On September 17, 2024, pagers exploded across Lebanon, indiscriminately killing at least 32 people and blinding or otherwise maiming thousands.

The next day, walkie-talkies exploded, again killing and maiming indiscriminately. In the days that followed, Israeli warplanes continued to bombard Lebanese towns, villages, apartment buildings and infrastructure. One of the largest attacks, on Friday, September 27, saw Israeli airstrikes dropping 80 tons of bunker busting explosives on Haret Hreik, killing hundreds of civilians, flattening several buildings and assassinating the secretary general of Hizballah, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, along with two of his advisors. These strikes began a dramatic escalation of aerial and sea bombardment, primarily of the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Beqaa Valley and the south. Israeli attacks have widened to include the Jbeil district north of Beirut, the Bashoura neighborhood in central Beirut and the Cola area—one of the major arteries into and out of Beirut and a significant transportation hub. The strikes, some of which have targeted densely populated areas, are the most destructive in Lebanon’s history and are ongoing as of this writing. On September 30, the Israeli military announced it had begun a ground invasion of Lebanon. To date, Israeli attacks have killed thousands, wounded thousands more and displaced over one million people in Lebanon.

These attacks are part of an expanded Israeli war machine that continues to commit a genocide in Gaza, in the process targeting Syria, Yemen and Iran, and threatening a wider regional war. They are also the latest in a long history of Israeli violence in, and on, Lebanon, justified by the Israeli state as being “targeted” toward groups it considers terrorists. In the past it was the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the leftist Lebanese National Movement. Today it is Hizballah.

For Lebanon, the current assault marks the country’s deadliest days since the civil war’s end in 1990. It also takes place in the context of a sequence of crises that began with the popular uprising in 2019 and its subsequent repression, and continued through the Covid pandemic, port explosion, a power vacuum and an economic collapse from which Lebanon had only just begun to recover. These crises are indelibly linked to Lebanon’s positioning vis-a-vis multiple powers in the region and beyond. In its relatively short history since 1920, Lebanon has been the object of avaricious interests driving various interventions that have been both a boon and a detriment to the tiny country. Since World War II, Beirut—and Lebanon more broadly—has served as a political, cultural and social refuge for Arab populations and ignominious political figures alike. Lebanon has long had a freer press than any other Arab country, and its constitution guarantees the freedom of religion, expression, assembly and association. Different universities in Lebanon have curricula in English, French and Arabic and are not subject to government censorship. These factors have made Lebanon an important publishing and arts center, as well as a popular higher education destination for the entire region.

Because Lebanon’s ports and overall economy were relatively well developed, it served as an economic gateway for and to Syria. Oil interests also came into play, as the country was used by US military and civilian planners to ensure access to petroleum, military bases, air transportation and commercial expansion in the region.[1] With the oil boom in the 1970s, Gulf oil producers and other investors poured funds into Lebanon’s banking industry, which has boasted banking secrecy laws since the 1950s (slightly amended in 2022). Lebanon’s tourist and service sectors expanded in the 1960s, in part due to Gulf interests, and employed not only working-class Lebanese, but Palestinian, Syrian and other migrant labor. The United States has also intervened to support the Israeli state, which has regularly inflicted violence on civilians in Lebanon. Even before the Israeli state’s establishment, Zionist visions for its borders included southern Lebanon and the waters of the Litani River.

Regardless of who is in power in Lebanon or who is leading the resistance, the country’s strategic interests vis-a-vis the Israeli state have remained relatively consistent since 1948. They are: the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, liberating Lebanese land occupied by the Israeli state, securing natural resources like water and gas and ending the Israeli military’s violations of Lebanon’s land, sea and air space.

This primer situates the latest Israeli war on Lebanon and resistance to it within the broader context of Lebanon’s political development and its relationship to Palestine. The primer begins by offering a historical overview of Lebanon’s formation that describes the role of external and internal forces in shaping the country throughout the twentieth century (Part I and Part II). It then details how regular Israeli violence as well as Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements and political parties fit into this trajectory (Part III). The primer ends with an explanation of the series of recent crises that are exacerbating the devastating effects of ongoing and escalating Israeli attacks on Lebanon (Part IV).

 

I. Creating New States and New Centers—Ottoman to Mandate Period

 

Ottoman Empire

 

There was no “Lebanon” during the Ottoman period. What often gets discussed by pundits and in some scholarly corners as “Ottoman Lebanon” largely centers around Mount Lebanon, which became the geographical-ideological locus of the post-World War I mandatory state. Instead, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the cities and towns that would later constitute Lebanon were part of the same Ottoman administrative districts that would be separated into the mandates of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. As a result, the communities of what would comprise northern Palestine and southern Lebanon were deeply enmeshed with one another and would remain so into the first half of the twentieth century.

During the Ottoman reform period called the Tanzimat (1839-1876), the empire reorganized its administrative districts into vilayets (governorates). For example, the vilayet of Syria (al-Sham) came to include the area from Aleppo south to Aqaba and from the Mediterranean east to the Syrian desert, with the exception of Mount Lebanon, which was governed as a semi-autonomous province, or mutasarrifiyya, after 1861. During this period, the Ottoman state also separated Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron and Gaza from the vilayet and governed this area directly, leaving Nablus, Akka, Haifa and the Galilee in the vilayet of Syria.[2]

Shortly thereafter, the Ottoman state further separated the northern and central parts of Palestine from the vilayet of Syria, attaching them to the newly established vilayet of Beirut, which included Acre, Nazareth, Nablus, Tripoli, the Beqaa and Latakia—areas that would constitute post-World War I Palestine, Syria as well as Lebanon. Before it became the capital of this new province, Beirut had been a small port town, whose economic significance paled in comparison to the major port cities of Tripoli, Sidon and Haifa.

