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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A Few Lessons for Israel to Learn From Lebanon - by Prof. Hillel Frisch

The Middle East, aside from the realization of the prophetic Jewish return to its homeland and the creation of a vibrant democracy for all its citizens, is not a place for miracles. Israel, alas, remains the exception that proves the rule—and that will continue only as long as it remains strong and is guided by worst-case scenarios like that being played out in Lebanon today.

Prof. Hillel Frisch..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,687..
11 August '20..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/lebanons-lessons-israel/

How many Lebanons are there?

This has been a question ever since the French Mandate in 1920. It was repeatedly raised after Lebanon’s independence in 1943, and came to the fore once again after last week’s explosion at Beirut’s port.

The question did not arise in the first hours after the explosion, as the Lebanese people weighed and grieved the terrible extent of their losses. It emerged in full force a little bit later, during the visit of French president Emmanuel Macron—the first, and indeed only, head of state ever to visit the beleaguered country.

In the Christian area of Beirut, which suffered the brunt of the explosion, Macron was greeted by chants in French: “Macron save us!” and “You are our only hope!” Few Lebanese Shiites and only a few more Lebanese Sunnis know French, and many members of both sects—even those who chafe under the Hezbollah-dominated government—don’t identify with those sentiments.

Even less do they identify with one of the most frequently viewed scenes of Macron’s visit—his warm embrace of a young Lebanese woman during his tour of the area. Most Lebanese Shiite and Sunni women, like their fellow womenfolk in the Muslim world, do not embrace men except for close family, and even then they do so only rarely, whatever the circumstances. This rule is not bent even for illustrious foreign leaders.

No Arab politician—not even a member of the local Communist party, which is fiercely committed to gender equality—would ever dare to do anything more than shake a woman’s hand, and even then he would only do so reluctantly. Arguably the most popular leader in recent Arab history, the “progressive” and nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser, never appeared in public with his wife, a cue picked up on by the present Egyptian president. Sisi’s wife rarely appears with her husband in public, and when she does, she wears a religious scarf on her head and a dress that conforms strictly to Islamic law. Sisi has appeared with her in public for the sole purpose of driving home the point that he is as good—or even better—a Muslim than members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he ruthlessly suppresses.

The same can be said of Sisi’s nemesis, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. When he makes public appearances with his wife, she is always garbed in appropriate Islamic dress and the couple always maintains a respectable distance. This was true even before coronavirus.

Macron’s visit and behavior bring into relief once again that both politically and culturally, after 77 years of independence, the state of Lebanon is fractured. There is a Lebanon that is part of the Muslim Arab hinterland and plays by its rules, which—no matter what Western liberals might hope—change at a snail’s pace if they change at all. There is also a Christian, mostly Maronite beachhead on the Mediterranean that is linked to France.

This was true in 1958, when “progressive” Nasser, the darling of the Western left, activated Sunni politicians and movements to subvert a Christian-dominated, western-centered Lebanon. Ten years later, as Nasser’s bright aura dimmed after his 1967 defeat, he did the same thing, only using PLO factions to achieve the same ends.

Even more germane is the lesson culled from the beginnings of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. It began when the Shiite and Sunni proletariat joined together to protest on behalf of better labor conditions. Western liberals thought that that solidarity was the stirring of a new non-sectarian Lebanon. The bitter 15-year war that ensued between warlords, sects, and their external allies demonstrated how wrong they were.

Yet once again, a flurry of headlines, features, tweets, and Instagram posts are focusing on the demonstrations in Beirut in the hope that they represent the beginning of a new, unified Lebanon.

Though the liberals’ focus might be on the loving French president and the promise of a Lebanese clone of France emerging on the Mediterranean, there is another picture in the background. The trained eye saw that after the massive explosion on the wharf, bearded goons in matching T-shirts appeared on motorcycles to inspect the scene—and the many soldiers from the Lebanese army who were in the area dared not chase them away. The goons were members of the Hezbollah militia, and it was understood by all parties that they would decimate the protesters if the army did not keep them in check. Hezbollah will gun down any attempt to create a Lebanon that is truly a state of all its citizens. Macron may come and go, but the Hezbollah goons are here to stay.

