In Beirut, Old Anger at Israel, but a Newfound Rage at Hezbollah

Lebanon is exhausted. On March 1, Hezbollah yet again initiated a completely unjustifiable war with Israel by launching missile and drone strikes supposedly in revenge for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. And for most of the country, it was the last straw. And it could well prove to be an inflection point, if Israel doesn’t overplay its hand. But Israel may indeed be doing that by creating a new occupation of the lower fifth of the country south of the Litani River, and vowing that hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians displaced from there cannot return until Hezbollah is disarmed to Israel’s satisfaction.

Lebanese were disgusted at Israel’s completely disproportionate and brutal response to the ineffective and virtually symbolic Hezbollah attack. Over 700,000 Lebanese were displaced in a matter of two or three days, with another 300,000 following soon after. In a country of fewer than six million people, that’s an extraordinary dislocation, especially in so rapid a time. In Beirut, where I was while this was unfolding, I suddenly saw refugees everywhere, sleeping on the streets, in their cars, in tents provided by the government, and anywhere they could lay their heads. Over 1,000 Lebanese have been killed in the past few weeks, and Israel vows that this war will likely continue even if the conflict with Iran is concluded.

So, there is obvious rage and disgust with Israel. But that’s familiar, and most Lebanese expect nothing else from the Israelis. Israel has launched major invasions of Lebanon countless times in recent decades, including in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2006, and 2023–2024. For many Lebanese, this is just what Israel does: invade and occupy their country.

What’s new, and unprecedented, is the overwhelming and near-total consensus of rage against Hezbollah. The militia group was seen by many Lebanese as heroic as long as it was fighting against a large and long-standing Israeli occupation that lasted from 1982, when Hezbollah was founded under Iranian guidance, until 2000, when Israel was driven out. Even after that, when Hezbollah insisted it needed to continue to be the only militia group that retained a private arsenal of heavy weapons, quite a few Lebanese (including many who did not otherwise like or trust Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons) viewed it as a necessary evil to combat Israel’s ongoing occupation of small areas in the south and offset the potential for another invasion.

This perspective began to shift in the aftermath of the 2006 war, which originated with a Hezbollah attack on Israeli soldiers in the border region. As the conflict subsided, many Lebanese began to ask themselves, and Hezbollah, why this conflict was necessary and why this organization had decided to inflict it on the country without consulting anybody else. The backlash was so severe that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah felt it necessary to apologize, saying that if he had only known the extent of Israel’s retaliation, he would never have authorized the initial attack. But everyone in Lebanon was well acquainted with Israel’s doctrine of disproportionate response to Arab adversaries. Nasrallah was, in effect, pleading incompetence and stupidity as indemnification against recklessness and preferring a foreign master to his own country’s government. That’s a good barometer of how serious the backlash had become.

A similar dynamic played out in 2023–2024, when anger against Hezbollah was stronger than ever. But that was of secondary concern to the organization, which was primarily focused on the intense losses Israel inflicted on it in a matter of weeks after the pager explosions that blew up all over Lebanon in September 2024. In less than a month following, Hezbollah’s arsenal, military command and control and battlefield officers, political leadership, and other organizational structures were decimated and lay in ruins. Unpopularity at home was, at that point, the least of its worries.

Many Lebanese were absolutely outraged that Hezbollah would drag the country into war over Gaza and Hamas and on behalf of Iran. Yet again, no aspect of Lebanese national interests—or even Hezbollah’s interests—was served by joining the conflict initiated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Worse, Hezbollah tried to have it both ways, initiating what it hoped would be a limited conflict with Israel that would maintain its “revolutionary” bona fides without risking the destruction of a full-scale war with the Israelis.

Israel was not interested in playing that game and instead sought to inflict a major strategic defeat on Iran and its core allies (Hamas is in a loose marriage of convenience with Tehran and its Arab proxies) by attacking and decimating Hezbollah. When the pagers exploded and Israel unleashed a flurry of full-scale attacks on Hezbollah, the cost of holding back almost all its most powerful potential blows against Israel became clear. The cliché of “use it or lose it” was never better illustrated, as Hezbollah never threw their big punch and saw themselves destroyed on the ground before they could even gather their wits.

It was clear to all serious observers in Lebanon that Hezbollah’s weapons were not only not meant for Hamas and Gaza, or for Lebanon; they were not even meant for defending Hezbollah itself. They were strictly to provided deterrence, and potential retaliation, against an Israeli or American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. And since that only happened after the decimation of Hezbollah, Tehran never gave a go-ahead. This confirmed the worst suspicions of many Lebanese that Hezbollah was simply a puppet of Iran that was cynically using Lebanon and the Lebanese people as a tool without any regard at all for their own interests, lives, or livelihoods.

It was against this backdrop that, less than two years later, Hezbollah once again plunged Lebanon into a war with Israel on behalf of Iran. For an overwhelming majority, it was the final straw. On March 2, the day after Hezbollah joined the war, the Lebanese Cabinet held an emergency meeting, after which Prime Minister Nawaf Salam announced a unanimous decision holding that all Hezbollah’s military activities were “illegal” and “banned” and instructing the military to confiscate Hezbollah’s “illegal weapons.” The next day, President Joseph Aoun told Arab and Western diplomats that the decision was “final, irrevocable, and irreversible.” The government, he insisted, would have the sole monopoly over the use of force and decisions over war and peace.

