Why the truth of Hezbollah’s origins matter

Our media and leaders are doing the world a disservice by obscuring the complicated history of Lebanon and Iran’s role in the Middle East

One of the most repeated and yet most nefarious statements of misinformation in the coverage of Israel’s current war against Hezbollah goes as follows: “Hezbollah was founded, with help from Iran, to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon that began in 1982 during the country’s civil war.” Or, as the foreign correspondent and Atlantic contributor Kim Ghattas told Fareed Zakaria, “what Israel is trying to do today is destroy a problem that it helped create when it invaded in 1982. It was in the wake of that invasion that Hezbollah was born.”

This claim – that Hezbollah is a ‘resistance organization’ created in reaction to the Jewish attack on Lebanon – is uncomplicated, easy to repeat, and false. Like most successful lies, it has an element of the truth in it, but twists that truth towards a narrative that serves the weaver. Given that we can only expect that narrative to become more prevalent the deeper Israel gets into this current conflict against Hezbollah, I believe it is important to present a historical view, a more complicated one, grounded in a comprehensive history of the region. (Since this piece may be slightly longer than normal, feel free to jump to the end for a summary you may find useful.)

It is helpful to begin the history with the fact that there never really was a Lebanon until the French made it so. Lebanon – along with Syria, Iraq, and Palestine – were born as countries with borders and a flag after the victory of the British and French led-allies in World War I, carved by the agreement between Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot. The implications, when it came to Lebanon, were complex: an amalgam of communities that historically were at odds with each other (Christians, Druze, Sunni and Shia Muslims) were now all smashed together into one political system and told to behave. For a time, Pan-Arabists in Lebanon tried to unite the people around a single Arab identity, but old conflicts ran deep.

It did not hold. Almost from the start, the different tribes and ethnic groups sought autonomy and were willing to fight for it. The conflict became a full-throated civil war in 1975, leading to the deaths of approximately 150,000 people and the emigration of over a million people from their ancestral lands, now considered ‘Lebanese.’

(An aside, civil wars between ethnic groups when many die and one side wins and millions leave their homes to start somewhere else anew are a standard not only in the Middle East; if only the world viewed the conflict between Jews and Arabs in 1948 as a civil war, perhaps we would be better suited to solve it.)

One of the parties in the Lebanese civil war were the Shia Muslims, at the time organized under a movement named Amal. Due to geography and historical enmity, Amal’s greatest enemy were the Sunni Muslims – not the Jews, and certainly not Israel, which had an armistice with Lebanon at the time. Things changed for the Shia when Yasser Arafat and the mainly Sunni Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) moved to Lebanon from Jordan after being defeated by the Hashemites in the Jordanian Civil War. They also changed for Israel: the PLO promptly began attacking Israel across the Lebanese border, and in doing so motivated Menachem Begin’s government to decide to respond militarily in what became known as the first Lebanese War.

While most Israelis initially supported Israel’s 1982 military operation to secure its northern border from missile attacks, the expansion of the war by then-Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon and most particularly his support for the Christian forces who carried out the massacres of Sabra and Shatila transformed the war into a tragedy for both Israel and the majority of the people living in Lebanon. For the Shia, on the other hand, it began as a tragedy and turned into an opportunity. In addition to seeing their traditional enemies challenged by a more powerful foe (Israel), the Shia drew inspiration from the Shia Islamic revolution in Iran and reimagined themselves as potential victors in their civil war.

Literally feeling that God was on their side, the more religiously and politically fervent Shia broke from Amal and founded the Party of God – Hezbollah – as a means of further aligning with the reborn Iran and expanding the efforts of the Islamic Republic to bring about the messianic age. As the historian Augustus Richart Norton – not a fan of Israel, I should emphasize – wrote in his Short History of Hezbollah, “Even if Israel had not launched its invasion of southern Lebanon of 1982, the young would-be revolutionaries among the Shia would have pursued their path of emulating Iran’s Islamic revolution.”

So yes, Israel definitely had a role in this multiparty drama, but to pin Hezbollah’s existence on Israel is the worst type of Orientalism, denying not only the aspirations and agency of the peoples of the Middle East, but also erasing the complex history of the peoples corralled into what we call Lebanon today. 

There is no doubt that Israel’s invasion tipped the scales towards Hezbollah’s rise to power: by fighting the Sunni, Israel became their enemy’s enemy. This complementarity explains why Hezbollah’s first major military operations were not against the Israelis but rather against the French and Americans, killing hundreds of service members in the name of the Ayatollah’s revolution in Iran. It was only later that Hezbollah turned its attention to Israel, bolstering its position through an alliance with the Syrian dictator Hafiz al-Assad, a member of the Shia Twelver sect known as Alawites, whose forces occupied Lebanon until 2005.

