Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and carried out a barbaric pogrom, the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. The next day, October 8th, 2023, Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, I'd argue they're the foreign legion of the regime in Tehran, began firing missiles at Israel.
The attacks have continued ever since, destroying villages, burning forests and farms, and depopulating a wide swath of northern Israel. For months, Israel's response was restrained, though a not insignificant number of Hezbollah commanders were precisely targeted and eliminated. Then last month, Israelis defended themselves against Hezbollah in new ways.
Exploding thousands of pagers worn on the belts of Hezbollah members, then utilizing much larger explosives to eliminate Hassan Nasrallah, the organization's longtime leader, who thought he was safe in a bunker deep below the streets of Beirut.
Not long after Israeli troops moved into southern Lebanon, where it turned out Hezbollah had been planning its own October 7th-style invasion of Israel right under the noses of U.N. employees who claim to be peacekeepers. If you're an American taxpayer, you've been spending lots of money on them for years.
To talk about Lebanon, its colonization by Tehran, its war with Israel, its storied past, its troubled present, its uncertain future, I'm joined by two FDD colleagues. Hussein Abdel Hussein, a research fellow at FDD, was born in Beirut. He worked as a reporter and later managing editor at Beirut's Daily Star. He's reported from war zones on the Lebanese border with Israel.
David Daoud is a senior fellow at FDD focusing on Lebanon and Hezbollah. He's lived in Lebanon and worked on Capitol Hill, providing analysis on Middle East policy. His work has been cited or published in numerous outlets, including Foreign Policy, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
I'm Cliff May, and I'm glad you found time to be with us, too, here on Foreign Policy. Thank you, gentlemen. Good to see you both. Good to see you, Cliff. I want to start with a little bit of geography and history, okay? And here's what I'm thinking of. If you look at a map from Morocco to Pakistan,
Across North Africa, across the Middle East and beyond, there are dozens of countries, every one of which has a Muslim ruler. Now, they're not all the same theology or ideology, but they're all in charge. In most of these countries, there are religious and ethnic minorities, some severely oppressed, persecuted, some tolerated, none with political power or civil rights.
Within this swath of the world, as large swath it is, you've got two countries that are different. One is Israel. It has a Jewish majority, but about 20% of Israel's citizens are Arabs and Muslims, and they are citizens with rights and freedoms. And then there's Lebanon. And I want to talk a little bit because Lebanon is unique.
And maybe I'll just ask, just give us a start and be brief, but go back centuries and tell us about it. So you're right. When the French designed their countries, the former Ottoman provinces, unlike the British who relied on the Sunni majority, the French took the side of the minorities, everybody else.
And that's how they designed both Lebanon and Syria. So Syria had a country for the Druze, one for the Alawites and the North. So they tried to dilute the Sunnis.
And they did the same in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, the Sunnis were a quarter of the population when Lebanon was formed. So half of it was Christian. Half Christian. They were probably a majority at that point, right? A slight majority. A slight majority, yeah. And you add the Druze, and you especially add the Shia, who are the fighting force of Hezbollah today. The Shia were non-Sunni Muslims. They were the minority. So the minorities added up to 75% of the population. And the biggest of them was the Christian bloc.
And the country was designed as a Christian country. And the cedar tree that you see on the flag today is the emblem of the Maronite Christian Church of Antioch. So the whole idea was that this is a Christian country. And they perceived themselves this way. When the British shut down the borders for the Jews after 1939, Jews used to use Lebanon, just land in Lebanon and go through the border. So that's how friendly the two nations were. And I think this persisted
almost until 1969 when Arafat moved from Jordan to Lebanon and relocated his operation. And gradually the Christians weakened.
And they plunged into civil wars. Now, of course, the country is ripe soil for foreign intervention. And like many other countries, you know, I mean, look at Iraq, look at Syria today, three, four Syrias, Libya, Yemen. So Lebanon is just like any other country. But the only difference is that they couldn't manage to get an autocrat to just hold the country together.
David, I'm going to go back, and I promise I'll do this briefly, but even further, because Lebanon on the eastern Mediterranean was initially settled by Phoenicians who came. They were seafaring people.
And eventually the Phoenicians ruled there for a very long time, like a thousand years, something like that, before the Romans conquered them. You correct me if my history is wrong. The Romans conquered them. Eventually, I guess around the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire conquered the area. Because it was mountainous, minorities were able to continue to exist without being forced at the sword to convert. So you had in the mountains the Christians, the Druze, and you had this split between the Shia and the Sunni tribes.
And that lasted until the end of the Ottoman Empire, which was the end of World War I. At that point, the French, I think because they had an affection in particular for the Christians, said to the British, you can have a mandate for Palestine. We want Syria and Lebanon. And so this area, both Syria and Lebanon, became kind of colonies. Though to be fair, the mandate system, the idea was that the
An empire like France or Britain was to lead these peoples and these lands to independence over time. It was a little different than – I think we're sometimes not fair about that.
Correct me if I've said anything wrong, but here's the other interesting thing. The idea was that after 1943, when the French left as the colonial, or whatever you want to call it, rulers. Mandatory power. Mandatory power, that's right. That's a mandatory power. An experiment was set up, and it was an experiment, if you think about it, in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Right? Because you had, you know what I'm talking about. Explain the system that was set up for independent Lebanon after the mandatory power left. So, yes, perfect. I'm glad you touched on the distinction between a mandatory power and a colonial power. The mandate system was meant to empower these, or to place these empires, these countries of experience ruling as trustees. They were not the beneficiaries.
of these territories. The beneficiaries were supposed to be the peoples themselves and these trustees, be it the British in mandatory Palestine, the beneficiaries are supposed to be the Jewish people. In Lebanon, it was supposed to be the
the Lebanese generally, but specifically the Maronites, not just the Christians, because historically France had a connection and an affection for the Catholics, right? If you go back to the Ottoman era, different powers had extracted capitulations out of the Ottomans. There's basically...
protective treaties over specific groups. And the French historically protected the Maronites. Now, when we get to Lebanon, the issue is that it was stitched together, yes, out of minorities, but based on certain fictions and minorities that had historical enmities. Now, when we talk about the demographics of Lebanon, the last census that was conducted in Lebanon and by design was 1932.