The moral of the story for Israel? There are many. We can start with the so-called solutions proposed to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

Israel’s Flight Under Fire from South Lebanon 20 Years On - by Prof. Efraim Karsh and Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen

Israel’s May 2000 rushed evacuation of its security zone in south Lebanon and the desertion of its longstanding local allies there tarnished the Jewish State’s deterrent posture and helped spark a string of large-scale armed confrontations with Hezbollah (2006), the PLO (the so-called “al-Aqsa Intifada”), and Hamas (2008/9, 2012, 2014). The withdrawal transformed south Lebanon into an ineradicable terror entity that can harass northern Israel at will and expedited Hezbollah’s evolvement into a formidable military power armed with 150,000 rockets and missiles capable of reaching anywhere in Israel. It also dented the IDF’s fighting ethos and operational competence, as illustrated by its lukewarm performance during the Second Lebanon War (2006) and Operation Protective Edge (2014).

Prof. Efraim Karsh and Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,577..
22 May '20..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israels-south-lebanon-withdrawal/

In the dead of night on May 24, 2000, 18 years after invading Lebanon with the expressed goal of removing the longstanding terrorist threat to its northern towns and villages, Israel hurriedly vacated its self-proclaimed security zone in south Lebanon and redeployed on the other side of the border. With PM Ehud Barak authorizing the operation a day earlier to avoid its disruption by the Hezbollah terror organization, which had long harassed the Israeli forces in Lebanon, the evacuation was executed without a single casualty.

Yet the humiliation attending the IDF’s flight under Hezbollah fire, leaving behind heavy weapons and military equipment (some of which were promptly bombed by the Israeli air force to deny them to Hezbollah), as well as its abandonment of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), which had aided its counterterrorist operations for years and which collapsed upon the withdrawal with many of its fighters and their families seeking asylum in Israel, was not lost on outside observers. A prominent leftwing Israeli journalist, by no means hostile to the withdrawal, even compared “the scent of humiliation [that] permeated the air” to that attending the “last helicopter on the [US] embassy roof in Vietnam.”

Shattered deterrence

Keenly aware of these disturbing images, Barak quickly extolled the flight as a glowing success that in one fell swoop ended Israel’s “18-year Lebanese tragedy” and neutralized Hezbollah’s terrorist threat to the Galilee. “To fight against terrorism is like fighting mosquitoes,” he told Time Magazine:

You can chase them one by one, but it’s not very cost-effective. The more profound approach is to drain the swamp. So we are draining the swamp [by leaving Lebanon] … Once we are within Israel, defending ourselves from within our borders, the Lebanese government and the Syrian government are responsible to make sure that no one will dare hit Israeli civilians or armed forces within Israel. Any violation of this might become an act of war, and it will be treated accordingly. I don’t recommend to anyone to try us once we are inside Israel.

This buoyant prognosis couldn’t be further from the truth. Far from draining Hezbollah’s “terrorist marsh,” the withdrawal served to expand it to gargantuan proportions. Hezbollah exploited the demise of Israel’s security zone to transform south Lebanon into an ineradicable military stronghold crisscrossed with fortified defenses, both above ground and in a complex underground tunnel system, designed to serve as a springboard for terror attacks on Israeli territory, to shelter Hezbollah’s burgeoning rocket and missile arsenal (which quickly doubled after the withdrawal from 7,000 to 14,000), and to exact a high cost from attacking forces in the event of a general conflagration. Hence the IDF’s inconclusive ground operations in the Second Lebanon War (July 12-August 14, 2006), which hardly ventured more than a few miles from the border during the 34 days of fighting—in stark contrast to the 1982 invasion, which swiftly swept across this area and reached Beirut within five days. And hence the war’s relatively high human toll: 164 fatalities, or 70% of those killed in the security zone during the 15 years preceding the 2000 withdrawal.

Nor did Barak’s warning against any attempt “to try us once we are inside Israel” (or, for that matter, FM David Levy’s threat that “Lebanon will burn” in the event of terror attacks from its territory) make an impression on Hezbollah. With Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah famously deriding Israel as “weaker than a spider web,” the organization launched repeated attacks on targets in northern Israel at a rate of half-a-dozen per year. These began as early as October 7, 2000—a mere four months after the withdrawal—with the abduction of three IDF soldiers on a border patrol (who, it later transpired, were killed in the attack), culminating in the July 12, 2006 abduction of two more soldiers (who, too, were killed in the process) and the killing of another three in a cross-border raid that triggered the Second Lebanon War. During that war, Hezbollah fired some 4,000 rockets and missiles on Israeli towns and villages—the largest attack on the Jewish State’s population centers since the 1948 War of Independence—killing 45 civilians, inflicting massive destruction and economic damage, and driving thousands of Israelis to flee their homes to the southern parts of the country.

