Now, this ancient castle has reprised its role: in what has become Israel’s largest incursion into South Lebanon since its 2000 retreat from the region. With IDF forces pushing past the Litani River, a natural barrier that’s played a major role in military operations dating back centuries, Benjamin Netanyahu seems intent on occupying South Lebanon once more. Yet with Hezbollah showing no sign of surrender, the risk is that Beaufort once again becomes emblematic of Israeli hubris.

Hezbollah has long been Israel’s more effective opponent. But after exploding pagers and airstrikes gutted the group’s leadership in September 2024, both Tel Aviv and Washington dismissed the Shia militants as a spent force. Following a ceasefire that autumn, giving IDF Northern Command a much-needed break, Netanyahu finally had the confidence to launch a ground invasion of Hezbollah’s stronghold in South Lebanon — especially after the cold war with Hezbollah’s patron in Tehran went hot. “There was an earned sense of satisfaction after decades of frustration in dealing with the most dangerous terrorists Israel has ever faced,” says Avi, a former Israeli intelligence operative specializing in Hezbollah, and who continues to consult the IDF as a reservist.

And so, in March 2026, IDF tanks rolled north once more. To be sure, Hezbollah retained significant military capabilities, not least thousands of rockets. Yet after eviscerating its leaders, Israel thought it would take years for the group to rebuild, particularly given a distracted Iran, and when the end of the Assad regime robbed the militants of strategic depth. As Avi now admits, however, “our enemies in Lebanon regrouped”. That’s something of an understatement. Now in its fourth month, Israel’s latest Lebanese incursion is proceeding far more slowly, and much more bloodily, than Tel Aviv expected. Over two-dozen IDF troops have been killed in South Lebanon since early March, with one medical captain dying near Beaufort just the other day.

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Israel’s problems are largely a matter of strategy. While IDF forces, backed by heavy armor and relentless air strikes, have made physical progress, pushing some 15 kilometers into Hezbollah’s rugged stronghold, two new tactics by the militants have greatly increased the cost.

The first is a flatter organizational structure, focused on small-unit guerrilla tactics. The second is an expanded campaign of cheap-but-deadly drones, ideal for harassing the Israelis at every turn. Beyond the human toll, this approach has damaged or destroyed dozens of tanks and other armored vehicles, while also targeting sophisticated radar, intelligence gathering, and missile-defense systems on Israel’s northern border.

Speaking by encrypted messenger last month, Has’n, a veteran Hezbollah commander based in Beirut, speaks with open confidence about the conflict. Technical innovations aside, he seems bullish about leading the enemy deep into Lebanon. Grudgingly respectful of IDF operations in Israel itself — they fight, Has’n says, “for their land” — just 500 meters across the border “the resistance” and its hit-and-run tactics are paying off.

This didn’t happen overnight. After the 2024 debacle — which saw Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s famous leader, killed alongside dozens of other commanders — the group didn’t attempt to restore its conventional military capacities. Instead, according to Israeli and Lebanese security officials, as well as Hezbollah commanders interviewed by UnHerd, the group pivoted back to its roots as a guerrilla group: deploying the same tactics that caused Israel grief back in the Eighties and Nineties.

This reorganization was directly led by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which sent hundreds of operatives to Lebanon, and which for the first time in decades appears to directly command Hezbollah fighters in the field. “The IRGC sent officers to take a much more hands-on approach in the wake of the ceasefire,” says Nick Blanford, an analyst at the Atlantic Council. “And they’ve streamlined the group.”

The relationship between Hezbollah and the Iranian regime has always been public: Tehran funds Hezbollah, by some estimates to the tune of $700 million a year, and supplies much of its advanced arsenal of weapons. But the command and control structure of the group — the extent to which Iran directly runs its operations — has historically been less clear.

“Hezbollah has always been free to operate in Lebanon as it sees fit,” says one Lebanese security official. “Iran didn’t have any interest in micromanaging Hezbollah, and both leaderships had close personal relationships for decades. There’s no need to command when everyone is on the same page.” Avi makes a similar point, noting that there’s always been “a level of compartmentalization” between the Lebanese and Iranian wings of the operation.

But, by all accounts, this formerly opaque relationship changed after September 2024. As Blanford explains, the group’s earlier decimation offered opportunities, with the Revolutionary Guards replacing various aging commanders with younger alternatives, battle-hardened from fighting rebels in Syria.

Of course, Israel hardly missed these developments. IDF airstrikes have habitually targeted hotels and apartment blocks suspected of housing Iranian officials in Lebanon, ceasefires be damned. But these don’t seem to have disrupted Hezbollah’s transformation; both Iran and the militants showing an uncanny ability to replace slain leaders, highlighting the perils of equating organizational decapitation with reduced military capacity.

Competent institutions, particularly militaries, can easily account for casualties among both the leadership and the rank-and-file. To put it another way, competent institutions can heal. And even their enemies agree Hezbollah and Iran are competent — especially after more than 40 years of on-off conflict with Israel and the West. “Hezbollah has surprised Israel with its resilience,” Blanford says, “and is fighting much harder in South Lebanon than anyone, including the Israelis, expected.”

What of the future? Frustrated by Hezbollah’s drone campaign, Netanyahu this week threatened to expand military operations to Beirut — and Lebanon’s already creaky civilian infrastructure. Iran, for its part, promised to resume its operations in the Persian Gulf, alarming a Trump administration desperate to finally reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In an apparently angry phone call between Trump and Netanyahu, all sides have agreed to a renewed ceasefire. But few in either Beirut or Tel Aviv trust the deal, and expect fighting to continue for as long as the IDF remains in Lebanon.

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A longer campaign in the country would likely end in stalemate, as Hezbollah and Iran work together to bleed the IDF. As the Israeli reoccupation of Beaufort so vividly implies, this also would raise the ghosts of history. In 1982, at the height of Lebanon’s sectarian civil war, IDF troops invaded the country to combat the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and similar factions ensconced in the country. And if the result was 20 years of quagmire, Hezbollah’s evolving tactics imply a similar outcome today.

Even Israeli insiders now seem to accept this. “Obviously the fighting has been harder than expected,” says Avi, “but maybe it should have been predicted considering Hezbollah’s long history of resilience. They’ve rebounded quite impressively.”

And with Israel expressly stating it plans to reoccupy much of South Lebanon, just as they did through 2000, when it was finally driven out by Hezbollah’s resistance, it’s no wonder that militant commanders are increasingly optimistic — especially after a string of surprising defeats. “This occupation will be a gift to the resistance,” says Has’n. “It’s much easier to kill Israeli soldiers on our own land than in Palestine. We will fight like in the Nineties, and send them back their dead sons until they leave. We did it before and, God willing, we will do it again.” Expect more fighting at Beaufort — and soon.

“These people” are the million-plus civilians displaced in Lebanon since fighting resumed between Israel and Hezbollah in early March. Sweeping IDF evacuation orders, encompassing most of southern Lebanon and the entirety of Beirut’s southern suburbs, have made one fifth of Lebanon’s population homeless in just a few weeks. Almost all of them are Shia Muslims. Israeli officials claim that the orders are intended to protect civilian life in their campaign against Hezbollah, creating enormous free-fire zones where bombs can fall. But Lebanon has walked, and often slipped from, a demographic tightrope many times since its founding in 1943, and to move people here is to move politics. 

All told, Lebanon is just half the size of Wales. Within its borders, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze, and Christians from 12 denominations share space, resources and control. Syria’s civil war saw Lebanon take in more than a million refugees, most of whom remain today. This diversity creates a mix so febrile that Lebanon hasn’t risked a census since 1932, fearing that the demographic assumptions upon which so much of Lebanese society is based might be proved wrong. In this, history is a warning. The demographic upset caused by an influx of Palestinian refugees, after Israel’s founding in 1948, was a big factor in the start of Lebanon’s own civil war from 1975. 

Lebanon’s confessional politics, designed to prevent the ascendance of one group over another, represents the chaotic web of invisible frontiers that span the country. Delineated by religion, history, fear and periodic violence, these frontiers split regions, encircle cities, isolate neighborhoods, and divide even the tiniest of villages. They are marked by roads, rivers and mountains but an uninformed visitor might remain oblivious to crossing them. Like a vase that has shattered and been repaired, Lebanon will break along the same lines if it falls again. Israel knows this well — and is pushing the vase to the very edge of the shelf.

Zahlé is a border town on one of these invisible frontiers. Founded around 300 ago, it is young by the standards of the Levant. Its position on the main Damascus-Beirut highway quickly made it prosperous, and it is now the third-largest town in Lebanon and the largest Christian city in the Middle East. Behind it, to the west, the heights of Mount Lebanon separate it from Beirut and the sea. To the east, the Bekaa Valley stretches out towards the anti-Lebanon and Syria. 

The vast majority of Zahliots are Melkite Catholic and Maronite, aligning the city culturally and politically with the Christian communities of Mount Lebanon and Beirut. But Beirut lies on the other side of the mountain, over a hair-raisingly narrow and potholed road that regularly closes in the winter. Economically, it has stronger links with the Bekaa, where the majority of the population is Shia and the rule of law is superseded by a complex mix of clan dynamics and Hezbollah hegemony. An oft-repeated saying here holds that Zahlé has its heart in Beirut but its stomach in the Bekaa.

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As well as running his restaurant, a simple spot offering grilled-chicken sandwiches and plates of hummus and salad, Masaad has been a mukhtar for 30 years. Mukhtars operate as local registrars, responsible for issuing official paperwork for a village or neighborhood. They are also important community figures, intimately familiar with their wards. When I ask Masaad what his constituents are afraid of, he looks incredulous, as though the question is profoundly stupid. “What are they afraid of? Everything! People are displaced, the state is broken, the banks took everyone’s money. The people most at risk are the ones at the extremities. Look, when it snows and the high roads get closed, the government opens the roads to the ski resorts but they don’t open the road to Zahlé.”

Lebanon’s recent history — one of socioeconomic collapse; massive, but ultimately failed, reform protests; the apocalyptic port explosion of 2020; soaring poverty and war — has made brittle even the glue sealing its cracks. Masaad’s comment about ski resorts references a deep well of resentment, as a thin slice of Lebanese society lives the good life while most struggle to get by. The state is seen as utterly impotent, the banks as thieves. Few are impressed by sectarian leaders who have achieved little but decline for decades, and their patronage is turned to as a last resort. Asked if Zahlé can rely on support from the Christian political parties, Masaad — a Christian himself — waves his hand derisively. “Curse the Christians, they all hate each other.”

In this atmosphere of abandonment and internal estrangement, the Israeli strategy of isolating Hezbollah and its base risks tipping Lebanon into all-out civil strife. Israeli messaging directed at Lebanon has, since the first round of this war in 2024, strenuously tried to frame its campaign as against Hezbollah, not Lebanon. So strenuously, in fact, that it has sometimes achieved an air of surreal gaslighting. On 13 March, an Israel aircraft dropped leaflets over Beirut urging the Lebanese to reject Hezbollah. “This land is yours,” they proclaimed. Yet within days, senior Israeli figures were advocating for the annexation of swathes of southern Lebanon. “The current war in Lebanon must end with a radical change,” said Israeli finance minister Bezelal Smotrich. “The Litani must be our new border with the state of Lebanon.” That river meets the sea some 19 miles inside Lebanese territory.

As Michael Young explains, that’s part of a broader strategy. “Hezbollah is a force that’s anchored deeply in the Shia community,” says the senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center. “What the Israelis are trying to do is break the relationship of the Shia community with a specific geographical area in which Hezbollah had created a virtual state within a state.” In Young’s view, the goals of this strategy stop short of pushing Lebanon into civil war. “They understand that they need to restrict Hezbollah within a broader society that can contain it and make it weaker, but they know that if you destroy all of Lebanon, the force that’s most likely to emerge from that is Hezbollah.”

Hezbollah was born in the wreckage of Lebanon’s last civil war, in conditions that appear eerily similar to those emerging today. Back in the early Seventies, the country’s Shia community lacked effective political representation, and therefore didn’t receive the same level of state resources and protection as sects boasting more entrenched political networks. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, aiming to remove the threat posed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which had gained a firm foothold in the south. The insults and injuries of occupation were a galvanizing force for Shia communities. The Bekaa Valley, where the grip of occupation forces was looser, became a base for a patchwork collection of resistance groups.

The then-new Islamist regime in Iran saw an opportunity in the nascent Shia resistance forming in the Bekaa. Revolutionary Guard advisers and resources were sent to Lebanon, where they trained and organized these groups until, eventually, they coalesced into Hezbollah. As well as resisting Israeli occupation and attacking Western interests in Lebanon — a suicide truck bomb in 1983 killed 241 US Marines in Beirut — Hezbollah sought to fulfill the unmet needs of the Shia, providing services, employment and welfare. In this way they established their “state within a state”.

Even as the party became the dominant political force in the country, Hezbollah continued to lean heavily on a vision of the Shia as a sidelined minority. For the past decade or so, this narrative may have been more rhetoric than reality, but Israel’s attacks have now plunged the Shia community back into poverty. Today, in Christian East Beirut, housewives in yoga gear drink $10 matchas and complain about the whine of IDF surveillance drones overhead. A few hundred meters away, West Beirut is covered in the tents of Shia displaced from the south, sitting in the rain and wondering if they will ever be able to return home — or if they even have a home to return to.

Alongside the violent reopening of a class wound that never truly healed, another occupation appears imminent. Israel has massed forces on the border and started an incursion intended to create what it euphemistically calls a “security zone” up to the Litani. Even if Smotrich’s threat of annexation doesn’t happen, that would still constitute an occupation of 10% of Lebanon’s territory.

In short, the conditions are forming for a disastrous sectarian collapse. If Israel is hoping to defeat Hezbollah, and then deal with a neutered-but-coherent Lebanese state, they may have underestimated just how much the country has fragmented. That fragility is everywhere, running through every crack and seam of society.

The further you get from the invisible frontiers, the more this fragility has bloomed into fear. In Christian Ashrafieh, an affluent Beirut neighborhood of colonial-era villas and French restaurants, I’ve heard people say that they “hope the Israelis can finish the job we started.” Or, referring to the displaced, “How can they expect us to live with these people?” There are also many in Ashrafieh, especially among the young, who have set up kitchens and donation drives for displaced families. But they are battling a strong underlying sense that the war is happening because of another group, a somehow less Lebanese group. 

In Zahlé, where daily life demands interaction, these tensions are expressed more subtly, and are tempered by pragmatism. Salim Ghazale, Zahlé’s mayor, is a civil engineer who has spent most of his career working on infrastructure projects in the Gulf. He returned to Lebanon and ran for the mayoralty in 2025, bringing a desire to “help build the state” and a project manager’s zeal for efficiency. “We learned lessons from the fighting in 2024 and set up crisis management committees to prepare months ago,” he tells me with pride. “We leaned on the municipal police to vet people arriving. Nobody wants to take in Hezbollah.”

Zahlé is currently hosting around 6,500 internally displaced people (IDPs), mostly from the Bekaa, and Ghazale claims that the process has been smooth so far. “We don’t want to burn any bridges,” he says. “Zahliots own a lot of land in Shia-dominated areas in the Bekaa and we process a lot of the agricultural produce from there.” 

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Despite Zahlé’s calm, there are signs of caution. More municipal police officers than usual are visible on the street. At the large roundabout, where traffic exits the Beirut-Damascus highway, a technician is up a ladder installing a new set of surveillance cameras. Once again, it seems clear that these suspicions have been nurtured by Israeli tactics. In 2024, IDF bombing also focused on predominantly Shia areas. But there were several attacks on IDPs who had taken shelter in remote Christian-majority villages in the north, notably Aitou. These strikes were widely read as a warning against taking people in, compounding existing sectarian paranoia.

Nor is it just the sectarian seam that’s so evident in Zahlé. Some here also lament an absent or obstructive state. “I don’t think there is an issue of integration in these frontier communities,” is how Ghazale puts it. “The problem is how to bring them back into the state.” At the same time, though, the mayor seems equally frustrated when government flexes its muscles. Local municipalities send their tax revenue to Beirut, from where it is redistributed nationally. Ghazale claims that successful, tax-paying communities are effectively penalized under this system, held in hock to towns with whom they feel no affinity. “Financial decentralization would allow communities to decide how they live,” he says, “If you want to live Kandahar-style, you can. If you want to live Beirut-style, you can.”

That acid allusion to the Taliban aside, the real threat to Lebanon’s future is revealed in this contradiction. Sectarian tensions are historic, deep and inflamed by the current war, inequality severe and entrenched. But when even the most state-oriented communities in Lebanon view the government as deadweight or worse, it is hard to see how Lebanon can maintain its coherence in the face of the Israeli war machine.

Because Lebanon’s sectarian power blocks are often identified as synonymous with religious identity — Sunni, Shia, Christian, Druze — it is easy to think that politics and religion are identical here. The reality, of course, is more complicated than that. There are priests and imams who preach division and those who preach reconciliation. In Zahlé’s church of Saydit al Najat (Our Lady of Salvation), the approach to the town’s soul is as reasonable as its mayor’s approach to crisis management.

“As a church we keep saying that we are Lebanese and must support each other and pray for everyone affected,” says Father Elie Maalouf before he delivers his mass. “The trouble is, before there were shared goals. Today everybody is working towards their own ends.” He looks tired as he finishes rolling a cigarette and pours himself another coffee from a thermos, as though there is nothing new in this story. “From long ago Israel has tried to divide. We tell people to be aware of this because when they leave we will still be living together.”

Later on, Zahliots gather in the church for the evening mass, coats and hair damp from the chilly rain that has been falling all day. The congregation is subdued, drowned out by the grandeur of the church’s interior. The fresco that circles the walls was painted by two artists. One Russian, one Ukrainian; their work completed before those two communities collapsed into war. There is an air of grim determination in the rituals of the mass, fitting for this orderly, independent-minded town that finds itself neither here nor there.

At first glance, Hezbollah’s actions over the last week seem baffling. Despite having been bruised militarily by Israel — and politically marginalized by pro-American politicians in Beirut — the group fired several rockets and drones against a military facility near Haifa. Bolder still, if reporting from Cyprus is correct, Hezbollah also launched a drone against the RAF base at Akrotiri, marking a previously unthinkable expansion of its offensive operations. The way to understand these attacks, of course, is precisely as a mark of weakness. With the Ayatollah dead, the Revolutionary Guards scrambling, and Israeli warplanes operating essentially at will, Hezbollah’s strikes were a last-ditch attempt to remain relevant, an appeal to heaven to retain whatever remained of its “resistance” credentials.

The contrast with Israel couldn’t be clearer, with the IDF relentlessly hammering Lebanon’s south, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s suburbs. Then there’s Israel’s renewed ground incursion, leading to dozens of deaths so far. Just yesterday, meanwhile Israel warned all civilians south of the Litani River in southern Lebanon to evacuate, suggesting at best preparations for a wide-scale ground assault — but possibly also a broader occupation. Yet if all that’s grimly familiar to students of the region (Israel last invaded Lebanon less than two years ago), things today feel different. Unlike nearly all Israel’s previous campaigns, this one was triggered not by imminent, large-scale threats to its national security, but instead by pre-emptive opportunism. 

Right after the October 7 attacks, Hezbollah began sporadic bombardments of Israel’s north, leading to the mass evacuation of Israeli civilians and, the following October, an IDF advance towards Beirut. This time, the militant group’s attack wasn’t even in the same ballpark; indeed with only around 20% of its original arsenal remaining, Hezbollah was hardly ready for another war against Israel. But having developed plans for the group’s final destruction months ago, Netanyahu saw his chance and decided to take it. 

While Israel has all but neutered Hezbollah over the last few years — not least via Mossad’s pager-bomb annihilation of its senior leadership — this new campaign is yet another expression of Netanyahu’s maximalist logic. Buoyed by Trump, Israel and its prime minister are clearly willing to eliminate even potential threats to their interests, whatever the human cost. 

Yet more than Israel, what really matters here are political developments inside Lebanon. Channeling the rage of a people drawn into yet another war, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has declared all Hezbollah’s military activity illegal, ordering that the group finally give up its substantial stock of weapons. Against the odds, Salam’s move is already having real-world consequences. This week, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) has reportedly arrested a dozen Hezbollah members, something unthinkable even a year ago. 

