cMore than one in ten Lebanese have recently been forced to flee the war, with 700,000 people moving within the country to escape Israeli bombings against Hezbollah, an armed group, also a political party, which was created by Iran four decades ago and which continues to be a staunch ally of the regime. ayatollahsas he has now shown without disguising it.
If we think that with just 10 thousand km2 Lebanon is practically the size of the Beja district, although the fighting is mainly in the south and also in Beirut, the capital, it is clear that none of the six million inhabitants is safe from the impact of a conflict that once again destroys the normalization ambitions of the small Arab country, distant heir of Phoenicia. President Joseph Aoun himself accused Hezbollah of contributing to the collapse of the state by attacking Israel and provoking the latter’s highly destructive reaction.
Hezbollah is a Shiite movement founded in 1982 in the midst of the Lebanese civil war. It has a history of terrorist attacks, including against American troops, but it also gained credit among the Lebanese population for forcing Israel to withdraw its troops from the south of the country in 2000, after 18 years of occupation.
The Lebanese civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, was a conflict between the various ethno-religious communities, but also brought foreign interventions, including from Syria, which came to impose a kind of guardianship over the country, until it was challenged and then entered into civil war itself, and, therefore, with other priorities.
Israel, arguing with the need to defend its northern border, was slow to withdraw, but even after 2000 it always intervened against Hezbollah, which never stopped being a threat to the Jewish State. In 2006, a brief war between Israel and Lebanon broke out again because of attacks by the Shiite group. I was in Metula, right on the border, last year, and heard the stories of those who refuse to live under constant fire from Hezbollah and applaud the military response ordered by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.
As soon as Israel and the United States attacked Iran once again on February 28, Hezbollah reacted. It was no surprise, except that the elimination of its leader two years earlier, and the heavy Israeli retaliation for the attacks in solidarity with the Palestinian movement Hamas, suggested that it would be weakened and more cautious. But loyalty to Iran weighed more than anything, as had already happened when it began bombing Israel after the massacre of October 7, 2023 by Hamas in the kibbutz next to Gaza.
Israel’s victory over Hezbollah is not in question. It may not be total or immediate. Everything will depend on whether or not it continues to receive support from an Iranian regime also under heavy attack, and also whether or not Lebanese Shiites turn their backs on a group that thinks more about the regime that is its patron than about the Lebanese people. It is also important to understand how other Lebanese communities will react, namely Sunnis, Christians and Druze. After all, even if Israeli fury focuses on Hezbollah, it is impossible for a country to always be (or almost) at war with its southern neighbor.
Until the civil war, Lebanon was a prosperous country. After centuries as part of the Ottoman Empire, it had experienced a short experience of French colonization that reinforced the land’s tradition of coexistence and openness. Independence came in 1943 and an agreement between the communities created a political system in which the president is always a Christian (Maronite, like Aoun), the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. A population census was not carried out again, but today it is evident that Christians, of various denominations, are no longer the majority, at most a third of the Lebanese. Muslims will be close to two-thirds, divided into almost equal halves between Sunnis and Shiites. The Druze, for their part, will be around 5%. Greater emigration to Europe (especially France) and a smaller number of children in Christian families explains the demographic change in what is still the Arab country with the highest percentage of Christians, a community in rapid decline, for example, in Iraq or neighboring Syria.
To date, the Lebanese state has been unable to dominate Hezbollah. Even when peace agreements with Israel, or a mere ceasefire such as the one in 2024, mediated by the Americans and the French, involve a withdrawal of Hezbollah from the south, the Lebanese armed forces are not in a position to do so, either because they fear a confrontation, or for fear of opening rifts between communities, or appearing to be in some way giving in to the Israelis. The UN itself appears powerless, despite being present on the ground. But it is clear that Lebanon gains nothing from Hezbollah. And Aoun’s appeals to Israel, which he accuses of never having even respected the 2024 ceasefire agreement, to stop the attacks, make a truce and try to reach peace, as well as the challenge to the international community to help the country in the effort to disarm the Shiite militia, are proof of this.
Israel, which knows that Hezbollah is an existential enemy, should, in addition to attacking, take advantage of the opportunity in negotiations to isolate the group, not giving any chance that, in despair in the face of violence and chaos, the Lebanese end up being tempted to once again see the extremists as a kind of national resistance.
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