At the outbreak of World War I, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers. A combination of Ottoman food requisitioning, an allied naval blockade and local war profiteering triggered a devastating famine in Ottoman Syria that led to the death of one in six civilians and carried repercussions for Lebanon’s postwar boundaries.[3]

 

French Mandate and Independence

 

Following World War I, the Allied victory meant the dismantling of what remained of the Ottoman Empire. The League of Nations mandates consecrated the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between the French and British that divided the Ottoman Arab provinces between them. Great Britain received the mandate over Iraq and Palestine, which in 1922 split into the mandates of Palestine and Transjordan. France received the mandate over Syria. In 1920, France carved Greater Lebanon out of Syria, combining Mount Lebanon with Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon (Saida), Tyre (Sur), ‘Akkar and the Beqaa Valley. The French had included the latter territory to prevent future famines, despite opposition in Syria and among many Lebanese communities and political parties.[4]

The Zionist movement unsuccessfully lobbied Great Britain and France to include the Litani River, now in South Lebanon, in the mandate for Palestine.[5] Many in these new mandates deemed the borders illegitimate. Not only were they imposed by western powers that were, even early on, recognized as imperialist, they also severed longstanding social, economic and religio-political networks that traversed these now-divided territories.[6]

Over the next two decades, Mandate authorities and local elites cultivated sectarian differences, enmeshing them into Lebanon’s political, economic, bureaucratic and social institutions—and, by extension, into daily life. Lebanon would eventually recognize 18 sects: Alawite, Armenian Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Assyrian, Chaldean Catholic, Coptic Orthodox, Druze, Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Isma‘ili, Jewish, Roman Catholic, Maronite, Protestant, Sunni, Shi‘i, Syriac Catholic and Syriac Orthodox. Many of the various ways sect shapes Lebanese life have grown out of this institutionalization.

For example, Lebanon’s political-sectarian government system was partly imagined in the National Pact, a 1943 tacit agreement between Maronite and Sunni leaders meant to maintain sectarian political balance. Despite never being formalized, by custom the prime minister has always been Sunni, the president Maronite and the speaker of parliament Shi‘i. Moreover, nearly every position, from member of parliament to mayor to public university professor, has been distributed by sect. Central to the sectarian distribution of power are Lebanon’s 15 personal status laws (corresponding to 15 of the 18 sects) and their role in census registries and bureaucracy: The state assigns each citizen their father’s sect at birth and denies women the right to pass on citizenship to their children under the guise that it would threaten the supposed demographic equilibrium between religions and sects.[7]

Shi’a Muslims were underrepresented in this political-sectarian system, in part due to the flawed nature of the 1932 census on which the initial distribution was based.[8] Over time, the unequal distribution of power and opportunity became more pronounced as the system failed to take into consideration demographic changes. As sect became a means to channel state resources into communities, rural Shi’i areas experienced disproportionate poverty, a problem aggravated by feudal landowning Shi’i elites.

Despite the imposition of these new political borders, people continued to move through them as they fought to maintain their pre-war networks, albeit with increasing difficulty. Merchants in Beirut continued trading with Haifa. Pilgrims of various religious denominations from across the region adamantly crossed borders to visit shrines.

 

Continuities with Palestine

 

The territorial—and topographical—contiguity between northern Palestine and southern Lebanon was a visual reminder of just how closely their fates were tied. Verdant yet rocky terrain, olive groves and important waterways connected these spaces, as did peasants who worked tracts of agricultural land from Acre to Tyre.

Historically, Jabal `Amil—an area that comprises much of southern Lebanon—was a key node in regional socioeconomic and cultural life, with people, goods and ideas traversing northern Palestine to modern day Syria. Many `Amili families had relatives in what became Palestine and Syria. Haifa, not Beirut, was the center of their economic activities. Bint Jbeil tobacco merchants sold their goods in Palestinian cities as did shoemakers in Mashghara. The Palestinian pound was a far more common sight in southern Lebanon than the Lebanese one.

Southern Lebanon and northern Palestine also had intertwined anti-colonial trajectories. The 1936 Palestine revolt had a more immediate and profound impact on southern Lebanon than did the Syrian Druze revolt one decade earlier. Bint Jbeil became a center for multiple anti-colonial resistance movements, including its own against the French mandate. Palestinians purchased arms in southern Lebanon in the months leading to the 1936 revolt.[9]

During the 1948 Nakba (see below), which brought over 100,000 Palestinian refugees to Lebanon, residents of southern Lebanon witnessed firsthand the violence visited upon the Palestinians by Zionist militias. Zionist designs on the waters of the Litani River brought that violence north of the mandate border on at least one occasion. And the ripple effects of the Nakba’s massive population displacements has had profound effects on Lebanon’s subsequent years.