The appointment of Salam as prime minister — and Joseph Aoun, an anti-Hezbollah Maronite general, to the presidency — dramatically altered the political landscape in Beirut. At the behest of the Americans, and taking advantage of Hezbollah’s new weakness, Lebanon’s civilian politicians could finally begin to make progress toward replacing the group’s hegemony in southern Lebanon. In the first place, that meant bringing in the LAF, with the Lebanese government announcing in January that it had completed the first phase of a weapons control plan. 

Forced to reckon with this challenging new reality, Hezbollah played along with Lebanon’s government where it had to, while holding jealously to what remained to its political power and military arsenal. Indeed, despite the Lebanese state’s piecemeal efforts at disarming Hezbollah, the group may well have enjoyed a slow and gradual post-conflict decline — had it chosen not to martyr itself alongside the Islamic Republic. 

Now, though, not only has Hezbollah given Israel an excuse to finish it off entirely, it has also alienated its most ardent allies among Lebanon’s Shi’a electorate. The Amal Movement, another Shi’a party that had long provided Hezbollah with cover within Lebanon’s explicitly sectarian politics, have abandoned the militants. Just this week, two Amal ministers voted in favor of a cabinet resolution banning Hezbollah’s military activity. Given the broader context, that’s unsurprising. Shi’a-majority regions of Lebanon suffered more than anywhere else during the 2024 conflict. Lacking both funding and political stability, swathes of the country remain in ruins, even as a new war threatens to bring yet more misery. No wonder even Shi’a strongholds like the Bekaa are expressing open frustration with Hezbollah — perhaps the first time this has happened since the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990. 

Taken together, Nabih Berri, Amal’s leader and the veteran speaker of parliament, has clearly decided that Hezbollah now threatens his own political survival. Paradoxically, this means that only by meeting Israel’s demands, and allowing Hezbollah to be disarmed, can Berri give his constituents the space and support they need to rebuild their homes and lives. Over the longer term, this may also allow him to lead Amal into the political vacuum once Hezbollah leaves the stage.

Of course, Hezbollah won’t vanish overnight. The group still commands fierce respect among its diehard base, especially among Shi’a in the south. But if the Islamic Republic truly does collapse in Iran, whatever funds Hezbollah may have still been receiving from Tehran will quickly dry up, leading to an eventual collapse of not only its military procurement capabilities, but also its state-within-a-state network of clinics, food banks, and other social services. And with the central government in Beirut for the first time trying to confiscate its weapons, Hezbollah will be lucky if it emerges from Israel’s onslaught with even its electoral future intact.

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Yet as so often these days, Israel remains a wildcard. Despite proclaiming victory over the militants in 2024, Netanyahu and his war cabinet have always wanted more. Indeed, given American and Israeli pressure on Lebanon over the last year, their new campaign isn’t just about smashing Hezbollah, but also about forcing Beirut to normalize relations with Israel for the first time since 1948. Whatever Lebanon’s eagerness for going after the militants, this would be a hard pill to swallow. Regardless of the pro-US, anti-Hezbollah posture of the current Lebanese government, even they understand that they cannot afford to alienate a populace that nonetheless remains deeply opposed to Israel. Though they have signaled an openness to negotiations with Tel Aviv — itself a major step — a full-blown peace treaty, and all the Israeli demands that’ll accompany it, may be a bridge too far. That tension, it goes without saying, would set the stage for yet another destabilizing confrontation between Israel and Lebanon: and all at the worst possible geopolitical moment.

Given Israel’s current confidence, meanwhile, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t push its luck and demand a degree of security enforcement over Lebanon’s south as a corollary to its peace treaty, and perhaps even seek to manage Beirut’s military affairs too. While a new occupation is certainly possible, you’d hope that Netanyahu would have learned enough from decades of Israeli errors in Lebanon to know that such a move would only catalyze the rise of Hezbollah’s successor.

While Hezbollah’s downfall may be imminent, in short, it won’t happen smoothly — and when it does, new challenges will inevitably emerge. The future behavior of Lebanon’s Shi’a will be decisive here, as will the ability of the country’s newly assertive government to quash sectarian rivalries. Violence between the state and Hezbollah, once off the table, is now a very real possibility, but so is the sort of backroom maneuvering that is a hallmark of Lebanon’s bureaucratic politics. While Israeli power is very directly and violently on the minds of Lebanese today, a sectarian civil war could yet loom tomorrow. 

One thing, however, is abundantly clear — despite Trump and Netanyahu’s desire to carve out a new American-Israeli order in the Middle East, one where Iran is nowhere and they alone call the shots, Lebanon will hardly be a pliable vassal. With or without the Party of God, this country’s long-suffering people have long memories, and the wounds of the last two years won’t soon be forgotten.

Long the dominant force in parliament, successive national governments, and on the streets, Hezbollah is now adrift, its organization shattered, its surviving leaders fearful of the next Israeli airstrike. Lebanon’s civilian leaders, for their part, are keen to seize the moment, defanging the militants while finally building a truly viable Lebanese state. But if Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun are ready to make their move after years of political deadlock, the schedule is hardly in Lebanon’s best interest — while any miscalculation could soon bring chaos.

As I wrote last month, Hezbollah understands that it’s no longer the formidable, hegemonic force it once was. In this new Lebanon, its options are few and far between. To that end, the group has itself considered shrinking its once-renowned arsenal in exchange for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the border regions they continue to occupy in southern Lebanon. But in a sign of just how earth-shattering the latest cabinet resolution was, Hezbollah and its allies abandoned the meeting in question, stating it would “deal with it as if it does not exist.”

As things stand, a renewed civil war in Lebanon remains unlikely, at least for the time being. Despite its recent battering, Hezbollah is still part of the Lebanese government and retains a great deal of bargaining power within the state. It is therefore more likely that, for the moment, the current dispute will remain confined to behind-the-scenes dealings. But if the US continues to push the Lebanese cabinet to go on the offensive — without respecting the delicate political dynamics at play in the country — that may well change.

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Of course, it is now quite obvious that the Trump administration’s agenda in Lebanon is about much more than just Hezbollah’s weapons: it’s about a fundamental realignment that includes Iran, Syria, Gaza, and more, and which will serve to put the finishing touches on the new Middle East envisioned by Benjamin Netanyahu. Tom Barrack, the US envoy who had been facilitating the Trump administration’s contacts with Beirut over the last few months, made this abundantly clear in comments in mid-July. “If Lebanon doesn’t hurry up and get in line,” he warned, “everyone around them will.”

In a sense, of course, that’s already happening — the region’s epochal transformation holds great promise for people from Damascus to Tehran. But as the recent massacres in Syria vividly prove, this transition can only succeed with forethought and care, and that any mistake can quickly spiral. Consider, for instance, that Hezbollah supporters lately took to the streets across Lebanon, both a show of force and warning of what would happen if the army took action. Even more worryingly, meanwhile, groups of protestors have gathered in front of a church in Beirut’s southern suburbs. That openly sectarian tinge is not necessarily new, but it still raises eyebrows, as does the fact that the Lebanese Armed Forces were deployed to confront pro-Hezbollah demonstrators in the Beqaa Valley town of Brital.

In the event, the Brital confrontation fizzled out. Tires were burned and car horns honked, but the protesters had dispersed by the following day. For its part, a senior Hezbollah official said the group would use only peaceful methods to deal with the cabinet decision, claiming it would “not be dragged into internal strife with the army or any Lebanese side.”

That all makes sense. Hezbollah’s position today is a world away from when it last engaged in armed clashes — violence sparked by the port blast investigation — let alone when it sparked a 2008 mini-civil war after the government tried to curb its communications network. Today, Hezbollah is a shadow of the behemoth it once was. Since the start of last year’s war with Israel, it has lost five of its most important leaders, notably its iconic Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. More than that, it has suffered over 10,000 total casualties and has seen perhaps half its arsenal destroyed. As a result, working within the state is the only realistic option Hezbollah has left. Even so, that doesn’t mean it would unilaterally lay down its arms without a fight, or at least without first securing some sort of politically advantageous deal.

The problem with the government’s gung-ho approach is that the Trump administration isn’t interested in the kind of dealmaking this situation requires. If the last six months have taught the world anything about the President’s approach to international diplomacy, it’s that he cares first and foremost about optics, securing wins for America, and making sure he is viewed as a kingmaker by allies and foes alike. And though Trump has recently had his fair share of spats with Netanyahu, his administration has been nonchalant about Israel’s latest plan to (temporarily) take control of the entire Gaza Strip, making it clear that it wants the entire Middle East to establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel.

In this context, then, American policy toward Lebanon is not about the well-being of the Lebanese people or their political system — just as in need of reform as Hezbollah — but about stamping the new Middle East with Trump’s personal trademark. The same can be seen in neighboring Syria, where less than a year after Islamist rebels overthrew the Assad dictatorship, the White House has mostly been concerned with the country’s relationship with Israel, even as Syria itself continues to face political and sectarian upheaval.

Despite removing sanctions on Damascus, the White House has placed 41% tariffs on Syria, the highest in the world, for no apparent reason — other than to blackmail the new government into making peace with the Jewish State. That’s despite the fact that Israel has occupied portions of southern Syria since the fall of the Assad regime, something also true of southern Lebanon, and that it has become deeply embroiled in the Syrian government’s conflict with the Druze minority, among other things striking government targets around Damascus. While Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has signaled his willingness to join the Abraham Accords in exchange for carrots from the West, Trump’s unsubtle arm-twisting ignores the other, much more existential battles Syria is currently facing, including the role of non-Sunni Arab minorities.

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Trump can forge a new Middle East

By Arta Moeini

Like in Lebanon, therefore, the US could well have a constructive role to play in Syria, but as long as it remains focused solely on advancing its own, and Israel’s, narrow objectives in both cases, it might as well kiss that role goodbye. These days, and as the recent church protest implies, sectarian tensions lurk down every street in Lebanon. Though the Lebanese themselves often downplay such divisions in everyday life, the threat of communitarian strife remains a tool of politics, especially in moments of instability. Certainly, Hezbollah has previously invoked the possibility of sectarian warfare as a cudgel to protect its powerbase during protests. Now, facing another existential crisis, it’s happy to play the sectarian card once more, knowing that its war-ravaged Shi’a support base, feeling disenfranchised and marginalized, may well be desperate enough to erupt into populist anger — especially if it fears being locked out of the political process altogether.

In other words, then, pushing too hard on Hezbollah without a requisite plan to support its base may yet again turn the country’s religious communities against each other. In Syria, for its part, the post-war sectarian balance remains incredibly delicate, and could yet be derailed altogether.

There is no question that Hezbollah’s weapons are a detriment to Lebanon’s stability and the health of its civil state. But contrary to conventional wisdom, the US is both speaking loudly and carrying a big stick, leaving no room for the Beirut government to find a genuine path toward disarmament. If Trump really was serious about helping the embattled Lebanese state, he might allow them to disarm Hezbollah in a way that is suitable to Lebanon’s incredibly sensitive political realities.

This could take a variety of forms, including a gradual, step-by-step reduction of Hezbollah’s arsenal that would be coupled with reciprocal withdrawals by Israel. Or else, the group might agree to de facto disarmament without giving up all its weapons, allowing it to maintain its mantle of defiance in a more ceremonial fashion. Details aside, though, the central facet of any workable solution must be giving the Lebanese government, as beleaguered as it is, the chance to define the conversation.

As it is, the great powers are once again using Lebanon as a pawn in their regional chess games, believing they’re better placed to handle the country’s problems than its own people. That’s frustrating, not least given the US is actually quite close to getting things right. All it needs to do is step back and let the Lebanese work out the details. Sadly for the Middle East, however, patience is not a word that often appears in Donald Trump’s vocabulary.

Over dozens of strikes against Iranian military infrastructure and nuclear facilities, Israel has truly done the unthinkable, decapitating swathes of Iran’s military and strategic leadership, and even establishing superiority in the smog-laden skies above Tehran. The regime, clearly, has been shaken to its core. But if Israel may ultimately overreach, with the ferocity of its campaign already pushing secular Iranians towards the patriotic fold, it’s also clear that Tehran’s humbling will remake the Middle East — which it has tried to mold in its own image for the better part of four decades.

Since the Eighties, Iran’s greatest assets have been oil exports, the Revolutionary Guards — and its network of proxies across the Middle East, threatening Israel and the Sunni Gulf states, all while creating a buffer between Tehran and its enemies. But the positions of these proxies carried with them the seeds of their own demise. Having entrenched themselves in the political landscapes of the Arab world, their allegiance to Iran often put them in conflict with the national priorities of the societies they’d cannibalized. That, in turn, rendered their positions deeply fragile.

One good example is Hezbollah, which, despite being inextricably linked to Iran’s mullahs, must increasingly cope with the vagaries of Lebanon’s complex sectarian politics. After dragging the country into war with Israel last year, the Shi’a militants duly earned the ire of Lebanese Sunnis and Christians alike. Since January, meanwhile, Lebanon has named a new president and prime minister, both of whom are seen as Hezbollah opponents. Worse still, in the wake of Israel’s assault, the Lebanese state has all but dismantled Hezbollah in southern Lebanon — reportedly using Israeli intelligence passed on via the US.

There are broader strategic problems for Iran too. Its foreign proxies can be compared to nuclear weapons: far more useful as theoretical deterrents, waiting ominously in the wings, than as actual tools of war. Indeed, after Israel called Iran’s bluff in September last year, unleashing the full weight of the IDF on Lebanon, Hezbollah duly crumbled — as did Iran’s ability to frighten its foes. In neighboring Syria, and without Hezbollah to act as an enforcer, the Assad regime collapsed to the rebels too. In hindsight, then, it should have seemed inevitable that the road from October 7 should have ended in Tehran. Hamas didn’t inform Iran of its plans in advance, but as a crucial pillar of its proxy network, Netanyahu and his ministers would always use the massacre to strike at the regime.

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Hezbollah's options are running out

By Michal Kranz

What happens next in Iran itself is hard to guess: perhaps an internal power struggle, maybe a revived liberal opposition. What’s clear, anyway, is that just as fracturing Tehran’s proxy network led to Israel’s attack last week, the degradation of its military capabilities and top brass has changed everything for the country’s regional allies.

Once again, consider the example of Lebanon. For years, Hezbollah boasted that it would shortly destroy the “Zionist entity”. These days, though, the group is rather more concerned with its own survival. In Iraq, meanwhile, the Kata’ib Hezbollah has done nothing other than call Israel’s strikes “deeply regrettable.” So far only the Houthis, Iran’s most committed attack dogs, have directly engaged Israel. But as they have in the past, they too may soon choose to cut their losses and reckon with the new political reality.

And no wonder. Israel’s war with Iran will reduce what was once a river of weapons and money to a trickle — having once supplied a total of around $300 million overall to the Houthis, and up to $1 billion per year to Hezbollah, Iran’s capacity for generosity has been decimated, especially after the mounting losses at home.

All this will expose Iran’s former proxies to challengers in their respective national arenas. What’s happening in Lebanon is now repeating in Gaza, with the battered remnants of Hamas threatened by popular protests and a parade of Israeli-backed thugs. At the same time, the decline of Iran will force the country’s erstwhile proxies to redefine their mission, facilitating a wholesale reorientation in political Shi’ism across the region.

As Shi’a groups across the region struggle to find a new political lodestar over the years ahead, the influence of these figures will only grow. No less important, Shi’a militant groups from Lebanon to Iraq appear to be doing something that few such groups have done before — embracing a more Arabized vision of Shi’a political activity, one bound by their respective national borders. Though the desire to wage a collective regional battle remains, groups like Hezbollah and Kata’ib Hezbollah seem to have realized that, having become tied to state institutions all around them, they too aren’t immune to nationalist impulses.

What is clear, anyway, is that the Middle East of tomorrow will be one where Iran will be much less influential. And, of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum. For if the mullahs cower in the face of Netanyahu’s bombs, Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia, and the UAE will be more than happy to take up the slack. Turkey, too, is in a strong position: with a new set of proxies in Syria, its influence in Damascus gives it a privileged seat at the geopolitical table. What that means in practice is yet more challenges for the former “Axis of Resistance”: with the power of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States on the rise in Lebanon, formerly marginal Sunni politicians are making a comeback. Even more dramatically, the new Syrian government is both hunting the remnants of Assad’s loyalist base, and taking a realpolitik approach towards even Israel.

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What will replace Hezbollah?

By Michal Kranz

Of course, the Shi’a sphere will hardly be irrelevant here, playing the new kingmakers against each other. The impact of a more nationalized, local vision of political Shi’ism could alter the calculus of Sunni powers, making regional dynamics much more multipolar. But disunited and disenchanted, Arab Shi’a will have little in the way of a true political home, regardless of what happens in the Islamic Republic itself. To be sure, the urge to find a new Khomeini for the 21st century will be strong. But having learned the price of relying on a single, corrupt power structure for political backing, the urge for genuine political emancipation may prove equally powerful.

What form this will take remains to be seen — from pro-democracy protests to Arab nationalism, the options for the next generation of Shi’a are varied, especially given the growing divide between the Shi’a elite, previously enriched by Iran, and the destitute Arab masses. Having once been at the top of the social hierarchy across the region, certainly, their arrogance has won them few allies among local populations. As one Lebanese Shi’a recently told a Palestinian: “We are going to take Jerusalem for you. You are not up for it.”

But despite the idealism of many young people across the Middle East, this remains a region where politics is seen as a zero-sum game. That means losses for Iran won’t be seen not opportunities for peace, but rather as an existential threat for Shi’a everywhere. Emergent leaders who do seek the mantle of Shi’ism won’t do so to emancipate Shi’a of all backgrounds from political exploitation, but to “save” them from domination by Sunnis, Israelis, and Americans, thus keeping the cycle of sectarian competition alive and kicking. Even al-Sistani, hardly a friend of Iran, backs a political vision centered on protecting Shi’a identity first and foremost — something that, given the broad reverence he commands throughout the Shi’a world, is a clear bellwether for the community’s future direction.

Nor will Iran itself will vanish from the scene. As the largest Shi’a-majority country in the world, it’ll remain the faith’s epicenter with or without the ayatollahs. Even before 1979, Iran had a clear geopolitical identity. And despite the fantasies of Israeli leaders, a post-Islamist Persia will hardly be an obedient satrapy — nor will it be a wholly secular society where Shi’ism is a spent social force. To quote Ferdowsi, a medieval forebear of Nizami Ganjavi: “Do you not know that Iran is my dwelling place? The world from head to foot is under my command.”

But now, suddenly, the Assads are gone, scuttling off to Moscow in disgrace. The Syrian Arab Army, which had occupied Lebanon in some form for decades, and which had fought viciously against Syrian rebels for 14 long years, melted like the Lebanese snow in springtime, fatally weakened by violence and wrecked by pitiful salaries. Yet if this revolution obviously means the most to Damascus, Lebanese too could see their lives change. The end of the Assads, after all, leaves vast economic and political opportunities — if, that is, foreigners avoid meddling in Lebanon once more.

With Syria stumbling into a new era, Lebanese political leaders are struggling to grasp what that means for them: especially given they are already reeling from Israel’s assault on Hezbollah and the not-so-final ceasefire that followed. What they have done, at least, is bolster the country’s security, deploying more troops to the Syrian frontier. To quote the office of Najib Mikati, the Lebanese prime minister, his government is working to distance “Lebanon from the repercussions of the developments in Syria”.

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Hezbollah has weakened Iran

By Michal Kranz

In practice, of course, that’s impossible. Assad may be gone, but Lebanon remains joined at the hip to Syria, just as it always has. Certainly, that’s clear when it comes to Hezbollah. As the militia itself has apparently conceded, Assad’s demise represents a “dangerous” new transformation both for Syria and itself. To understand this, you only need to look at a map. Though it was created as an Iranian proxy, Hassan Nasrallah’s former group always needed help from Syria, with the Assads representing a logistical bridge from Tehran to Beirut. The rebel takeover in Damascus has decisively severed this link, and though Iran may still funnel weapons to Hezbollah by sea, it’ll no longer be able to provide the heavy equipment that made the group so formidable.