And that's the one that shows a slight Christian majority. And even that census, there is doubt cast on what the majority or what the actual breakdown of the demographics was. Second part is, you know, and so this mandate was supposed to, as Hussein noted, center around the Maronites, right? This wasn't just the French creating a Christian state. This was the Maronites also beseeching the French in the same way that the Jews beseeched the international powers to create a Jewish state.
They wanted a Christian state. The problem is if you look at where the Maronites were located, primarily in the mountains, as you noted, it's not economically viable. It's not territorially viable. Even in Mount Lebanon, right? There's some outlets to the sea, but that would have been easily cut off by Muslim powers or the remainder of the Muslims in the country. Right.
or what would later become Lebanon. So the territory of Lebanon was expanded for economic viability without consideration for demographic viability. This idea of whether a house divided against itself can actually stand. And this is, if you ask me, this is the experiment of Lebanon, whether a house fundamentally divided against itself can stand. Because if you look at just Mount Lebanon, 1975 wasn't Lebanon's first civil war.
Even 1958 wasn't Lebanon's first civil war. We have to go back into the 1800s, the mid-1800s, where there was a civil war between the Druze and the Maronites in the mountains. And that historical enmity carried over, that historical distrust carried over into independence. That's one element of the historical enmities that exist within Lebanon. The second part is that the Maronites, specifically the Maronites, not just the Christians were at large, wanted Lebanon to be oriented in a Western direction.
Whereas the Sunni population, the Shiites were kind of not necessarily the most politically active at the time, but the Sunni population wanted to direct Lebanon towards the Arab world. So you have this Janus-faced identity as part of Lebanon's DNA.
And you don't have a cohesive narrative that stitches Lebanon together. Now, these contradictions, right? We hear about Lebanon's golden age from independence until the civil war, right? The so-called Paris of the Middle East and all that. If you ask me, this was a fiction. This was a veneer built on this volcano of these historical enmities, these divergent viewpoints, these divergent views of who are we as Lebanese? What are we? What is our identity? What is Lebanese to begin with?
And then you take these people, these groups of people who are not even just divided along sectarian lines, but even divided along subsectarian, if you ask me, feudal lines, and you tell them, okay, now share a country, govern. And the power sharing agreement
was called the National Pact. It's an unwritten gentleman's agreement with a quasi-constitutional force. And this says that the Maronites get the presidency, which at the time was the most powerful position. After the civil war and the Taif agreement, the presidency was gutted of a lot of its power. And the Sunnis permanently get the premiership, the prime ministership, and the Shia get the speaker of the house. So power was allocated to different sects.
and the subsectarian rulers would take over those portions allocated to the sects to kind of smooth out the differences. Except again, we go back to Lincoln's famous speech that a house divided itself cannot stand. And eventually these threads pulled apart into what we call the Civil War
They were uncomfortably stitched back together by the Taif Agreement. And yet- There was 1989? 1989 when it was formally adopted by the, if I'm not mistaken, it was November 1989 when it was formally adopted by Lebanese parliament.
But this was plaster over deep-seated cracks. In contrast to Israel, which had as much as Sephardim and Ashkenazim are disunited to a certain degree, or there's the religious-secular divide, there's a shared history and a shared identity, a shared vision to a certain degree. There's a bedrock of identity that exists there.
that Lebanon didn't. And these cracks are what allow actors like most lately Iran, but not just only Iran to step in. And just so I understand, you're saying that the various religious and ethno-religious groups, maybe we'll explain what that means in a minute, didn't necessarily feel Lebanese. They didn't have a sense of Lebanese patriotism, which would make sense after all they were part of
on the mandate before that, but they were an emirate of the Ottoman Empire. There were Shia, Sunni, Christians, Druze, I want to get back to. There were Jews too until, until when? Until the 1940s?
So, no, 1948, there were the actually the number of Jews increased from Syria and Iraq. There were Jews escaping from Syria and Iraq who entered. The community started to shrink post 67 just a little bit. It started to fold into Beirut with the civil war. The Jewish community started because of the collapse of the state.
the Jewish community started to leave, not because it was targeted specifically as part of the civil war, just happened to be, its focal point happened to be on the fault line between the two warring parties.
And then throughout the 1980s, you started to have Syria and then Hezbollah, nascent Hezbollah target the Jewish community. And that's when you started to see the end of organized Jewish life. And now you have about, I want to say, 27 Jews living left in Lebanon under false paperwork, false identities. But it's not that they necessarily didn't view them. Some did view themselves as Lebanese, right? The Sunnis, by contrast to them, they had to accept Lebanon.
They wanted to be part of Syria. They wanted to be part of the broader Arab world. It's less that they didn't view themselves Lebanese than what does Lebanese mean? I think this remains the question today, right? If we talk about Hezbollah, do Hezbollah view themselves as Lebanese, the average person, or they view themselves as Iranians? I think
I would split the difference and say that they have a different understanding of what Lebanese means that aligns with Iran's vision than, say, Samir Jaja, who has a different understanding of what Lebanese means. Jaja being? Being the head of the Lebanese forces party, now the largest Maronite Christian party. And these two visions are fundamentally incompatible.
And for a long time, the Shi were the weakest and poorest of the various groups. Am I correct in that?
for many years? Well, weakest, yes. Particularly unorganized. Poorest, I would say, not necessarily. They had, like everybody else, they had their notables and wealthy people and they had their, you know, not so wealthy people. Yeah. Average. So, this is something that they, that the Shia, when they started politically organizing, they were,
with the Iranian-born Lebanese, Moussa Sadr, who moved to Lebanon in 1959, he came up with the idea that now it's our time and the sun, we should get our share of the state. And mind you, at the time, his fight was to get a share for the Shia and the state, and it had nothing to do with the conflict against Israel, to the extent that he led the
the cracking down or the harassment of the Palestinian factions operating in the predominantly Shia in the south, the Shia south. So he was against launching war from, you know, he used to say, you launch war, we the Shia face the consequences. So it's costly for us. He supported the 1949 truce against
He supported disarming the Palestinian factions. So Moussa Sadr, his orientation was that the Shia are Lebanese should get a share of the state. And even though Hezbollah now praise him as one of the founders of the political Shias in Lebanon, they have a different vision of what Lebanon should be. Now, just let me add one thing. Yeah.