 

II. ‘No Victor, No Vanquished’—Civil Conflict in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

 

1958 Civil Conflict

 

The 1958 civil conflict in Lebanon was linked to the Cold War as well as to a persistent division between those elites who understood Lebanon to be part and parcel of the region and those who developed a chauvinistic Lebanese nationalism based on the French-drawn borders. While multiple allegations of corruption and bribery plagued Lebanese President Camille Chamoun (in office between 1952–1958), it was his pro-US stance in the wake of the rising crest of Arab nationalism, inspired by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, that triggered this conflict. In 1957, Chamoun endorsed the US Eisenhower Doctrine (a directive against the USSR and the presumably pro-Soviet Arab nationalist regimes). Others in Lebanon’s government opposed it. In the ensuing weeks, the conflict coalesced around two poles: a pro-western flank aiming to keep Chamoun in power and a pro-Nasser, Arab nationalist flank whose calls for Chamoun’s removal were also rooted in the socioeconomic inequalities engendered by the sectarian system he upheld.

In 1958, violence broke out in parts of Beirut, Tripoli and the Chouf. On July 18, motivated by the Arab nationalist coup d’etat in Iraq, the US ambassador to Lebanon activated the Eisenhower Doctrine, and the US Navy’s 6th fleet arrived 24 hours later. The United States eventually brokered an agreement whereby Chamoun left office as scheduled and Fouad Shihab became president after which US troops departed. The Lebanese cabinet remained divided between loyalists and opponents of the status quo in a stalemate Shihab dubbed “no victor, no vanquished.” Yet despite these transitions, the 1958 episode of civil conflict did not end for months, until December 1958, when all warring parties finally agreed to a ceasefire.[10]

US intervention ensured that the 1958 crisis in Lebanon would be seen as a regional and international Cold War affair, yet it failed to mask the ongoing local tensions between Maronite and Sunni political elites at the expense of the rest of the country. The continuation of sectarianism without reform fueled ongoing political rivalries in which leaders scapegoated marginalized regions and groups, rather than the uneven development that privileged finance, trade and services based in Beirut at the expense of the country.

This period was also marked by rapid urbanization, which led to the formation of a ring of impoverished and densely populated suburbs around Beirut. Communities including the Armenians in Beirut and the Shi`a from the south and Beqaa who settled in these new suburbs struggled with poverty born of the lack of economic opportunities and government services.

 

1975–1990 Civil War

 

With the growth of this so-called misery belt Lebanese elites increasingly painted poor migrants to the city—especially Palestinian refugees—as not only bothersome but also a nefarious, destabilizing presence. On April 13, 1975, militants from the right-wing, Maronite Christian Phalangist party attacked a bus of Palestinian refugees heading to the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in northeastern Beirut. In January 1976, another Maronite militia, led by former President Chamoun’s son, massacred hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims in the Karantina area, in pursuit of a purely Christian “East Beirut.” The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its allies retaliated with a massacre in the Maronite Christian town of Damour. Throughout the war, politicians and militia leaders would identify different regions of Lebanon, both urban and rural, as lawless slums and their inhabitants as foreign transgressors and/or insurgents to legitimize often horrific violence against them.

Maronite militias invited foreign intervention—first, the Syrian military and later, the Israeli one—into the country in an attempt to prevent their defeat. The Syrian army participated in the 1976 siege and shelling of the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp to thwart Palestinian factions. The camp was later razed, and its inhabitants were massacred by the rightwing Lebanese Front: a coalition of competing, largely Maronite militias, which included the Lebanese Forces (the military wing of the Phalange). The Lebanese Front coalesced around a Christian supremacist ideology, Lebanese chauvinism and an opposition to the PLO presence in Lebanon.

The leftist Lebanese National Movement under the leadership of Kamal Jumblatt formed the other main coalition of militias in the early years of the war. This group was allied with the PLO. In 1982, the same year as the large-scale Israeli invasion (see below), the war expanded to the mountains east of Beirut, where a militia of the mainly Druze Progressive Socialist Party, assisted by the Syrian military (whose alliances had shifted) and some PLO factions, fought against the Lebanese Forces. In addition to forced displacement and massacres, this “Mountain War” (1982–1984) also resulted in the military defeat of the Lebanese Forces and their retreat from the area.

Some of the worst fighting during the civil war was between militias of the same sect, often over control of a region, economic resources or positions of power. For example, in 1988 tensions between the two primary Shi’i militias, Amal and Hizballah, escalated to such an extent that Iran and Syria stepped in to broker an agreement with the parties that essentially ceded control of the southern suburbs of Beirut to Hizballah. The late 1970s and early 1980s were also characterized by Maronite militias massacring rival Maronite leaders and their families, as the Lebanese Forces under Bashir Gemayel consolidated their power. The final battles of the war were likewise between two Maronite forces, each led by an army general who would later become president: Michel Aoun (in office 2016–2022) and Elias Hrawi (in office 1989–1998).

The 1990 Taif Agreement that ended the violence of the civil war held firm to the “no victor, no vanquished” slogan. At the same time, Syria maintained its presence and control of Lebanon’s military and security apparatus, which it used to manipulate Lebanese politics to privilege Syrian interests. 25 militias and at least six foreign militaries and intelligence agencies had participated in the civil war, killing over 150,000 people and maiming thousands more. The General Amnesty Law retroactively exempted most protagonists from any legal liability for crimes committed before 1991, allowing most, if not all, to continue holding onto power. The Taif Accord was incorporated into the Lebanese constitution, but its structural roadmap for phasing out of political sectarianism has never been implemented.