Nor do the consequences for Hezbollah end there. As the Syrian economy crumbled, the Assad regime effectively became a narcostate, financing both itself and Hezbollah through the captagon trade. Now though, that funding has gone, even as the ceasefire with Israel has squeezed the group north of the Litani River. Dovetailed with persistant IDF strikes against Hezbollah infrastructure, and the group is weaker than ever, especially when you recall that forces hostile to Hezbollah surround Lebanon on three sides. Even the militia itself has begun to see the light, releasing a statement saying it “supported” the aspirations of the Syrian people — a ludicrous claim after helping Assad butcher civilians for years.

Where Hezbollah falls, meanwhile, other forces may rise to take its place. Already, there are signs that Lebanese heavyweights outside the militia’s circle are breathing more freely. Consider Walid Jumblatt. The leader of the Druze, his father was assassinated by Syrian operatives during the Lebanese Civil War. And though Walid himself remained deferential to Assad for much of the last decade, he nonetheless welcomed the dictator’s expulsion. As he wrote after the regime’s collapse: “I greet the Syrian people after a long wait.” He isn’t alone. Gebran Bassil, a Lebanese Christian politician, recently stated that Hezbollah should now focus on domestic affairs, and end its adventures abroad.

Whether this more open atmosphere translates into action will become clearer as Lebanon approaches its presidential vote on 9 January, with lawmakers hoping they can finally appoint a head of state after two years of gridlock. The Americans, for their part, see an opportunity here too: Washington is pushing the Lebanese parliament to appoint a president not aligned with Hezbollah. For the first time in years, this seems possible. One obvious candidate would be Joseph Aoun, the head of the Lebanese Armed Forces. And though his election is far from guaranteed, Aoun’s ascension to the presidency would be a major blow to Hezbollah’s influence at the top of Lebanon’s politics.

Beyond the parlour games in Beirut, the fall of Assad could soon have vast consequences for the Lebanese themselves. No longer running the risk of an extended stay at Sednaya, many of the million or so Syrian refugees in Lebanon will return home. Their departure will transform Lebanon’s embattled economy, creating much-needed work for locals while throwing industries like agriculture into crisis. For a large segment of the Lebanese political establishment Syrians as a group have long been a convenient political scapegoat, unfairly blamed for political murders and the country’s economic crisis. Their return home won’t solve Lebanon’s problems — but may remove a lightning rod social issue from Lebanese discourse, helping mitigate social tensions at a time of unprecedented uncertainty.

Much could still go wrong. With Hezbollah weakened, and Assad gone, Lebanon’s sectarian politicians are now likely to compete among each other for power. That, it goes without saying, could potentially usher in more instability, or even actual bloodshed. That’s what happened back in 2008, when Hezbollah’s rivals tried to constrain the group following an earlier war with Israel. More to the point, there are plenty of factions ready to take Hezbollah’s place. One is the Amal Movement, another Shi’a organisation, others, such as Christian groups like the Lebanese Forces, could jockey for position too.

Nor are Lebanon’s internal dynamics the only worry here: with Israel one obvious fly in the ointment. In an ideal Middle East, Hezbollah’s growing isolation would encourage the Jewish State to sit back, allowing its old foe to founder. But given the upheaval in Syria, Israel may decide that now is the time to destroy Hezbollah once and for all.

Israeli behaviour certainly seems aggressive. Netanyahu’s first impulse following the rebel takeover of Damascus was to attack Syrian weapons depots, preventing them from falling into militant hands. No less striking, Netanyahu has “temporarily” moved his troops beyond the Golan Heights, illegally annexed by Israel in 1981 — and into Syria proper. The prime minister justified this move by pointing to the collapse of a border security agreement Israel had signed with the Assads back in 1974. Be that as it may, with the IDF’s capture of the Syrian side of Mount Hermon, the tallest peak for miles, Israel has gained a strategic point from which to monitor both southern Syria and Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Lebanon. If Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah indeed restarts in the coming months, both Syrians and Lebanese may find themselves dragged into the quagmire once more.

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Can Lebanon survive without Hezbollah?

By Michal Kranz

The new Syria could also cause more direct problems for Lebanon. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) leader, is presenting himself and his forces as moderate Islamists interested in preserving a genuinely pluralistic Syria, but it’s unclear if he’ll stick to this agenda. Though HTS seems unwilling to launch incursions into Lebanon for now, a resurgent Hezbollah could change that. No less worrying, HTS has form here. Under its former guise of Jabhat al-Nusra, it launched several forays across the border. The Syrian war even sparked a micro-conflict in the Lebanese city of Tripoli, where Sunni militias fought their Shi’a rivals for years.

An Islamist regime in Damascus, then, could quickly reopen Lebanon’s own religious wounds. And that’s not the only Syria threat. Between Syrian Kurdish forces, clashing with groups backed Turkey, to the competing foreign ties of other rebel factions, renewed violence is likely. And as reports now emerge of pro-Assad Syrians fleeing over the border to Lebanon, there’s a risk that Beirut gets dragged back into its neighbour’s political fights — especially if the new rulers in Damascus choose to hunt down their newly exiled enemies.

As with so much else in the Levant right now, it’s too early to know how things will go. Yet Lebanon now faces its most significant movement of flux since the end of the civil war in 1990. With Iran and Hezbollah on the decline, the US resurgent, and the Gulf States and Turkey poised to return to Lebanese politics, there’s plenty to play for. Let’s just hope the country’s long-suffering citizens don’t yet again lose to other peoples’ games.

This is important: and not merely for the militia itself, or the 1.4 million civilians displaced by violence. For 35 years, Lebanese and foreigners alike have battled to build a genuine Lebanese state. Every time, they’ve failed, stymied by Hezbollah and its allies. This time, though, Hezbollah may have little to say in the matter, even as its own future depends on strengthening the civilian political order. Not that Lebanon’s hapless politicians should necessarily be making plans just yet. For while Hezbollah is surely weakened, there are still forces eager to hamstring Lebanese democracy — both among the country’s bickering sects, and in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Lebanese politicians were quick to grasp the ceasefire’s implications. Just hours after the deal was inked, Prime Minister Najib Mikati vowed to “assert the state’s authority over every inch of the homeland”, adding that the Lebanese army must be “at the forefront” of any such move. To be sure, Mikati isn’t the first Lebanese premier to make a dash for sovereignty. Fouad Siniora faced a full-scale rebellion by Hezbollah after moving to dismantle its influence in 2008. Three years earlier, the group assassinated Rafiq Hariri for trying something similar.

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The end of Lebanon's French connection

By Michal Kranz

Almost two decades on from Hariri’s killing, however, Hezbollah is far weaker. The fact it’s been forced to accept America’s ceasefire terms speaks volumes, especially when the deal includes provisions that had once seemed impossible. That notably includes the long-awaited implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed at the end of the 2006 war with Israel, and which requires Hezbollah to withdraw its forces north of the Litani River. In fact, Wednesday’s deal is even more far-reaching, with Hezbollah also obliged to retreat from a mountaintop that overlooks northern Israel. The area’s strategic value has been known for centuries: crusaders built a castle on the peak back in the 12th century, and its ruins attract tourists to this day.

In Hezbollah’s place, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) will be deployed to the country’s south instead. They’ll be in charge of security, and preventing any violations of the ceasefire. Among other things, that could include attempts by Hezbollah to smuggle weapons into the country. As part of the agreement, meanwhile, the US, France and other countries will raise funds to train the LAF, helping it fulfil its new mandate. There are reasons to be sceptical of such an arrangement: it failed spectacularly in 2006. This time, though, the ceasefire includes the creation of a new committee, led by the US and France, to monitor the situation in southern Lebanon and ensure the ceasefire holds.

Nor is this merely a theoretical plan. So far, in fact, things mostly seem to be proceeding smoothly — in terms of the LAF’s deployment anyway. Columns of Lebanese military vehicles have started trundling south, while LAF troops have already entered several towns, much to the relief of exhausted locals. It hasn’t all been easy: Israel has already claimed that Hezbollah is ignoring the ceasefire in several places, leading to limited but deadly clashes with the group at several spots along the border. Hezbollah, in turn, has accused Israel of firing in the direction of civilians returning to their homes. Yet at the same time, Hezbollah missile launchers have been spotted moving northward, and the group has said it’s cooperating with the LAF as it assumes control in the south.

What does all this mean in practice? At the very least, Hezbollah’s monopoly on violence in the south has decisively ended: a monumental shift in itself. For a generation, the group had branded itself as the only organisation in Lebanon capable of acting as its “resistance” to Israel, using this title to justify its extensive arsenal and its domination of south Beirut, southern Lebanon, and much of the Beqaa Valley. Though Hezbollah supporters have claimed that their northward withdrawal changes nothing, the fact is that the organisation’s image is now tarnished. How, to put it differently, can Hezbollah act as the “resistance” to Israel now that it’s retreated almost 30 kilometres from its enemy’s border? The humiliating demise of Hassan Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders is hardly good optics either.

As for Lebanon itself, Hezbollah’s moment of weakness is an opportunity. For the first time in decades, the Lebanese government and its military might just have enough political capital among Lebanon’s war-weary public to assert themselves, finally dragging their country back from the prospect of total state failure.

Especially if they can secure genuine backing from the West, Lebanese leaders may be able to use their present momentum to create the foundations for a fully functioning state. Yesterday, one day after the start of the ceasefire, the country’s feeble government announced that it had agreed to finally hold presidential elections in January: a goal that had eluded it for more than two years.

Naturally, Hezbollah and its allies will continue to hold sway. But with the stick of Israeli guns, and the carrot of American diplomatic and financial support, the government that emerges from the ceasefire will be forced to claw back at least some power from Hezbollah — and will, by default, be more pro-Western than before. Lebanon’s infamous corruption and sectarian infighting will doubtlessly persist. Yet with an increasingly tangible partner, Lebanon’s international friends may finally see an opening to forge a path forward toward not only a new security reality in the country, but also a new economic one as well.

It’s a good sign, surely, that Lebanon’s embattled civilian politicians have received tentative support from an unlikely source: Hezbollah itself. Already, the militia’s relatively passive public statements reflect a willingness to work with the suits — a sign, perhaps, that they know their legitimacy is bruised. Though Hezbollah’s MPs were quick to claim that the “resistance” would continue, meanwhile, they’ve also stated that they would help “people to return [home] and to rebuild”. No less striking, Hezbollah’s new Secretary General has claimed his organisation would work within the framework of the Taif Accords. Ending the Lebanese Civil War, in 1990, they called for the dismantling of the country’s militias. Hezbollah, it hardly needs saying, has ignored that particular clause for decades.

All the same, it would be wrong to bet the house on a new Lebanon. The government in Beirut does have a great opportunity to assert its strength: but that’s partly because it has got so much space to fill. As it stands, the Lebanese state is little more than an abandoned husk, occupied by a myriad of sectarian political parties. To put it differently, then, the post-war order offers ample opportunities to several other partisan groups — certainly not Hezbollah, but no more democratic for it.

Hezbollah’s Shi’a allies in the Amal Movement, and who have challenged the group’s position in the past, may well view this moment as an opportunity to present themselves as a less risky and volatile party for Lebanese Shi’a. Among Christians, parties that once tacitly backed Hezbollah have already moved away. And if that creates the potential for a more unified anti-Iranian bloc, Sunni parties like the Saudi-backed Future Movement may well re-emerge too.

As I wrote last month, then, this maelstrom will doubtless lead to renewed chaos over the years ahead, especially if Mikati and his deputies fail to exert power over their country’s borders, or else fail to restrain a resurgent Hezbollah.

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Can Lebanon survive without Hezbollah?

By Michal Kranz

And certainly, just such a scenario is possible. The militia, after all, is far more than a domestic Lebanese outfit, with its masters in Tehran remaining crucial. Hezbollah’s troubles have severely damaged Iran’s position in the region, and not simply in terms of men or materiel. For one thing, the ceasefire deal has shattered a central tenet of the regime’s grand strategy: that the fight against Israel in Gaza was inextricably linked to the battle for Lebanon. Though Iran reportedly pressured the militia to accept the ceasefire deal, meanwhile, it also promised to resupply its proxy. But given Israel has implicitly reserved the right to renew attacks against Hezbollah if it violates the ceasefire, something it would inevitably do with US backing, practical support is now much harder to provide. Especially with rival sectarian groups circling, in short, Iran now faces a much less hospitable Lebanese landscape.

Combined with the pressure the ceasefire puts on another Iranian ally — Hezbollah has long supported the Assad dictatorship in Syria — Tehran’s freedom of movement suddenly looks rather constrained. The point, though, is that Iran’s leaders are nothing if not long-term thinkers: there’s no reason to believe that the sphere of influence they’ve meticulously built over decades will suddenly collapse. While, in short, the Islamic Republic’s singular focus on Hezbollah as its strategic lynchpin has proved costly, the country still has moves to play. Just like after the 2006 war, when Beirut tried to use the moment to wrest some control back from Hezbollah, the stage is therefore set for another confrontation. On one side sits the militia and Iran. On the other waits the Lebanese state and its friends. Who’ll emerge triumphant remains to be seen.

For Israel and Lebanon, the coming weeks will be no different. The outgoing Biden team will seek to have an impact on the war. The incoming Trump team will manoeuvre to have as much unpleasantness as possible finished before it comes and as much credit as possible coming to them. And various European and Arab states will seek to exploit the American transition for their own initiatives.

Across the West, diplomats and experts have settled on a consensus for solving the ongoing Arab-Israeli war — one that reveals exactly why international diplomatic efforts have consistently failed. At its core, this approach focuses on restoring the very ceasefire conditions which Lebanon and Hezbollah violated last year, while avoiding any mention of even the desirability of peace — something Lebanon would benefit from more than any other party. In failing to recognise this, our international diplomats embody all the pathologies and failures that have come to define their contribution to this decades-long conflict.

According to the Quai d’Orsay and the State Department, the formula for ending the war merely requires punching in the four-digit PIN code 1701. That, of course, is UN Security Council resolution 1701, the one that ended the last war back in 2006. The resolution included several clear obligations for all parties. Israel was to withdraw from Lebanese territory. Hezbollah was to move all its forces north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone where the only permitted armed forces would be those of the UN peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) and the Lebanese Army (LFA). UNIFIL was to monitor and enforce these deployments. And Hezbollah was supposed to be decommissioned as an armed force inside sovereign Lebanese territory.

The first measure, Israeli withdrawal, was implemented within days of the resolution’s passage. The others were not. Once Israel’s withdrawal was complete, UNIFIL announced that it had no intention of enforcing 1701, and over the course of the next 17 years, Hezbollah assembled an arsenal of rockets and missiles. It also built a network of tunnels that were supposed to allow it, in a future war, to “conquer the Galilee” in an operation similar to the one Hamas ultimately launched hundreds of kilometres away in southern Israel.

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The next Intifada is about to begin

By Shany Mor

The day after Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on October 7 last year, Hezbollah began firing rockets on northern Israel, forcing the rapid evacuation of border communities comprising nearly 100,000 residents, most of whom have yet to return home. After 11 months of low-intensity warfare, Israel took the initiative, and in 11 days managed to deal Hezbollah a decisive blow. 

On 17 and 18 September, exploding pagers and walkie-talkies disabled the militia’s communications network, taking thousands of fighters out of commission. Over the next week, a series of airstrikes based on precise intelligence destroyed the majority of Hezbollah’s rockets and launchers and eliminated key military commanders. Finally, on 27 September, an Israeli airstrike on a bunker in Beirut killed nearly every senior figure in the organisation, including its voluble leader Hassan Nasrallah. This was followed by a ground invasion which has seen tunnels and munitions, prepared over a decade and more, destroyed with huge losses to Hezbollah and minimal losses to the IDF.

However, the 11-day campaign woke up the international community in a way that 11 months of rocket fire did not. And the unanimous response has been an urgent call for implementation of 1701. David Lammy called for a “political solution in line with Resolution 1701”. The French ambassador to the UN called upon Israel “to stop the escalation underway in Lebanon” and reiterated Frances determination for a cessation of hostilities “in accordance with Resolution 1701”. Hours before the successful operation to kill Nasrallah, the US, Canada, Australia, Canada and a host of European and Arab states issued a joint declaration demanding an immediate 21-day cease “to provide space for diplomacy towards the conclusion of a diplomatic settlement consistent with UNSCR 1701”.

This consensus around the indeterminate and obsolete Security Council resolution tells, in short, the entire story of the failure to resolve this conflict. If there is one thread running through nearly every diplomatic effort of the last eight decades, it is a firm commitment to the idea that any party that launches a war against Israel and is then defeated is entitled to a restoration of the conditions it violently rejected when launching the war.

This unspoken normative commitment explains the iterations of final status plans presented to the Palestinian leadership after its rejection of statehood at Camp David and subsequent suicide bombing campaign of the early 2000s. It explains the insistence on pre-1967 armistice lines as the only legal basis for Israel’s border after 1967. It explains the curious exception to that norm regarding the refusal to recognise even the pre-1967 part of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And it explains the cruel human experiment known as UNRWA, a refugee agency that, unlike any other refugee agency, exists not to rehabilitate refugees but rather to keep them in a permanent state of immiseration to maintain an irredentist claim against another country.

Such a norm has not featured in the post-war mediation of any other conflict, not before 1945 and not since. No one has ever seriously suggested creating a kind of sportsman’s mulligan as an international diplomatic norm for other conflicts for this very reason. It’s not hard to see why this might be the case. If the international community extended a line of insurance to other aggressors, which promised that launching wars could bring gains with victory but no losses with defeat, there would be a lot more wars. 

But what’s even more notable than the warped consensus around 1701 is the absence of any mention of making peace between the two neighbouring states. Nowhere is the establishment of normal diplomatic relations between Lebanon and Israel even mentioned as a long-term goal.

One might argue that peace right now is not realistic, and that may be true. But that is equally true about an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank or the establishment of a Palestinian state or the redivision of Jerusalem — and yet these are always mentioned as long-term goals by European governments.

Why shouldn’t a peace treaty be the clearly stated goal? Normal diplomatic relations would resolve any existing border disputes. After all, the ones still extant are tiny and largely invented pretexts for maintaining Hezbollah’s arsenal.

Just before the US election, France hosted an “International Conference in Support of Lebanon’s People and Sovereignty”, where $1 billion in aid was pledged and where French President Macron claimed Israel was “sowing barbarism”. If there was any suggestion that Lebanon’s situation might have been improved by not firing rockets into Israel for the past 11 months, the participants were too polite to mention it. Nor was there any reckoning with Lebanon’s decision to cultivate an alternative armed force, larger than its own military, implicated in atrocities in Syria, and answerable to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The insistence of global actors, most notably the host country itself, on protecting Hezbollah and securing for it advantageous ceasefire arrangements in previous wars in 1996 and 2006 also went unmentioned.

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Chaos has consumed Israel

By Shany Mor

And no one mentioned peace. Normal diplomatic relations between Lebanon and Israel wouldn’t mean that Lebanon agrees with everything Israel does. This is already the case for France as well as most of its allies. For that matter, it is also the case for Egypt and Jordan. It would just mean that there is an agreed border, a possibility for minimal economic cooperation, and a commitment to resolve disputes by negotiation. Good for Israel, to be sure. But even better for Lebanon. 

True, no one could seriously believe that this path will be adopted. But the reticence to even raise the topic of peace is in many ways revealing. Most obviously, it sends the wrong message and incentivises the wrong behaviours — as well as violates any normal diplomatic practice regarding other international disputes. But it also mirrors the manner in which the contemporary Western cordon sanitaire around racism has an elaborate permission structure exempting hatred of Jews. Once again, all that’s required is to frame one’s dislike as a kind of grievance against Israel — rather than as pathological hatred of a highly imperfect state that is fighting a complex seven-front war it did not seek.

What’s new about the recent Israeli method, however, is that it doesn’t stop at one or two important figures. Rather, they’ve gone after leaders, planners, strategists, figureheads and key implementers, with the obvious goal of not merely slowing down the adversary but actually crippling them, ideally beyond repair, and turning the population against them by demonstrating just how damaging these leaders are to their quality of life. 

It’s too soon to say if this will become a key tactic in Israel’s arsenal, whether it will prove effective in the long run, and what responses it might draw from their enemies. Yet what we can speculate on is this: might a strategy that emphasises the enemy’s decision makers turn out to be good news for civilians? 

