-Analysis-
BEIRUT — It was a quiet afternoon in the summer of 1982. Suddenly, the force of an explosion shook my apartment. Neighbors who had come out onto their balconies told me that a building had been destroyed in an airstrike, near Sanayeh Park, just a few hundred meters from our street.
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As a curious teenager, I went to see the site of the bombing, and found that the roof of the 10-story building had collapsed to the ground, and sat in a pile of rubble.
There was muttering in the crowd that Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), had been visiting the building, which was packed with Palestinian refugee families. The Palestinian leader had left the building just 15 minutes before the bomb had struck. More than 100 residents of the building were killed.
In the summer of 1982, Israel launched what it called “Operation Peace for Galilee.” It was the invasion of Lebanon, and the stated goal was to eliminate the PLO. The Israeli army occupied Beirut and expelled Palestinian fighters from its southern suburbs.
This was in the summer of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Israeli soldiers surrounded the Palestinian camps and brought in right-wing Lebanese Christian militias who slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian civilians over three days.
We don’t know for sure how many civilians were killed that summer. It may have been as many as 20,000.
A brief history of Hezbollah
In the summer of 1982, Hezbollah did not exist. Israel was largely fighting the secular nationalist Fatah movement and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by George Habash, a doctor turned guerrilla leader.
Hundreds of Iranian Revolutionary Guards were sent to Lebanon to support Palestinian fighters against the invasion. They did not fight much, but instead set up training camps in the Bekaa Valley and formed guerrilla groups that would later become known as Hezbollah.
A decade later, in 1993, Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Yasser Arafat and signed the Oslo Accords, a peace agreement that promised the Palestinians self-rule.
But the Oslo Accords were never implemented. Two years after its signing, a Jewish extremist assassinated Rabin, and the assassin eventually won: instead of the Oslo peace, Israeli leaders now wanted “security” for themselves, at the expense of security for Palestinians.
Hezbollah’s success would come at a high price.
In the mid-1990s, the massive Jewish settlement of Palestinian land in the West Bank began. In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, but kept it under strict control, making the area the largest “open-air prison” in the world.
All this was accompanied by the humiliation of the Palestinians in their daily lives, with a high dose of daily violence by the occupation army and the settlers.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah emerged as the main force of resistance against foreign occupation. It was behind the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, which killed 241 American soldiers and 58 French paratroopers, forcing them to leave Lebanon.
A monopoly on resistance
Hezbollah has spent the past four decades embedded in and deepening the sectarian fissures of the Lebanese polity. First, it attacked its secular rivals, such as the Lebanese Communist Party. It became associated with the assassination of its leaders, trade union activists, and intellectual figures, like Marxist thinker Mahdi Amel.
It also eliminated the “National Resistance Front” led by the Lebanese Communist Party, thus monopolizing the resistance against Israel. It has become the main force that mobilized and represented the Lebanese Shiites.
Hezbollah’s success in expelling the Israeli occupation from Lebanon in 2000 was a source of pride for the Lebanese, as the party transformed the poorest Lebanese communities into an effective fighting force. This, however, would come at a high price.
Hezbollah was entirely dependent on Iranian funding, as well as weapons, and therefore orders. This was evident in the 2006 war when Hezbollah provoked Israel, and in the subsequent 33 days, intense Israeli bombardment devastated the Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut.
Rising from PLO ashes
Hezbollah in 2024 is not the same as Hezbollah in 2006. In the intervening years, the party joined the war in Syria to save the regime of Bashar al-Assad from a popular rebellion that had become violent, Islamist, and sectarian.
By fighting in Syria, in an unfriendly environment, the party exposed itself to Israeli espionage, both through data mining and infiltration. For years, Israel has been preparing to fight Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. In a series of dramatic strikes it has killed Hezbollah leaders, including its longtime chief, Hassan Nasrallah.
No one in the Middle East believes in the “end of history.”
But if Israel believes it can achieve “security” on its northern border by committing massacres in Lebanon, turning the suburbs of Beirut into another Gaza, then it is bound to repeat history: For 42 years ago, Israel destroyed the secular Palestine Liberation Organization, but from its ashes arose the more radical Islamist Hezbollah.
No one in the Middle East believes in the “end of history.” It’s always here. Israel burning Lebanon again will bring neither peace, nor security.