Obviously, Hezbollah’s paramilitary activities have always been illegal and extra-constitutional. No state authorizes a private army to operate on its soil, let alone maintain its own independent foreign and defense policies. Yet the Lebanese government had never said this to Hezbollah after it was founded in 1982. It has repeatedly refused to disarm: in 1989 (as everyone else did as part of the Taif Agreement), after Israel was chased out of southern Lebanon in 2000, or even after Hezbollah turned its weapons on other Lebanese to defend control of its independent (and illegal and extra-constitutional) military communications network in 2008.

So it’s not as if this current behavior by the group was suddenly unlawful and extra-constitutional. It is, rather, that the government leaders concluded that there was suddenly an unprecedented political opportunity to speak, and hopefully act, against Hezbollah because of the outpouring of outrage against the organization for once again subjecting the country to a completely unnecessary, avoidable, and pointless war in behalf of another country, far away.

The depths of the consensus was illustrated by the fact that Cabinet members from the Amal Party, a Lebanese Shiite grouping that predates Hezbollah and maintains a close alliance with it, were authorized by its leader, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, to stand with the rest of the Cabinet in these unprecedented declarations. Effectively, the whole country is now divided in two camps: Hezbollah’s core members and supporters on one hand, and everybody else on the other.

I was taken aback by the depth and breadth of the outrage I heard against the group on the streets of Beirut before I left the country a week ago, after two months there. Several times, people who did not know me, or know anything about me, and did not know or care who else was listening, launched into diatribes against “the terrorists,” clearly referring to Hezbollah and spewing venom at their recklessness, stupidity, and lack of patriotism. In the past, out of concerns for self-preservation, people would’ve hesitated before expressing such opinions to strangers and in the earshot of many other strangers. But partly there was a sense that everybody thinks this, so why not say it, combined with a feeling of “Who cares?” Such talk was unimaginable in the past, and members of the Cabinet, being canny Lebanese politicians, were aware of, and counted on, this national mood before moving, at least rhetorically, against Hezbollah.

They are also relying upon their hope that the Army would not split in an unmanageable way if the order came to confront Hezbollah and confiscate their weapons. The Army commander, Gen. Rudolphe Haykal, remains hesitant to give the order. Partly he’s genuinely concerned that the military could split in a way that would render it ineffective if troops were ordered to disarm Hezbollah. Even more, though, he is probably hedging against the military—and himself as its leader—being left holding the bag for a failed policy, especially if it plunges the country into another round of civil unrest and even conflict.

The irony is that by attacking Hezbollah on the ground in the south, Israel is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the Lebanese government and military. But its stated plan to create a new, semipermanent occupation and “buffer zone” across southern Lebanon could fatally undermine the government’s efforts to disarm Hezbollah. Worse, it could throw Hezbollah a lifeline, saving it from its own endless miscalculations and blunders. If Israel institutes a new occupation in Lebanon’s south, it would be providing Hezbollah with an opportunity to do the one and only thing it has consistently proven it can do well: fighting Israeli occupying forces in southern Lebanon. That is what the organization was founded to do in 1982, what made it into a strong fighting force through 2000 and beyond, and it is what could well give it the opportunity to rebuild by pursuing exactly the agenda for which it was initially established.

Israel seemingly has forgotten the lessons of earlier adventures in Lebanon, most notably 1982, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon determined to drive out or wipe out fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization once and for all. In the late summer of that year, Israel did secure an agreement that led to the departure of PLO fighters and leaders from Lebanon to Tunisia. But that hardly produced the “Peace for Galilee” quiet along its northern border that Israel purported to be seeking. Instead, the result was the creation of Hezbollah, a new militia that was far more capable, implacable, and at home in southern Lebanon than Palestinian fedayeen ever had been. In short, it backfired.

For Lebanon and Israel, it’s Groundhog Day again. These repeated invasions since 1978 have never resulted in calm along the border, and have almost invariably left the security situation worse than when they began. Much like Donald Trump’s campaign against Iran, why Israel expects this time to be any different defies rational explanation. In both cases, a national neurotic repetition compulsion seems to be at work. The alternative for Israel is quite clear. The Lebanese government has issued an unprecedented—and, until now, virtually unthinkable, call for direct negotiations with Israel (the two countries have technically been in a state of war since 1948). France has offered to broker these talks in either Cyprus or Paris and reportedly proposed a negotiation framework that would involve Lebanese recognition of and diplomatic normalization with Israel in return for Israel ceasing to bomb Lebanon and pulling back from areas it has held onto since 2024. In this context, Hezbollah would be disarmed, but over time and carefully so as not to ignite another civil war in Lebanon.

Israel gets to choose. It can have peace with Lebanon, a disarmed Hezbollah (though not overnight), and after that, a calm border in the north for the first time in over half a century and into the foreseeable future. Or it can experience another occupation of southern Lebanon, the likely resurgence of Hezbollah, and a squandered opportunity to actually achieve peace for Galilee. Unfortunately, because Israel is applying, as it boasts, the same tactics in Lebanon that it has employed in Gaza—near-total destruction and displacement in order to render inhospitable the environment in which its adversary operates—the outcome is hardly likely to be any better.

In Gaza, instead of Hamas being “destroyed,” the group is now ruling in all areas from which the Israeli military has withdrawn. Wars of vengeance can result in satisfying revenge, but they don’t produce stable, sustainable, or advantageous strategic and political outcomes. Israel may well view the wars in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon as all part of the same “mighty vengeance” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised on the evening of October 7, 2023. But such vengeance only feeds a self-reinforcing vicious circle of attack versus counterattack with neighboring societies, and enemies who are not going anywhere and are often only strengthened in the long run by policies informed by anger instead of careful strategic analysis. Surely it’s time to finally heed the obvious lessons of a long and painful history for both countries.