The goal of bombing across many previous conflicts, notably the Second World War, was to demoralise the citizenry through starvation and destruction. As late as 2003, meanwhile, the goal of the US bombing blitz in Baghdad was to cow the Iraqi population into a state of “shock and awe”. The current Israeli goal, at least in theory, is to eliminate the people and infrastructure of their sworn enemies. This is a significant difference, and is potentially epoch-making. 

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The Taliban must purge itself

By Cheryl Benard

The unjust distribution of the costs of war have been one of its eternal features. Wars are declared by leaders, planned by generals, fought by often-reluctant footsoldiers — and endured in misery by the population at large. To put it differently, it’s always been ordinary people, the conscripts on the frontlines and the mass of civilians behind, who bore the brunt of any war, and this hasn’t changed. According to the Red Cross, a full 90% of war-time casualties remain civilians.

In theory, these civilian losses are “collateral” damage, unintentional and regrettable consequences of fights between armed combatants. But the evidence shows that most lethal action against civilians is either deliberate, or else represents a consequence that was known in advance and judged to be acceptable. You don’t bomb a city like Dresden without realising that you’ll be burying women, children and the elderly in the rubble, with an estimated 30,000 perishing in February 1945. 7,500 civilians died during America’s initial bombardment of Baghdad, and thousands more were traumatised and maimed. 

What if 2003 had gone differently? What if, instead of invading the country, the Americans had simply killed Saddam and his inner circles in a focused strike? There might have been no insurgency, no sectarian slaughter, no eventual Iranian triumph. Or, to return to the Second World War, what if the Allies had tasked Oppenheimer with focusing his scientific genius on developing missiles instead of atomic bombs, with the goal of destroying Hitler and his advisors in the Eagle’s Nest? What, to put it bluntly, if they’d targeted Hirohito not Hiroshima? Would that not have sacrificed one life for thousands? 

It’s hardly a new question. I grew up with it. My grandmother, cynical over a lifetime of catastrophic military ventures that saw her survive the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the loss of two world wars, and the Soviet occupation of her country, perennially greeted global conflict with the comment that “the big shots with their big ideas should fight it out directly” and leave the civilians out of it. But, to reluctantly quote Steve Bannon, this was a pipe dream, because “the aristos never fight”. 

And in fact, over more recent decades, psychopathic dictators not only sidestepped punishment, but were allowed comfortable exiles overseas. That’s what happened with Baby Doc Duvalier, the erstwhile Haitian despot, or Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, who both found themselves living the high life in France. Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, protector of Josef Mengele and killer of political opponents, was hosted by Brazil. The theory behind this genteel approach was that a cornered dictator would fight to the death, thereby prolonging the bloodshed. Offer him an attractive way out, and more slaughter could be avoided. 

Over time, though, this solution became less acceptable to global public opinion, ushering in our current era of sanctions and International Criminal Court arrest warrants. The approach sounded salient on paper, but in truth the ICC lacks any real muscle and has rarely proved effective either as a deterrent or as an instrument of justice. Just ask Vladimir Putin. 

The Israeli approach, then, represents a far more impressive reframing of the question of accountability. As we’ve discovered, war always assumes collective guilt. But are civilians truly more deserving of punishment for the decisions of their leaders than those rulers themselves? “They went along with it,” we may say. And that’s true. Too often, indeed, fanatical leaders can count on the hysterical enthusiasm of the masses. “They elected them,” we point out, and that sometimes applies too. 

Yet civilian populations are usually motivated by little more than the chance to prosper. Most people, moreover, are not heroes of the resistance. American voters did not choose a president in the knowledge that he would become obsessed with non-existent WMDs in Iraq. The fateful decisions, in short, are made at the top. What does a corporation do when it’s in trouble? Does it fire the entire staff, or replace the CEO? Isn’t it then both more just, and arguably more efficient, to go after the leaders?

A stronger objection comes from political scientists. While they generally agree that “decapitating” an enemy by taking out its leader is psychologically effective, they argue that the impact only lasts until a successor emerges, and all you may have achieved in the end is having created a martyr. What’s different now is that Israel seems to be aiming well beyond mere psychology, and is instead working to disable the broader command structures of its foes. It has focused on disrupting the enemy’s communication channels, as well as preventing new leaders from taking over. Just a day after killing Hassan Nasrallah, the IDF also targeted his Hezbollah successor. 

From there, the list continues. Ali Karaki (Nasrallah’s longtime adviser); Eid Hassan Nashar (the commander of Hezbollah’s medium-range rocket force); Samir Tawfiq Dib (the commander of its southern front); Nabil Kaouk (deputy head of its central council); all these, and many more, have been killed in Israeli strikes. Nor has the IDF neglected its main ideological enemy: Iran. The assassination of top Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh, while he was staying at an official military guesthouse in Tehran, is an excellent example. The suspicious death of Iran’s former president Raisi in a helicopter crash may or may not have been an accident — but anyway bears striking similarities to Israeli actions elsewhere.

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The first lesson of diplomacy: karma's a bitch

By Cheryl Benard

To be clear, I’m not ignoring the appalling number of civilian casualties in Gaza, nor the impact on Lebanon. Nor do we yet know how other players may respond to this emerging new style of warfare. Mossad’s recent pager attack is a remarkable piece of spycraft, untangling adversaries from their surroundings. It plucked the Hezbollah members from the crowd, albeit imperfectly. But the similar weaponisation of daily items could plausibly yet be deployed by the West’s enemies too, with obviously unpredictable consequences. 

So far, though, our assessment must be: tactical advantage Israel. Even after taking some time to think it over, Iran hasn’t been able to react innovatively to Israel’s attacks, instead launching its usual knee-jerk show of missiles into established Israeli defences. 

If, then, we want to be optimistic: there’s a chance that Israel’s focus on going after the “brains behind the operations” might make leaders think twice before sending their lackeys off to die. And if not, it may at least drive a salutary wedge between violent-minded ideologues and the population at large, as the latter recognises that they’re better off without them. In fact, this may already be happening in Lebanon, where criticism of Hezbollah is beginning to be voiced by politicians and the public at large. Netanyahu’s message that the Lebanese people aren’t the enemy will need, in light of the damage they’re suffering, to be amplified with concrete offers of cooperation and support.

Hezbollah is far from finished. It has continued to fire hundreds of rockets, and at times even ballistic missiles, towards Israel on a daily basis over recent weeks. In Lebanon’s south, its guerrilla forces have reportedly repelled Israeli advances, claiming to have killed dozens of troops and destroyed multiple Israeli Merkava tanks. And if Hamas has been able to endure a year of war with Israel in the tiny Gaza Strip, the expansive Shi’a militia will surely endure too.

Yet whether the war in the north persists for weeks, months, or longer, it’s already clear that Lebanon’s old political order is dead and buried. As its fierce resistance to the IDF implies, this is less about Hezbollah’s military capabilities — and more because of politics. With the group humbled by Israel, Lebanon’s powerbrokers are finally poised to nudge the militants from their prized place at the top of the country’s political hierarchy. That, in turn, will leave space for the group’s allies and rivals to scrap for influence, both in Lebanon itself and across the region. As disastrous as the status quo has been for the Lebanese people, in short, whatever happens next will surely rival the worst crises of the country’s modern history.

The essential problem here is how Lebanon works. It may in theory be a democratic republic, but in practice the country’s politics is a tangle of feudal, sectarian fiefs, each ruled by an oligarchy of former warlords operating though political parties. Woven into this complex tapestry are threads of foreign influence. From Syria to Israel to Iran, they’ve each prodded Lebanon in varied directions since the latter’s independence from France in 1943. No wonder the formal state has become little more than a way for domestic leaders and their foreign backers to enrich themselves at the expense of the Lebanese people.

This reality is unlikely to change after the current war. But it also means that, unlike in Gaza, Hezbollah and its Iranian masters aren’t the only game in town. Certainly, Lebanon’s elite are keenly aware of this. Having for years been forced to watch their country be abused by Hezbollah and Iran, the prospect of winning back some degree of independence is surely enticing.

That’s especially true given that Hezbollah have been making themselves unpopular for years. Consider, for instance, their support of Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War. Apart from alienating Lebanese Sunnis, who loathed the Syrian army’s extermination of their coreligionists in Aleppo and Homs, many Lebanese Shi’a couldn’t understand the relationship between Assad’s brutality and Hezbollah’s claims to be fighting for a free Palestine.

In more recent years, moreover, Hezbollah increasingly became bound up within the Lebanese state itself. That meant it was forced to act as a guarantor of the country’s corrupt order, even as people from across the religious spectrum rose up in protest after the financial collapse of 2019. Many Lebanese, especially Christians, also blamed the group for the catastrophic 2020 Beirut port blast, hardly unsurprising given Hezbollah essentially shut down efforts to investigate it.

Though Hezbollah’s level of support among Lebanese Shi’a remains high, and is perhaps more robust than ever right now, it’s now far less popular among other denominations. At the height of the 2006 war, after all, the group was lionised across the Middle East for its stout defence against Israel, with its support among Christians, Druze and Sunnis ranging from 80-89%. These days, almost exactly 18 years later, polls show that their non-Shi’a support had collapsed to just 10%, with more than half of Lebanese stating they had no trust in Hezbollah at all.

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By Edward Luttwak

Given all this, the arrival of full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah was the last straw for many Lebanese — and their political representatives. Without a sitting president since 2022, and with a mere caretaker as prime minister, the main representative of the Lebanese state has long been Nabih Berri. A career politician and long-time parliamentary speaker, he’s for decades served as Lebanon’s political kingmaker. And though he’s long tied his political prospects to Hezbollah, in the last few days Berri has signalled that he may sidestep Hezbollah’s preferred presidential candidate in favour of a consensus-minded alternative. The Biden Administration has reportedly backed this proposal too, even as it prods the Lebanese elite to pick a new president before any ceasefire with Israel is signed.

The election of a president without Hezbollah’s blessing — and indeed one backed by the White House — would be a major departure from the tenure of former president Michel Aoun. Serving from 2016 to 2022, he proved a reliable Hezbollah ally. More fundamentally, though, the relegation of Hezbollah’s voice within Lebanon’s bewildering political chorus could have broader implications too. Within the country’s sectarian parliamentary system, it may signal that Berri and his Amal Movement seek to grab more influence among Lebanon’s Shi’a.

Other political factions could be quick to pounce too. One example is the Lebanese Forces, the country’s largest Christian party, which has long opposed Hezbollah. They’ve already spoken out against Hezbollah, Iran, and the current war, and may ultimately seek to absorb burgeoning discontent among Lebanese Christians toward Hezbollah — and in doing so may try to gain leverage over their confessional rivals, namely Michel Aoun and his Hezbollah-aligned Christian party. Lebanon’s Sunni leaders, who’ve struggled to make their voices heard amid Hezbollah’s dominance, could also feel reinvigorated to pursue their interests — especially if Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States decide to reinvest in Lebanon now that Hezbollah is weaker.

Naïve observers may be inclined to see this political merry-go-round, and Hezbollah’s potential weakening within it, as a sign that Lebanon’s prospects could improve. But even if you ignore the country’s mountain of social and economic problems, a humbled Hezbollah would hardly slink off without a fight. We’ve seen exactly what the group is capable of when it feels threatened. On two occasions, in 2008 and 2021, it deployed fighters to the streets of Beirut, clashing with other militias as well as the Lebanese army proper.

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That’s hardly surprising: vastly more powerful than the nation’s official soldiers, Hezbollah is used to throwing its weight around. Just as important, the destruction of some of its arsenal may delude Hezbollah’s enemies into believing the group is primed for annihilation. That would be a mistake — and anyway, without the deterrent of the group’s missiles and armoured vehicles, the risk of bloodshed between Lebanon’s various militias becomes ever higher. To put it bluntly, then, the end of the conflict with Israel may yet return civil war to Lebanon itself.

As so often, though, what happens to Lebanon is ultimately for outsiders to decide. Crucially, Hezbollah has never acted independently, and as the region takes stock when the current round of killing finally ends, Iran will be there to pull the strings of its favourite Lebanese puppet. One option is that Tehran chooses to strengthen Hezbollah once more. In practice, however, it may find its freedom limited by a range of potential post-war agreements. One is the implementation of UN Resolution 1701, adopted in 2006, which mandates a withdrawal of Hezbollah away from Lebanon’s border with Israel. Both the US and Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister have endorsed the resolution as a way to end the war, though practical implementation remains hard to envisage. If Tehran decides Hezbollah is no longer up to the task of carrying out its wishes in Lebanon, Iran may instead opt to borrow the lesson of Syria — and deploy the Islamic Revolutionary Guards directly. Paradoxically, this would only further erode Hezbollah’s influence within Lebanon, and introduce even more jockeying into the region’s Shi’a ecosystem.

As far as the Americans are concerned, the current uncertainty offers a striking opportunity. After decades of failure in Lebanon, the White House could finally rebuild the Lebanese state and empower its army to become the country’s primary armed force. Despite its relative impotence, and the fact it’s been hamstrung by the government’s near bankruptcy, it’s long been one of the few state institutions to enjoy cross-confessional support. All the same, the idea that the Lebanese state can easily overcome its sectarian corruption is fanciful. This, after all, is a country completely bound by domestic venality and foreign power politics — just as it has been for most of the last century. Whatever happens to Hezbollah, that’s unlikely to change.

One year on, Netanyahu is determined to continue his war in Gaza at all costs — not just to Gazans, of whom more than 40,000 have been killed and another 1.9 million (90% of the population) displaced, but to the Israeli hostages as well. His future and the outcome of the war are now inseparable.

Even before October 7, Netanyahu was highly polarising. Liberal Israelis turned up in vast numbers to protest his policies, denouncing him as a threat to democracy and the rule of law, while those on the Right saw him as a peerless leader, even a saviour. Attitudes towards him have only hardened. The families of the remaining hostages believe that only a ceasefire will bring their loved ones home and that Netanyahu refuses to agree to one because he is obsessed with destroying Hamas entirely. Other Israelis are convinced that Netanyahu is bent on prolonging the Gaza war to remain in power so as to avoid facing the pending corruption charges against him. More still see him as a threat to rule of law in Israel. Many Israelis hold all three of these opinions. In a late July interview, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert went to far as to warn that the country could descend into civil war — a view shared by nearly half the respondents in an August poll.

Yet despite this, Netanyahu’s vow to destroy Hamas has proven chimerical. And his refusal to abandon it has created a rift between him and the most hawkish members of his cabinet — National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who lead far-Right religious parties — and senior Israeli military officers and intelligence officials who insist that Hamas cannot be vanquished.

But what does it actually mean in practice, to destroy Hamas? The IDF’s overwhelming superiority in soldiers, military technology and firepower may well demolish its fighting force, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and eliminate its senior commanders. (The Brigades’ leader, Mohammed Deif, has most likely already been killed.) And even if the Brigades don’t disappear, they will have been battered badly. But destroying Hamas entirely is all but impossible. It is a political movement with a distinctive ideology, which includes ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control of Gaza through a draconian blockade. So long as both continue it will have a cause to which it can rally support. Thousands of vengeful young men whose mothers, fathers and siblings have been killed by Israel’s war machine will continue to join up, the suffocating Israeli blockade fuelling their resentment.

Regardless of Hamas’s future, when the war eventually ends, Israel will have to arrange for Gaza’s governance. But none of the available choices is workable. Netanyahu has ruled out a coalition government containing the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas or even one run solely by the PA. As for a government staffed by Gaza’s notables, that would be almost impossible. Anyone who steps forward will be condemned as a Quisling: the more acceptable they are to Israel, the less they will be trusted by Gazans. Alternatively, Israel could run Gaza through a military occupation but that, sooner or later, would restart the familiar cycle of repression and resistance.

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The No-State Solution

By Rajan Menon

To complicate matters, Israel is waging a war of sorts on a second front, the West Bank, where tension and violence are increasing. State-sanctioned seizures of land there have accelerated, with the largest single authorisation in three decades taking place in July. The number of housing units has nearly doubled over the past five years, according to the European Union which doesn’t include the nearly 200 “outposts”, many of which eventually gain legal status despite being illegal under Israeli law. Meanwhile, settlers’ attacks on Palestinians have surged along with their destruction of Palestinians’ olive groves, gardens and orchards; the killing and stealing of sheep and cattle; the demolition and defacement of schools; and the takeover of water sources, sometimes assisted by the IDF.

Worse, as +972 Magazine reports, the security forces and settlers have killed nearly 700 West Bank Palestinians since October 7. Israel’s far-Right parties have praised these attacks, denouncing foreign criticism as smears. Ben Gvir has even relaxed gun ownership laws for the settlers: within the first two months of Hamas’s attack, 250,000 firearm applications were filed, more than in the past 25 years. In fact, the Government’s relentless, accelerated approval of West Bank settlements has all but destroyed the already-dim prospects of a two-state solution.

Unsurprisingly, support for armed resistance among Palestinians has increased. Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and to a lesser extent Hamas have sunk deep roots in the territory. Overall violence in the region — by the IDF, settlers, and militant Palestinian groups — had increased by 50% even in the 12 months preceding the Gaza war. Current trends suggest the very real possibility of a third Intifada. David Shulman, a scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, warned recently in the New York Review of Books that, if left unchecked, the actions of Israeli settlers “will lead to Hamas and Islamic Jihad taking control of the West Bank”.

Further inflaming the situation, Israel has now launched a ground invasion in southern Lebanon, opening a third front against the Lebanese Shiite political party and paramilitary force, Hezbollah. It’s the culmination of almost a year of hostilities: since October 7, Hezbollah has been aiming missiles and drones at northern Israel, while Israel has been retaliating with air strikes on Hezbollah redoubts in southern Lebanon. While Hezbollah has vowed to continue its attacks so long as the Gaza war persists, Netanyahu is bent on enabling the return of people displaced from their homes, and it appears he will take great risks to do so.

But by invading Lebanon, Netanyahu is taking on a foe far more formidable than Hamas. As retired Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brik wrote in Haaretz: “The IDF, which failed to destroy Hamas, certainly won’t be able to destroy Hezbollah, which is hundreds of times more powerful than Hamas.” Israel’s ground forces have been cut by 66% in the past 20 years, Brik explains, which means that Israel “doesn’t have enough troops to remain for a long period of time in any territory it conquers, nor does it have troops to relieve those who are fighting”.

Then there’s the question of how Israel will respond to Iran’s barrage of missiles fired yesterday evening. And whether the United States will limit itself to helping Israel shoot down Iran’s missiles, as it did in April, or decide to strike Iran directly. In response, Iran could go so far as to close the Straits of Hormuz, a step whose ripple effects could course through the networks of the global economy.

One year on from October 7, the combination of increasing violence in the West Bank, an Israeli war in Gaza and ground invasion of southern Lebanon, and an Iran that feels pressure to shore up its credibility given Israel’s attacks against its allies — Hamas and Hezbollah but also the Houthis of Yemen — amounts to a tinderbox. The consequences of an explosion are impossible to predict with precision. But this much is clear: we will only see more death, destruction and suffering. Wars are easy to start but hard to end — and quickly spiral out of the control of those who initiate them.

Before that act of appalling barbarism, the world was strangely optimistic about the future of the Middle East — despite the catastrophic scale of human suffering, millenarian fanaticism and economic collapse that was already evident across the region. The root of the hopefulness could be found in the Abraham Accords, that potentially transformative set of Trump initiatives, the aim of which was — somewhat euphemistically — to “normalise” relations between Israel and some of its Arab enemies. Last September, the great glittering prize of Middle East peace seemed to be in touching distance: Saudi rapprochement with Israel.

The radical idea at the heart of Trump’s plan was that regional peace did not need to wait for “the Palestinian question” to be solved. Instead, that could be put to one side while other grand strategic moves played out. As Mohammed bin Salman “modernised” Saudi with his combination of political repression and social liberalisation, the two great anti-Iranian powers in the region could finally be brought together. A similar assessment was made about Lebanon, a country without a functioning state or economy and at the mercy of Iran’s colonial army, Hezbollah. This, also, was a situation that was thought to be containable — even as Iran exploited the anarchic chaos of Iraq and Syria to supply its proxy with enough weapons to devastate Israel.

