When Lebanon’s Western-backed government once declared a private Hezbollah telephone network illegal, the response was immediate: The Shiite militia’s gunmen took over the streets of Beirut, blocked districts with burning barricades, and blockaded the airport.
“The decision is tantamount to a declaration of war … on the resistance and its weapons in the interest of America and Israel,” proclaimed then-Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah back in 2008. “Those who try to arrest us, we will arrest them. Those who shoot at us, we will shoot at them. The hand raised against us, we will cut it off.”
Through decades of internal and external wars and political upheaval in Lebanon, Hezbollah and its potent arsenal of battle-hardened fighters, rockets, and missiles have been a constant check on governmental power in Beirut.
Why We Wrote This
For decades, Iran’s powerful Lebanese ally Hezbollah was a check on the Beirut government’s power. Israel severely weakened the Shiite militia, yet as a new Lebanese government seeks to assert its authority, an easy compromise seems unlikely.
Yet the Iran-backed militia is now facing an unprecedented political and military reckoning, with the remains of its once-vaunted arsenal in the balance.
The difference today? Hezbollah’s decision to open a “solidarity front” of rocket attacks against northern Israel, after Hamas mounted the Oct. 7, 2023, assault that precipitated the war in Gaza.
The violent exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel came to a head last autumn with a surprise onslaught by Israel. That attack wiped out Hezbollah’s top political and military leaders – including Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah – destroyed much of Hezbollah’s arsenal, and left Shiite strongholds in Beirut and southern and eastern Lebanon in ruins. Hezbollah says 5,000 of its fighters were killed, and 13,000 wounded.
A ceasefire reached last November requires Hezbollah to disarm and the Lebanese Army to take control of all border areas, in exchange for Israel withdrawing entirely from southern Lebanon and ceasing attacks – none of which have fully happened.
Pressure to follow through
The current Lebanese government, formed in January, is under pressure from the United States and Israel to deal with Hezbollah. Last month, it formally instructed the Lebanese Army to draft a plan to disarm the Shiite force by the end of the year. The army is due to present its plan to the Lebanese cabinet Friday. Hezbollah has indicated that doing so will prompt it to suspend cooperation with the army in southern Lebanon.
As part of the Beirut government’s bid to establish a state monopoly on arms in Lebanon, Palestinian factions have also begun a disarmament process, though analysts say results so far are little more than symbolic.
Yet the response from Hezbollah – long regarded, until its recent decimation by Israel, as the most potent member of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” alliance – has been relatively muted. There have been no mass uprisings by Hezbollah’s Shiite supporters, and no Hezbollah effort to resign from or collapse the government.
If the 2008 telecommunications decision “was a declaration of war,” then the government’s August resolution to disarm Hezbollah “is a much, much, much bigger decision,” says David Wood, the Beirut-based senior Lebanon analyst for the International Crisis Group.
“Until now, Hezbollah has very clearly voiced its opposition to that [disarmament] decision, but hasn’t resorted to the kind of political and, shall we say, extra-legal tactics that it has deployed in the past, when decisions didn’t go its way,” says Mr. Wood.
“Probably the most obvious inference is that Hezbollah is not in anywhere near as strong a political position as it was after its previous conflict with Israel in 2006,” he says.
That year, Hezbollah fought Israel to a standstill in a 33-day conflict that led to the destruction of Shiite strongholds in Beirut and southern Lebanon. Hezbollah emerged with broad cross-sectarian support.
Existential issue
Nevertheless, Hezbollah’s popularity has dropped since the high point of the 2006 war. The 2008 takeover of Beirut tarnished the militia for breaking its own promises not to use its weapons against fellow citizens. Hezbollah’s reputation fell again due to its intervention in Syria, alongside Iran and Russia, which ensured the survival of dictator Bashar al-Assad – whose regime engaged in industrial-scale torture and killings.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah also helped put down pro-democracy protests in 2019, when streets across the country were crammed with people of all sects demanding an end to corruption and sectarian rule.
For Hezbollah’s Shiite base, the disarmament issue “is existential,” says Makram Rabah, an assistant professor of history and archaeology at the American University of Beirut.
“They know that, after years of bullying other Lebanese factions, and killing and humiliating people, the hour of judgment has come upon them, so they are not willing to disarm because they don’t know what will happen,” he says.
“I believe the Lebanese don’t want to punish them, but they need to go back to reality and act like normal citizens,” says Dr. Rabah. “That means they can take advantage of the corrupt system, but they cannot override the system every time they don’t like it.”
Still, Hezbollah is not likely to make an easy compromise. It has cooperated with dismantling some of its military infrastructure south of the Litani River, as the truce deal specifies, though it reportedly has been less helpful locating and destroying its arms depots. And it has balked at disarming elsewhere, in areas that are targeted almost daily by Israeli airstrikes.
“We will not abandon the weapons that honor us nor the weapons that protect us from our enemy,” Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said Aug. 25. “If this government continues in its current form, it cannot be trusted to safeguard Lebanon’s sovereignty.”
While other Lebanese sectarian militias disarmed over the years, Hezbollah kept its weapons, arguing that those weapons were necessary to “defend” Lebanon and to deter Israeli attacks.
U.S. incentive?
As an incentive to disarm, United States envoy Tom Barrack recently floated the possibility of backing a special economic zone in southern Lebanon meant to benefit Hezbollah’s Shiite base.
“We have 40,000 people that are being paid by Iran to fight,” Mr. Barrack said last week. “What are you going to do with them? Take their weapon and say: ‘By the way, good luck planting olive trees?’”
He offered few details. Analysts give little weight to such an idea and also note that the U.S. has signaled that it won’t restrain Israel in Lebanon.
“The longer disarmament is stalled, the more Israel is likely to expand its attacks and effectively take disarmament into its own hands, even more than it is now,” says Mr. Wood.
Another reason disarmament is problematic for Hezbollah, says Dr. Rabah, is because the militia has “always used the word ‘resistance’ as synonymous with its arms.”
“For the longest time they used what they called the ‘Golden Trinity’ – the Army, the people, and the resistance. So now this so-called Golden Trinity has been discredited. … The government has said, ‘You can no longer control the state,’” he says.
“More importantly, the weapons themselves failed on the battlefield,” he adds. “The people who asked for the ceasefire were Hezbollah, not the Israelis. The Israelis were willing because they ran out of targets.”
More than 3,500 Lebanese were killed in Israeli strikes last fall, and 1.2 million people displaced. Israel invaded Lebanese territory, still occupies land at five locations in the south, and conducts frequent strikes against what it says are efforts by Hezbollah to regroup and rearm.
“Israel is not helping the situation by continuing to undermine the ceasefire,” says Mr. Wood. “It allows actors like Hezbollah to say, ‘Why on earth would we disarm when the country is under attack, when we’ve given space to the Lebanese state to resolve this through diplomacy, and it’s not working.’”