All of these small sects tend to caucus with the biggest. So if you're Maronite, you think that France and the Pope are your big brother. And if you're Sunni, you probably think Saudi Arabia or Turkey. If you're Shia, even before the Islamic Republic, they used to look at the Shah as their patron and sponsor. And the Shah at the time was an ally of Israel.
And to the Shia, Israel was not an enemy until at least the ally was, until 1979. Until the Islamic Revolution in Iran, yeah. Exactly. And that's why in the 1978 Israeli operation, military operation against the Palestinians in the south, these were the Shia who were holding banners saying, you know, we welcome the Israeli invaders and whatnot. Right.
So this position did not start shifting until after 1979 when Iran changed. All right. We're going to get to current events very soon, but there's just a couple more pieces of history because I want people to understand this place. One is I want to say a word more about the Druze. The Druze are an ethno-religious group. In other words, they're ethnically Druze and religiously Druze. And I would say Jews and Druze are both Druze.
ethno-religions. There are differences. One is you can become a Jew, you cannot become a Druze. Okay? But the other thing about the Druze is that they, as I understand it, have no ambition to have a state of their own anywhere they are. They believe that it's their obligation to be good citizens of the state they are in.
In Israel, they fulfill that. We just had a very important IDF colonel, a Druze, killed. He was a hero to Jews and Druze and other Israelis. We had 12, of course, Druze children killed by Hezbollah rockets not long ago. Druze are a fascinating people, and they're considered very loyal Israelis. Now, I'm not sure about the Druze of Israel.
of Lebanon quite the same way. Waleed Jambalata has been their leader for a very long time. David, tell us a little bit about the Jews of Lebanon and help me understand how they fit into all this.
So look, I think the question of whether the Druze aspire to a state or not is a separate question from whether they can acquire one. And the Druze have been historically pragmatists. This is what lends itself to this loyalty to the existing state. Now, this is, I think, sometimes presented inaccurately as kind of the Druze being mercenaries. I would think to Druze Israelis, yes.
whom I served alongside in the IDF, for example, that's an insult. I think they are loyal citizens of the state because they're as Israeli as anyone else. And Israel provides... They have ancient villages. Those are their homes. Yes. And I think that the state of Israel's makeup, with all of its complications, provides them with the room to be not just...
part of the status quo or just accepting the status quo, but to be full citizens. Now with Lebanon, the Druze of Lebanon constitute, and again, these are imprecise numbers because Lebanon hasn't had a census since 1932, but we could say approximately like 5% give or take of the country. It's a very small part of the country, but nevertheless, they have positioned themselves as
as a very influential part of the country. They're not entirely unified. Internally, you have divisions between Wali Jumblat and the Arslan family, right? The Arslan family are the kind of the older Druze establishment and the Jumblats are kind of, you could say, degree of upstarts.
Now, Erslan takes more of an Arabist pro-Hezbollah line. He's pretty consistent in that regard. And, you know, I guess like him, although Wiam Wahab is another pro-Arabist, pro-Hezbollah Druze, but he's not part of that. He's not part of either clan. He's kind of just his own, another, a third upstart. Jumblat goes with the wind. He really, you know,
for lack of a better metaphor, licks his finger, puts it up to the wind and sees which way is the current going. And he goes with that. At certain times, he was aligned against the West. At certain times, he was aligned with the West. For the past few years, it seems like he has not only been trying to figure out how to put this precisely, let's say buddying up to Hezbollah, but
Papering over the frictions of the past with Hezbollah to create a sort of comfortable coexistence of sorts, I guess is the best way to put it. I wouldn't call them allies, but for example, he's recently expressed regret over
over instigating the events of May 2008. This is when the government tried to act against Hezbollah and Hezbollah responded by taking over Beirut and fighting with the partisans of Saad Hariri, the future movement, and then trying to enter the mountain areas where the Druze, where Jean Blat's Druze existed. They were repelled by the Druze. So Jeanblat
So Jumblat has said, I've regretted this. He's started to take a much more conciliatory tone towards Hezbollah in recent years, describing them as, and as they are, right, a part of an integral part of Lebanon's political and social fabric because they represent a sizable part of the community. And today he still remains, you know, he's still sticking to that line that whatever happens to Hezbollah's arms, he has to, or sorry, Hezbollah and its base's consent has to be taken into account.
So he's all over the place, but generally he goes where the current is pushing him. Let me just say a word about the Druze. Yeah. As someone who's honored to be married into the Druze and having, you know. Your wife is Druze? My wife is Druze and my children are half Druze. And I know this group really well. My best friends are Druze.
the Druze perceive of themselves as, if you know the Druze religion, they believe in reincarnation. - Yes, seriously, yeah. - And they believe, they perceive of themselves as people who have lived in this land since forever. - Right. - And they plan to live in this land until forever.
And their policy in doing this is that they strike deals with whoever is ruling. And their mind is that empires come and go, but we will be here. The only time that they fight is that they fight defensively. And throughout the Lebanese war, even though Jumlat had his own PSP militia, he never expanded. So his militia was mainly for self-defense.
And they hedge because they understand that they have limited numbers. Arslan, the gentleman David was talking about, his dad was supportive of Bashir Jumail and the Israelis and the Israelis support of Bashir Jumail.
So, you know, I mean, the sun is, you know, has changed because, you know, he has different calculus. But this thing about the Druze is that they try to always guess the right way. So what happened to Jumblat after the year 2000, he understood that with Assad in Syria and Hezbollah, that the Druze were not having their fair share.