The central conceit of the Abraham Accords was that, irrespective of Hamas, Hezbollah and the occupation of the West Bank, once the Israel-Saudi axis was formed, Iran could be pushed back and contained without direct American involvement. But, then, the depth of Hamas’s murderous brutality on 7 October shattered that assumption, leaving not only a traumatised and vulnerable Israel, but also a traumatised and vulnerable Western order forced to confront the stark realities of the Middle East.

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David Cameron's vanity trip

By Tom McTague

Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel. 

By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.

With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.

Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map — even from history itself. The pretence that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered. 

Israel, of course, has not let Hezbollah’s missile attacks go unpunished, replying with raids on Southern Lebanon which have forced 100,000 to flee their homes for the apparent safety of Beirut and its surroundings. But as Israel escalates the war, the Lebanese population — already impoverished and abandoned — are having to flee again. This fight to the death leaves the 5 million people of Lebanon with nowhere to go, trapped on all sides by anarchy and war. The only escape is by sea — which is controlled by the West.

Any worries that Western forces are once again being “drawn in” are moot — we are already involved. In the days following 7 October, Washington redeployed an aircraft carrier into the Mediterranean to cover Israel’s northern flank which would allow Netenyahu to wage his war in Gaza. Since then, Iran itself has launched a direct rocket attack at Israel, prompting an armada of Western forces to intervene. And in the event of a humanitarian disaster, prompted by an Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon, it would fall to Britain, France and the United States to organise the mass evacuation of Lebanese civilians that would be required to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe.

Such is the scale of that impending catastrophe that I am told that David Lammy, our new Foreign Secretary, has spent around a third of his time dealing with an operation so complex that it resembles a full-scale war plan. Because Lebanon borders Syria to its north and east and Israel to its south, the only option for a mass evacuation would be by sea. And the only powers capable of delivering such a mission are the United States, France and Britain — each of whom is currently distracted by its own domestic political dramas. And in each case, the rise of the nationalist Right makes any mass refugee scheme a political nightmare. 

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Starmer has revealed his weakness over Israel

By Tom McTague

The French government is locked in a particularly acute fiscal crisis; the Biden administration is limping towards its end; and our Starmer government is only just coming to terms with the anti-refugee riots which gripped the country over the summer. No country could easily cope with a mass influx from another war-torn country in the Middle East.

Hence the extraordinary diplomatic push now underway to avert a full scale war. Yesterday, a joint declaration from Britain, France, the United States and Saudi Arabia called for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon. Israel, though, quickly rejected its terms: a ceasefire would only leave Hezbollah in place, free to continue growing in strength, armed by Iran, capable of making much of northern Israel uninhabitable. With Gaza lying in ruins and Hamas devastated but not defeated, Israel has concluded that it is now strong enough to wage war on Hezbollah, and that any delay only serves the interests of its enemies, principally Iran. 

The stakes today are far higher for Israel than the war it has been waging in Gaza for the past 12 months. This war against Hezbollah is one that must reestablish the ability of Israel to be able to shelter its citizens within its own borders. It is, then, a battle for the very purpose Israel was founded.

In its ignorance and arrogance, the West believed it could contain the appalling disorder of the Middle East. But it has simply allowed Iran to grow in strength. Not only did 7 October shatter the failing assumptions of Benjamin Netenyahu’s grand strategy, it also revealed the Western world’s myopic passivity too. Today, the world is reaping the whirlwind.

The quiet stillness of Slim’s villa, its libraries, its garden — all were a refuge from the hustle and bustle of Dahieh beyond. Slim, for his part, offered me coffee as we discussed Lebanon’s complex political existence, apparently unconcerned by his powerful armed neighbours. Yet less than two years later, in February 2021, he was dead, murdered by unknown assailants in his car outside Beirut. Though no perpetrators were ever identified, the assassination was obviously carried out by Hezbollah or one of its affiliates. Slim, like every Shi’a Muslim living in Dahieh, was ultimately swallowed by it.

This is the reality for many people in Hezbollah-dominated areas of Lebanon: sooner or later, you’ll either need to tie your existence to the group, or else be consumed by it. This was made plain by Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks last week, when communication devices exploded in supermarkets, offices, homes, and funerals across Dahieh, south Lebanon, and the Beqaa Valley, leaving no corner of Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state untouched. 

Commentary on this revolutionary event has largely fallen into one of two camps. While some have derided the pager operation as an indiscriminate attack on civilians, others have noted that those who carried pagers distributed by Hezbollah were by default bonafide members of the organisation. 

The truth, however, is that both these viewpoints are accurate simultaneously. Hezbollah in 2024 is not just a militia fighting Israel — it is an entire parallel society, boasting a political party, a social welfare system and charitable religious institutions, alongside five hospitals and hundreds of medical centres. Even the Beirut International Airport and the city’s commercial seaport have for years been under Hezbollah’s sway. 

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Altogether, these institutions serve a living, breathing, multi-religious patchwork of communities. As Lebanon has weathered financial ruin, disasters like the 2020 port explosion, and the intransigence of the country’s sectarian politics, the Lebanese government has slowly collapsed, taking many social services with it. This has pushed Lebanese Shi’a, Hezbollah’s primary constituency, even closer to the group, where they’ve been able to provide much more for adherents than the state itself. Examples abound. As pharmaceutical supplies dried up amid Lebanon’s economic crisis, Hezbollah was able to provide life-saving medication smuggled in from Syria and Iran to people living under its rule. As the value of the Lebanese lira plummeted, it opened supermarkets for its constituents that sold Iranian goods at lower prices than the competition.

The majority of those killed in the pager attacks were indeed Hezbollah fighters. Yet hundreds of people — working as medics and teachers, mechanics and shopkeepers — were wounded too. Though they’d never held a rifle in service of the group, and were by most definitions civilians, they too were caught in the crossfire: Hezbollah’s hold on their daily lives was just too tight. It’s a situation with parallels elsewhere, with Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and drug cartels in Latin America playing a similar social function.

Nor is all this merely relevant to Lebanon’s internal dynamics. Deciding where to draw the line between combatant and civilian has been and continues to be a vital matter in conflicts involving non-state actors, blurring as they do the line between guerilla movement and quasi-government. But with Israel seemingly setting the stage for an all-out war with Hezbollah — having now conducted hundreds of air strikes north of the border, which collectively have resulted in the single deadliest day in Lebanon since hostilities began last year — this unresolved ambiguity will continue to produce deadly consequences for the Lebanese people. To put it bluntly: many risk finding themselves declared guilty by association with Hezbollah and its vast, multifaceted network.

As the last year of warfare in Gaza has made clear to the world, Israel has little problem with inflicting devastating civilian casualties to achieve its battlefield goals. Indeed, the policy of bringing maximum pressure to bear on Hamas and Gaza was itself born in Lebanon. In 2006, the IDF smashed civilian infrastructure to bring Hezbollah to heel, ultimately producing the infamous Dahieh doctrine. Since the start of the current round of fighting, now almost a year old, Israel has hit Hezbollah-linked rescue teams, as well as the group’s medical services. This suggests that, for Israel, the distinction between civilian branches of Hezbollah’s infrastructure and its military wing is already null and void.

From a purely military perspective, this brutal policy is understandable. All branches of Hezbollah’s network feed into the same coffers. These play a part in funding its armed wing, so working to incapacitate the entire organisation does make sense for Israel strategically, despite the immense ethical caveats involved. But then the question emerges: how far is Israel willing to go?  Who, to put it bluntly, will it decide is contributing to Hezbollah’s operations — and therefore get a target on their back? Nor are random civilians the only ones at risk here. Since 1992, after all, Hezbollah has held seats in the Lebanese parliament, and is currently part of the country’s governing coalition. Though Israel apologised for killing a member of the Lebanese Armed Forces in late 2023, IDF commanders have previously stated that they wouldn’t distinguish between Hezbollah and the formal state in any future war.

Over the past year analysts have often noted that while Israel may have achieved tactical victories against Hezbollah — notably the pager attack or the recent killing of Ibrahim Aqeel — it has no strategic vision beyond these triumphs. The closest thing they have is the belief, apparently held by many within Israel’s national security and military leadership since October 7, that deploying overwhelming force will awe its enemies into capitulating. This calculus has in effect produced a policy of collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for their closeness — voluntary or not — to Hamas. As we’re now seeing, Shi’a Muslims in Lebanon are now suffering a similar fate thanks to their (often unwanted) relationship with Hezbollah.

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From Fifties British Kenya, to post-2011 Syria, where powerful actors tried to tame guerilla forces and the restive populations that supported them, history shows that such a strategy is doomed. Basic group psychology agrees. In Lebanon, punishing people who just happen to be under Hezbollah’s thumb will do nothing but strengthen Nasrallah’s authority, and personalise support for a group that was hitherto more abstract. In the event that Hezbollah can be defeated militarily — and with some 20,000 active personnel and over 100,000 missiles, that’s no sure thing — that inevitably means Lebanese antipathy toward Israel will linger. That, in turn, offers space to new rogue actors, especially in the absence of a fully functioning state.

A brave new generation of Lokman Slims can only appear when Lebanese Shi’a can choose which political group they associate with. Hezbollah’s stifling repression is the most significant obstacle stopping this happening — but how Israel behaves is crucial too. If people working regular jobs in suburbs like Dahieh can expect to be attacked no matter what they do, why bother resisting Hezbollah at all?

The Party of God had begun striking Israel in “solidarity” with Hamas and has not stopped since. But it was always careful not to escalate. Israeli security sources told me that the strikes were fastidious in their proximity to the border, delivering fatal payloads but also a clear message: Hezbollah would respond, but did not want war with Israel. This thesis was confirmed when the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah gave one of his famous “bunker sermons” in which he congratulated Hamas on a masterful operation — not least the manner in which it had been absolutely and unequivocally carried out without the knowledge of him or his party of thugs. He said this more than once, in one form or another.

More to the point, pretty much every country in the world — even Iran — wanted to avoid an all-out regional war. But Israel was stuck. Hezbollah had de facto veto over daily life in northern Israel — something no sovereign state can allow — but Jerusalem had little choice to restrain itself.

A miserable stasis held. Until now.

Israel has seen civilians killed once more; and once more, it is enraged. Saturday’s rocket strike on a football pitch in the Golan Heights killed 12 Druze Israelis, all aged between 10 and 20. In response, the Israeli security cabinet has given authorisation to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant to decide when and how Israel will retaliate. Matters are not helped by the IDF’s conclusion that Hezbollah struck using an Iranian Falaq-1 rocket. Tehran cannot be divorced from the 12 Israeli deaths over the weekend — the crisis is regional.

In committing this atrocity, Hezbollah has made a big mistake, not least because it upended its own long-standing strategy toward Israel. Broadly speaking, Hezbollah bases its policy of force on a so-called “deterrent equation”. This is, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center, built on four objectives: one, proactive attacks on Israeli targets; two, attacks in response to IDF offensive operations; three, attacks on key Israeli targets and infrastucture; and four, increasing the range of attack in response to Israeli attacks. The idea, outlined in May by the head of the Hezbollah faction in the Lebanese Parliament, is to keep Israel from “deluding itself into thinking it was capable of attacking Lebanon”.

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Above all, the “deterrent equation” is based on rules around the use of force, which primarily limit attacks to those on Israeli military targets within a range of 3-5km from the border. They also seek to kill soldiers and destroy military capabilities, while trying to avoid harming civilians. This preference, of course, exists only in theory; when Hezbollah fires rockets into Israeli cities, it knows that civilians are likely to be struck — especially given the sheer amount of ordnance it sends in.

As the fighting between the two sides has continued, Hezbollah has sought to tweak the “equation” by gradually escalating when it deems the situation appropriate — either through longer-range weapons during, say, a peak in the Gaza war or following the killing of one of its commanders. With regards to Gaza, its official position is that it will only stop attacking Israel when the war ends.

Unsurprisingly, Israel’s response had gradually taken shape in recent days. Reports on Monday claimed that two people died and three were injured in an Israeli drone strike outside the southern Lebanese town of Shaqra. Another was also killed and four wounded in Israeli airstrikes on a car and motorcycle driving between the towns of Mays al-Jabal and Shaqra. Netanyahu, for his part, has promised “harsh” retribution.

Strip away much of the geopolitical and strategic rhetoric and Hezbollah’s “equation” comes down to a simple tactic: mirroring. If Israel attacks deeper into Lebanon, Hezbollah will strike deeper into Israel. If Israeli strikes hit Lebanese civilians, Hezbollah will do the same south of the border. Indeed, Lebanese institutions demand it. Following an Israeli strike that killed three militants at the start of the war, Ibrahim al-Amin, the editor of the Hezbollah-affiliated daily al-Akhbar, wrote that the group should reasonably expect to act according to the “equation of symmetry”, which required it to carry out a military operation that would result in the death of at least three Israeli soldiers.

Yet now, Hezbollah finds itself in a deeply precarious situation. The group initially denied Saturday’s strike — perhaps unsurprisingly given that they killed not Jewish soldiers but Druze children. They realise that this is bad for them. Nasrallah must also know that the blame for further escalation now lies with Hezbollah: the consensus is that the group fired heavy rockets at an IDF base on Mount Hermon, above Majdal Shams, but that one of the rockets overshot the target.

During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, which began after a cross-border Hezbollah attack led to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others, Israel devastated large parts of south Lebanon. Afterwards, Nasrallah declared that, had he known that Israel would have reacted so ferociously, he never would have countenanced such a raid. Yet he also repeatedly boasted that Hezbollah had “won” the war. (As a friend in Beirut later remarked to me: “Any more ‘victories’ like that and we won’t have a country left.”)

More than anything, the conflict taught Hezbollah one overarching lesson, and it is the bedrock of the “deterrent equation”: do whatever you can to deter and inflict pain on Israel — but always keep it below the threshold of all-out war, because that you cannot win.

Today, however, that strategy is now at risk. When I returned to Israel early in the year, a government official told me that the elements within the IDF leadership were keen to take out Hezbollah. No longer, they reasoned, could they allow the northern part of their country to be held hostage to a terror group. No longer would they accept the north being emptied of its people. They understood the scale of the worldwide opprobrium that would follow. But the alternative — to live with a terror army perennially on your border — is, they concluded, worse. What other nation would accept that? And besides, the world has already turned against Israel — so why not take the opportunity to try to remove the country’s greatest terror threat?

One might think that the trajectory of the war against Hamas would give the IDF pause for thought. But this is post-October 7 Israel: an even angrier and traumatised nation. And the threat is undoubtedly very real. How many rockets should a country “accept”? How many civilians should be killed, before it responds with full force?

On Saturday, Hezbollah may have given them the green light they need. And if Israel escalates, Hezbollah — by its own doctrine — will be forced to escalate in turn. Then there is probably only one way this will end: in catastrophe, for Israel and Lebanon, and for the civilians on both sides.

Such proxies are far cheaper than Iran’s own conventional military, and more useful in the region’s many conflicts. They are also less politically divisive. Iran’s foreign wars aren’t popular among the young, who have already destabilised the theocracy through mass protests. And this is especially difficult given that Iran relies on conscription to fill at least half the ranks of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Long-term foreign deployments of resentful draftees would be a risky strategy.

But proxy warfare is not only good politics — it is also essential to upholding Iran’s theocracy. As their religious and political legitimacy has collapsed at home, the ruling elite has sought it abroad. Iran’s clerics were ecstatic when allied militias defeated both the Sunni Arab jihadists and the United States in Iraq, and relieved when they helped to save the dictatorship in Syria in 2012. If the Assad dynasty had fallen, it could have triggered the collapse of Tehran’s entire anti-American, anti-Zionist, enfeeble-the-Sunnis strategy, which it had been cultivating since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

More recently, October 7 and the Gaza War have served as an unparalleled frisson to the antisemitic Iranian political elite, and a seductive clarion call to others in the region who thought they couldn’t make the Jews bleed. The war, with its growing Palestinian civilian death toll and the vast destruction in the Gaza Strip, may have given the clerical regime, and its overwhelmingly Shiite “axis of resistance”, a means of restoring its standing with faithful and secular Sunnis alike. Relations have been tense since the Syrian civil war, when Iran helped to slaughter tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs.

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If Israel fails to destroy Hamas, if the outfit rises like a phoenix from the Gazan rubble after an Israeli withdrawal, then Iran will take credit for successfully resisting Zion and America. And a prolonged Hamas insurgency — a definite possibility if Israel reoccupies Gaza — will offer Tehran an inspirational theatre of operations. Trouble in the Gaza Strip could embolden Tehran to encourage its proxies to wound Israel and America further. The death of three US soldiers in Jordan in a drone attack last week may be just the start of it.

Yet America is unlikely to seek vengeance. Clerical meddling has so far failed to provoke Israeli and US retaliatory strikes against Iran; at the most, it has led to attacks on Iran’s Arab partners. That’s because Washington and Jerusalem dread escalation — the former, out of fear of another Middle Eastern “forever war”; the latter, because it doubts its missile defence and air power are capable of defending Tel Aviv from Hizbollah and Iran. Indeed, Tehran’s supply of missiles to its friends in Lebanon may have deterred Israel from mounting another ground invasion to secure its northern border. And the feebleness of the US and Israeli response may well have emboldened Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, knows now that the power lies in his hands.

Historically, there are no Islamic parallels to what the clerical regime has pulled off. Shiism, unlike Sunnism, is a charismatic path, which lends itself more easily to revolution. Its leaders have occasionally appealed to heterodox Muslims who combined Sunni and Shiite sympathies. On conquering Iran, Ismail I (1487-1524), the first shah of the vast Safavid empire, forcibly converted his realm to Shiism. He managed for a time to win the hearts of heterodox Sufi orders in the rival Ottoman empire — that is, until defeat in war shattered his religious allure.

Today, Iran’s proxies are less ecumenical: hardcore Sunnis and Shiites feature in the “axis of resistance”. The clerical regime has developed a powerful pan-Islamic call, promising to drive the US from the Middle East, destroy Israel, humble the wealthy Western-backed Sunni Gulf Arab monarchs, and create a new Islamic culture that can withstand Westernisation. This has considerable appeal among many Arabs, as well as Shiite Afghans and Pakistanis. Such anti-American, anti-Zionist and antisemitic messaging has great sway among many young Muslim men.

But Iran doesn’t just rely on ideology. It also rewards loyalty. The idea of taking back “stolen” property has always proved alluring: just consider the first Islamic conquests, which promised booty as well as paradise, or the Crusades. The French Marxist description of Israel as a “colonial-settler state” has been fully absorbed into the Islamic lexicon. And Iran’s hope that Zion can actually be defeated in a long, bloody struggle by the faithful helps to strengthen the Islamic Republic’s credibility in the region.

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The Houthis, Shiites who are doctrinally close to Sunnis and were once spurned by Iran’s clerics, have signed up to this fight. And now they’re giving the US, Israel and their European allies a hard time in the Red Sea. Even though Tehran probably fears escalation more than anyone else, neither Washington nor Jerusalem have been willing to play on these fears by striking Iran directly. The occasional assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and senior Revolutionary Guard officers, including the dark lord, Qasem Soleimani, doesn’t really count. Nor has Washington shown any desire to hit the Islamic Republic where it’s still likely the weakest: Syria. The Revolutionary Guard general, Hossein Hamedani, who died in the battle for Aleppo in 2015, wasn’t exaggerating when he said that “to protect the accomplishments of the Islamic revolution, we had to intervene” in Syria and Iraq.

Even so, neither America nor Israel seems willing to rearm the Syrian Sunnis. A return of the Syrian civil war is just too ugly to contemplate: the refugee crisis it sparked empowered Right-wing populist parties across Europe and gave Turkey’s president, the philo-Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, extraordinary leverage within the European Union. Syrian Sunni militancy, an unavoidable by-product of a Sunni Arab rebellion, also strengthened Sunni jihadists.

But the slow-motion implosion of the Middle East dates back even further, to the aftermath of the Second World War. Since then, military autocracies have gutted traditional mores, basic decency and functioning economies. The Great Arab Revolt further shattered the region. This has left militias practically invincible since Western powers, now allergic to ground campaigns, can’t effectively use air power to extirpate them.