While the Israeli architects of the war, which was censured by an official commission of enquiry as “a great and grave blunder,” sought to portray it as a shining success that led to a prolonged period of calm, the conflagration did not deter Hezbollah from sporadic attacks on Israeli targets in subsequent years or from substantially expanding its military buildup in flagrant violation of Security Council Resolution 1701, which had ended the war. This included the expansion of its already substantial rocket/missile holdings to a monstrous 150,000-strong arsenal and the deployment of thousands of well-armed and battle-hardened fighters in south Lebanon on a constant state of alert to invade Israel en masse, either directly or via offensive underground tunnels penetrating Israeli territory (some of which were destroyed by the IDF in 2019).

Even the postwar relative lull has had less to do with the Lebanon War’s deterrent effect (though Nasrallah later admitted he would have foregone the soldiers’ abduction had he known it would lead to full-scale war) than with Hezbollah’s decade-long immersion in the Syrian civil war and the reluctance of its Iranian patron to unleash its protégé’s full might absent a direct Israeli attack on its nuclear weapons installations. Had PM Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak’s purported intention to launch such an attack in 2010-11 not been nipped in the bud by their security establishment and the Obama administration, an all-out Hezbollah-Israel war would likely have ensued. As it is, such a conflagration remains a distinct possibility, with Hezbollah’s security threat via both its rocket/missile arsenal, which can hit any part of the Jewish State, and ability to invade Israel and occupy Israeli localities infinitely greater than it was in May 2000.

Sparking the Palestinian war of terror

Defending his Lebanon decision 20 years later, Barak argued that the withdrawal improved Israel’s military position vis-à-vis the Palestinians since the IDF’s continued presence in Lebanon would have seriously constrained its ability to launch Operation Defensive Shield (April 2002), which curbed the Palestinian war of terror (euphemized as “the al-Aqsa Intifada”) that had begun a year-and-a-half earlier.

As with his claim that the Lebanon flight neutralized Hezbollah’s terrorist threat, this assertion is not only false but the inverse of the truth: had the humiliating Lebanon flight not occurred, the “al-Aqsa Intifada” might not have ensued in the first place, at least not on its unprecedented massive scale.

How America continues to help Hezbollah pursue its deadly machinations on the border - by Shoshana Bryen

...in the 12 years since the 2006 war, UNIFIL and the LAF have failed to establish or defend Lebanese sovereignty separate from Hezbollah. The United States pays for the fiction that the Hezbollah government in Beirut will order the Lebanese Armed Forces to fight the Hezbollah army in the south. That the Lebanese right hand will chop off the Lebanese left hand.

Shoshana Bryen..
Jewish Policy Center..
11 December '18..
Link: https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2018/12/11/how-america-helps-hezbollah/

The terror organization Hezbollah has built tunnels from Lebanese territory into northern Israel; the intention was infiltration. It turns out, however, that Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence had been tracking them and last week entered southern Lebanon to destroy them. (You can watch the IDF video of a Hezbollah member actually finding the camera in a tunnel before it blows up.) The Israeli operation—“Operation Northern Shield”—will likely not cause a major cross-border war because Iranian is not prepared to lose the assets it put there to the Israel Air Force.

What appears less understood is how the United States—by its financial and training support of the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF)—is providing resources that allow Hezbollah to pursue its deadly machinations on the border.

Not deliberately, of course, and not directly. The Trump administration strongly supported Israel’s decision to strike Hezbollah. Even the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said in a press briefing, “We do not question Israel’s right to ensure its national security, including by preventing anyone from entering the country.”

Where this become hazy is when both the United States and Russia—and the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—try to make a distinction between Hezbollah the terror organization and Hezbollah the government of Lebanon. The Russian spokesperson said, “We hope that no actions taken … will be in conflict with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701,” and Moscow hopes the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) would “fulfill its monitoring mission and will not allow any violations.” That last bit was public window-dressing. Every inch of southern Lebanon is a well-known violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701’s 2006 demand that UNIFIL ensure: