Hezbollah couldn't save Gaza or Lebanon: Only state-building can ensure our future

October 7 happened. Since then, Gaza has witnessed a brutal genocide which has killed over 41,000 Palestinians and indefinitely paralysed and destroyed the Strip’s economy and social fabric.

From the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure and whole neighbourhoods to the deliberate bombing of universities, schools, and hospitals, it has been a plan of erasure meant to depopulate Gaza and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population.

Benjamin Netanyahu, with full US backing and Israel’s strong integration in an international market complicit in the genocide, is aiming for a final resolution to the Palestinian question. 

Hezbollah, a Shia Islamist group with a long history of military confrontation with Israel during its occupation of Lebanon and thereafter, opened up a mild front on the southern Lebanese border on October 8, supposedly to pressure Israel into a ceasefire in Gaza. Hezbollah remained wary of an open war and preferred to keep the “rules of engagement” to a minimum, focusing on low-intensity warfare. 

Fast-forward a year and, following an exponentially expansive Israeli military campaign, Lebanon now faces a ground invasion, mass destruction, and an incredibly weakened Hezbollah. After years of economic, social, and political collapse, Lebanon may as well lose its part of its territory. It’s also incredibly divided and faces a real potential for civil war. 

What went wrong with Hezbollah? And what ought to be our next direction forward to protect our future from further collapse.

At first, Hezbollah’s “support front” on the border seemed symbolic. And one would argue Hezbollah was not interested in an escalating military front — on the contrary, it tried its best to avoid it.

Nevertheless, it simultaneously had to maintain the ideological promises it made to its local constituencies, which expected it to be up to the challenge of “resistance” against Israeli-American hegemony.

Israel did not accept symbolism. It initially started targeting middle-rank Hezbollah commanders and officials, but then went totally beyond that. 

Israel proceeded to assassinate of Hezbollah’s leading military commander Fuad Chukr on July 30; committed the pager massacre which killed 42 and injured more than 3500 persons on September 17-18; ordered an airstrike on Dahyeh which killed Radwan Forces commanders Ibrahim Akil and Ahmad Wehbe three days later. Israel's spiteful reflex culminated in the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and other senior commanders on September 27.

Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts On

In parallel, for the past two weeks, Israel has conducted a series of “air raids” in South Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut in Dahiyeh, and the Bekaa region.

The razing of whole neighbourhoods and the decimation of houses and apartment complexes left more than a thousand killed and a million people displaced. Gaza has become a model for what parts of Lebanon may look like in a few months. 

In other words, Israel exploited the opportunity to make sure Hezbollah’s symbolic entry transformed into a “real war”; it then took the “real war” to its logical conclusion.

Firstly, Israel is using massive state terrorism and collective punishment in the pursuit of making the civilian population pay the price of the war. Secondly, it is employing years-long data-collection and developed technological asymmetry to take out Hezbollah’s leadership and infrastructure. 

We can't understand the tragic product of this war without understanding Hezbollah’s strategic choices and transformed structure in the past few years.

Hezbollah as a "counter-state" project

Hezbollah’s crisis today has several components. First, after the 2006 war, it transitioned into a group which got very comfortable with authoritarian endurance.

Its primary priority focused on retaining its power grab on Lebanese politics in the pursuit of obstructing attempts to disarm it and limit its influence.

Its secondary priority was maintaining its supply line from Syria. It thus intervened to assist Bashar Al Assad in his war against the opposition — and his people — following the Syrian revolution in 2011.

The battle itself proved to affect Hezbollah's organisational and informational discipline.

Fighters and officers regularly interacted with corrupt and infiltrated Syrian and Russian intelligence and have regularly conversed about their ventures during the war, opening up a large collection of data for the Israelis and their allies.

Consequently, on the local Lebanese dimension, the interests of the organisation were naturally at odds with the quest for development, recovery, and overall social progress.

As the economic crisis hit Lebanon in 2019, it simply had no clear economic-political project, except for the need to maintain the rule of some of Lebanon's most corrupt and neoliberal leaders.

In other words, Hezbollah was and continues to bet on the weakness of Lebanon’s central government; it would prefer to coexist with an apparatus which wouldn't compete with it on matters of strategy, security, and foreign policy.

Second, Hezbollah’s organizational resilience was quite useful in raising the cost of the Israeli occupation during the 1990s. It was also important in terms of preventing an Israeli invasion in 2006.

Nevertheless, Hezbollah cannot persuasively launch an offensive war. Its victory in 2006 was based on its ability to obstruct, halt, or postpone Israel’s proactive objectives.

But Hezbollah cannot itself put forth an objective and go on the offence to implement it; this especially applies to the front it opened on October 8, which could not credibly sustain a serious exchange with exponentially aggressive Israeli attacks. 

Finally, Hezbollah had to balance between its ideological promises and its quest for stable, pragmatic endurance. Hence, it thought Israel would respect the “rules of engagement” it repeatedly announced.

But Netanyahu read Hezbollah's intervention as an opportunity to score a political victory of some sort amid continuous failure in Gaza. This ranges from returning the residents of the north back home to heavily damaging Hezbollah’s military capacity and chain of command.

Defeat, self-critique, and state-building 

Amid a war practically killing what’s left of our country, we are told, by many, that it’s not “the time” to speak politics. But politics is not about moral posturing, and moral posturing of other kinds does not save our country.

Politics, as a tool which first attempts to imagine the alternative to the destructive status quo we’ve reached, and then locates the necessary partners to move in that direction, is the only solution to our predicament in Lebanon. 

Palestine cannot be saved amid a genocide, or liberated amid colonial apartheid, via a regional war.

Lebanon cannot be protected by an ideological force which is strong enough to maintain organisational resilience but too weak to face a brutal genocidal and technological regional power.

The 2006 war, in which Hezbollah and Israel faced off for over a month, took place 18 years ago — it was a catastrophic political defeat for Israel.

It couldn’t dismantle Hezbollah or reoccupy South Lebanon. 18 years later, the world has changed, and the technological gap between Israel and Hezbollah, fueled by the group’s lack of discipline during the Syrian civil war, has led to a series of fatal blows.

Only institutional state-building, which advances the standing of our citizens and economy and invests in our society’s capacity to compete in a brutally competitive international market, can withstand neocolonial aggression and war. 

More immediately in the case of Lebanon, this first necessitates letting the Lebanese government decide on a unified ceiling to speed up negotiations and preserve what’s left of our standing.

Eventually, this ought to be accompanied by abandoning the “militia model” maintained by Hezbollah for too long, commencing with an economic recovery, returning back to the democratic process, and pursuing national salvation. 

In 1968, Syrian Marxist philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm released a book titled Self-Criticism After the Defeat to address the conditions which produced the defeat of the Arab regimes facing Israel during the 1967 “Six-Day War”.

Today, in 2024, we need a new wave of self-criticism after acknowledging yet another defeat. Its first component ought to address the crisis of Islamism, as a chauvinistic and culturalist political current constantly reproduced in the face of Zionist settler-colonialism. Its second component ought to challenge the local dominance of Iran-backed paramilitary groups, which obstruct the establishment of states capable of building a real deterrence against Israeli aggression. 

Our criticism of Hezbollah can’t be a sectarian response, as we’ve seen from some of the group’s Lebanese adversaries, nor can it ignore the threat of Israel’s ground invasion. Popular resistance against such a threat, from anyone with the capacity, is a must today. But we need to think of the future. 

Karim Safieddine is a political writer based in Lebanon.

Follow him on Twitter: @safieddine00

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@alaraby.co.uk

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff, or the author's employer.