By Brian Stewart
Thursday, April 16, 2026
In the modern Middle East, if any group could claim the
mantle of revolutionary Islam, it is Hezbollah. And no country, with the
exception of Syria and Iran itself, has suffered more from the Iranian
Revolution than Lebanon, where Hezbollah, the Party of God, operates outside
state control. The story of Hezbollah’s rise is central to understanding
Lebanon’s current plight, in which decisions of war and peace are made by a
fanatical and bellicose militia rather than the sovereign state. Its fall would
not only restore Lebanon to its full stature but, by virtue of Lebanon’s
position as the strategic gate to the Levant, restore balance to the region as
a whole.
It is often forgotten that the war provoked by Hamas’s
murderous assault on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, was joined one day
later by Iran’s other jihadist surrogate on the Mediterranean. On October 8,
while Hamas continued to wreak havoc against Israeli civilians in the Gaza
envelope, Hezbollah launched a volley of rockets into northern Israel. In
conflict with Israel since the group was founded nearly half a century ago,
Hezbollah made a fateful decision to strike at the Jewish state in its hour of
maximum danger.
The rapid deployment of two U.S. carrier strike groups to
the Eastern Mediterranean along with three Israel Defense Forces brigades to
Israel’s north helped stave off a larger conflagration. A scenario in which
Hezbollah had mounted a full ground campaign to complement the Hamas onslaught
in the south would have given the war a truly existential dimension — a
reasonable fear anyway, given the long-standing ambition of Israel’s enemies to
destroy it. Although Hezbollah’s leaders (or their Iranian masters) were
dissuaded from launching an all-out assault, they maintained periodic rocket
barrages across Israel’s borders, ensuring that the furies of war would burn
the ground in Beirut and across Lebanon’s Shiite heartland for years to come.
Beginning on October 8, Israel made a series of audacious
and successful wagers on economizing violence: though it was tempted to strike
Hezbollah first to eliminate the threat from its more formidable foe, Israel
decided to focus on Hamas in Gaza. When it eventually turned back to the north,
the Party of God did not fare well in its skirmishes with Israeli power. In
September 2024, in a move since nicknamed “Operation Grim Beeper,” Israel
eliminated the Hezbollah leadership in Dahiya, the part of southern Beirut
where the group is headquartered. Thousands of Hezbollah operatives were taken
out of action in one fell swoop by means of exploding pagers. The terror
group’s fearsome arsenal, in excess of 100,000 rockets and missiles, has been
relentlessly attacked and is now dramatically reduced. A substantial fraction
of Hezbollah’s reserve power has been laid to waste.
Despite these enormous and bloody setbacks, it is not
evident that Hezbollah has lost popular support among the Shiite community of
Lebanon, and it has certainly not lost its appetite for violence. On March 2,
2026, a few days after the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in
U.S.-Israeli strikes on Tehran, Hezbollah launched missiles and drones at
Israel. As a result, Lebanon has once more begun to suffer the effects of
military retaliation brought on by the decisions made by the terrorist organization
operating freely within it.
Before the fragile cease-fire agreement, there were
strong indications that Israel was poised to invade Lebanon and lay siege to
the Iranian proxy. Should Israel manage to establish a “security zone,”
clearing Hezbollah out of territory south of the Litani River, the Shiite
militia has made clear that confrontation with the Lebanese state will be
“inevitable.” “The government in Lebanon is no longer fit to run the country,”
said Mahmoud Qamati, deputy head of Hezbollah’s political council. To deter
their compatriots from collaborating with a foreign occupier, Hezbollah has
threatened to “hang them like Vichy.”
For years, in Israel’s towns and kibbutzim along the
border with Lebanon and as far south as Tel Aviv, its second-most-populous
city, people have lived in the shadow of Hezbollah. Its formidable arsenal of
rockets and missiles has disrupted Israel’s economy and civil society, tingeing
normal life with an ever-present threat. Israel’s patience with Hezbollah has
run out.
The war to extinguish Israel’s nationhood instantly
shattered Israel’s deterrence — a near-fatal wound in a region as treacherous
as the Fertile Crescent. But now that precious asset has been painstakingly
restored, and it is the Iranian axis that is nursing its wounds. At this
strategically plastic moment, the Israeli governing class has resolved to
confront what remains of the Hezbollah menace in the hopes of uprooting it from
Lebanon for good. The bounty that once sustained the Party of God may now belong
to an irretrievable past, and thus, for the first time, it will be forced to
expend military capital without the prospect of replenishment. But after years
spent as complicit spectators in their own national drama, the Lebanese people
remain Hezbollah’s most fearsome enemy and must ultimately decide its fate.