Which brings us full circle to today. When Israel left Lebanon in 2000, ending its military occupation of the security zone along its border with the confirmation of the United Nations, Syria stayed. No one in the UN complained. Hezbollah’s ongoing attacks on Israel led to a Second Lebanese War, which ended in a political agreement summarized by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 calling for a withdrawal of Hezbollah forces from Israel’s border up to the Litani river. Yet despite the resolution, and the peacekeeping troops the UN deployed, Hezbollah remained and rearmed. And as the Shia-aligned Syrians fell into hard times with their own civil war, Iran stepped up its support: funding and arming Hezbollah to fight to keep the Assad family in power in Syria, and supporting both outposts of its empire so long as they swore fealty to the Supreme Ruler in Iran.

Which is why the solution to the challenge of Lebanon should reflect the historical reality: Lebanon has been the victim of imperialism, created by the Western Empires as a spoil and then ransacked and roped into the Islamic Imperialist push to spread the Khomeinist Revolution. Israel is, at best, a side character in this drama, one with albeit a major influence in a certain chapter, but with little influence on the civil strife wracking the society and weakening it to the point where it is no more than a vassal state of the Islamic Republic.

I believe that once we hold that complexity in mind, we can more easily see potential solutions to the challenges facing the residents of the imperial colony of Lebanon, and strategies for Israel to achieve the peaceful northern border it seeks. I would summarize these as follows:

1. Lebanon has no more a reason to continue to exist than did Yugoslavia. By smashing together so many different ancient peoples with conflicting aspirations the Europeans guaranteed strife. By continuing to imagine Lebanon as a coherent State we opened the door to first Syrian and now Iranian control. For there to be peace, the ancient peoples of Lebanon should be granted the right to self-determination.
2. Iran has had far more influence than Israel ever had on Lebanon, and it should be held to account. It has the blood of the Lebanese and the Syrian people on its hands, and we should never forget their direct intervention in other murderous attacks around the world. So long as the Islamic Imperialist aspiration is not defeated, the regime will continue to export its supremacist ideology and fan the flames of war.
3. Hezbollah must be thought of as part and parcel of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), no more and no less. We see this in the regularity in which IRGC generals meet with – and are assassinated alongside – Hezbollah leadership. To present Hezbollah as Lebanese as opposed to the vanguard of the (Iranian) Islamic Empire obscures their identity and is an insult to the majority of the people living in Lebanon who aren’t Shia.
4. For Israel to achieve peace along its northern border, the solution lies in Iran, not Lebanon. If the great powers want to enforce UNSC 1701 and ensure stability on the banks of the Mediterranean, they must act to stop Iran’s brazen imperialism. Recognizing that Iran’s territorial ambitions run in direct contradiction to the UN Charter is a crucial first step, and Israel and its allies should never allow the world to forget the poisonous role Iranian colonialism plays in fomenting violence across the world.

I can understand why Kim Ghattas and other journalists with families in the Middle East may seek to obscure this history and place the blame on Israel: their lives and the lives of their family members are literally at risk if they tell the truth. Iran has no problem executing people who oppose their regime. But that does not absolve the editors of the world’s major news sources from accurately framing the history of this conflict. It does not absolve the leaders of the countries majorly responsible for this mess – France and the UK – from their responsibility to clean it up by confronting the main party currently fanning the flames: Iran. Until Iran is contained within its borders, and the ancient peoples of the Levant have the right to self-determination without foreign interference, there will be war.

As promised, a summary of this more holistic view of the Lebanese challenge: 

1. Lebanon is a colonial fiction without an ancient identity or national imagination, a territory created by the French and British without regard to the interethnic tensions that preexisted in the region. Much like Yugoslavia.
2. The Shia Muslims were one of the ethnic groups mashed together by the imperialists, and they drew inspiration from the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978 to found Hezbollah with Iranian support to fight for power and security during a brutal Lebanese civil war.
3. Lebanon was mired in a civil war well before Israel invaded in 1982 to establish a security zone along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. The Shia initially found common cause with Israel because they shared a common enemy: the Sunni.
4. Hezbollah took advantage of the Israeli occupation of the South to band together with the Syrian occupation of the rest of Lebanon, both receiving financial and military support from their Shia allies in Iran.
5. After Israel withdrew – and the UN confirmed the withdrawal and declared a demilitarized zone in the South of Lebanon – Hezbollah upped its game, working closely with the still-occupying Syrians, financed by Iran to build up a forward base against Israel in the very same territory the UN was supposedly peacekeeping.
6. The current war in Lebanon is an actualization of this Iranian Imperialist strategy, and a failure of the UN to secure its member states.
7. Israel is not at war against Lebanon, and the Lebanese people are the victims of Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic’s imperialist ambitions to control the region.

Until the world works together to end Islamic imperialism, and free the ancient peoples living in the territory now called Lebanon from their grip, there will be war.