Israel Is Hurting Hezbollah But It Can’t Rely on Lebanon to Finish the Job

David Daoud & Ahmad Sharawi | October 22, 2024

The Third Lebanon War has begun, and Israel has already landed impressive blows against Hezbollah. But victory has yet to be achieved and remains far from certain.

The group has deep popular roots, and its degradation or elimination will have to rest equally on military defeat coupled with political and social pressure to finish the job. Israel is handling the military prong – it possesses the capabilities and means, the numbers and organization and, most importantly, the will to finish its part of the task. Israeli popular support for degrading Hezbollah, no matter the price, has never been higher. Israel is therefore certain to severely weaken the group if it continues fighting at this level of tenacity.

Who will carry out the political and social prong remains an open question. Lebanon and the Lebanese, Hezbollah’s host state and society, are the most obvious candidates. But they lack any of the vital components to make them credible or viable actors to undertake that task.

Hezbollah today is hurting but is far from decimated. The group continues to demonstrate both its ability to take the fight into Israel – albeit at much lower levels, so far, than previously expected – and to put up a determined defense in south Lebanon. This, the group is still insisting, will continue until a prior cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.

Considerable erosion of Hezbollah’s popular support also cannot be identified. At Hezbollah’s nadir, figures like Abbas Ibrahim – former head of Lebanon’s General Security and an allegedly opportunistic supporter – poetically eulogized Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. From fear or conviction, lead “opposition” figures like Mark Daou similarly condemned attacks on Hezbollah, including Nasrallah’s assassination, describing him as a “historical figure” whose death “was a loss to all.” More surprisingly, so did Saad Hariri and An-Nahar CEO Nayla Tueni, whose fathers were both murdered by Hezbollah.

This continued popularity has restrained even Lebanon’s old feudal chieftains who would be so inclined from undermining the group. Much ado was made of Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Miqati and Druze figurehead Walid Jumblatt’s joint October 2 statement allegedly decoupling Lebanon from Gaza – including, erroneously, that it had forced Hezbollah to follow suit.

Speculative rumor and gossip aside, Berri’s moves are not aimed at seizing this opportunity to settle decades-old scores with Hezbollah or undermine it. To the contrary, he still supports Sleiman Frangieh, the pro-Hezbollah candidate, for president and has been meeting with Iranian officials. By exploiting misplaced Western and American trust in him as a reliable interlocutor, he is – as he did during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war – playing the political angle to obtain a cease-fire that would prematurely halt Israel’s campaign, giving Hezbollah room for survival and regeneration and a possibly face-saving off-ramp from continuing to fight on behalf of Gaza. Hezbollah could then theoretically accept decoupling Lebanon from Gaza by saying it was following Lebanon’s orders, not succumbing to Israeli military pressure.

No wonder, then, that Hezbollah’s top remaining officials have expressed their utmost trust in Berri and his maneuvering – while Berri says Hezbollah has authorized him to act on their behalf since 2006. Jumblatt has similarly condemned Nasrallah’s assassination and insisted now is not the time to force terms upon Hezbollah domestically.

Frangieh’s alleged request to fleeing Hezbollah leaders and their families that they stay out of his political-sectarian stronghold of Zgharta also should not be interpreted as severing alliances. Lebanese identity is very local, and Frangieh doesn’t want his Lebanon to suffer the consequences of war with Israel. This hyper-localized identity also prevented Jumblatt, in May 2008, from supporting his erstwhile allies against Hezbollah’s onslaught but didn’t stop him from tenaciously fighting off the group’s encroachment into his Druze-Progressive Socialist Party sectarian enclave. So long as Hezbollah and the consequences of its actions remain the problem of Hezbollah’s Lebanon, feudal chieftains like Jumblatt or Frangieh will not act against it.

The self-styled Lebanese opposition – both those aligned with traditional political parties and the so-called independent and civil society figures – is disunited and ineffective, and as unreliable as the old political establishment they seek to unseat. The former, including Kataeb and the Lebanese Forces parties, have produced little more than rhetoric for two decades, with no meaningful progress or action against Hezbollah. Much like their idol Bachir Gemayel, they seek foreign forces to solve their domestic problems while they observe from the sidelines and reap the benefits after the fact.

In fact, rather than exploit the group’s weakness, they publicly condemned both Israel’s telecommunications device attacks and Nasrallah’s assassination. Lebanese Force’s leader Samir Geagea, despite obvious and real disagreements with Hezbollah, nevertheless insisted Israel was Lebanon’s real enemy to be fought.

Civil society figures, framed as anti-Hezbollah progressive alternatives, critique the group’s independence from the Lebanese state but not its status as a national resistance or ultimate objective of destroying Israel. This camp’s far-left orientation has led it to likewise adopt strong anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israel stances, with rhetoric that inadvertently but frequently mirrors Hezbollah. As many, like Paula Yaacoubian and Elias Jarade, have demonstrated their willingness to compromise with Hezbollah, they and others have also openly defended or celebrated violence against Israelis – including the October 7 massacre – accused Israel of genocide and framed the Israeli national psyche as inherently evil. Prominent figures like Mark Daou have even connected to anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian movements in the United States.

Discounting both prongs of the opposition is therefore not making the perfect the enemy of the good. It is recognizing that, while these figures and factions do nothing to counter Hezbollah, their ideas and rhetoric unwittingly create an intellectual environment that legitimizes the group. Promoting the notion that Israel and Zionism are inherently evil and their destruction desirable – albeit, through a soft-power delegitimization approach that Hezbollah also endorses – as Lebanese consensus normalizes Hezbollah’s ideology and objectives.

Furthermore, neither the old feudal lords nor the opposition in its various permutations are calling for making Hezbollah disarm by force or law. Instead, they are calling for a solution through “dialogue and consensus” that includes Hezbollah, and which will allegedly culminate in a national defense strategy. The group, after all, won 356,000 of 1.8 million votes cast in the 2022 parliamentary elections and a 2024 poll found 93 percent of Lebanese Shi’ites support Hezbollah. The group therefore can’t be ignored. Nor can a solution be imposed upon it. Hezbollah can, as in the past, mobilize its supporters to paralyze the country, its fighters to forcefully repel any attempt at disarmament, or summon its regional allies, as the Resistance Axis did in Syria, if it feels in mortal danger. But neither will Hezbollah ever agree to disarm.

But even this national defense strategy dialogue, if it ever happens, would come at the end of a long political process, one that involves international financial aid and assistance in electing a president, followed by the election of a cabinet, and only then dealing with Hezbollah’s arms. Meanwhile, Lebanese officialdom is simply trying to extract benefits from the international community. Until the Israeli war effort against Hezbollah intensified, Beirut sought this by exploiting the group’s continued attacks. Now, Lebanon is replicating its 2006 war playbook and seeking the same through empty promises that will lead to a premature cease-fire.

Once that cease-fire is imposed, Beirut likely hopes that the world will tire and move on as the issue of Hezbollah’s arms becomes lost again in the byzantine mazes of Lebanese politics. Hezbollah will survive to rearm, Lebanon will have received a needed injection of international aid, and the current crisis will inevitably repeat itself in several years’ time. The current opportunity to degrade Hezbollah is too important, and too rare, to prop up half the strategy against the group on an undependable leg – on the hope that a reed that has long proven itself splintered and broken will now, for once, step up and act at all, let alone correctly.

David Daoud is senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he focuses on Israel, Hezbollah and Lebanon affairs. Ahmad Sharawi is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies focused on Iranian intervention in Arab affairs and the Levant.