During the past month, Israel has surprised Hezbollah—along with Iran, its sponsor, and the rest of the world—with several high-profile intelligence and military successes. A technically sophisticated sabotage of Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies enabled Israel to cripple the organization’s communications network. What’s more, Israel claims that its airstrikes have destroyed a significant portion of Hezbollah’s missile stockpiles, which had been intended to deter another destructive cross-border war. And perhaps most consequentially, a broad Israeli assassination campaign has wiped out much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, including its popular and charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Israel’s tactical accomplishments in Lebanon have been widely acknowledged. Yet many observers have been puzzled by the absence of any practical Israeli plan for ending the conflict, particularly one that might lead to a lasting political settlement. The apparent disjunction between means and ends is especially notable given the steep toll that Israel’s recent military successes have exacted on Lebanon’s Shiite communities. Much as Israel’s efforts to eliminate Hamas have been ruinous for Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Israel appears to be conducting its operations in Lebanon with little concern for the harm to civilian populations or infrastructure. Entire Shiite towns and neighborhoods have been destroyed, and according to the Lebanese health ministry, 127 children and 261 women were killed during the first five weeks of the recent Israeli campaign. In Lebanon as in Gaza—albeit on a lesser scale, so far—Israel appears to have settled on a strategy of collective punishment that holds civilian populations responsible for the actions of the militant groups that operate in their midst.
The necessity of a plan for “the day after” the military campaigns end has been a consistent theme of American warnings to Israel—and especially to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu—for more than a year. In October of last year, in a speech in Tel Aviv, Joe Biden warned Israel’s leaders not to repeat the errors that Washington made during the “war on terror” and the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States,” Biden said. “While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” In his speech, Biden did not specify which mistakes he meant. But he gave indications by reminding his Israeli audience that “the vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas” and by arguing that wartime decisions require “clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.” The message was clear, if not quite explicit: without a careful plan for the aftermath, even an overwhelming military success can easily lead to chaos, just as it did for the United States in Iraq.
Biden, however, was missing the point. Netanyahu does not need a plan to avoid chaos, because chaos is his plan. The past month in Lebanon, like the past year in Gaza, has demonstrated that Israel’s leaders have no idealistic pretensions about establishing a new political order in Lebanon or in the Strip. They are not trying to plant the seeds of democracy or to remake the Middle East. For an Israeli state that rejects Palestinian self-determination and feels unconstrained by its Western allies—and particularly for Netanyahu, who is determined to protect his domestic political power at any cost—the results of the American invasion of Iraq are less a warning than a model. Netanyahu appears convinced that his country’s security, along with his own political survival, depends on prolonging the military offensives and keeping both Gaza and Lebanon ungovernable, and therefore acquiescent.
Yet there are reasons to think that this goal, and the tactics and strategies Israel has been using to achieve it, will work less well in Lebanon than they have so far in Gaza. For all their similarities, Hezbollah is not Hamas. The former is a larger organization than the latter, with broader popular support, more resilient networks, and a better chance of recovering from its losses. And even though Israel is currently facing no serious check on its expansionist impulses in the West Bank—should Donald Trump become president again, the United States might well endorse Israel’s illegal settlements, or even its annexation of some Palestinian territories—international diplomacy still has some purchase in Lebanon.
A CAMPAIGN OF CHAOS
The bleakness of the current situation in Lebanon should not be underestimated. Before the latest Israeli military campaign, the country was already in the midst of a long economic meltdown, which saw its GDP cut in half over the past five years. By October 20, roughly a month after the start of the recent offensive, an estimated 809,000 people in Lebanon had been internally displaced by the fighting. The United Nations estimates that an additional 425,000 people crossed the border into war-ravaged Syria. According to UNICEF, the Israeli campaign has also destroyed at least 28 water facilities, which serve more than 360,000 people. The scale of the destruction is making life unsustainable in many parts of the country, and has led Imran Riza, the UN’s deputy special coordinator for Lebanon, to warn that Lebanon “risks falling off a humanitarian cliff.”