 

Post-1990 Stalemate

 

The civil war entrenched sectarianism in new ways in Beirut’s neighborhoods as well as outside of the capital. While the Taif Agreement gave the displaced the right to return to their houses, it did not include non-Lebanese residents. Moreover, many Lebanese who had been displaced did not return to their original neighborhoods. Population displacements between the eastern and southern suburbs of the capital persisted, creating the predominantly Shi’a southern suburb, known as Dahiya. Wartime movement of many of Beirut’s Christians from the western part of the city to the east consolidated the latter as Christian-identified. These and other war time displacements, both forced and voluntary, led to the almost complete sectarian segregation of much of the country.

Following the war, militia groups that had grown out of political parties reverted to their political party status and participated in the 1992 elections. Hizballah, which had formed during the war (see below), joined this constellation of political parties but kept its weapons to continue its resistance against the Israeli occupation in the south—a stipulation provided for in the Ta’if Agreement. Their decision to work within the Lebanese state was taken under the leadership of the recently-assassinated Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, who became Hizballah’s secretary general in 1992, after the Israeli military assassinated his predecessor.

Over time, Hizballah won increasing numbers of seats in municipal and parliamentary elections and developed a reputation—even among its ideological opponents—as a capable and less corrupt party, due to the lack of inherited political positions among its members and the lack of ostentatious displays of wealth among its political class. The party also built a vast network of charitable associations, centers for the disabled, hospitals, mosques and schools. Like other political parties in Lebanon, Hizballah is an inextricable part of society. The party consistently received the most votes and the most cross-sectarian votes in parliamentary elections—people support them for a range of reasons, including their record of resistance, their religious ideology, their approach to political-economic support, their municipal-level policies and their personal connections. Its popularity skyrocketed in 2000, after the longstanding Hizballah-led resistance forced the Israeli military to withdraw from the parts of southern Lebanon it had occupied since 1978 (see below).

Beginning in 2005, Hizballah and the Syrian regime were implicated in a series of political assassinations aimed at maintaining their influence in the Lebanese government but changing the trajectory of Lebanese politics instead. For the first time, and in a regional environment that stoked sectarianism, Sunni-Shi’i sectarian tensions came to the foreground. On February 14, 2005, Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, a billionaire real estate developer turned politician, was assassinated in the middle of downtown Beirut by a car bomb that also killed 21 other people and wounded more than 200. Hariri’s assassination galvanized the country and led to two competing protest movements in March 2005. One side was led by the Sunni Future Movement, headed by Hariri’s son Saad, which demanded the military, economic and political withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon. In response, Hizballah and its allies came to Syria’s defense in a counter protest. By the end of April, Syrian troops had withdrawn from the country.

That same year, Hizballah increased its parliamentary seats and participated in the cabinet for the first time. In early 2006, the Free Patriotic Union, a largely Christian party and the Armenian Tashnag Party formed a coalition with Hizballah. While the party’s popularity rose when it fought the Israeli military to a stalemate in 2006 (see below), that boost was short-lived. The rift between Hizballah and its allies and the Future Movement and its allies widened. Political assassinations continued. A Hizballah-led sit-in took over downtown Beirut for nearly a year and a half. And a general strike was enacted to protest the Future Movement prime minister’s neoliberal economic reform plan.

In 2008, friction led to fire when, in response to government threats to shut down their communication network, Hizballah and its allies took military control of the Sunni-majority area of Ras Beirut and aimed their weapons at Lebanese across sectarian lines for the first time since the civil war ended. Armed Future Movement cadres appeared in response, and caches of hidden weapons were found across the city. Several people were killed on both sides during armed street skirmishes. Qatar stepped in to mediate, and the subsequent Doha Agreement gave Lebanon a new president, a new election law and a distribution of cabinet posts that granted Hizballah and its allies veto power. While Lebanon has not seen this sort of inter-party political violence since 2008, tensions between the groups regularly manifest in dramatic government resignations and long periods of political paralysis, including presidential vacancies.

 

III. Lebanon in Relation to Palestine, the Israeli State and the United States

 

The Nakba and the Naksa

 

The 1948 Nakba, during which Zionist colonial militias primarily made up of European Jewish settlers killed at least 15,000 Palestinians and displaced 700,000 more, deeply impacted Lebanon on several levels. One of the disputed areas of the southern border includes seven villages that, in 1948, were violently depopulated by these militias along with over 500 villages in Palestine. The violence continued after the Israeli state unilaterally declared its independence in 1948. A unit of the Israeli military entered the Lebanese village of Houla at the end of October 1948 and, over two days, massacred all the civilians that remained in the village.

More than 100,000 Palestinians were pushed into Lebanon during the Nakba. At the time, these Palestinian refugees constituted an estimated tenth of the resident population. Eventually the United Nations established 16 official Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. At its peak, the number of Palestinian refugees likely exceeded half a million people, more than ten percent of the total resident population in Lebanon, although today UNRWA estimates it to be around 250,000.