***
In Lebanon, as in much of the Sunni-dominated Arab world,
the Shiites long constituted a despised underclass — one of the “compact
communities” in the Levant and the Gulf that the ruling classes could repress
with impunity. Relegated to the margins of Lebanese society, not least in
cosmopolitan Beirut, these Shiite stepchildren in the capital’s southern
suburbs discovered a sense of self-confidence from the example of their
brethren in Iran, who had pulled off an improbable revolution and infused their
common faith with muscle and sinew.
In 1979, Iran staged a revolution that possessed the
ideological potential of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the first time
in history that an Islamist clique had taken control of a state and put its
vast resources in service of undermining the international system. For nearly a
half century, the Islamic Revolution has spurred sectarian violence, from the
Middle East to the Indian subcontinent.
After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed himself a
supreme leader, a faqih, his theocratic regime summoned those excluded
from Arab politics to make a new bid for power, and Hezbollah, in answering
this call, was the most significant and lasting result. The Shiites of Lebanon,
seeing the “armed imam” as their great avenger, were suddenly done with
quiescence. “The symbols and rituals of Shiism,” the Lebanese scholar Fouad
Ajami wrote in Beirut: City of Regrets, “once invitations to submission,
had been reinterpreted, turned to an ethos of martyrdom and zeal.”
In the early 1980s, in the Bekaa Valley east of Beirut,
zealous Shiite militias bent on martyrdom officially coalesced into Hezbollah
and, through Syria, drew extensive Iranian support in the form of Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps operatives, clerical guides, and military armaments.
In the tumult of a country at war with itself, Hezbollah turned away from the
“vanished” Imam Musa al-Sadr and his commitment to a common national identity
for all Lebanese. The Shiite militants looked instead to the militant cleric
Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, who emphasized loyalty to the transnational
ideology backed by Iranian power. At the same time, in place of the doctrine
that clerics should refrain from activism in government pending the
reappearance of the hidden Twelfth Imam (the Mahdi, an Islamic messianic
figure, in occultation), Khomeini conceived the velayat-e faqih, the
“rule of the jurists,” to legitimate absolute theocratic rule under a single
supreme leader.
This revolutionary revision of Shiite theology, and its
potent fusion of spiritual and political authority, gave Iran’s grand ayatollah
unlimited power over his followers. Hezbollah, with a ceaseless supply of
manpower and matériel from its Iranian patron, has been the Islamic
Revolution’s branch on the Mediterranean, creating a political world of its own
in multi-confessional Lebanon.
During a recent visit to Lebanon, I saw a variety of
garish tributes to Hezbollah’s shahid, or martyrs, who fell in Syria.
They died by the thousands, fighting for more than a decade in defense of the
Assad dictatorship. This was nothing new. Any visitor in the past decade or so
would have seen such macabre displays along roadways, outside Shiite mosques,
or in the odd café. But in communities where Hezbollah exercises a
stranglehold, I also witnessed a greater profusion of Iranian flags and posters
than ever before. Perhaps this heavy foreign imprint on Shiite Lebanon is why
the wider Lebanese public, which once welcomed Hezbollah as a necessary
defensive force, has now largely forsaken it.
The vast majority of Lebanese are understandably weary of
war and wish only to tend to their vineyards. The widespread impulse to
transform Lebanon back into a place of merchants and migrants (to reprise the
title of Leila Tarazi Fawaz’s history of 19th-century Beirut) is what makes
Hezbollah’s latest rocket attacks on Israel so infuriating to Lebanese who
understand that culture and commerce cannot easily coexist with an interminable
fight against the “Zionist entity.” In an extraordinary step, following the
latest Hezbollah rocket barrages into Israel, Lebanon’s cabinet moved on March
2 to prohibit Hezbollah’s military activities. The question is whether the
feeble and corrupt Lebanese state can enforce its writ and push the outlaw
Islamist outfit toward oblivion.
The perpetual dilemma for Lebanon is that any attempt to
constrain Hezbollah by decree risks inflaming sectarian tensions, particularly
if it draws the Lebanese military into direct confrontation with an armed and
heavily embedded Hezbollah. The trauma and travails of history run deep in
Lebanon, and these exert a powerful gravitational pull against tinkering with
the fragile established order. But the political class has signaled that it
will no longer support and live with the Hezbollah exception. Now that the
Lebanese have taken this stand for freedom, the United States and its European
allies, especially France, must oblige them — and help them — to hold it. The
alternative would be an unduly punitive, and probably counterproductive,
Israeli military campaign.
