Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
“I say to you, the people of Lebanon: Free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end.”
That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Tuesday as the Israel Defense Forces started a bombing campaign and ground incursion that has displaced more than a million Lebanese residents. Netanyahu is offering them a stark choice — throw Hezbollah out or expect “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”
The Israeli leader has broad support in his country to take the fight to Iran-aligned Hezbollah, which has been launching cross-border rockets at Israel for over a year now. Even die-hard political adversaries like Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid — leaders of the country’s official opposition — have fallen in line, the former writing in the Economist that this war is perhaps the last chance for Lebanon “to become a normal state again.”
Meanwhile, several still influential former intelligence and security chiefs — including former Mossad head Tamir Pardo — have publicly urged sustaining the military campaign with the aim of redrawing the Middle East, arguing it presents “an opportunity that must not be missed” to ensure the paramilitary movement has no chance of rehabilitating itself. It’s a prospect that seems to have enthralled a hesitant U.S. administration as well, sidelining its fears of a broader regional war and quietly approving Israel’s incursion across the border.
But as Israeli soldiers battle Hezbollah’s Shiite militia in Lebanon’s south and pummel the country with airstrikes — hitting targets as far north as Tripoli and the Christian-majority town of Aitou, and even downtown Beirut — their campaign is hardly endearing them to the Lebanese, whether Shia, Sunni, Druze or Christian.
Even Lebanon’s staunchest Hezbollah opponents, long hoping to see the back of Iran’s most important regional ally, are recoiling at a campaign that’s triggered the country’s biggest population displacement in over four decades, creating a humanitarian crisis that’s only adding to the woes of a nation devastated by economic hardship and dysfunctional governance.
If Netanyahu hoped he’d be able to exploit the country’s sectarian fissures and hodgepodge of religious affiliations, he might need to rethink. So far, the airstrikes laying waste to villages and his blunt orders to evacuate homes in southern Lebanon are having quite the opposite effect. No one is welcoming Israel as a liberator — and Netanyahu’s ultimatum is only enraging them.
The Lebanese don’t need to be told their country is a mess and that no healthy, prosperous future beckons as long as they remain in the grip of a confessional power-sharing political order that’s hollowed out state institutions, paralyzed governance and encouraged grubby backroom deal-making and graft. They’ve had to live with it for years. And Hezbollah has, of course, manipulated this order to its own benefit, as well as that of Lebanon’s 1.6 million Shia — a downtrodden, marginalized community until Hezbollah’s founding in response to Israel’s 1982 invasion.
But deciding one’s own future is very different from being instructed what to do at the end of a bayonet, under the threat of becoming the next Gaza. Many in Lebanon have long yearned to forge a new political order that rises above sectarianism and many — although not a majority — are angry with Hezbollah for opening a second front with Israel after its cross-border rocket attacks forced around 80,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes.
However, Lebanon has no love lost for Israel either. According to a poll taken three weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7 onslaught, 80 percent of the country reportedly supported the murderous rampage through southern Israel. Among Lebanese Shiites, 98 percent approved of the violence, and, startlingly, 86 percent of Sunnis and Druze also said they agreed with the attacks — so, too, did 60 percent of the country’s Christians. Seventy-five percent of respondents said they didn’t want Hezbollah to stand on the sidelines of the war raging in Gaza either.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the alternative to Netanyahu’s “be destroyed or expunge Hezbollah” is basically an invitation to rekindle civil war. What other mechanics of change are there? In addition to being the most powerful armed force in Lebanon — even now, after its degradation by Israel — Hezbollah is a political and social force, operating a vast network of services such as schools and hospitals. And throwing it out would be a tall order, as there’s no other armed outfit, including the Lebanese army, that has the might to do so.
Hezbollah fighters are schooled to submit to strict military discipline from a young age and are nurtured in a culture of martyrdom, instructed that their struggles are sanctioned by God. They won’t throw in the towel easily. And many are battle-hardened from years of urban fighting in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad.
Moreover, expunging Hezbollah would be almost akin to taking on Lebanon’s Shiites as a whole — they comprise 27 percent of the population. Within the Shia communities of the Beqaa Valley and southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s seen as the defender of a Muslim sect that was traditionally powerless in a country dominated by Christians and Sunni Muslims. And fearing a reversal of all that’s changed for them in the past four decades, they’re hardly likely to stand idly by if it’s attacked by other Lebanese forces or groups.
Nor is there any appetite among Sunni Muslims, Christians or Druze to fight Hezbollah and have at it with a new civil war. Rather, what has become strikingly clear since Israel launched its military campaign is a determination to avoid such a disastrous outcome at all costs.
At one time, the arrival of displaced Shiites in the towns, villages and neighborhoods of Sunni Muslims, Druze and Christians may well have triggered inter-communal violence. Not so now: Ground reports and first-hand testimonies indicate they’ve been met by a spirit of cooperation and sympathy.
In the Chouf mountains, 40 kilometers from Beirut, Walid Jumblatt — leader of the country’s 300,000 strong Druze minority and an ex-commander in the 1975-1990 civil war — along with his eldest son Taymour, has been preparing to receive refugees from southern Lebanon for months now, stocking up on food, medicine and bedding. A year ago, Jumblatt told POLITICO that the Chouf mountains, the ancestral home of the Druze, would be open to all — whether Shiite, Sunni or Christian — should they need to flee in the event that the country lurched back to war.
And, according to commentator Mohamad Fawaz, host communities in the Chouf and elsewhere have largely welcomed the displaced. “In my mainly Sunni area, the population has tried to look beyond the abuses caused by Hezbollah,” he wrote for the Carnegie Endowment.
“Although these memories remain, the current challenges, along with the existence of personal relationships and an understanding that Nasrallah’s assassination has affected the community profoundly, have led many people to regard welcoming the displaced as a duty,” he added.
Maybe that will change. Maybe Israel’s fourth ground invasion of its neighbor will ignite a struggle that will see some turn on Hezbollah, partly due to the economic fatigue of hosting the displaced. But no one — including the Gulf princes, and least of all the Lebanese — will thank Israel for that. It would be less a redrawing of the map and more a burning of it.