Lebanon was also impacted by the 1967 Naksa, when the Israeli military defeated the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Israeli troops withdrew from Sinai in 1982 but continued to occupy the other regions, including the Golan, which includes an area called Shebaa Farms that both Lebanon and Syria claim is Lebanese territory. The Naksa also led to disillusionment with Arab nationalist and leftist movements, creating an ideological void for resistance against Israeli colonialism and state violence.

 

Israeli Invasions and Siege of Beirut

 

In 1969 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Lebanese military, among other signatories, signed the Cairo Agreement, which allowed the former to operate from south Lebanon and placed the refugee camps under PLO control. Following the violence between the Jordanian military and the PLO and its allies in September 1970, known as Black September, the PLO moved the majority of its forces to Lebanon. In April 1973, Israeli fighters invaded Beirut by sea and assassinated three PLO leaders in Beirut in an assault that also killed a number of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. During the Lebanese civil war (see above), which began two years later, the Israeli state invaded Lebanon twice.

On March 14 1978, Israeli forces invaded south Lebanon, purportedly to dislodge the PLO and stop rocket fire and cross-border operations. They named their invasion “Operation Litani,” and true to its name, Israeli forces occupied territory up until the Litani River, killing close to 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians over the course of one week and displacing 250,000 people. UN Security Council Resolution 425 called for the immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from south Lebanon. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was created and deployed to southern Lebanon. Israeli troops withdrew in April of that year, leaving the South Lebanon Army (SLA) as its proxy militia in charge of its occupation. The Israeli state’s main ally during this phase of the war was the Phalangist Lebanese Forces, led by Bashir Gemeyel. The Lebanese Forces were committed to expelling the PLO from Lebanon and maintaining Christian dominance in the state apparatus.

When the Israeli military and its Maronite allies failed to destroy the Palestinian presence in the country, Israeli troops reinvaded Lebanon in 1982. This time, the invasion and occupation extended to Beirut and killed approximately 20,000 people, mainly civilians, at least 5,500 of whom were in west Beirut. As part of the invasion, Israeli forces placed West Beirut under a devastating siege, cutting off electricity, water and access to food for three months. During the siege the Israeli military regularly conducted air raids and saturation bombing of Beirut, killing hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, often under the guise of a targeted assassination of a PLO leader or the destruction of PLO infrastructure. In August, the United States brokered an agreement whereby the PLO agreed to evacuate from Lebanon to Tunis and move many of its cadres to other Arab countries. The United States (and other countries, including France) sent marines to Beirut to supervise the evacuation and became embroiled in the war as an active participant in support of the Israeli state’s ally, the Phalangists. Gemeyel was elected president of Lebanon but was assassinated on September 14 before he could take office.

Following his assassination, the Israeli army surrounded the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. In addition to thousands of Palestinians, the camps housed Shi’i Muslims displaced from the south and other impoverished Lebanese. Between September 16–18, under the protection of the Israeli military and then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, a Lebanese Forces militia unit entered the camps and raped, killed and maimed thousands of defenseless civilian refugees.

 

Formation of Hizballah and the Islamic Resistance

 

Until the late 1960s, Shi’i Muslims made up much of the membership of the Lebanese Communist Party. At that time, charismatic cleric Sayyid Musa al-Sadr drew on Shi’i cosmology to mobilize people with the goal of obtaining greater political and economic rights for Shi’i Muslims within the structures of the Lebanese state. When the civil war began in 1975, this movement formed an armed wing called Amal, the first Shi’i militia in the country.

Three events propelled this movement forward and led to Hizballah’s founding. First, in 1978, al-Sadr disappeared while on a trip to Libya, leaving a leadership vacuum. Second, the 1979 Iranian revolution which brought about the Islamic Republic provided an ideological alternative to western capitalism for those who had previously turned to communism. Most significantly, the Israeli invasions of Lebanon and the 1982 siege and massacres at Sabra and Shatila catalyzed a resistance. Small groups of armed young Shi’i men began fighting the Israeli invaders and were joined by many Amal leaders. In 1984, Iran orchestrated a meeting bringing these groups together, which led to the establishment of Hizballah and its armed wing, the Islamic Resistance. In February 1985, Hizballah announced its existence in an “Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World,” declaring the removal of the Israeli occupiers from Lebanon, Palestine and Jerusalem as its raison d’etre. The manifesto was revised in 2009 to remove language calling for an Islamic state and to affirm Hizballah’s commitment to working within the framework of a multi-sectarian Lebanese state.

 

1983 US involvement and Marine bombing

 

In the United States, Hizballah is considered the “A-Team of terrorists” due to associations between the group and attacks on the US marine barracks and embassy in Beirut in 1983. That year, the United States had increased its military presence in Lebanon to support the right-wing, Christian, Lebanese Forces and the Phalange party, a presence that many saw as a foreign occupation. A car bombing at the US embassy in April killed 17 US personnel and tens of Lebanese who worked there. In the summer of 1983, US warships began shelling Beirut and the surrounding mountains from the sea, making them active participants in the conflict. The United States also exchanged direct artillery fire with various militias, and on at least one occasion, used F-14 fighter planes.

In October of 1983, Shi’a fighters drove trucks full of explosives into the US army barracks in Beirut and blew it up, killing 241 US soldiers. A group called Islamic Jihad, which the United States claims is a branch of Hizballah, took responsibility for the bombings. Although it targeted soldiers involved in a war, the United States labelled it a terrorist attack. Following the barracks attack, the US military continued to participate in the war, with both air and naval power, until the Lebanese army collapsed in 1984.