***
Ever since the outbreak of their long and bloody civil
war in the 1970s, the Lebanese have been complaining that a host of cynical
outside powers and hostile forces have used their nation as a battlefield. In
recent decades, that grievance has been especially apt given the nefarious
influence of Iran’s radical theocracy, which has summoned Lebanon’s traditional
Shiite underclass, “the oppressed of the earth,” to claim a dominant position
in — or, better put, above — the Lebanese state. Propelled by Iranian largesse
and a sense of messianic purpose, the Shiite revolutionaries have conscripted
Lebanon into their wars of faith.
This is why the Lebanese have watched the war in Iran,
and the prospect of the destruction of its Islamist imperium if not the Islamic
Republic itself, with breathless anticipation. Hezbollah’s military capacity,
financial networks, and ideological legitimacy are inextricably linked with
Tehran, and any fundamental transformation inside Iran would break the
organization’s grip over the Levantine state. For this reason, the cunning
Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt has long maintained that the solution to the problem
of Hezbollah “is not in Lebanon.” It thus involves little exaggeration to say
that the integrity of the Lebanese state will largely be decided by the success
or failure of American and Israeli arms on the Persian frontier.
The path that has led to this potentially epochal shift
in the balance of power in the Middle East is a fitting reminder, as Herodotus
observed, that “war is the father of all things.” By now it’s clear that the
war initiated by Iran’s so-called axis of resistance more than two years ago
has backfired dramatically. Instead of setting the stage for an apocalyptic
multifront assault on Israel’s existence, brazen deeds of jihadist terror
reaped a terrible whirlwind across Iran’s sphere of influence, devastating
Hamas in Gaza while inflaming Lebanon’s border zone, the Bekaa Valley, and
Beirut’s southern suburbs. Not even the Houthis in Yemen, who attacked ships in
the Red Sea and fired ballistic missiles at Israel, have been spared. The
longtime Iranian policy of proxy warfare, which allowed the Shiite clerisy to
inflict relentless pain on its adversaries without using its own forces or
endangering its territory, has been undone.
***
The conflict is now climaxing in a battle royale against
the Islamic Republic itself. The clerical regime in Tehran was an accessory to
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood — the Hamas code name for October 7 — which produced
the most lethal pogrom against the Jews since the Holocaust. But its
Revolutionary Guards were not content merely to activate a “ring of fire”
around the “Zionist entity” and watch it burn. From its inception in 1979, the
Islamic Republic has been a font of irrevocable hostility toward the United States,
directing attacks on American soldiers and civilians, as in the Khobar Towers
bombing of 1996 in Saudi Arabia, and aiming, ultimately, to extirpate the power
and presence of the liberal superpower in the Middle East.
This is why thwarting Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon
has been of the utmost importance. Iranian hegemony would be far easier to
achieve with a nuclear deterrent. But until it acquired that ultimate power,
Iran’s primary safeguard had always been Hezbollah, whose substantial firepower
was meant to deter Israel from attacking Iran and to exact a colossal cost if
it did.
It should therefore come as no surprise that, with
Hezbollah reeling, and after years of ineffectual efforts at containment of
Iranian power, Israel and America — the “little Satan” and the “great Satan” —
chose to strike at the head of the axis, working in tandem to decapitate Iran’s
political and military leadership and knock out its ballistic missile
capabilities along with its nuclear facilities. The Islamic Republic posed not
so much an imminent threat as a permanent one. Despite the abiding menace of the
theocratic regime, it was the regime’s weakness and fragility that made this an
opportune time for the custodians of American and Israeli power to strike
against, and potentially strike down, a sworn foe of the established
international order.
Despite the confused rhetoric coming out of the White
House and the Pentagon, it became clear once the war began in earnest that the
only real choices were regime change or an unsatisfactory — and impermanent —
truce. Once closing the Strait of Hormuz became the linchpin of Iran’s
strategy, it meant that anything short of absolute victory would do lasting
damage to America’s substantive and psychological deterrent power. A wounded
and vengeful revolutionary regime in Tehran that remains in power while commanding
the approaches to the Persian Gulf (and thereby able to shut down global oil
supply) would double down on domestic repression and shore up its now-battered
ideological offshoots in the Arab world.
But whatever the fate of the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran,
the greatest tentacle of the Iranian Revolution will be confronted in Lebanon —
by the Israelis and, with any luck, by the Lebanese themselves. From the
standpoint of American interests as well as of American ideals, the outcome of
that struggle is not a matter of indifference.
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