So he took the side of Hariri, who wanted to disarm Hezbollah. And Hariri, of course, was killed for... We're talking about Rafiq Hariri, who was a Sunni leader. A Sunni leader who was killed in 2005. Assassinated in the streets of Beirut, along with everybody around him. And the assassins are believed to have been... The UN tribunal found one Hezbollah... Yeah, I mean, the UN tribunal is a joke, I think, because it wasn't going to... But we
It's pretty much assumed that he was assassinated by Hezbollah. By Hezbollah, okay. Yes. With Iran's compliance. With Iran's compliance. As long as you get that. Yes. But what Jumbala did was that he took the side of Hariri. And at the time, the Bush administration was throwing its support behind anyone who was standing up and spreading democracy. So they went against Hezbollah. And they were beaten hard. So the first...
blow that they took was Hariri was killed in 2005. The second beating was the 2008 that David is talking about, that the Hezbollah went to their mountains, swept their territory. Now, of course, the Druze being, you know, feisty and everything, they stood their ground, but
Jumlat immediately understood that he couldn't fight more than a few days because otherwise, you know, if Hezbollah get, if they get out the big guns, I mean, look at the Hezbollah is now, you know, they're standing up to Israel and the South. So he understood that if they get out the big guns, he'll be dead. So he conceded. And during that time, Hariri, the son and Jumlat both reached out to Washington and they said, you know,
to dismantle Hezbollah. The reason why May 8th happened was because the Lebanese cabinet had instructed the military to dismantle the telecom network of
of Hezbollah and to replace the man who was in charge of the airport, who was pro-Hezbollah, to replace him with a loyalist to control arms shipments from Iran. So when they were being beaten for standing up to Hezbollah, they reached out to Washington. And what we did here in Washington was that we advised them to get into a national unity cabinet with Hezbollah. And that was the time when Jumlah decided, okay, you know, so
If I don't get support, the Druze will be out. And he conceded and he's been, you know, like David said, he's been just laying low, so to speak. All right. And one more thing before we get to the president. People need to know, they may not know, how and when Hezbollah was formed, was created. Well, it depends on what you mean by Hezbollah, right? The ideology that...
to Hezbollah's rise predated the rise of the actual organization. This is Khomeinism. This is the ideology that arose with Ayatollah Vahela Khomeini. And the 79 Revolution in Iran. Yeah. Exactly. There were schools of thought in Lebanon that accepted this idea of the rule of the Jewish consuls. It's kind of this rule of the philosopher king, but on Shiite theocratic terms. And
uh, these, you know, these schools of thought existed and we're trying to make headway in Lebanon. Then you have the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that acts as a catalyst. It didn't create Hezbollah. This is so often presented as, uh, the, the creation of Hezbollah, the inception of Hezbollah occurred on June 6th, 1982. And, and Hezbollah pushes that narrative for its own reasons. But the school of thought, uh, uh,
And, um, the Israeli invasion acted as a catalyst because, and this goes to kind of why I would say Washington has been cautious about lending support to any Lebanese. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 occurred at the behest of, uh, the Jamail family, particularly, uh, uh,
Bashir Jemayel. He had been working- Christian Lebanese leader. Maronite Christian. Maronite Christian, I always say. And he had been working with the government of Menachem Begin, defense minister at the time was Ariel Sharon. There had been a historical relationship between the Israelis and the Maronites that predated that under the Rabin government, the predecessor government of the Begin government. But their philosophy was, and their stance was, we will help you to help yourselves. We'll give you training. We'll give you arms. You take care of yourself.
With Begin and Sharon, they knew how to, the Maronites played a different game. To Begin, the Jamails, because Begin's entire worldview is formed by the Holocaust, and
and the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. They turned to him and they said, they're doing to us in Lebanon what they did to you in Germany and Poland. Help us. And Begin viewed this as an opportunity to help another persecuted minority that was being exterminated. Sharon had more political ambitions. He was much more of the hard-nosed,
And I would say he was the first in some way, the first neocon in the sense that he thought that he could enter Lebanon and reshuffle the deck and create a new Lebanon, similar to our philosophy going into Iraq in 2003. And the Israelis entered.
Uh, they enter with weapons and doctrine that is suited to, uh, war fighting in the deserts of the Sinai and the open areas of the Golan Heights and not to the narrow streets, uh, and dense populate populated areas of Lebanon. And you have a high civilian death, death toll. So the Israeli objective initially as presented to the cabinet at the time, uh,
officially was to reach the Litani River and clear out the PLO. Behind closed doors, Bashir Jemayel and Sharon had agreed that Israel would creep up to Beirut and crown Bashir Jemayel as president of Lebanon, and then he would normalize ties with Israel in full normalization treaty, the first Abraham Accords.
if you will, or maybe the Hiram Solomon Accords instead. Um, uh, except the Maronites, the Lebanese forces party, the Kitab did not fulfill their end of the bargain. Uh, the Israelis were fighting and, and Bashir Jamal's men just sat on, sat on by the wayside. The Israelis fulfilled their end of the bargain, reached Beirut, um,
have Bashir Jamal elected as president in parliament under the protection of Israeli tanks. And then afterwards, as president-elect, he meets with, Jamal meets with Begin and Sharon in Nahariya. And they say, well, no, time for the peace agreement. He says, well,
you know, I actually have a lot of Muslims in my country and they wouldn't be too happy about this. So maybe we can do an economic treaty for now. Give me a year. We'll talk about it then. And the Israeli response was, well, you promised. And I said, well, I'm not your vassal. You're arrested. This is documented, right? There's documentation of this. And this adventure into Lebanon got Israel stuck. And it gave Hezbollah the traction between the lethality of the Israeli invasion
between the Israelis staying much longer than they had, between their interference in Lebanon's political affairs. Hezbollah then took this and said, see, look, the Israelis, they want to occupy. They want to take over your land. And there were specific incidents that lent themselves to this narrative. There was, I think it was in 1983 in Nabatiyeh, the Israelis, there was an Israeli patrol in this predominantly Shiite town, city in South Lebanon during Ashura.