 

Israeli Occupation of the South, 1978–2000

 

In 1985, the Israeli military withdrew from most of Lebanon but continued to occupy around ten percent of south Lebanon, including part of the Litani River—the importance of which Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion had reiterated in 1956. Hizballah’s Islamic Resistance took the lead in fighting that occupation along with multiple other resistance contingents.

Villages in the occupied south were cut off from the rest of the country, with many of their displaced residents unable to return. Those who stayed often faced impossible choices, like having to participate in an Israeli occupation economy in order to survive. The Israeli military continued to grow its proxy Lebanese militia, the SLA (see above), drawing leaders and cadres from the same right-wing Maronite militias and movement, though the militia included Druze and some Shi’i fighters as well.

Levels of national support for the resistance rose with each Israeli attack on Lebanese civilians and infrastructure, both within and beyond the occupied zone. In 1993, more than one hundred Lebanese civilians were killed in Israeli attacks over seven days. Israeli warplanes destroyed power plants in Beirut in 1996, 1999 and 2000. On April 18, 1996, in a campaign it called “Grapes of Wrath,” the Israeli military bombed a United Nations bunker in Qana in south Lebanon, where 800 civilians had taken refuge, killing 106 Lebanese civilians and injuring 116 Lebanese and 4 Fijian UNIFIL soldiers.

The occupation forces also maintained a notorious detention center in the occupied Lebanese village of Khiam, where both male and female Lebanese civilians and resistance fighters were held, interrogated and tortured by Israeli troops and their Lebanese collaborators.

By the late 1990s, the occupation of south Lebanon had grown financially and politically costly. In his 1999 bid to become the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak made withdrawal a campaign promise and when he won, said it would take place by July 2000. An increase in desertions from the SLA sped up the timeline, and on May 23, Israeli troops began a chaotic withdrawal along with a few thousand SLA fighters and their families, who fled across the border. By May 25, 2000, Lebanon was liberated from the 22-year Israeli occupation.

Fears that lawlessness and sectarian violence would accompany liberation proved unfounded, as Hizballah maintained order in the border region and prevented its members from taking informal revenge on those who had collaborated with the occupation.

There remains a territorial dispute over the Shebaa Farms, however. The 15 square miles along the border is still under Israeli occupation. Lebanon and Syria both assert that Shebaa Farms is part of Lebanon. The Israeli state asserts it is part of the Golan Heights and therefore part of Israeli-occupied Syria.

 

2006 War and the Israeli ‘Dahiya Doctrine’

 

After the liberation of south Lebanon, both the Israeli state and Hizballah followed unstated rules of the game that limited attacks to military sites and personnel. From 2000–2006, Hizballah made no deliberate attacks on Israeli civilian targets and only maintained an active contingent of approximately 500 fighters. UN observer reports document ten times the number of Israeli violations of the border than Hizballah violations. Israeli forces kidnapped shepherds and fishermen. Hizballah kidnapped an Israeli businessman in 2000, and four years later, negotiated a deal via German mediators to exchange the businessman and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers for hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners. It seemed as though these negotiations had set a new precedent for prisoner exchanges via a European third party mediator.

Working on that assumption, on July 12, 2006, Hizballah fighters captured two Israeli soldiers and stated that they had done so in order to begin another round of negotiations for the release of three Lebanese who remained in Israeli detention. This time, however, the Israeli state launched a 33-day war on Lebanon on a scale unseen since the 1982 invasion, their stated goal: to disarm and remove Hizballah from south Lebanon. Leaked testimony from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s statements to the Winograd Commission (an Israeli investigation into the perceived failures of the 2006 war) would later reveal that the Israeli state had planned a war on Lebanon months before the two soldiers were captured. And reports suggest that US diplomats had seen these plans in advance.

Israeli air power was accompanied by a naval blockade and ground invasion. Hizballah again led the resistance. Over the course of 33 days, Israeli attacks killed 1,191 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and wounded thousands. The Israeli state reported 158 deaths, most of whom were soldiers. Half a million people were displaced in Lebanon, nearly one eighth of the country’s population. Israeli warplanes also inflicted 3 billion dollars of infrastructural damage on the country, flattening entire villages in south Lebanon and destroying runways, roads, bridges, power plants, sewage treatment facilities, ports, gas stations, cell phone towers, factories and wheat silos across the country. Israeli airstrikes destroyed whole neighborhoods in Dahiya, which by 2006 had become an integral part of Beirut: a vibrant, densely populated part of the city with homes, schools, businesses and cafes.[11] In just one of these neighborhoods, Haret Hreik, Israeli bombardment destroyed 250 residential buildings, holding 3,000 apartments. The Israeli general in charge of the northern command, Gadi Eisenkot, dubbed this level of destruction, developed and implemented in the 2006 war, “The Dahiya Doctrine.”

Reflecting on the war, General Gadi Eisenkot summarized the doctrine: “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”[12] The Dahiya Doctrine, which explicitly calls for the use of disproportionate force and the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, has governed the multiple, devastating, Israeli attacks on Gaza since 2008 including the current genocide.

The adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 accompanied a ceasefire, but, like UNSC 425, it has never been fully implemented. Today, the Israeli government and the United States demand that Lebanon implement its side of 1701, withdrawing professional Hizballah fighters to behind the Litani river—even as the Israeli state has not abided by the resolution.

Within Lebanon, despite disagreements about the degree of blame Hizballah should carry, the war was characterized by the active engagement of both sectarian and non-sectarian civil society organizations that coordinated aid and housing for the displaced. For example, most schools, regardless of sectarian and religious affiliation, became temporary shelters for the internally displaced. Popular support for Hizballah and its leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah grew.

Rebuilding efforts led by Hizballah-affiliated organizations began the day the ceasefire went into effect, but in some ways, Lebanon has never fully recovered from the July War’s fallout. In addition to lingering distrust between Hizballah and the Future Movement, unexploded ordnance from the millions of cluster bomblets (submunitions) dropped by Israeli planes, plus white phosphorus residue, made much of the arable land in the south unusable and dangerous, significantly impacting the livelihoods of people there even after they were able to return to their homes and rebuild.[13]

 

IV. Sequential Crises—Syrian Civil War to the War on Gaza

 

Syrian Civil War and Refugees

 

The Syrian uprisings and subsequent civil war opened a new chapter for Lebanon. Hizballah sent fighters to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war on the side of Bashar al-Asad’s government in 2012. Since, Hizballah has been the most polarizing political party in Lebanon. Their involvement likely led to the series of devastating car bombings in Dahiya—claimed by Sunni extremist groups opposed to the Syrian regime—that killed tens of civilians in 2013 and 2014. This decision sent ripples through the party, with intense disagreements among its leadership and supporters. It also exposed the party’s intelligence and security networks in new ways. It is possible that hindsight will point to this 2012 decision as the most significant factor in eroding popular support for Hizballah, contributing to its vulnerability and allowing for Israeli assassinations of many of its top leadership in September of 2024.

Before the Syrian war, hundreds of thousands of Syrians lived and worked in Lebanon—mostly as semi and unskilled laborers in the construction and agricultural industries. The violence in Syria led to the influx of about one and a half million Syrian refugees into Lebanon. Approximately one million were officially registered with the UNHCR by 2016, and perhaps an additional million unofficially resided in the country at the highest point, effectively growing the total resident population of Lebanon by 30 percent. This rapid change in population put enormous strain on the already meager services provided by the state, and has led to rising violence, anger and bigotry against Syrian refugees.

 

Popular Uprisings and 2019

 

The second decade of the twenty-first century saw multiple mobilizations of Lebanese protesting against government corruption and its facilitation by the sectarian power sharing system.

In 2011, during the wave of uprisings across the Arab world, a short-lived anti-sectarian and anti-regime protest movement spread across the country but faded within months. 2015 saw a widespread and sustained protest movement against corruption and its manifestation in a countrywide waste-management crisis. Protesters skirmished with police, who blocked their access to parliament and tried to disperse them.

In 2019, the Lebanese Central Bank’s financial engineering scheme—which had pegged the Lebanese pound to the US dollar at the rate of 1,507 to one since 1997—collapsed. What had been a gradual financial decline accelerated as the black-market exchange rate between the US dollar and the Lebanese pound dropped in comparison to the official rate. By summer 2019, the black-market rate was 15,000 to one. In early fall, the government began to implement planned austerity measures, imposing new taxes on a population that was already suffering financially. Then in October, over 100 wildfires, among the worst the country had ever seen, broke out and spread uncontrollably throughout the Chouf mountains causing residents to flee their homes. The Lebanese government had failed to maintain the scant fire-fighting equipment it had. Many believed government officials had pocketed funds donated for that purpose.

On October 17, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese took to the streets, declaring a revolution against political corruption and the sectarian system. The immediate triggers were a new monthly tax on the widely-used communications application WhatsApp, the austerity measures and the spectacle of the government’s failure to suppress the wildfires. But this moment had been building for at least a decade. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, went on strike, blocked roads and effectively paralyzed the country. The protests were regional, expressly cross and anti-sectarian, multigenerational and, in certain actions, involved the cooperation of different socioeconomic classes. Lebanese state security forces as well as groups of armed men from different sectarian parties attempted to suppress the protests, which were further weakened by growing polarization among protesters. In February 2020, the start of the Covid-19 pandemic put an effective end to lingering mobilization. The already suffering economy ground to a halt.

 

Port Explosion

 

Against this backdrop, one of the largest ever non-nuclear explosions rocked Lebanon on August 4, 2020, when some 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at the Beirut port exploded, killing 219 people and injuring thousands. It caused extensive damage to multiple Beirut neighborhoods and rendered hundreds of thousands of people homeless. The destruction of the grain silos at the port contributed to bread shortages and widespread hunger.

In the face of this catastrophe, the governing authorities failed to take effective action. A government investigation into the cause of the explosion rapidly became mired in political tensions. Hizballah and other political groups and politicians sought to block the investigation to hide their different and overlapping responsibilities for the disaster—from storage to corruption to criminal negligence. To date, nobody has been held accountable.

