Hezbollah is believed to be the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world, and for decades, it has murdered Americans, destabilized Lebanon, and targeted innocent Jewish communities around the world. What is the story of this fearsome organization, which has so maliciously targeted not only Israeli but American interests in a shadow war lasting more than 40 years? To answer this question, we must go back to the end of the Carter administration, to the year that shook the Middle East.
It is hard now for Americans to remember, but 1979 dawned with a new Middle East in the making, led by three powerful leaders: Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, the peacemakers of Camp David, and their staunch friend, Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, a pillar of the pro-Western order in the region. But 1979 was an ill-starred year in which the bottom fell out for the region in alarming ways. In Iraq, an unstable Baathist coalition was overthrown in a brutal coup by a new one-man regime led by the thuggish Saddam Hussein. The Soviet Union breached all international norms and invaded Afghanistan, seeking to impose atheist communism by force in a deeply Islamic land. Most traumatically and drastically of all, the shah of Iran himself and the millennia-old tradition of the Persian Empire that he represented was suddenly overthrown by the extremist theocratic regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, with his fearsome cries of “Death to America! Death to Israel!”
Meanwhile, in Lebanon, a once high-functioning and Western-aligned state was spiraling out of control. Created by France in the aftermath of World War I as a safe haven for Christians, Druze, and other religious minorities, Lebanon long relied on a careful confessional balance. Then known as the Paris of the Middle East, Beirut hosted a significant cultural presence from countries like the United States, France, and Italy. In the twilight years of the 1970s, that began to change, as the hostile coalition of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hafez al-Assad’s Syria, and ultimately Khomeini’s Iran combined to plunge Lebanon into a final crisis that pulled in both the Israeli Army and a substantial U.S.-allied force, including 800 U.S. Marines, who oversaw the evacuation of the PLO to the more distant country of Tunisia.
A rocket fired by an Israeli war plane approaches a building in Beirut’s southern suburb of Shayah on Oct. 22.
-/AFP via Getty Images
This intervention gave Iran the opening it had been seeking. In 1982, Hezbollah was formed under Tehran’s auspices to export the Islamic Revolution. The same year, a Syrian supporter assassinated Lebanon’s peacemaking president-elect, Bachir Gemayel. In April of 1983, Hezbollah assaulted the U.S. Embassy in Beirut with a suicide truck bomb that slaughtered 63 people, including 17 Americans. In October of that year, Hezbollah bombed the U.S. and French Marine barracks in Beirut, murdering 240 U.S. and 58 French servicemembers. In April of 1984, Hezbollah extended its reach, bombing a restaurant near the U.S. Air Force Base in Torrejon, Spain, killing 18 U.S. servicemembers and injuring 83.
By this point, Hezbollah had truly gone global. In 1992, a Hezbollah suicide bombing at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killed 29 and injured another 240. In 1994, Hezbollah struck a private Jewish community center, the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association building in Buenos Aires, murdering 85 innocents and injuring another 300. Hezbollah violence continued to spiral globally in the post-Cold War years, targeting Jews and other perceived enemies in countries as diverse as Azerbaijan, Thailand, and Bulgaria.
But it is in Lebanon itself where Hezbollah’s influence has been most pernicious. Hezbollah has come to act as the de facto military occupying power of the southern and eastern parts of the country. In 2005, when Lebanon was on the verge of shaking off Syrian domination, Hezbollah assassinated the popular Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, depriving the country of the charismatic leader it needed to secure its future. The following year, Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers on the border and dragged Israel and Lebanon into an ugly war defined by Hezbollah’s use of hundreds of cheap rockets to harass Israeli civilians.
Hezbollah’s vicious actions against Israel in this past year are so instantly recognizable to Americans, in part because Hezbollah has shown that, in line with the ideology of the Iranian Revolution, their war is not only with the “Little Satan” of Israel but with the “Great Satan” of the United States. Since Oct. 8, 2023, when Hezbollah declared allegiance to the Hamas terrorists who had just the day before massacred 1,200 Israelis and taken 240 hostages, the Lebanese terror militia has bombarded Israel with missiles and drones. One horrific attack on the Druze village of Majdal Shams murdered 12 young people between the ages of 10 and 20 who were playing a soccer game. Much of the Galilee’s forestland is on fire, and more than 60,000 Israeli civilians remain displaced from their northern homes.
What must the American and Western objectives be in this conflict? The answer is clear: empower and support Israel to finish the job, comprehensively defeating and demilitarizing Hezbollah and transferring control of Lebanon back to the Lebanese people and the Lebanese Armed Forces. Hezbollah is a violent hate group bent on war to the death with the West and the murder of Jews. Too many Americans and others have lost their lives to its crimes. Hezbollah must be defeated.
Bassem Eid is a Palestinian human rights activist. He lives in the West Bank.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