Uh, now the Israelis have no idea what Ashura was, their entire intelligence. There's no Shia in Israel. Their entire intelligence on Lebanon had come from the Maronites and their entire perception of Lebanon had come from the Maronites. And they see this procession of people, you know, uh,
beating themselves, you know, and they don't understand what happens. The Israeli patrol gets out, tries to clear the streets. The people already worked up, uh, in a religious ceremony, think the Israelis are disrespecting them. There's a clash. And if I recall correctly, some people were killed. This allowed, uh, Hezbollah to take this incident and say, see, the Israelis are enemies of the Shia. And all of this together, this Israeli mistake, uh, in
influencing this preexisting ideology that was trying to find the opportunity to rise, this created the catalyst in the chemical sense, if you will, almost for Hezbollah, uh, to begin attracting popular support and to rise to, uh, its position today. And there were other obviously stages of Hezbollah's growing popularity, but that was the inception. And Hezbollah, the Iranian revolution was 79, the Islamic revolution in Iran. Immediately there were the,
Hezbollah begins to coalesce in support and as an agent of the regime in Iran. There's civil war in Lebanon in 1983. There are peacekeepers who come in from American France and Hezbollah or proto-Hezbollah come
bombs them, used truck bombs and kills hundreds, 241 I think Americans, something like 58 French. And again, some of those involved were only recently eliminated by Israel because even though they had been on a most wanted list with bounties on their head, the U.S. had never come after them. Also, Hezbollah
kidnapped the CIA bureau chief in Beirut, held him and tortured him for a number of years, actually, and there were no repercussions for that either. All right, we probably—unless I get anything wrong, we probably want to fast forward. Hezbollah begins to build up. We go to the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel.
It started when Hezbollah kidnapped or killed Israeli, I guess, killed some Israeli soldiers. It said that, and I think this is correct, that Hassan al-Nusra later said, well, if I had understood that it was going to create that kind of war, I probably wouldn't have done it. That may or may not be true. I think if he could be asked today, would you have started the current war? He'd probably say, no, I probably wouldn't have wanted to do that one either. Not a good idea.
At the end of that war in 2006, which lasted 35 days, something like that, so it wasn't long, Condi Rice told the Israelis, you've got to stop. Too many civilians are getting killed. You've just got to withdraw. You had a UN Security Council Resolution 1701. Basically, what it said was that the Lebanese armed forces were supposed to come in and there was not supposed to be any Hezbollah troops there.
south of the Latani River, anywhere near the border with Israel. UNIFIL came in to help, which is a UN peacekeeping force. And the important point here is that
1701 was in no way enforced. On the contrary, Hezbollah, since 2006, built up a phenomenal arsenal of weapons. And now we know tunnels and fortifications in southern Lebanon with the plan of invading Israel in the north the way Hamas did in the south. Why they held back, I don't know. Maybe you do. But that's...
But that resolution got nowhere. I want you to talk a little bit about that because the Israelis now, they're not going to, I cannot imagine the Israelis saying, oh, we'll rely on the international community and the UN and the Lebanese armed forces to do what they haven't done since 2006. Their north, as I said in my introduction, has been depopulated. They want their people to go back to their villages, to their homes, to their farms, and they have to feel safe there.
Pick it up from there. Sure, yeah, but just first let me just put out these two footnotes. Number one, Lebanon became the second country to approve a peace treaty with Israel.
after Egypt. May 17, 1983, the Lebanese parliament voted by a big majority on this treaty. Now, it did not get ratified because Assad threatened Jmeil, the brother. I mean, Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria. Yes, the dictator of Syria. But it's a dynastic dictatorship. It's a family dictatorship. So, the father, Assad the father, had killed Bashar al-Jmeil for cooperating with Israel in September of 1982. Uh-huh.
Jemayeh's brother Amin was elected in his stead. And in 1983, when Lebanese parliament voted on a peace treaty with Israel after negotiations with the Israelis and everyone was happy, Amin Jemayeh never signed that treaty into law because the father, Asad the father said, do you remember what happened to your brother? So that was what held him back.
Another footnote, my second footnote is about Hezbollah. And, you know, I was a kid at the time. I grew up with these guys. Hezbollah was never designed when it started. Israel was not a thing. The slogans that they taught us at the time was that no East, no West, an Islamic Republic. So they were an extension of the Islamic Republic. They chanted, we chanted at the time, death to Israel.
Russia, France, Israel, and the Falange Party, which is the ruling party of the Maronites. Of the Maronites, right. So the idea was that if you take the first bombing that Hezbollah executed in Lebanon, it was against the Iraqi embassy in 1981. That was part of the war between Iraq and Iran. So they were doing everything.
Iran's bidding all the way. And Iran was busy fighting with Iraq and really not concerned about Israel. So you'll have to wait way until 1987 or 88 for Hezbollah to start launching attacks. After the war between Iraq and Iran was over, that was when Hezbollah shifted its attention toward Israel.
Now, to answer your question, when the Lebanese civil war ended, the Ta'af agreement, the Ta'af agreement was designed in a way that all militias will be disbanded and all fighters will get a general pardon. And once that happens, Israel will withdraw from southern Lebanon. And once the Israelis withdraw from southern Lebanon, the Syrian Assad army will withdraw from the rest of Lebanon.
So, Assad wanted to stay in Lebanon. So, after most of the militias disbanded, he wanted the Israelis to stay. So, he kept Hezbollah and he rebranded Hezbollah as resistance, not a militia. For him to keep the Israelis, for him to stay. As long as the Israelis are in Lebanon, he wouldn't be asked to leave.
Start in 1996, 97, 98, Bibi Netanyahu, at the time he was prime minister, then Ehud Barak, they reached out to both Beirut and Damascus. They said, listen, there's no beef between us. We're going to pull out. Just give us guarantees that if we do, you will not launch any attacks on us. And Assad, the father at the time, was in charge of both countries, categorically refused to give such guarantees. So Israel...
ended up doing it unilaterally in line with UN Resolution 425. And the UN showed up and they said, okay, now Israel is in compliance and we verify that. And they drew the border as the blue line. And there were no outstanding issues between the two sides. So when this happened now...
Hezbollah didn't have its raison d'etre anymore. It didn't have an excuse to remain armed. And starting that point, that was when Rafiq Hariri, the father who was assassinated, that's when he started agitating against the arms of Hezbollah. He started saying, okay, now we're not occupied anymore. There's no reason for you to keep your arms. And if that happened, this means that Assad would have to pull his troops out. And he kept on pushing for that.