It is, however, still possible to shut down Iran’s proxies, but it would require significant military commitments. It’s hard to imagine any scenario — apart from a direct attack on Iran — in which the clerical regime ceases and desists. And any assault would need to be highly destructive, as a direct Western strike that leaves Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme unscathed doesn’t make much sense.

Jerusalem appears willing to pay a high price in Gaza. But given that the Gaza operation may permanently tank Israel’s reputation among Western Leftist political parties, Jerusalem may not wish to take on the even more arduous task of neutering the Lebanese Hizbollah. The group’s massive stockpile of Iranian-supplied missiles could pin-cushion Tel Aviv no matter how quickly Israel’s air force and anti-missile batteries reacted. The Hizbollah is the only Iranian proxy force whose demolition would grievously wound, perhaps cripple, the clerical regime’s ambitions in the Middle East.

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America is unlikely to lend a hand — despite the most recent deadly provocation in Jordan. The White House’s truly muddled response to this surely reflects the continuing intellectual confusion of the Biden administration about Iran since Khamenei rejected another nuclear deal last summer. “We are not looking for a war with Iran,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Monday. “We’ll keep looking at the options… We want these attacks to stop.”

But these attacks won’t stop. They’re too much fun. And they’re strategically effective: the Islamic Republic has become the dominant power in the Middle East. To give Khamenei the credit that he deserves, he has taken a weak hand and played it brilliantly. Even with Russian and Chinese patronage, the Islamic Republic doesn’t possess a lot of hard power in the face of the US and Israel. But even the greatest of the Safavid shahs, Abbas I, who defeated the Ottomans in Mesopotamia, didn’t have the influence that Khamenei now has through a motley collection of poorly-educated, young Arab men who have probably never set foot in Iran and may not have even met a Persian.

Tehran will surely keep pushing the envelope unless the United States or Israel pushes back far harder. The clerical regime may pause its operations or claim that proxies are beyond its control — but success breeds aggression. So does the regime’s conception of itself as an Islamist paladin battling American and Zionist imperialism. To paraphrase Major General Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the clerical regime isn’t “looking for a war” that it will lose.

As a result, if Washington responds to the attack in Jordan with just another air strike against Iranian-supported militias, or even Iranian deployments in Syria, this likely won’t alter Khamenei’s calculations. Only something shockingly different — US attacks against Revolutionary Guard targets inside Iran, and the openly declared threat of insurmountable American escalation — has a decent chance of convincing the clerics that the past is no longer prologue.

Lily Moo is a pseudonym; she is too worried to use her real name. When she leaves the house, she wears a disguise. The police have been advising her about how to stay safe. Most recently, she attended a joint Jewish and Iranian event for peace. Since then, she has been “in a kind of prison”.

“It is really horrible to be in London and having to hide from extremist Islamic groups,” she says. “It feels like it was in the days before my family left Iran, when women couldn’t leave the house. I knew the Iranian secret services were already keeping an eye on me — making the odd threat.” But now, other Islamic groups seem to be watching her, which “makes it twice as scary”.

Lily Moo is not the only Iranian who is in danger for speaking up for Israel. In Iran itself, supporters of Israel communicate using secret social-media accounts because they know others have been “vanished” for doing the same. Closer to home, another dissident, Vahid Beheshti, has been protesting outside the Foreign Office for 10 months, in an effort to get the British government to prescribe the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation. Recently, he started flying an Israeli flag alongside his Persian one. One Saturday, as a pro-Palestinian demonstration marched past, someone took his Israeli flag — and as he gave chase he was warned he would be beheaded. The man who is alleged to have made the threat was later arrested by police and found to have a knife on him.

The danger is very real. Last year, MI5 foiled at least 10 potential IRGC plots to kidnap or kill people in Britain. In February, the dissident Persian language satellite station Iran International moved from London to Washington because of threats to its staff.

Both Lily and Vahid are understandably frightened, but determined to keep speaking out at pro-Israel events. “It is a duty,” says Lily Moo, whose family left Iran when she was 13, as the growing power of the “morality police” became suffocating. “The danger people are facing from Iran and its proxies… is not just about Iranian people, it is not just about Israel: it is about all of us.”

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“They want to kill everyone who is a non-believer,” adds Vahid, who escaped Iran 24 years ago. “They believe they will go to heaven for doing it. That is their mentality.” He is dedicated to raising awareness of the brutality of the IRGC and its proxies, which include Hamas and Hezbollah. Citing how Iran and Hezbollah are accused of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish Centre in Argentina that killed 85 people, he says the brutality of the events of October 7 did not surprise him. “In Iran girls and boys are raped too, people are kidnapped or go ‘missing’ all the time. Torture is one of their tools; they cut off the fingers of people. In the past year alone more than 80 children under the age of 17 have been shot dead.”

Last September, a young Kurdish Iranian woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, was murdered by police for not wearing her hijab correctly. It sparked a wave of Woman, Love, Freedom protests. Since they began, hundreds if not thousands have been shot or arrested. A year ago, Iranian human rights organisation HRANA documented 520 people who had been killed in the first 82 days of the demonstrations — Vahid says he believes the number is now closer to 2,000 people. He adds: “While they say they have arrested 20,000, the true number is closer to 70-80,000.” Even after they are released, Vahid says, some prisoners commit suicide, having experienced such severe torture.

The alliance between Iranian dissidents and Israel is partly a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has Israel-hate at the centre of his world view. His regime funds Hamas as well as Hezbollah, which is threatening war on the Lebanese front, and the Houthis, who have been firing missiles at Israel from Yemen in recent weeks. Iranians are taught to chant “death to Israel” while still at school.

It makes sense that Iranians who object to the Ayatollah’s increasingly vicious crackdown on free speech would stand with the people he hates most. But there is so much more to it than that. Jews and Iranians have ties going back centuries, to before the birth of either Mohammed or Jesus. The Persian King known as Cyrus the Great is celebrated for freeing his kingdom’s Jewish slaves and returning them to Jerusalem in 539BCE — but many Jews stayed in the area.

In 1948, the year that Israel was established, there were 150,000 Jews living in Iran. It was one of the few countries in the Middle East not to throw out all its Jews. But as tensions between Islamicists and the more tolerant Shah loyalists grew throughout the Seventies, Jews started to leave. Then came the 1979 revolution, in which Ayatollah Khomeini took over, triggering a mass exodus of Jews. Today, there are just 10,000 in the country.

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The longing Persian Jews retain for their former home is depicted brilliantly in the recent Israeli-American television show Tehran, starring the Iranian-Israeli actress and singer Liraz Charhi. Her family fled Iran in the Seventies, after being forced to read the Koran. But long before October 7, Liraz discovered that she can speak to people in the country she has never been allowed to visit. (Iran, like many other Middle Eastern countries, bans people with Israeli passports.) After falling in love with Persian music, she decided to write her first album in Farsi. “Many people thought I was mad,” she tells me. But after its release in 2018, it became a huge hit in Iran. “An Iranian DJ started to play my music and people would send me videos of them taking their veils off and dancing.” Her most recent album was secretly made in Turkey with Iranian musicians who had to remain nameless for their safety.

When Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, and five members of Liraz’s husband’s family were killed at Kibbutz Be’eri, she was inundated with messages from new Iranian friends. “Last year we suffocated from this madness when Jina Amini and the others were murdered in cold blood in our homeland,” reads one. Another says: “99% of Iranians are supporting Israel and all of your people in this difficult moment. We stand with you.” Footage has come out of Iran showing students deliberately avoiding walking over Israeli and American flags painted outside their university. Shortly after Hamas’s massacre, a few Iranians brandishing Palestinian flags at a game in Tehran were met with overwhelming resistance from a large crowd of other fans.

In the West, we tend to view the war over Gaza as part of a conflict that started in 1948; in the Middle East, people understand that the roots go much deeper and spread much wider. So, the Iranians who support Israel are not only calling for revolution in their own nation; they are supporting an ally against an evil that threatens the entire world.

“The people of Israel and Iran share the same enemies and we have no choice but to fight together,” says Vahid. But “this isn’t just about us in the Middle East but an ideology that everyone in the West needs to fight.” It is a battle against a fundamentalist ideology, and for freedom and democracy. “We need Israel to win, to beat Hamas,” says Vahid, “because the arms of the Iranian octopus need to be chopped off.”

The cultural capital of the Levant, this Beirut styled itself as a home to great merchant families of the Middle East. In the Twenties, it had welcomed the Armenians, the refugees from Enver Pasha’s First World War genocide. In the Forties, it had accepted the Palestinians — not only penniless Galilee peasants but Jaffa intellectuals and Jerusalem landowners — who had either fled or were expelled by David Ben-Gurion’s armies in 1948.

But not only them. Cosmopolitan Beirut was the only Arab city that saw its Jewish population grow after the establishment of the state of Israel, as pogroms, persecutions and expulsion drove the ancient Jewish communities of Cairo, Alexandria, Aleppo, Damascus and Baghdad into exile. Freewheeling Beirut, with its champagne bars and singers, was for thousands of Middle Eastern Jews preferable to rationed, socialist and besieged Israel. It was more familiar.

This city snags on my family tree. It was this Beirut, at its very start in the late 19th century, which drew my great-great-great grandfather, Avraham Sassoon, from Aleppo. And it was here, in the 1910s, where his son, Moise Abraham Sassoon, chose to build a synagogue. He named it in honour of his father, Magen Avraham — or the Shield of Abraham.

That city was lost in the civil war that broke out in 1975. One of its most enduring images became the ruins of the Holiday Inn, as militias battled their way through the hotel district. The Jewish quarter of Wadi Abu Jamil emptied almost in its entirety. In my great-grandmother’s files are clippings, notes and desperate appeals for money sent to London from those that remained. But these also abruptly stopped around the time the synagogue itself was destroyed in the Israeli invasion in 1982, having been used as a Palestinian position.

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In 2007, I visited these ruins, just a year after Israel had struck Hezbollah, demolishing whole streets in their stronghold of Dahieh. Locked-up, its roof caved in, I didn’t climb in for fear of booby-traps, but through the window I could make out faded Palestinian militia posters and what looked like ancient iodine capsules from their wounded.

This is the Lebanon we know today: a country synonymous with civil war, corruption and terrorism, its former glamour buried beneath the rise of Hezbollah, state failure and financial crisis. Breakdowns, from sewage to electricity to the central bank, have left every family fending for themselves. In 2020, when an ammonium nitrate explosion ripped through the port of Beirut, killing over 200 people and making over 300,000 homeless, it reeked of corruption, negligence and official fecklessness.

This has left Hezbollah the only functioning institution in the country — one which happens to be totally committed to ensuring the state does not function in turn. More than a state-within-a-state, the Iran-sponsored actor runs its own army and conducts its own foreign policy. Millions of Lebanese hang on its leader Hassan Nasrallah’s every word: only he will tell them if there is to be war with Israel.

The idea that these lands are tied together is an old one. The Bible twice recounts the borders of the Promised Land as extending from the mountains of northern Lebanon to the edge of the Negev. Even though the Israelites never conquered or even settled these lands, these mountains of cedars and Phoenician cities were seen as part of Canaan. Centuries later, the Crusaders thought so too. Across their Kingdom of Jerusalem, mostly modern-day Israel, and their County of Tripoli, roughly modern-day Lebanon, the tombs of knights recounted their deaths: “en Terre Promise”.

The Ottomans likewise saw these lands as bound. In the late 19th century until the empire’s demise, the vilayet of Beirut stretched from coastal Syria to south of Nablus. Then their fates diverged. Palestine became a British Mandate, to be a “Jewish National Home”; north of this was assigned to be French mandate territory.

Everyone in Damascus with a sense of history tells a story about how, when the French High Commissioner for the Levant, General Henri Gouraud, entered Damascus, he kicked the tomb of Saladin, before saying: “We’re back.” In reality, it was probably a deputy, but it captures something of the French attitude to Lebanon: not as explicitly as what Earl Balfour had wanted to the south, General Gouraud saw this new mandate as a national home for Middle Eastern Christians, led by its Maronite Catholics

These Christians, however, wanted Greater Lebanon. In an uncanny parallel to how Israel would think after the Six Days War some 50 years later, the Maronite Patriarch at Versailles set out demands for mostly Shia territories to the south, north and east of the old Ottoman district of Mount Lebanon — despite the fact that this expanded state would not, unlike this smaller enclave, have a clear Christian majority. This fateful choice set the stage for Lebanon’s crisis and decline decades later, as this narrow order would be overturned first by the Sunni Lebanese, then the Shia Lebanese with Hezbollah.

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The parallel to Israel has never been lost on the country’s intellectuals and generals. Pre-1967 Israel was a state with a clear Jewish majority and unarguably a democracy. Today’s greater Israel, thanks to the occupation, administers a territory where there is similarly no clear Jewish majority. Not only Israel’s troubles but its state dysfunction stem from this point. For decades, it has been repeated that Israel must choose between being a Jewish state or a democracy. But there is a third risk: that the mess could eventually prove inextricable, ungovernable and foment internal conflict. In other words, a fate rather like Greater Lebanon.

The legacies of both British and French mandates eventually set the stage for the Lebanese civil war: not only had a narrow, Christian, even Maronite-run Lebanon proved unsustainable, but the mass influx of Palestinians in 1948, whose leaders would turn the south of the country into a revenge base to attack Israel, had permanently destabilised it. As Christian militias fought Palestinian, Arabist and leftist ones, Syria intervened, then Israel, with Ariel Sharon besieging Beirut in alliance with Phalangist militias to rout out Yassar Arafat. Civil wars within civil wars erupted within sects and alliances. The bloodshed didn’t stop until 1990.

Without realising it, in those first years after the war, Israel was tying its future to Lebanon, when it deported the leadership of Hamas to the latter’s south, which it then controlled. The Lebanese authorities refused to let them travel further than the valley of Marj al-Zohour. This is where they got to know the Shia movement that had emerged alone from the civil war with the right to keep its militia — Hezbollah. The alliance we see today was born here, in this rocky valley of wildflowers.

***

In 2007, I found myself in Dahieh, looking at Hezbollah’s victory exhibition of fluttering flags and captured Israeli equipment. Inside their office hung portraits of the Iranian revolutionary Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and maps of occupied Palestine. Now I realise this “victory” — which allowed Hezbollah to cement its grip on Lebanon — is exactly what Hamas was seeking to emulate on October 7: a victory that would allow it to claim complete ownership of the Palestinian cause.

Today, when Hassan Nasrallah is photographed meeting the Iranian foreign minister in Beirut, underneath portraits of the ruling Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his predecessor Khomenei, there is no way to know this is in Lebanon, except for the cedar flag tucked behind him. That summer, when I peered into those ruins, there were still hopes that the second Lebanon that emerged out of the civil war could find its feet. But it was already too late.

Through Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, which it launched at a moment when it was under pressure to join the reconciliation process, it had made clear its militias would control the questions of war and peace. And then through countless refusals and blocking measures, it steadily paralysed the nation’s power sharing institutions.

In this, it found a loyal ally — corruption. As the paralysed state withered away, politicians of all backgrounds feasted on its remains. By 2019, the country had been left with no genuinely functioning institution apart from Hezbollah. One after the other these failed until the Central Bank was exposed as having engaged in financial engineering, prompting a 90% devaluation.

The scenes that followed — mile-long queues for fuel, hospitals in crisis and power outages — were the backdrop to the 2020 explosion. For a few weeks, symbolised briefly in a dramatic visit by President Macron, it seemed that public anger might force a change. Then it was lost, and all that remained was a simple question: is the political system completely broken — or is it just the players?

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Today, some insist that the confessional system — a Maronite President, a Sunni Prime Minister, a Shia Speaker of Parliament, with parliamentary seats split between religions — no longer functions and needs to be replaced with federalisation, with each sect running its own enclave. Others claim there is no alternative to the current system, meaning the problem is really with the politicians. Like those south of the border furiously debating abstract one- or two-state “solutions”, there is an odd symmetry here.

The entire Levant feels stuck. The Lebanese, the Israelis and the Palestinians have been cornered by the same actors. The first is Iran, building up Hezbollah, to the point it is essentially a state, and Hamas, until it could strike deep inside Israel. The second are a caste of tribal politicians who, when they are not fanatics, are fantastically short-sighted or corrupt.

As Israel spiralled into four elections in five years, culminating in an attempted judicial coup that split society along secular and religious lines, it became clear that these are two nations with conjoined fates. Israeli politics, despite its classic electoral system, has deep resemblances to Lebanon’s confessional politics, with secular, settler, ultra-Orthodox and Arab parties all competing for resources for their “sector”. Former President Reuven Rivlin is more explicit, once referring to them as Israeli “tribes” — with their own towns, parties and corners of the country.

The civil strife that so weakened Israel before October 7 came from Netanyahu pitting these “tribes” against each other. In other words, he did the most dangerous thing you can do in Levantine politics. In the months before the Hamas massacres, the Israeli press was full of warnings of “civil war”, as commentators feared just how “Lebanese” the clash over the judiciary could get. My fear was that Israeli politics would become a sequence of “rioting” tribes, with Haredim refusing to serve in the army and settlers refusing orders in the West Bank. Not the Lebanese frontlines of the Seventies, but its paralysed present beckoned.

Both Israel and Lebanon’s failed politics conspired to give Hamas and Hezbollah their chance on October 7, opening up the prospect of a much wider war. If this does happen, the fate of Gaza, Tel Aviv and Beirut will again be shared — this time in even greater destruction. Hezbollah, with 150,000 rockets, can overpower Israel’s Iron Dome, leading to the kind of destruction its cities have been spared. Meanwhile, Israel’s retaliation, which officials warn would “destroy Lebanon”, could turn parts of it into Gaza.

The last time I stood at the Lebanese border, from the south, I was struck by how the same trees and hills just continued, unperturbed. I have often fantasised about what it would be like to drive north from Israel, past the Roman temples, Crusader castles, and the sites of recent wars to visit Beirut — my own private fantasy of peace. I used to feel sure I would do it one day. Today, I am not so sure.

On the ground, with the ceasefire extended for another two days, relations between Israel and Hamas seem to be progressing. The temporary truce, however, is just a plaster on a gangrenous wound. If Hamas releases all of its hostages, then its leverage evaporates and it has nothing to deter Israel from its assault. If Israel ceases military operations now, then its promise that Hamas will never again be able to launch another attack is just empty rhetoric. Neither its traumatised population nor its desperate Prime Minister will allow that.

So, the war continues, with Israel completing its operation in northern Gaza and turning to the south. And along with its horrific cost, the chances of broader escalation will increase.

But the war with Hamas has already expanded. Hezbollah are firing from the north, Syrian groups from the northeast, the Houthis from Yemen in the south — and behind them all, Iran. Israel is now fighting a war on five fronts. But it’s in the north that the greatest threat lies.

“What we’ve been experiencing on the northern border are a few kinds of Hezbollah approaches,” says a source in the IDF’s Northern Command. “Number one: infiltration attempts on the border itself. Two: using anti-tank missiles to target Israeli soldiers, outposts, tanks and armoured vehicles. Three: using aerial vehicles [drones]. This did not really exist in [the Lebanon war of] 2006. The investment in aerial vehicles began in 2009.” Hezbollah, they tell me, is targeting a narrow strip just a few kilometres from the border, rather than cities further south such as Haifa. “From that we assess that the current decision of Hezbollah is not to escalate.”

But Hezbollah also needs to manage its optics. It cannot spend decades railing against the “Zionist Oppressor” and then do nothing when it is at war with the group’s supposed brethren in Hamas. “Hezbollah has activated a few Palestinians from the refugee camps in Lebanon,” I am told. “There is cooperation when interests converge when their interests converge, and Hezbollah is using Palestinians to fire anti-tank missiles at us.” Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, seemingly confirmed these assessments when he congratulated Hamas on its attack last month, while stressing he had no idea it was coming. The signal was clear: we had nothing to do with this; beyond saving face, we don’t want to get involved.

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But while 1914 is an overwrought analogy, here, with so many moving parts, escalation cannot be discounted. And beyond the trauma of October 7, many Israelis want action. The northern city of Qiryat Shemona is a mile from the Lebanese border. Today, after local authorities ordered civilians to leave in the face of daily rocket attacks, it is almost deserted. One man who hasn’t left is Moshe Peretz, 63, who owns a garage. He works with the IDF and local farmers and is, he tells me, an essential service provider. “I’ve been here 58 years and I’m used to this sort of stuff — sometimes Hezbollah would fire over 100 Katyusha rockets in one day. Back then we had to cram into small shelters.”