This widespread destruction is not a mere byproduct or unintended consequence of Israel’s attacks against Hezbollah. It is, rather, part of a broad campaign whose central goal is to exacerbate internal Lebanese tensions, a campaign that has been obscured by the technical wizardry of Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks and its well-publicized assassinations of Hezbollah leaders. The systematic destruction in South Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut suggests that Israel hopes to displace more than a million Lebanese Shiites, with the ultimate aim of forcing Lebanese social tensions to the breaking point.
It is for this reason that Netanyahu, in early October, called on “Christians, Druze, Muslims Sunni and Shia” to stand up to Hezbollah and “take your country back.” Netanyahu is not so naive that he expects a Lebanese uprising against Hezbollah. But he understands that blaming the organization for Israel’s attacks will likely increase tensions in Lebanon, which Netanyahu expects will act like a sponge to absorb future threats against his country.
A similar logic explains why Israel has taken pains to target Lebanese Shiite towns within regions that are predominantly Christian or Druze, as well as Shiite refugees seeking shelter in Christian, Sunni, and Druze areas. The attacks have encouraged the majorities in those regions to see the Shiites as a threat to their safety, feeding grievances and hostilities that have simmered for decades. In both cases, the military campaigns have had little security or military significance, since they tend to target lower-ranking Hezbollah militants. Yet the attacks, which often kill scores of civilians, have successfully increased intercommunal tensions and, in some cases, have even led to the expulsion of Shiites.
Israel’s campaign has also put severe pressure on the Lebanese government. In the months before the recent escalation of the conflict, the government’s role in reconstruction and refugee relief was a contentious matter in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s foes in Lebanese politics believed that the organization, along with Iran, was responsible for initiating the conflict last year and therefore should foot the bill for reconstruction. As Israel destroys more and more Lebanese infrastructure, this argument has the potential to produce a full-blown domestic crisis. Should Iran successfully avoid paying for reconstruction, for instance, Hezbollah’s political opponents might try to block what little domestic government spending is available. The resulting stalemate could very well lead to violence. On the other hand, in the unlikely event that Iran does get involved with reconstruction, it will surely demand a political price that would work to the advantage of Hezbollah and its allies.
LEBANON IS NOT GAZA
Israel’s strategy of inflicting collective punishment on an entire population as a means of ensuring acquiescence is hardly without precedent. Syria, Lebanon’s neighbor, provides an example of how effective this brutal tactic can be. During the recent civil war in his country, President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Iran and Russia, relentlessly bombed entire cities in a campaign that killed thousands and displaced millions. Assad’s father had inflicted a similar punishment after an uprising in the 1980s, and although his actions led to international isolation and sanctions, they also afforded the Assad regime decades of peace.
Thanks to its Western allies, Israel will probably not have to worry about diplomatic consequences for its campaign of collective violence in Lebanon. Even if a new agreement based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701 is put in place to end the current conflict—the resolution established a buffer zone where no forces except the Lebanese military and UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force, are supposed to be allowed—the repercussions of the campaign will almost certainly fall most heavily on Lebanon’s fractured society.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that Israel’s plan to put chaos to productive use in Lebanon might not succeed in the way Netanyahu hopes. For one thing, it seems clear that Iran is committed to funding and maintaining Hezbollah, even in the face of growing internal Lebanese pressure to disarm the organization. Israeli strikes within Iran are unlikely to change this. In fact, the more humiliated and insecure Iran becomes, the more likely the regime in Tehran will see Hezbollah as a necessary bulwark against Israel, especially if the organization manages to restore Iran’s trust in its capabilities.
For another thing, it seems clear that the momentum of Israel’s campaign in Lebanon is slowing. Although Hezbollah lost its secretary-general and much of its leadership, enough of the organization’s military capabilities survived that it was able to push back against Israel’s ground attacks. Dozens of Israeli soldiers and officers have been killed or injured, which has helped morale among Hezbollah’s militants, and the organization has been able to reconstitute some of its communications networks. In the past weeks, Hezbollah has launched lethal attacks in Lebanon and in northern Israel, and its drones have even reached Netanyahu’s home in Caesarea. Hezbollah likely hopes that these attacks will offer some compensation for its grand failures during the past few weeks.