To the extent that in 2004, Hariri was very close with President Jacques Chirac of France. He lobbied Chirac, who talked to President Bush. And that's how 1559 was born. And 1559 said what in the Fraser? And 1559 had two demands. All non-Lebanese military should withdraw. This means that Assad should withdraw. All Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias should disband. And this meant Hezbollah. This meant Hezbollah.
And what Hariri did at the time, together with Jumlat and the others, they built national consensus in Lebanon that came to be known as the March 14. It forced Assad out, but then it fell short of forcing Hezbollah to disband.
And Hezbollah be built up as stronger than the Lebanese armed forces, stronger probably than the military of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I mean, the military of – the basic military of Iran is not very strong. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a fairly strong expeditionary force, particularly the Quds Force.
But it was – and it was seen that Hezbollah was really a foreign legion of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israelis had reason to fear that if they got – if they went to war with Iran, they would be hit by 150,000 missiles from Hezbollah. Now, what no one expected –
And we know you and I, you guys and I know a lot of military experts, a lot of intelligence experts here at FTD and elsewhere. No one expected the kind of swift attacks with pagers and walkie talkies and bunker buster bombs that the Israelis launched against Hezbollah. So I guess my question is, how incapacitated, how diminished is Hezbollah at this moment? Why don't you start on that, David?
Just a couple of footnotes also, just to start off. The 1983 treaty was signed under Israeli occupation of Lebanon. The second the Israelis started to pull back, that's when the Lebanese reneged under Syrian pressure because the Syrians remained the dominant force. As for Hezbollah's enmity towards Israel, yes, it's secondary to the United States. In their 1985 open letter, they talk about the United States. This is a point that I try to make in my work, that we are their primary enemy.
We, because we offer, again, neither West nor East, an Islamic state, we are the West. We are the spearhead of the West, and Israel is our tool, our forward military base as far as Hezbollah is concerned. It also has its own problems with Israel's existence, period. Now, where is Hezbollah now? Like you said, Resolution 1701, 1559, 1560.
was reincorporated into Resolution 1701. It was passed after the Second Lebanon War. It mandated not just that Hezbollah be pushed north of the Litani, but taking Resolution 1559's terms and strengthening them, I would argue, giving them more force of international law, saying that this is a first step, distancing them north of the Litani. They must be disarmed. This is in compliance with Lebanon's underlying international obligations. This was never done.
This is never done and we can talk about why. And I think we should talk about why this was never done because it brings us to the present and whether to your question, Cliff, it will be done now. I don't think it will be because Hezbollah still retains popular support. Right. And as we said earlier, you don't think that support is in any way being eroded by, I mean, the people of Southern Lebanon didn't realize necessarily when missiles were being put in their family rooms that they're,
They were going to lose everything in time. I do wonder if there isn't a change of attitude. Up to now, it doesn't bother us. It's kind of nice. I wonder for Gaza, too, if a lot of Gazans aren't saying, you know, our life was pretty good before this. It wasn't an open-air prison. Look what Hamas has brought upon us. And what have we gotten in return? What are we going to get in return? Nothing for a generation or two.
Two, Israel is still standing. I throw that out at you. But anyway. So I would exercise caution with that just because I think, look, it may happen. Yeah. Yeah. Look, it also doesn't. I mean, I just want to. It also we put we in the West say talk too much about what the people want in places where they don't vote. And that doesn't necessarily matter what the people want. In a way, it matters more. Does does the Biden administration or the administration that comes next? Do they think, you know what?
We want a moderate Hezbollah. If we were to let the Israelis kill Hezbollah off, who knows? It's going to be complex afterwards. I think Macron in France has that view. Oh, we don't want Hezbollah out. We want them to moderate. We in the West always want everybody to moderate.
Bring the Chinese into the WTO. They'll moderate. Putin, he'll moderate. Hezbollah, Hamas, they can moderate. We don't want them to. We don't kind of believe in victory and defeat anymore. I think this is part of our problem. And I don't know where the Biden administration exactly is. They kind of have even with Ukraine. Oh, we don't want Ukraine to defeat Russia in this. We want them to defend themselves politically.
Again, I wonder here if they're not thinking, if Amos Hochstein, who's the envoy for Lebanon, isn't thinking, how do I get a political settlement which means Hezbollah exists, but they'll be more moderate in the future as opposed to, okay, time to build up for the next war against Israel. You see what I'm saying?
So, and then this takes us back to the 1990s where Hezbollah rebranded both because of Syrian hegemony that Hussein mentioned earlier, and because they are, look, they have their objectives, but they pursue them pragmatically. So even their flag changed from being the Islamic revolution in Lebanon to being the Islamic resistance in Lebanon. Why? Because they wanted to argue to the world, hey, we're only focused on expelling the Israeli occupier from South Lebanon. Leave us alone. Right.
Right. We're not we're not. And they cease their activities again, at least their overt activities against Americans and other forces. They Lebanonized in the language that was used at the time, including by the late Augustus Richard Norton. This idea that Hezbollah started to participate in parliamentary elections. They became part of the Lebanese body politic. They accepted ostensibly the Lebanese Lebanese state's legitimacy and they focused their activities on Israel's.
What they did in the cover of this, what did this do for them? This took the Syrians off their back because at the time the Syrians were trying to, having lost the Soviet Union as a protector, were trying to orient towards a better relationship with the West. This took the Lebanese off their back because the Lebanese were trying to cobble back their country, put Humpty Dumpty back again. And it took the international community off their back because they weren't conducting these attacks, kidnapping Americans and kidnapping French and murdering Soviet diplomats and so on and so forth.
