war in Syria (2011-20), a Sunni majority country, ruled by a clique of Alawite minority, a splinter group of Shias, put a strain on Hezbollah’s Islamist commitments.

As the civil war in Syria progressed, opposition to al-Assad’s regime hardened on sectarian lines. Both Al-Qaeda and ISIS (Islamic State/Daesh), committed to pan-Islamism (Sunni), became active in Syria. In June 2014, ISIS (Islamic State/Daesh), after seizing vast territories in Syria (in addition to neighbouring Iraq), declared a caliphate with its capital at Raqqah. Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia came to the support of al-Assad’s regime against the assaults of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The Sunni fundamentalists who wanted to import ISIS-style rule in Lebanon were obviously angered by Hezbollah putting sectarianism above pan-Islamism. Hezbollah acted proactively to prevent the infusion of ISIS’ and its Syrian subsidiary, Nusra Front’s, ideology into Lebanon. The secret of secular Syria and Islamist Hezbollah is obviously that al-Assads belong to the Alawi splinter sect of Shias.

Hezbollah, despite its support for the Palestine cause, is careful to craft a Shia bridge spanning across Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut, much to the chagrin of the Sunni Arab countries. With the departure of Nassarallah and several top functionaries of Hezbollah, a new alignment might take shape.

The writer is author of the book ‘The Microphone Men: How Orators Created a Modern India’ (2019) and an independent researcher based in New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.