There are also signs that Hezbollah is already planning for its post-Nasrallah future. Unusually for a Muslim, Nasrallah was not buried immediately after his death. Instead, his body was preserved for a postwar funeral, which will likely draw crowds larger even than the ones that mourned former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005, and whose funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands. Nasrallah, the son of a vegetable street vendor, was seen by poor Shiites in Lebanon as a symbol of empowerment against both Israel’s and Lebanon’s other religious and ethnic communities. Hezbollah will likely use his funeral and his memory to reestablish itself in the political arena and to lend legitimacy to the organization’s remaining leadership, particularly Naim Qassem, the new secretary-general, who was previously Nasrallah’s deputy.
HEZBOLLAH’S FUTURE
Hezbollah can recover, but if the organization is to regain its footing, it will need to surmount three main challenges. The first is the generational shift within the organization’s ranks. Most of the leaders who have been killed in the Israeli campaign belonged to Nasrallah’s generation, which came of age in late 1970s and early 1980s. The lack of upward mobility has caused tension within the organization, and it seems probable that Israel and its allies were able to exploit those frustrations for intelligence purposes. The fact that most of the organization’s leadership, now deceased, were in their 60s, suggests a problem that Iran and the new leadership will have to deal with.
A second challenge is the internal tensions between Shiites from the Bekaa Valley and those from southern Lebanon. After the killing of Abbas al-Musawi, a former secretary-general of Hezbollah, who hailed from the country’s northeast, it fell to Nasrallah, a southerner, to manage the geographical tensions within the organization’s ranks. Although both Shiite communities are united by a shared faith and political struggle, there exist between them significant socioeconomic differences. The Bekaa Shiites tend to live in clan-based societies and are both poorer and more marginalized in national politics. Southern Lebanon, by contrast, is home to all of the country’s prominent Shiite leaders, including Qassem, the new head of Hezbollah, and Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament. The destruction of Shiite towns and cities, and the likely sectarian tensions that will follow the war, mean that the whole of the Shiite community in Lebanon will need Hezbollah’s assistance and what remains of its social institutions to provide in the absence of state capacity.
The third challenge is Hezbollah’s relationship with Iran. Although he was Lebanese, Nasrallah was in many ways an insider in Tehran. He was skilled at winning Hezbollah a significant share of financial and military resources from the Iranian regime. Now, however, in the aftermath of his death, Hezbollah may have to manage for a time with less Iranian funding, which could cause the organization to adopt a more predatory approach to the Lebanese state and its resources.
NO WAY OUT?
At times, and especially lately, it can be easy to imagine that Lebanon is forever doomed to be a pawn in the long-running conflict between Israel on the one side and Iran and Hezbollah on the other. But such a bleak outcome can still be ameliorated through inclusive diplomacy, a national dialogue, and an international commitment to rebuilding the Lebanese state. These three elements need to go hand in hand, and all of them will require a concerted effort from the United States, France, and Arab countries.
Inclusive diplomacy will ensure Iran’s cooperation, which is critical to ensure that Tehran doesn’t play a spoiler role in any transitional phase that would follow a cease-fire agreement. A national dialogue in Lebanon is needed to fill the current power vacuum, to discuss constitutional reforms that would help ensure intercommunal peace, and to establish a time frame for merging Hezbollah’s military capabilities with the Lebanese armed forces. (Such a merger, known as the National Defense Strategy, was at the center of Lebanon’s previous rounds of dialogue, and would secure the Lebanese state’s monopoly over violence.) Finally, a commitment to rebuild Lebanese state institutions and the country’s fractured economy will be necessary to implement any cease-fire deal, not least since the Lebanese armed forces have been operating in survival mode since the economic and financial meltdown began, in 2019. If the armed forces are called on to guarantee a cease-fire, they will need to be able to fund their operations, which will only be possible with the resources of a revived economy.
Without such a concentrated effort, the current trajectory of the conflict will produce further turmoil in Lebanon, as Israel continues to respond to Hezbollah attacks with disproportional violence that leads to more mass displacement. A campaign of chaos conducted under the cover of an anti-Hezbollah offensive might offer some limited political benefit to Netanyahu and his far-right government. For everyone else, however, and particularly for Lebanese civilians, it will be a disaster.
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