And it positioned them in this place of consensus between the Lebanese and the Syrians and themselves of fighting Israel. Under this cover, they grew their arms. And by the time anyone decided to question their arms after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, they were too powerful to disarm. And I would say this is exactly what's going to happen now in this idea that Hezbollah, this is why I caution against saying that Hezbollah is too weakened. They've been beaten before. Their population has
1993, 1996, 2006, right? In these repeated engagements with Israel and they've somehow managed. I mean, look, if we go back to October 17th, 2019, the economic collapse of the country, every two million people went out into the streets. A lot of people heralded this as the sea change in Lebanon's political makeup, that the old parties were going to be abandoned in favor of this new identity. And Hezbollah managed to
navigate between the raindrops and retain its support to where in May 2022, they won the largest number of votes in parliament of any party. So I would, I,
I do not underestimate my enemy in this case, in which case we cannot leave it up to Lebanon because it has failed for 18 years since 2006. I was a kid when we fought the 2006 Lebanon war. When I was in the same villages that I'm seeing these young Israeli boys fighting in now. We can't leave it up to Lebanon to do the job because as much as it is Lebanon's obligation
to do so, to police its territory, to ensure that its territory is not used by a terrorist actor to threaten the state of Israel. With or without 1701, this is Lebanon's obligation, Lebanon is unwilling and or unable to do so because Hezbollah has a say at the table
When Lebanon wants to sit down and decide what to do with Hezbollah's arms, Hezbollah is part of that voice. And if they can't get Hezbollah on board, they realize they can't disarm Hezbollah because then we go back to shutting down the country like they did in December of 2006. We go back to street fighting. We go back to maybe even Syria where they can bring this array of allies into Lebanon to confront anyone who would disarm them. So it really is going to fall to the Israelis.
to continue policing this territory and ensuring that, yes, they've dealt spectacular blows to Hezbollah, but they shouldn't leave the remainder up to chance. For a very long time, Lebanon has been what we've been calling a failing state economically. Basic services. David said that
It's not true to say Lebanon was the Paris of the Middle East, but Beirut was once upon a time a prosperous city, good restaurants, good nightclubs, beach nearby, beautiful. I've talked to, I know a lot of journalists who enjoyed spending time there compared to anywhere else in the Middle East, but it's been a failing state.
And it's hugely in debt. Now, one thing that Hezbollah has had, it's had funds. It has funds from two sources. One is from Iran. And I'm sorry to say the current administration has enriched the Islamic Republic of Iran by waiving sanctions, not enforcing sanctions, that sort of thing. And probably the best estimates I've seen, $100 million a year coming to Hezbollah from Iran. It's also...
People don't talk about this as much, but they should. Hezbollah is an international crime syndicate.
It's in the drug business. Captagon made in Syria, sold through the Middle East, sold in Europe. It's money laundering. It makes common cause with cartels in South America. Probably, again, estimates I don't know how reliable, 30% of its funds have come from that. Now, the Israelis, not only have they hit commanders, launch pads, missiles, warehouses of weapons, but
They've also been hitting, we believe, their financial structure, the banks. And there's some credible reports that in the bunker with Hassan Nasrallah were maybe a billion dollars in gold bars that have now melted. So that may have an impact, too.
At the end of the day, I cannot believe that most Christians, Druze and Sunnis and a fair amount of Shia don't want Lebanon to have the parasite of Hezbollah and to be what is in effect a colony of the Islamic Republic of Iran with even Islamic Revolutionary Guard commanders coming in to take over posts of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah commanders who have been killed and saying from the reports, I see we're in charge now here. We have to take over. In other words, can I guess this may be my final question of the day, even though there's 10 more subjects I could raise. This is Lebanon's one chance to decolonialize, to become an independent nation, to become to have national sovereignty and
I'm not sure there's anybody in Lebanon who can do that. I'm not sure. I don't think the Israelis can do it for him. I don't see, I think the French as a nation that cares a lot, uh,
But I don't see them doing anything useful. I remember when my – after the – you remember when that – when the explosives in the port in Beirut blew up. What year was that? 2020. 2020. Yes. We think that Hezbollah was storing explosives there. Whole neighborhoods went out. Macron comes in and says, I'll help you. Well, he doesn't. He just talks about it. He never did. Anyhow, the question is can Lebanon decolonize, be decolonized? Is there a way to get there? If not –
I guess a weakened Hezbollah will try to build up while I think, as David says, the Israelis will be watching and they will hit any launch pans or missiles, uh,
in the south that can threaten them because it's gotta be a priority for the Israelis that people go back to their homes in the north and not feel threatened every single day. That has to be a priority of this war. - Yeah, well, great points, Cliff. So the Lebanese think that they had a golden period between 1949 and 1969. Not a superpower, but this was the days when they were called the Switzerland of the Middle East or Paris or whatever they were called.
And they understood that in 1969, when Egypt, when Nasser forced them to accept the Cairo Agreement to allow Palestinian militias to operate in Lebanon, this was when they lost sovereignty. And this has been going on until today.
And they think that if they disband militias and the weak army, no matter how weak, becomes the one in charge, they'll be able to muddle through. So over the past few years, the patriarch of the Maronite church, Pshar Arai, he started demanding that Lebanon goes back to the pre-1969 arrangement.
And he said, revive the truce with Israel, disband Hezbollah, and take what they call the positive neutrality. That is, we're not engaged in the war with Israel, but we will not sign until the Palestinian. We'll just technically, we'll take the side of the Arab League in Saudi Arabia. And in their minds, this is much better than what they have now. And even that point, Hezbollah couldn't tolerate to the extent that it's...
It's allowed in the Lebanese constitution for clerics to cross the border, this border that's at war now, from Rosh Hanikra, Nakoura, from the coastal side. They can cross for clerical visits. So there are Maronite Israelis, and these Maronite Israelis get visits from Maronite Lebanese bishops. So the bishop who is visiting Israel on his way back
Hezbollah stopped him and arrested him. And they started investigating with him. And that was a clear message to the patriarch that you have to shut up or we go after your bishops and your church. And lo and behold, even the leader of the Maronites, a man of religion who doesn't have really lots of politics,
He shut up. So the point here is that these, Hezbollah can twist arms. And like we said, when Hariri stood up to them, he was killed. Jumblat, you know, saw his mountain invaded. The Patriarch. So what you see now is that the Lebanese would love to see Hezbollah disbanded, but they're not sure whether if they come out, you know, a repeat of 2008 will also happen. And, you know, either us, America or the French or someone will show up and say,
Kiss and makeup and, you know, and if this happens, they think that they'll be, you know, in a tough spot.