He continues, “if we pass this problem onto our children, then we haven’t achieved anything. We will have suffered 60 years for nothing. We can end it now – and we must.”

We drive up into the mountains, towards the border, through forest where IDF soldiers and tanks line the roads. At the summit, stands a thick metal barrier. It has been erected to protect us from fire from Lebanon. I cannot film it: it’s a new type of armour, I’m told. If I publish photos, the enemy will be able to analyse its thickness and adjust its fire accordingly.

The Hezbollah threat is incredibly potent. In 2019, US intelligence estimated the group had 150,000 projectiles in its arsenal, which includes Iranian Fateh-110 and Syrian M-600 satellite-guided missiles with a range of up to 186 miles, putting Tel Aviv in reach. Added to this are its anti-ship missiles, particularly the Iranian Noor and Russian Yakhont, as well as the 100,000 fighters Nasrallah claimed to have in 2021 — a figure which, while almost certainly inflated, is not entirely divorced from reality.

That said, Lebanon is also suffering its worst financial crisis in modern history. The last thing it needs is another war with Israel, especially since the one in 2006 brought such destruction to the country. And internally, Hezbollah is powerful right now — why throw it all away?

Meanwhile, the Houthis have launched several drone and missile attacks against Israel: a show of solidarity with the Palestinians and a display of strength to its domestic audience. Though not as powerful as Hezbollah, the group has Iranian Quds-351 cruise missiles, which it has used against Saudi oil fields and which have a reported range of 1,650km. It also has the Iranian Toufan ballistic missile that has a range of up to 1,950km (though unlike the Iranian original it is not precision guided). Finally the Houthis have a drone capability, notably the Samad UAV.

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While their missiles are slow and inaccurate, they could theoretically overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome if launched in conjunction with Hamas and Hezbollah. Before October 7, the most missiles Israel had faced in a day was 470 in May 2021. On October 7, it faced 5,200 in 20 minutes. Throw drones into the equation, and the picture becomes disconcerting. That said, the Houthis main fight is with Saudi Arabia. If it were to use all its weapons against Israel, the Saudis might sense opportunity, and move in for the kill.

In the end, though, the state that matters most is the one that stands behind Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis: Iran. Tehran bases its regional strategy on a doctrine of “Forward Defence” that, loosely speaking, means using regional non-state terror groups to fight its opponents abroad and retain stability at home.

Right now, Iran’s proxies are well-positioned around the borders of its two main regional rivals, Israel and Saudi Arabia — including a joint operation room with Hezbollah in the Golan Heights — which give it a degree of regional security it seems unwise to risk. After Israel and the United States bombed its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) base in Syria in October, Iran has shifted many of its missile production facilities to Lebanon. Ultimately, these proxies deter direct attacks from Israel. If they are smashed, which will happen with escalation, the threat to Iran gets serious.

But Iran has other options. The IRGC has recently set up two new proxies in Syria: the Afghan Fatemiyoun and Pakistani Zainabiyoun groups whose stated goal is to destroy Israel. Iran can have them continue to attack the “Zionist Entity” at a limited level, while remaining largely unconcerned about retaliation as they are fundamentally expendable.

But in the end, while the Mullahs are happy for Hamas to hurt Israel, there is a limit to their support for it. Reuters reported that at a recent meeting in Tehran, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei complained to Hamas boss Ismail Haniyeh that his country was not warned of the October 7 attacks and that it would not enter the war on their behalf.

For their part, the Israelis are immovable on the eradication of Hamas but also wary of a broader war. The IDF was clear: the end of Hamas serves everyone. Anything short of a decisive defeat, they say, would embolden every terror group in the Middle East.

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This is partly why the UK and US have both deployed forces in the area. But, in truth, it is unintended escalation that is the greatest concern — especially when Hamas is still holding so many hostages. Standing in the mountains of northern Israel, I peer down at the roads below and imagine the domino effect a stray Katusha accidentally hitting an Israeli school bus would have.

One act begets another in a region where no one can back down in the face of their own, often oppressed populations. Dictatorships are better at sustaining wars — and casualties — than democracies, and worse at avoiding them. From al-Houthi to Nasrallah to Khamenei, they continue to fight because policy and rhetoric cannot allow otherwise.

On 3 August, 1914, as the United Kingdom entered World War I, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, remarked darkly that “the lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”. Today in the Middle East, a return to 1914 seems, if not yet imminent, then no longer beyond the realms of possibility either.

The discovery that Hamas was going all out to build these tunnels marked the start of the Israeli army’s education in the arcane art of finding, conquering (“clearing” is reductive) and quickly demolishing them. But tunnel warfare, it swiftly discovered, is not for amateurs. Nor is it even for highly accomplished but generic “commandos” including its top echelon Sayeret Matkal. It requires specific detection and monitoring skills, ultra close-combat skills and weapons (even compact assault rifles are too long), specialised shields and respirators, as well as the very quick reactions that all first-rate soldiers must have.

Hamas knows from previous experience that the closer the range, the greater the qualitative gap between their men and first-line Israeli infantry; Arik Sharon, who ended up as Prime Minister after a brilliant military career, discovered back in the Fifties that Israelis had the edge in close combat. Even in Hamas’s hyper-successful surprise raids, that took full advantage of Israel’s grossly over-confident reliance on high-tech observation towers and absurdly few troops, they lost more than a thousand to civilian home guards with their pistols and submachine guns and a handful of soldiers.

Knowing these odds, Hamas is now doing all it can to delay Israel’s tunnel offensive by releasing hostages in pairs after lengthy talks for each batch. At two at a time, with more than 200 to go, assuming they are still alive, this approach could delay the offensive until next year, if then.

In human terms, the waiting is excruciating. And with 360,000 reservists recalled to duty alongside the additional 160,000 on active duty (the entire British army numbers 80,360 including the Ghurkas; the US Army, 452,689), there is also the very practical consideration of what happens when you keep a great part of the labour force away from its jobs, and parents away from their families. But the solution here can been found in the very thing that makes Israel so vulnerable: its size. It is small enough that batches of troops can be released from their unit deployments facing Gaza and allowed to go home to live and work, but still be back in a matter of hours if called to launch the offensive. They are certainly not needed to defend now that the defences are wide awake; today there are guard units all along the perimeter, where they should have been all along. (Overconfidence is also an Israeli trait: on October 6 1973, when the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal with tens of thousands of troops, there was a paltry 411 Israeli reservists holding 17 Canal-side forts).

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But the intensely frustrating delay in launching the offensive doesn’t preclude all offensive action. Both the Israeli Army and the Shin Bet security service have units of skilled individual fighters who speak perfect Palestinian-accented Arabic and who can look the part. With all the confusion caused by the bombing, they have been able to walk into the Gaza strip to blend in and look for Hamas leaders. So far, the names and photos of 28 Hamas commanders and political chiefs successfully found and killed have been published—and the mini-campaign is continuing.

Meanwhile, the Hezbollah Shia army is also waiting across the Lebanese border, with an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles. This is such an enormous number — the total launched so far from the Gaza Strip is under 8,000 — that in order to cope, Israel’s Iron Dome batteries would have to engage them very selectively to protect only the most exposed human lives. But so far, Hezbollah has done nothing to back up its loudly vehement support for Hamas, with two exceptions. One was a brief bout of machine gun fire, which killed a young reservist who had just arrived in Israel from his American family home, and the other was the launch of some rockets by Palestinians it harbors, “Hamas in Lebanon”.

Hezbollah’s vehement leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and his Iranian paymasters keep calling for Israel’s destruction, along with “death to the USA”, but for now, neither has reacted to Israel’s destruction of the freight terminals in Aleppo and Damascus airports which Iran uses to deliver weapons to Hezbollah. Nasrallah has met with Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri and Islamic Jihad chief Ziad al-Nakhala at which “an assessment was made of the international positions being taken and what the parties of the Axis of Resistance must do … to realise a real victory for the resistance in Gaza and Palestinian and to halt the brutal aggression.” But thus far, Hezbollah hasn’t unleashed its barrage.

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At this point, then, is still impossible to say what Nasrallah’s plan might be. Will he start the rocket barrages when Israel kicks off its offensive into Gaza? Or will he have another starting point in mind? Equally, he may be deterred from action by the vulnerability of his Shia supporters in Southern Lebanon to Israel’s artillery and mortars, as well as its airpower. He learned this by hard example: during the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006, Shia southern Beirut was left in ruins along with Hezbollah headquarters and barracks — and dozens of Shia villages all the way to the border. After that conflict, Nasrallah, with commendable honesty, declared that he would never have started the war had he known what the Israeli force would do to the houses of his followers. To mitigate their fury, Hezbollah officials were sent around with bags of US dollars supplied by Iran to pay for some of the damage.

It is not unreasonable, then, to think that the only Arab leader in the region who does care for his supporters might be reluctant to expose them to another devastating bombing campaign simply to launch rockets against Israel — especially since Israel’s bombing capacity has tripled since 2006. There is also the large question of asking Shia to sacrifice their homes for ultra-Sunni Hamas that views them as heretics deserving of death. There’s also the small matter of Nasrallah’s personal vulnerability: he too becomes a target if he enters the war.

Middle East Experts will immediately point out the fallacy of holding out any reasonable hope of rationality in the region, but as of writing the war has not expanded. Nonetheless, Israel’s declared intent of destroying the Hamas tunnel network and defeating its defenders has not changed, nor will it. Held up till now by promises to liberate the hostages, the Israeli offensive will not wait for very long.

In all their wars, that is the one error the Israelis have never made, and they are not about to start now. Aside from the Fauda teams before they defected to Netflix, and the undercover Shin Bet agents who can track down individual leaders, the Israelis have been content to remain on the defensive. Any offensive actions are taken only against clear enemies in recognisable garb, even if not actual uniforms, as well as physical facilities that can be spotted from the air, such as the recently destroyed Iranian rocket depots in Damascus and Aleppo.

In Gaza, by contrast, there are no visible military facilities, while Hamas fighters can shed their fashionable black outfits and dress like civilians. This will not, however, frustrate the Israeli offensive, which still has fixed, immovable targets. These are the deep tunnels — too deep for aerial bombing — that Hamas has been excavating and lining in concrete for more than 10 years, using construction equipment and vast quantities of cement donated by different governments and international organisations “to house refugees”. As a result, Gaza’s refugee “camps” do not contain a single tent. Instead, they are home to a forest of high-rise apartments, which is undoubtedly a good thing, except for the fact that both machines and cement were also diverted for tunnelling on the largest scale.

These tunnels house relatively sophisticated rocket-assembly lines, motor-assembly works, sheet metal and explosives’ stores, and warhead-fabrication workshops. More tunnels house Hamas command posts and its ordnance stores of small arms, mortars and rockets. Even deeper tunnels house its leaders’ lodgings and headquarters. Finally, there are the exfiltration tunnels, though there is no sign that they were used in the October 7 attacks, perhaps because their exits had been detected and blocked long before.

When Israel’s forces enter Gaza, they will engage any enemies who resist them, but they will not go looking for them. Their task is to escort combat engineers to their job sites — the camouflaged places from which tunnels can be accessed. How do they know where these entry points are? While Israel’s aerostats with cameras, satellite photography and the pictures generated by radar returns cannot reveal tunnels, they have been used to monitor where cement-mixer trucks have stopped over the years. They cannot pinpoint tunnel entrances by doing so, but they can at least identify places worth exploring with low-frequency, earth-penetrating radars or simple probes.

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The obvious danger here is that, even before the escorting troops and combat engineers descend underground to fight off Hamas’s guards and place their demolition charges, they will keep losing casualties to snipers and mortar bombs on their way to the sites.

To minimise the danger, however, the Israeli army can rely on the most heavily protected armoured vehicle ever developed: the Namer infantry combat vehicle. As well as having significantly more armour than any other combat vehicle anywhere in the world, it uses an active defence weapon to intercept incoming anti-tank missiles and rockets, and also has machine guns to fight off infantry attackers. In urban combat, tank crews firing machine guns from the top of their turrets are desperately vulnerable, but the Namer’s crew remains “buttoned up” inside the vehicle, relying on TV screens to see the outside world and operate their weapons remotely. In 2014, the last time Israeli troops fought in Gaza, most were riding thinly armoured M.113s, which were easily penetrated by RPG anti-tank rockets, with some 60 soldiers killed and hundreds wounded. Not this time.

After they reach the suspected tunnel sites, the Namers will line up to form a perimeter — an improvised fortress — to protect the combat engineers as they go about their task. It is very likely that there will still be skirmishing before, during and after each de-tunnelling operation, with Hamas mortar teams in action, as well as snipers hidden in ruins. Fortunately, the Israelis will have their 70-ton Namers, as well as their post-2014 street-fighting training, to protect them.

And they will need that protection, as dismantling Hamas’s tunnel network will take time: the one certainty in all this is that the planting of demolition charges cannot be done quickly without suffering many fatalities. This means there will be at least two weeks of war in the Gaza strip — and even this optimistically assumes that the entire tunnel system in the evacuated northern part can be cleared in a week, allowing the Israelis to do the same in the southern sector, after evacuating the southerners and sending home the northerners. The Government’s vow to persist until the destruction of Hamas will be tested every day.

Meanwhile, with the Gaza battle imminent, an entirely separate war might start on Israel’s northern border. Since Hamas’s surprise attack, the very large bombardment capacity of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon has loomed over Israel’s response. Hezbollah, after all, has a truly huge quantity of rockets — 100,000 is the conventional number, as well as dozens of missiles that can be aimed with much greater precision.

If the rockets were launched all at once, technically not impossible, or even in closely spaced volleys, their sheer number would overwhelm Israel’s advanced Iron Dome batteries, many of which are in the south. Faced with such a barrage, Israel’s much smaller number of  longer-ranged, more advanced David’s Sling interceptors would play a crucial role in protecting high-value targets such as hospitals, oil refineries, microprocessor factories and military installations. (Civilian housing has a lower priority because every house and every apartment has an effective bomb shelter.)

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But numbers matter, and it’s not inconceivable that Hezbollah’s bombardment could become an example of quantity becoming quality. This would allow Hezbollah’s ground troops to penetrate Israeli territory just as Hamas did from the south. As it happens, the otherwise overwhelmed villagers and a few guard soldiers in the south killed almost 1,500 Hamas attackers, almost as many as Israel’s total killed, and Hezbollah’s raiders would likely share the same fate.

This will no doubt play on the mind of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, who already has good reason to avoid another war with Israel. After the last one, in 2006, he openly confessed that if he had known how much damage the Israeli air force could inflict, he would not have started the war. Moreover, even though Iran supports Hamas politically, the fact remains that its intense Sunni Islamist ideology classifies Hezbollah’s Shi’a followers as heretics deserving of punishment and exclusion until they repent.

Yet none of this means that the threat of Hezbollah can be ignored. After all, with Hamas still fighting in Gaza, Hezbollah can’t be seen to be doing nothing. As all eyes turn to the South, Israel’s strategists know very well that, while the fight for Gaza’s tunnels is today’s battle, tomorrow’s will come from elsewhere.

The latest attack came on Saturday morning, as four explosive-laden drones flew into the east of the city, buzzing menacingly before slamming into a hilly area northeast of Erbil. They were designed to explode on impact, like a kamikaze plane. This time, the residents of Erbil were fortunate; despite three hitting a house, there were no fatalities.

It was, however, enough to concern American forces in the area. The US Consulate in Erbil issued a forthright statement, claiming it was a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty. And on Monday, American F-15s retaliated by carrying out “defensive” airstrikes against pro-Iranian militias in Syria near the Iraqi border. A White House spokesman explained: “The targets were selected because these facilities are utilized by Iran-backed militias that are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq.”

The use of drones in the Middle East is, of course, nothing new. Last January, for example, the US used a Reaper to kill the Iranian Quds Force head Qasem Soleimani. Yet this most recent attack at the weekend points to a disturbing shift in how these killing machines are being deployed: the US is no longer just a military power capable of taking out terrorists with sophisticated drones; it is now a target for them, too.

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As I explain in my new book, Drone Wars, the answer to that question requires us to return to the 1980s, to the start of the global arms race for drone technology. At that time the West was gripped by movies such as Terminator and Robocop which provided a glimpse into a futuristic world of menacing machines, from computers that take over spacecraft to those that enslave humanity. Meanwhile, in military bases across the world, a very real revolution was taking place.

During the Reagan years, the US emerged from the Cold War as the world’s sole superpower — a supremacy that was ultimately borne out in 1991, when America’s hi-tech military destroyed the Soviet-equipped Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein. That war, more than any other, showcased how modern military technology, particularly stealth fighters and cruise missiles, could decimate a powerful enemy.

The use of drones, though, dates back to 1982, when Israeli defence experts were trying to find a way to protect their air force from Syrian surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) that were based in Lebanon. Their innovative solution? A drone, albeit in a rudimentary form: Israel’s remotely piloted aircraft, called Scout, was initially a giant model airplane that could provide intelligence on the location of dangerous SAM batteries.

Almost four decades later, the use of drones remains enticing for several reasons — the most obvious being that they can fly in dangerous airspace and be shot down, or crash due to bad weather, without risking a pilot’s life. They can also fly for hours, sometimes even days, monitoring a target.

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Indeed, drone operators often say that their vehicles are good for “dull, dirty and dangerous” missions. However, the reality is that while drone technology was developed by Israel and the US in the 1990s, drones didn’t actually go on dangerous missions until recently. In fact, the US only started to use drones to carry out airstrikes in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen under President Obama. By then, the drones deployed by America bore little resemblance to Scout. The US Predator — an archetype of the military drones used today in Iran, China and other countries — was 27 feet long with a wingspan of 48 feet. It would grow into the Reaper, a drone that can carry hundreds of pounds of missiles and fly 200mph for more than 1,000 miles, staying aloft for 14 hours.

But as the West is now discovering, it was far from alone in carrying out drone research. Indeed, in recent years, Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS have all acquired Iranian drone technology — and are using it to devastating effect.

In March 2017, I was in Iraq covering the final push by the Iraqi army to drive ISIS out of Mosul, the country’s second largest city. When the Iraqi army entered Mosul using American-made Humvees they encountered a deadly surprise: ISIS had developed drones that could drop grenades on to unsuspecting Iraqi troops. Worryingly, they appeared to be modified quadcopters, the kind that can be acquired by anyone on Amazon. The Iraqis were understandably spooked by the drone threat. We stayed in alleyways, and crawled through homes, trying to avoid sniper fire and listening for the buzzing of this new aerial menace.

By that time the drone threat had been reduced as ISIS’s troops were surrounded and were largely cut off from their supplies. However, the fact that a terrorist group had still managed to acquire a mini air force was striking; after all, it confirmed that drones have become a battlefield threat, as well as a military resource. And as a result, the West needs to start thinking not just about how to deploy them, but how to defend against them.

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The truth, however, is that today’s defences are often woefully inadequate. Earlier this month, US Marines trained with giant “drone defender” guns that look more like a ray gun from some bizarre futuristic movie than what an efficient modern military would use. Other “counter-UAS” solutions are being developed, ranging from missiles and microwave weapons to lasers and machine guns that fire thousands of rounds at drones. But the fact that Iranian drones have been able to get around US defences and target everything from fields near a planned consulate to a secret CIA hangar in Iraq illustrates how much more needs to be done.

Indeed, the question now is whether countries like Iran and China — the world’s leading exporter — will pioneer the next stage of this evolution or whether the US and Western countries will learn from their experience in Iraq and start deploying new drone technology. China, India and Russia are all now experimenting with AI-powered drone swarms that attack as a unit to overwhelm an enemy. To put it simply, this is not an arms race we can afford to lose.

When it comes to Israel, the Arab world can be divided — loosely — into blocks. There’s the so-called “Axis of Accommodation”: states like Egypt and Jordan that have made peace with the Jewish state, accept (officially at least) its existence and seek to avoid future conflict. Set against them is the “Axis of Resistance” — countries that believe all compromise to be a betrayal of principle, centred on Iran and Syria.

