Full Throttle: Inside the Struggle Between Israel and Hezbollah - by Dr. Shimon Shapira

The struggle between Hezbollah and Israel is currently at full throttle. Hezbollah, with Iran’s help, is working to build long-range capabilities that will allow it to strike precise targets in the Israeli home front. Israel is resolved to prevent Hezbollah from gaining that capability.

 

Dr. Shimon Shapira..
Tablet..
11 August '20..

At the basis of the struggle between Israel and Hezbollah stands Iran, which views Lebanon as part of the territory of the Islamic Republic. The Islamic empire seeks to establish itself among the Shiite populations of the region while denying any importance to the national component, instead granting these populations collective expression in the form of movements, parties, and organizations whose task is to challenge the nation-states in which they operate and to shape them by building a fighting Islamic society that is exclusively loyal to the leader of Iran.

Lebanon was the Islamic empire’s first target. Over the past decade it has fallen like a ripe fruit into Iran’s hands. Through Hezbollah, Iran has taken control of the institutions of the Lebanese state and turned it into a failed state whose stability has collapsed amid severe economic and political corruption that threatens its demise.

The Hezbollah movement was founded in the summer of 1982 by Iran, which intended it to be the spearhead of the states exporting the Islamic Revolution to the Arab and Islamic world. The Shiite movement Amal, which was founded in 1975 by the Iranian Imam Musa Sadr and his Iranian assistant, Dr. Mostafa Chamran, was not prepared to replace its loyalty to the Lebanese state with loyalty to Islamic Iran. Musa Sadr was murdered in Libya in August 1978 with the encouragement of associates of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was decided in Tehran to set up a new Islamic movement that would lead the Islamic Revolution in Lebanon according to the revolutionary precepts of the Islamic Republic.

Khomeini assigned the mission of establishing the new movement to his longtime associate Ali Akbar Mohtashemi Pur. Considered an expert on the Levant, he arrived in August 1981 to serve as Iran’s ambassador in Damascus. One of the first tasks of the new Iranian ambassador was to invite for a meeting the Shiite clerics who recognized the Wali al-Faqih (the Rule of the Jurisprudent) principle and played key roles in the life of the Shiite community in Baalbek. Those who came to Damascus included Subhi Tofaili, who was the imam of the Imam Ali Mosque and eventually the first secretary-general of Hezbollah (1989-1991); Abbas Musawi, who was head of the hawza named after Imam Almantazer—the most important madrassa in Lebanon, to which the Lebanese students came who were expelled from Iraq with the Baath Party’s rise to power—and served as Hezbollah’s second secretary-general (1991-1992); and Mohammed Yazbek, who was the senior instructor at the madrassa. This was a seminal meeting in which the Iranian ambassador told the Lebanese clerics of Iran’s intention to establish a new Shiite Islamic movement, one that would unite all the pro-Iranian Lebanese elements who until then had operated independently and without any joint coordination with Tehran.

Khomeini appointed Ali Khamenei, who was then president of Iran, as his liaison to the new movement in Lebanon, thereby indicating the great importance he assigned to the undertaking there. This meeting laid the cornerstone for the establishment of Hezbollah.

The command staff of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Lebanon was in charge of building the new movement’s organizational and military framework. Their first act was to remove the white flags that the residents of Baalbek and its vicinity had hung on their houses to signal surrender to the Israeli forces that invaded Lebanon in 1982 to force out the PLO, and to replace them with red flags of jihad and war.

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Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Dr. Shimon Shapira is a senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and author of Hezbollah: Between Iran and Lebanon. He served as the Military Secretary to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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