 

Economic collapse

 

In the wake of the revolution, port explosion and pandemic, Lebanon’s financial collapse accelerated rapidly, exacerbated by corruption in the banking sector and the state. Banks illegally cut off access to checking and savings accounts as inflation soared, and the Lebanese pound devalued by 98 percent. The World Bank warned in June 2021 that Lebanon’s economic crisis risked being one of the worst in modern history. A few months later, the government ended fuel subsidies, power plants ran out of fuel and public utility electricity across the country—already inconsistent with regular daily power cuts for decades—began providing only a few hours of electricity per day at best. Some parts of the country experienced total blackouts. Widespread shortages of basic necessities including fuel and medicine, skyrocketing inflation and a spike in unemployment followed. In February 2023, the Lebanese state unpegged the pound from the dollar, devaluing the official exchange rate, but it still did not approach the black-market rates. As of this writing, the pound has stabilized on the black market at around 89,000 pounds to the dollar.

Facing inflation of over 200 percent and massive unemployment, most people in Lebanon now struggle to survive. Incomes have been effectively slashed by 95 percent. Emigration rates and reliance on remittances have increased. The cumulative impact of this series of spiraling crises has led to an extraordinary rise in multidimensional poverty for both Lebanese and non-citizen residents including Syrian refugees, with eighty percent of all people in Lebanon estimated to be living in poverty.

 

The Dahiya Doctrine Again

 

In the days following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Hizballah and the Israeli state began exchanging fire across the border, as the party sought to support anti-colonial resistance in Gaza and intervene against the genocide of Palestinians. The Israeli military has carried out around 82 percent of these attacks, which until September 6, 2024, had killed at least 646 people in Lebanon, while Hizballah attacks killed at least 32 people. Moments of escalation followed the Israeli assassination of Hizballah commander Fuad Shukr in Lebanon and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran in late July.

The indiscriminate killing of people carrying pagers from a shipment associated with Hizballah on September 17, 2024 marked the start of the Israeli state’s full-scale attack on Lebanon. Israeli officials celebrated the attacks for killing Hizballah members, lauding their intelligence services’ capacity to target the party. But a Hizballah member could be a politician, bureaucrat, administrative assistant, janitor, driver, doctor or nurse, teacher or person who votes for the party in elections. The pagers that exploded on September 17 were also used by people not associated with the party and exploded around, injured and killed others, including children.

Since September 23, nearly nonstop Israeli bombardment has killed close to 2,000 people in Lebanon including 127 children, injured over 9,000 and displaced over one million, one fifth of the population. Three days after the assassination of Hizballah secretary general Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah on September 27, his deputy Shaikh Naim Qassem addressed the public, stating that the resistance would continue and that Hizballah was in the process of determining Nasrallah’s successor as secretary general. Israeli forces began a ground invasion on September 30 and were fought back by Hizballah forces at the border. Iran entered the fray on October 1, sending hundreds of ballistic missiles into Israeli territory. Israeli bombardment as well as fighting inside Lebanon between Israeli troops and Hizballah are ongoing at this time.

As it implements the Dahiya Doctrine for the second time in Lebanon, the Israeli state continues its deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. Not only Lebanese civilians, but the more than two million Syrians and Palestinians, and migrant workers and refugees from other countries living and working in Lebanon, are being injured, killed and displaced. The Israeli government’s claim that its goal in Lebanon is to eliminate Hizballah is tantamount to its claim that the goal in Gaza is to eliminate Hamas. As with the Israeli genocide in Gaza and ongoing violence in the West Bank, the United States has maintained its support for escalating Israeli aggression in Lebanon and the broader region. As Israeli forces continue to attack Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen and potentially Iran, it is civilians in the region who continue to suffer, and many around the world continue to wonder if any line exists that the Israeli state will not cross.

 

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Endnotes

[1] Irene L Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945-1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 7.

[2] Mahmoud Yazbak, “The Birth of the Jerusalem Sanjak 1864-1914: Administrative and Social Impacts,” Bulletin of Palestine Studies, Issue: 2 (2017), pp. 40–41.

[3] Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 97.

[4] Graham Auman Pitts, “Make Them Hated in All of the Arab Countries: France, Famine, and the Creation of Lebanon,” in Environmental Histories of the First World War, eds. Richer P. Tucker, Tait Keller, John Robert McNeill, and Martin Schmid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 189.

[5] Laura Zittrain Eisenberg, My enemy’s enemy: Lebanon in the early Zionist imagination, 1900-1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 40–41.

[6] Nadya Sbaiti, “Governing Summer in Mount Lebanon: Istiyaf, Tourism, and Mobility in the Interwar Arab East,” Journal of Tourism History 16/2 (2024), pp. 151–169.

[7] Maya Mikdashi, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2022).

[8] Rania Maktabi, “The Lebanese census of 1932 revisited: Who are the Lebanese?” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 26 (1999), pp. 219–41.

[9] Malek Abi Saab, “Shiite Peasants and a New Nation in Colonial Lebanon: The Intifada of Bint Jubayl, 1936,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29/3 (2009), pp. 483–501.

[10] Tsolin Nalbantian, Armenians beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon Their Own (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 187–188.

[11] Lara Deeb and Mona Harb, Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’i South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013).

[12] “Israel warns Hezbollah war would invite destruction,” Reuters, October 3, 2008.

[13] Munira Khayyat, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Survival and Resistance in South Lebanon (University of California Press, 2022).