So there was a week when Speaker Birri, who is Shia and allied with Hezbollah, together with the caretaker Prime Minister Mikati, who is a Sunni, and Jumlat, the three of them came together and said, okay, we're going to, we promised to enforce 1701 and we're going to elect a president even before there's a ceasefire. Now, this is very important. You have to keep in mind, Hezbollah has kept parliament shut for two years because
so that a president will not be elected because Hezbollah doesn't have the numbers to elect a loyalist president. So what these guys said, we will elect a president now, which means the president won't be a Hezbollah loyalist. Hezbollah needs a president for its legitimacy because they have an unconstitutional militia. So they did this over a few days and they said, we will elect a president. And then after four or five days, all three of them shut up completely
completely, not a single statement from them. So we understood that they, that someone called them or talked to them. There's only one guy who remains now, Jaja, who's the leader of the Maronite, or the biggest Maronite bloc in parliament and party. He's still holding to his guns. He's saying, you know, 1559, disarm, disarm Hezbollah. And Jaja went even to the extent that he said enforcing
1701 and 1559 will end the war, not the promise to enforce it. So he gets it. He understands that the promise will not cut it like it did in 2006. So my last question for you for today, David, it would be this. The Lebanese armed forces were mentioned earlier. The U.S. has been investing in the Lebanese armed forces, the LAF, for years. Money?
Arms, training, when people like you and I argue with Americans and they say, yeah, it's an investment for the future. The future is now.
Do you see any possibility of the Lebanese armed forces doing what the armed forces of a nation is supposed to do? Be they have a monopoly on the use of force because when political parties and, you know, the Republicans and Democrats, a lot of things they don't like about each other. Neither has a militia. If the Green Party had its own militia, they probably would be both of them. That's why we don't let the Green Party have a militia.
So this is what I'm saying is now is the time, if it ever was or ever will be, for the Lebanese armed forces to exert itself. Is that at all possible or are they hopeless?
I would say no. And this kind of goes back to the fractured makeup and what Mikati and Birri and Jumblat were actually saying. When we talk about the enforcement of 1701, it talks about the disarming of militias, armed groups rather is the specific terms. Except Lebanon plays this game. Well, Hezbollah is not a resistance organization. Therefore, it's not an armed group. Therefore, we don't need to disarm it under 1701. So let's implement 1701, guys.
on our understanding, except international law prohibits Lebanon from actually doing that. This is a game that Lebanon plays. They do the same thing, by the way, with the Taif Agreement, where the Taif Agreement calls for disarmament of all militias. And then if I'm not mistaken, it's section three, paragraph C, talks about using all of the all the means necessary to liberate remaining Lebanese territory from Israeli occupation.
They interpret Hezbollah into that. And therefore, ah, well, Hezbollah is not a militia. It's a resistance organization meant to liberate territory, which again, by the way, is illegal under international law, resolving territorial disputes by force, but whatever. So why, why does, why did the Lebanese play these games? Right. So, and then we ask, you know, well,
If Lebanon sent 15,000 troops to South Lebanon, as they promised in 2006, would this have solved the problem, the mere presence of 15,000 troops? Right now, actually, most Lebanese officials don't know how many troops there are in South Lebanon. The foreign minister was asked in January. He had no idea. But it's certainly not 15,000. But what if we got to that 15,000 number? I think that, you know, this is where I'll answer from the two sides of your question.
Lebanon cannot get the LAF to disarm Hezbollah because of everything we talked about before, right? Because Hezbollah has a legitimate seat at the table and it uses the carrot of its legitimate seat at the table to ensure that it's not disarmed. This is why when the first March 14th cabinet was put into place in July of 2005 under Fouad Senura, they joined the cabinet because
to prevent any implications of 1559 from reaching them from within the cabinet, right? And they had to be given a seat at the cabinet because they don't have to have 51%. They have a critical mass of support and they retain that so far.
And this is what, by the way, all of these Lebanese chieftains that Hussein mentioned have said. We're not going to, including the so-called opposition, by the way, the ones that are very much openly against Hezbollah, even Jaja, said we're not going after anyone by force. We're going to implement this through dialogue and consensus. Dialogue and consensus means Hezbollah is at the table. We're going to ask them. I'm quoting. I'm quoting. I'm quoting specifically by dialogue and consensus. Hmm.
And I can name names and there are sources, right? So this means that you're going to ask Hezbollah, sit down. Do you want to disarm? No. Okay. And then you can't force Hezbollah. You can't send the LAF after them because it will lead to civil war. And I will quote Abdullah Abu Habib, the current caretaker foreign minister of Lebanon, who said,
Leaving Hezbollah armed will lead us to regional war. Disarming Hezbollah will lead us to civil war. Between these two choices, we choose regional war because if a civil war starts, we'll never see the end of it. And that's where this puts us. Puts us back 18 years ago, where if we go after, if we trust Lebanon to enforce this resolution, if we trust Lebanon,
It will fall back into Lebanon's so-called special circumstances. And the question of Hezbollah's arms will be lost in the Byzantine mazes of Lebanese politics. It'll be forgotten because international attention will be drawn back to Ukraine, perhaps China and Taiwan to other problems. And a domestic Lebanese squabble will be forgotten. This is what I'm concerned about.
Did you want to get in front of words? Yeah, and just, I mean, Jaja was on Al Arabiya, which is the second biggest channel yesterday, and he was specifically saying disarming Hezbollah. I don't think, you know... On MTV, he said, in his interview with MTV, he said, I think it was last week, he said it would be by dialogue. But this is yesterday. Yesterday, he was on Arabiya with Rasha Nabil, and he said, and I just told you that
We enforce it first, then the war stops. So Hezbollah disarms first. So I think these guys are moving to becoming more bold. They're becoming bolder on this. All right. Here's my takeaway, my bottom line for this conversation. If we want a better day in Lebanon, we really need a new regime in Tehran. Absolutely. And that actually, if you think of it, that's the bottom line for pretty much all the conflicts in the Middle East.
So what do we want? A White House that understands that. I'm not sure we have one. I'm not sure we're going to have one, but we'll go on explaining as best we can. David, thank you very much. Thank you, Hussein Abdul-Hussein. Always a pleasure. Always an education for me to talk to you people. Thanks to all of you who have been with us today for this conversation here on Foreign Policy.
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