It is important to understand that these are more than just opposing stances to Israel — they are alternative modes of Middle East statecraft. As Thanassis Cambanis observes in his rigorous book, A Privilege to Die, Hezbollah has “convinced legions of common men and women that Israel can be defeated and destroyed — and not just in the distant future, but soon.” Its leader Hassan Nasrallah now regularly “reminds his millions of listeners across the Arab world that Hezbollah and its allies — the ‘Axis of Resistance’ — have wrung more concessions from Israel by force than the pro-Western ‘Axis of Accommodation’ has won through decades of negotiation.”

But the Middle East is riddled with militia groups allied against the West and, specifically, Israel — not least Hamas, which recently fired hundreds of rockets from Gaza into the country. The Iranian-controlled Shia militia organisation, the Popular Mobilisation Front (PMF), has spent years attacking Western targets in Iraq; in Yemen, the Houthis have battered the Saudi Army. But Hezbollah towers above them all, both in its military efficacy and political strength. Why? The answer lies with Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, the Iranian cleric who died aged 74 last week from Covid-19.

Few know more about Hezbollah — and Mohtashamipur — than Shimon Shapira, a retired Brigadier General in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), former ‎military secretary to ex-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‎Netanyahu, and now a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “Mohtashamipur was the architect of Hezbollah,” he tells me. “And Hezbollah changed everything.”

“Mohtashamipur was a real revolutionary, and a close associate of the founder of the Islamic Republic [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini himself,” he continues. “It was Khomeini who personally sent Mohtashamipur to Damascus to create a new Shiite radical movement to rival Amal, the Lebanese Shia movement founded in 1976. Amal is secular, and the Mullahs knew it would never be what they wanted: an Iranian arm in Lebanon.”

What the Iranians needed was a new movement, one adhering to the doctrine of the Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih, (rule of the jurist), which holds that those best equipped to rule are those best equipped to interpret God’s law — namely clerics. It needed an organisation led by Ulama, Muslim clerics. From Syria, Mohtashamipur went across the border into the city of Baalbek in Lebanon’s Baqaa Valley. There he met with three clerics, Abbas al-Moussawi, Subhi al-Tufayli and Mouhammad Yazbek, all men steeped in the ideology of the velayat-e faqih; all men who would happily take orders from Khomeini, and therefore, Iran. Together they founded Hezbollah, or “The Party of God”. Al-Moussawi would be its leader until Israel assassinated him in 1992.

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“And I’ll let you in on a secret,” Shapira adds: “This was in summer 1981 — before Israel even entered Lebanon.” Received wisdom has it that the Lebanese Shia became radicalised after Israeli forces moved into Lebanon in 1982 and began occupying the country. In truth, the seeds were sown before.

If step one for Tehran was to set up an organisation ideologically devoted to it, step two was to provide its proxy the military heft needed to become a player. Tehran dispatched soldiers from its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to Lebanon, where they set up training camps in Baalbek and the surrounding areas. Suddenly, the Israelis were facing Iranian-trained Shia fighters in Lebanon. Things got tough. They were no longer facing just a militia group but the direct instrument of a state.

“That’s the real strength of Hezbollah,” Shapira concludes, “and it’s the key to understanding their success. Hezbollah is essentially an Iranian brigade in Lebanon.”

Iran spent money and time and human resources to turn Hezbollah into a militia of unrivalled ability in the Arab world, but that is only half the story. Hezbollah is an army, but it is also a political party, and it is now the de facto ruler of Lebanon. The last time I was in the country I took a trip to South Beirut, the group’s stronghold in the capital, and here the truth of that fact is everywhere.

To understand the Party of God you need to see the banners of Nasrallah and Khomeini and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dangling from lampposts and roundabouts. You need to see the yellow flags flutter in the wind, the veiled women scurry down narrow roads in tight, black phalanxes, and see the watchful, bearded men on the balconies who follow your every move.

Lebanon is a multi-ethnic state with a confessional system that allocates government office via ethnicity, religion and sect. Christians, Druze and Sunni parties and militias all jostle for power in a state smaller than Yorkshire. But only one group is almost pathologically well-organised; only one group hogs the best guns. Hezbollah runs things, and it runs them well because the Islamic Republic is a revolutionary state and it taught its Lebanese allies the tools of politics just as much as war.

Jonathan Spyer is an Israeli journalist and Middle East analyst who was in the IDF during the 2006 war and has long studied Hezbollah. “Iran has developed a methodology of irregular and political warfare that is effective beyond anything comparable in the region,” he says. “Israel is far more skilful than Iran in most of its military capabilities. But in terms of creating training and indoctrinating proxies, and then using that military muscle to build political movements, they are unparalleled.”

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It’s not enough to train people to shoot accurately. You also need to give them a reason to hold a gun in the first place. And the best way to do this is not just with an ideology — though that sits front and centre — but to construct an apparatus around it. Hezbollah builds schools and creates youth outreach programmes; it funds building works and the training of doctors and engineers; it cares for the sick and the elderly. After the destruction of the 2006 Lebanon War, when the Israelis flattened swathes of Lebanese infrastructure, Hezbollah began distributing large amounts of cash to anyone who could prove their home had been damaged. Known as the “Green Flood” (Al-sayl al-akhdhar), the dollars reportedly came into Beirut from Iran via Syria.

And the young Lebanese Shia who do join Hezbollah to fight get not only top-class training and the respect that comes with carrying a gun, but a reason to do so, beyond the cult of martyrdom endemic across the Middle East. 30 December 1999 was the last time Hezbollah launched a suicide bomber when a fighter drove a car bomb into an Israeli military convoy; unlike al-Qaeda and ISIS, and (very often) Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah is interested in people who can do more than just die.

Right now, the Party of God sits on Israel’s northern border. The extensive combat experience Hezbollah gained fighting an ultimately successful 15-year insurgency against Israel in Sothern Lebanon is now complemented by almost a decade of fighting in Syria. Its soldiers are battle-hardened to a degree that Israel’s other border enemy Hamas simply cannot match.

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Seeded within its territory are an estimated 150,000 missiles (many Iranian-made), and this is where Hezbollah’s threat becomes regional — indeed possibly global. Through them, Iran can now strike deep into Israeli territory, with a force that would be beyond the ability of Israel’s anti-missile system Iron Dome. Hezbollah has become Iran’s primary means by which it can deter and respond to Israel in the case of war.

But that’s not all. As a proxy force Hezbollah gives Iran not just an expanded forward footprint but something almost as valuable: deniability. The Iranians are now beginning to seed its Zulfiqar missiles in Western Iraq among their PMF Shia militia clients — giving them another position from which to fire into Israel.

Israelis are in no doubt that it is Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, acting to all intent and purposes as a forward Iranian base, that now poses the greatest threat to national security. They are on its border and are arguably the toughest foe Israel has ever faced. Mohtashamipur might be dead, but Spyer still remembers 2006, “Hezbollah reminds me of what people said about the German Army at the end of World War II: you cannot afford to take chances with them: they will punish any lack of professionalism. You have to be at the very top of your game, or you will pay.”

The comparison is disappointingly abstract because there is no former British colony that is remotely similar to Lebanon. The bond that Britain has with Malta or Cyprus or Israel has nothing on what many French people feel for Lebanon, a country they ruled briefly between 1919 and 1946, but with which they share history going back to the crusades. The Ottomans recognised France’s ongoing interest in the region in the sixteenth century: it was as the protector of Christians in the region that the French came to the aid of the Maronite Christians during the massacres of 1860. The numerous French religious institutions in the region ran schools, which were enormously popular with ambitious locals. At Baalbek, the country’s most famous ancient site, there is old chalk graffiti done by long-gone Lebanese. The names are Arab, the handwriting distinctively French.

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By Aris Roussinos

When I saw the footage of Macron being mobbed by beleaguered Beirutis, my instinct was to assume that some cunning strategic rationale underpinned his move. Since the collapse of the Iranian nuclear deal, the French president has been trying to position his country as Iran’s obvious intermediary. I wondered initially whether this explained his seemingly reflexive decision to swoop in, given how Hezbollah, the strongest political force in Lebanon, could provide another conduit to Teheran.

The reality is simpler. Macron is genuinely interested by Lebanon – he visited during his presidential campaign in 2017 and I know he enjoyed reading at least one book about the recent history of the region last summer (it was mine). When Macron went to Beirut to electioneer, the French ambassador at the time was Emmanuel Bonne. Debonair, thoughtful and hawkish, Bonne is now chief foreign policy adviser at the Elysée. Macron’s confidence stems in part from the fact that his conseiller diplomatique will have the numbers of all the key people in Lebanon on his phone.

Macron’s willingness to weaponise the history he knows became abundantly clear during his walkabout in Gemmayzeh, an area which was the social epicentre of the city until it was smashed by last week’s explosion, and where no member of the Lebanese government would currently dare tread, such is the degree of anger. There he said (in French) that he would be proposing a new “political pact” to members of the country’s political elite that very afternoon, and that he would be coming back on 1 September.

There is an enormous symbolism to the date and the word “pact” that will have passed most people by. September 1 2020 is the centenary of France’s establishment of Greater Lebanon as a discrete state separate from Syria, which it had been mandated to govern by the League of Nations six months earlier. The new state joined Mount Lebanon, which was (and is) predominantly Christian and Druze, to adjacent coastal and interior areas where most of the inhabitants are Sunni or Shia. Its proclamation was made by France’s first high commissioner to Lebanon from the steps of his official residence, La Résidence des Pins: it was a bone thrown very publicly to the Christians on whom French power would depend.

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Successive French High Commissioners governed the Levant from the Residence for the next quarter of a century and the French saw no need to give up this piece of real estate even after Lebanon gained its independence. Now home to the French ambassador, it is the very place to which Macron summoned Lebanese politicians to talk about the future last week.
Five years after the French high commissioner brought Greater Lebanon into being, a revolt against French rule erupted in Syria, next-door. In 1926, in an attempt to stop the rot penetrating their bridgehead, the French granted Lebanon a constitution modelled on their own. This gave each of the main religious groups one of the top jobs: the president would be Christian, his prime minister a Sunni, and the speaker in parliament a Shia. This, and the allocation of seats in parliament, institutionalised Christian dominance. Power remained in the French high commissioner’s hands.

The reason why Macron’s deliberate use of the word “pact” will be so resonant is because of events that happened two decades later, during the second world war. In 1943, following significant British pressure, the French were forced to hold elections in Lebanon, which resulted in a nationalist triumph and de facto independence. The “National Pact” reached by the new president and his prime minister afterwards confirmed the confessional arrangements of 1926. The deal was that the Christians would no longer seek western support; the Sunnis gave up their dream of reuniting Lebanon with Syria. When both sides abandoned the agreement in the late 1950s, the result was a short civil war. What Macron is proposing is that a new government reopens, rewrites and then reseals this pact in time for the centenary next month. Given how many months it took to form the last administration, this is a very tall order.

In normal times, such casual interference in domestic politics by another country’s head of state would be extraordinary, but Lebanon is in dire straits. Coming on top of strikes, power-cuts and a banking crisis, the explosion is a symptom of the rotten state’s collapse. Significantly, it has devastated the lives of well-off Beirutis who have so far managed to insulate themselves from other aspects of the crisis. A friend I rely on as a barometer for the mood in the city described “living like you’re an animal” — in the sense of not really understanding what is happening around you. What she wanted to know most was whether there is a willingness in the West to help.

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Anthony Elghossain, who is writing a book about Western policy in the Levant since the 1950s, and whose own flat in the city was wrecked by the blast, believes that the West needs to be careful that the support it does offer does not simply entrench the oligarchy responsible for the chaos. In his view “friends of Lebanon and its diaspora need to crowdsource and explore alternative ways of working through international and domestic organisations to help Lebanon rebuild”. That task is urgent because the different factions are already clearly trying to exploit the situation: by the weekend, medicines donated by Kuwait were reportedly already on sale in Beirut pharmacies.

Lebanon has long relied on foreign friends, but Macron’s tone last week suggests that the patience of one of its strongest champions is now running out. Elghossain hopes that his compatriots will finally confront the fact that there is a direct correlation between Hezbollah’s power and the outside world’s growing reluctance to help. “All Lebanon’s political parties are passively complicit and actively criminal,” he says. “All are problematic but some are more problematic than others. Hezbollah is the most powerful party; it is also the most problematic party on the international plane.”

Tackling Hezbollah is easier said than done. This deeply disturbing terrorist organisation serves the senescent president, Michel Aoun, like a Zimmer frame and its existence suits many other members of the country’s self-serving elite, if only to frighten people into supporting them. Lebanon is caught in a vicious circle: its corrupted politics have caused a crisis which means three-quarters of all Lebanese are now thought to live in poverty. In such a situation the patronage and protection their politicians offer them have an ongoing, if battered, allure. Moreover, other Arab states will be doing what they can to prevent the Lebanese government being ousted in a popular revolution, which might give their own citizens ideas.

Macron’s determination to muster an international coalition has a precedent. In 1861, following the sectarian killings of the previous year, the Ottomans gave the Christian Maronites a degree of autonomy. To reassure the Maronites, the Règlement Organique – as it was misleadingly known, since it was the result of intense western pressure – was guaranteed by the five European powers: Britain, France, Austria, Russia and Prussia. Is Macron thinking of something of this kind to break the ruinous cycle Lebanon is in?

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What are the chances of success? There is no question many Lebanese are desperate for profound change. Macron received a tumultuous reception. But the worst-hit areas, where he conducted his walkabout last week, are in the Christian east of the city, where he might expect plenty of goodwill. The big question is how Hezbollah — whose representatives attended last week’s discussions — will respond to the greatest threat to the power it has accumulated since fighting off the Israelis in 2006. “[A]ll of Hezbollah’s resources are at the disposal of the Lebanese state,” its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said tellingly in a defensive speech last Friday, in which he accused others of blaming the group, which controls the port, reflexively for the disaster. His tone suggests that he knows he’s vulnerable.

As the 1943 pact demonstrates, Lebanon’s politicians have always had to navigate low levels of trust between the people they are supposed to represent. It is no longer working. Give it too hard a shake, however, and there’s a real danger that the entire country explodes.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

There has always been a healthy suspicion of jingoism and flag-waving on the Left. However it wasn’t this that Orwell was referring to. Few wrote more damning screeds about the British empire than the former colonial policeman, who was always willing to give the “blimps” who ran Britain a good kicking. Rather, Orwell was referring to a more generalised contempt many on the Left felt towards Britain and — by extension — their fellow countrymen.

Socialism to Orwell meant bread and butter issues of higher wages and more freedom — freedom itself depending to a large extent on how much money one has. Yet the movement attracted its fair share of cranks. It was this penumbra of crankishness that prevented socialism from developing a mass following. A major hallmark of it was its anti-Britishness.

Jeremy Corbyn has been compared plenty of times over the past five years to the “vegetarian”, “fruit-juice drinker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist” oddballs Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier. In Orwell’s time these types seemed to gravitate towards the socialist movement “like bluebottles to a dead cat”, as he put it. Since Corbyn became leader in 2015 something similar has occurred: the Labour Party has been flooded with conspiracy theorists, antisemites and various other subliterate fools. Uniting almost all of them is a profound contempt for Britain and in particular British foreign policy.

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This is arguably a major reason Labour lost the recent election. “Such was the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn,” wrote the Labour MP Liam Byrne, “that hundreds of voters I met thought Labour’s leader was a ­communist terrorist sympathiser who wouldn’t push the nuclear button or sing the national anthem.”

This isn’t so much the “demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn” as an accurate summation of the Labour leader’s views. Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, two of Corbyn’s first appointments as advisers, are communists. Corbyn called members of Hamas and Hezbollah “honoured friends”. He fraternised with the IRA and argued for the abolition of Nato. He has obfuscated shamefully over acts of aggression directed against Britain, such as during the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury. It is not demonising someone to accurately list the things they have said and done.

Many who opposed Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from the outset did so because of the crude ‘anti-imperialism’ he subscribed to. As Professor Alan Johnson wrote in 2015: “Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘strange associations’ — so widely noted, yet so little understood — are not a personal foible. They are a symptom of the ideological corruption of that part of the Left in which he was formed.”

This ‘ideological corruption’, as Johnson put it, is a legacy of Stalinism — or more specifically, Stalinist ‘second-campism’. This refers to the Soviet Union’s policy of supporting reactionary movements in what at the time was called the Third World, on the basis that they contained ‘progressive’ elements. The cultural theorist Judith Butler summarised this world view approvingly in 2006: “Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.” Never mind that such movements sought to murder Jews only for being Jews.

This was the milieu — swamp might be a more appropriate term — from which Jeremy Corbyn emerged in 2015. Crude anti-capitalism meant that America and its allies, notably Britain and Israel, were responsible for all of the world’s ills. This worldview is best encapsulated by the Stop the War Coalition (an organisation that Corbyn chaired for many years), whose guiding mantra might be boiled down to “It’s our fault”.

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The flipside of this ‘anti-imperialism’ is a lionisation of any movement that points an AK-47 in the direction of the West; distinctions in non-western countries are rarely made between the rulers and the ruled. The Iranian mullahs, Hamas, Hezbollah, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, Colonel Gaddafi are viewed as historically progressive forces. Those who languish under their tyrannical rule are ignored. This also contains a neat reanimation of Bertrand Russell’s point about the “fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed”. Effete bourgeois intellectuals and activists, softened by the relative comfort available in the western democracies in which they live, pursue their vicarious revolutionary fantasies through fatigue-wearing men of action such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

The assumption that Britain’s role in the world is overwhelmingly negative and that Britain’s enemies “have a point” undermines repeated attempts by Labour over recent weeks to forge a “progressive patriotism”. The implication being that the Labour Party is viewed as unpatriotic by the electorate. The Conservative Party doesn’t need to constantly burnish its patriotic credentials. Labour on the other hand must, partly because its hard-Left flank contains many comrades who cannot abide the notion that Britain has any progressive role in the world.

This is not simply a question of foreign policy, though foreign policy plays a significant part. One burnishes one’s credentials in Labour these days by talking up one’s opposition to the 2003 war in Iraq. It’s as if there were no consequences of isolationism and inaction prior to 2003 (Srebrenica anyone?) and everything since is viewed through the lens of ‘blowback’ from the Iraq war. A profound ignorance reigns when it comes to successive humanitarian interventions in Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia, as well as the no-fly zone over Iraq from 1991 to 2003.

If the next Labour leader is to win an election Labour must change significantly. In selecting Jeremy Corbyn to be Labour leader back in 2015, party members didn’t only consign the party to inevitable defeat while he was at the helm. They probably relegated the party to opposition for several parliaments post-Corbyn. This was their biggest miscalculation. It will take this long to detoxify the Labour brand in the eyes of the electorate. As the New Labour strategist Philip Gould wrote after defeat at the 1992 election: “Labour lost because it was still the party of the winter of discontent; union influence; strikes and inflation; disarmament; Benn and Scargill.”

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It was a decade-and-a-half between the infiltration of Militant in the early Eighties and Tony Blair’s victory in 1997. Labour’s climb back to electoral credibility could take longer this time.

There is set of first principles that the Labour Party must adhere to if it is to have any hope of winning back power in the foreseeable future. Central to that is the assumption that Britain is a country that is more good than bad, both as a place to live and in its conduct around the world. This is not to ignore ill-thought out and gung-ho foreign policy decisions such as Iraq — nor to whitewash domestic issues such as inequality and xenophobia. Britain is not a bad place to live, and from its generous developmental budget to successful humanitarian interventions in places such as Kosovo and West Africa, there are examples in its recent history of British governments doing the right thing.

There is a lot more to do of course. There always is. Britain’s obsequious relationship with Saudi Arabia is an easy target for the ire of Labour activists but an appropriate one. As is China, whose human rights abuses the British government seems increasingly willing to overlook for the sake of economic expediency.

But whenever such matters are discussed some perspective is required. And this will not be forthcoming for as long as Labour adheres — even tangentially — to the fly-blown notions that animate Corbyn’s worldview. A break with these sclerotic doctrines is required. And a break with them will do more for Labour’s chances with the British people than any convoluted attempt to forge a gimmicky ‘progressive’ patriotism.

Patriotism needn’t be flashy or tub-thumping. But it does begin with the belief that one’s own country is more good than bad, more right than wrong.