History Suggests Israeli Force Won’t Vanquish Hezbollah

The fighting between Hezbollah and Israel has intensified in recent weeks. The Lebanese militia, which is also the country's dominant political group, has regularly attacked Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, in solidarity with Hamas. In recent weeks, Israel has responded with a series of deadly pager and walkie talkie explosions, air raids against targets it says are linked to Hezbollah, and, a series of assassinations. The most significant of these assassinations came on Friday when an Israeli bombardment killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah. On Tuesday, Iran launched missiles at Israel in response for the killing, a day after Israeli troops entered Lebanon. The Israeli onslaught has killed hundreds, including Hezbollah fighters and commanders, but also numerous civilians.

While this battle may seem inevitable, given Israel’s more than 75-year conflict with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors, the historical reality is far different when it comes to Hezbollah and Lebanon. 

Hezbollah only began gaining traction with Lebanese civilians, after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 — which aimed to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from its northern borders. This history strongly suggests that Israel’s current strategy is counterproductive and it would stand a better chance of achieving sustainable security by trying to deescalate the situation and establishing a buffer zone with international peace keepers. This pathway would deprive Hezbollah of the need for revenge, give the Lebanese population a respite from the intense fighting, and increase the chances for lasting peace.

The roots of this conflict began in the early 1970s, when the PLO started targeting Israel from neighboring Jordan in a guerrilla warfare campaign. The Jordanian army expelled the PLO to avoid additional Israeli retaliation, which threatened Jordan’s sovereignty and King Hussein’s tenuous rule. The Palestinian group moved its operations to Lebanon, where the government was too weak to prevent it from using the nation’s south as a base to attack Israel.

The PLO’s presence helped ignite a civil war in Lebanon in 1975, with the country divided in part over whether they should support the Palestinian cause or expel the guerrilla organization. Shi‘ite Muslim civilians in Southern Lebanon resented the Sunni Muslim PLO using their country as a base to attack Israel, because they knew they’d bear the brunt of Israeli retaliation. The PLO also set up roadblocks and checkpoints that caused resentment from the locals.

Read More: How the Death of Hezbollah's Nasrallah Brings a Renewed Opportunity for Mideast Peace

This resentment fueled the creation of a Shi‘ite militia, the Amal Movement, which fought the PLO in the late 1970s for control of Southern Lebanon.

An Israeli invasion failed to dislodge the PLO in 1978, which left the situation smoldering for four years. Then on June 6, 1982, Israel launched another, more extensive invasion to expel the PLO from Lebanon once and for all. By mid-June, Israeli forces had surrounded Beirut, and for the first time, Israel was besieging an Arab capital.

Yet, as this was happening, a new force was moving to capitalize on the conflict. By 1982, the Shi‘ite Islamist government that had taken over Iran in 1979 was laboring to export its revolution around the Middle East in an attempt to become the preeminent Islamic power in the region. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was working to train Muslim (especially Shi‘ite) militants from many countries in the techniques of insurgency.

That summer, the Iranians set up revolutionary training centers in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, inhabited primarily by Shi‘ite Muslims. Initially, however, they struggled to gain recruits, because Lebanon’s Shi‘ite already had their own militia, Amal. Additionally, far from seeing Israel as an enemy — as Iran and its client groups did — the local Lebanese population initially welcomed Israel’s invasion, hoping it might compel the Palestinians to leave.

Yet, while Israel successfully forced the PLO to move from Lebanon to Tunis, the Israeli Defense Force made a crucial tactical error. They kept troops in Southern Lebanon, setting up the very same checkpoints that the PLO had used and occupying land as well. Southern Lebanese residents realized that the PLO had been replaced by the Israeli military. 

This compelled many Lebanese Shi‘ite to defect from Amal to the fledgling Hezbollah. Their goal was simple: to regain their own sovereignty.

At the time the extremist group was a small militia, employing suicide bombs as its most powerful weapon. In 1983, Hezbollah generated international horror after an attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut killed close to 300 American and French troops and drove Western forces out of the country. 

But the longer Israeli soldiers remained in Southern Lebanon, the more traction Hezbollah gained with the local populace. This enabled the group to win the battle with Amal — which had remained a rival — for control over territory in southern Beirut and the south of Lebanon in the late 1980s. 

Even after the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990, the country remained divided. The Syrian-Saudi-backed 1991 Taif peace accords that ended the civil war required all the militias to disarm — but Syria carved out an exception for Hezbollah so it could fight Israel. Sunni Muslims and Christians resented it, but lacked the power to object. 

Then, in 1992, Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s leader, Abbas al-Musawi. Some Israeli military figures questioned the wisdom of the move because, in the words of Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, “Musawi was not the most extreme man” in Hezbollah’s leadership, and the possibility existed that he’d be replaced by “someone more radical.”

These predictions proved prescient. Al-Musawi’s successor, Nasrallah, proved to be more charismatic and eloquent and was able to rally even Lebanon’s Christians and Sunnis behind his nationalist call to expel Israel from Lebanese soil. He put Fouad Shukr (who Israel assassinated earlier in 2024) in charge of stepping up sophisticated guerilla attacks on Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, including rocket attacks that inflicted a heavy toll.

The relentless assault eventually drove Israel from Lebanon in 2000, Israel’s first loss to an Arab military force.

This victory helped Hezbollah to curry favor with Lebanese civilians of all stripes because they had now driven both Western and Israeli troops out of the country. 

But Hezbollah couldn’t just declare victory. It needed to continue to stoke the conflict with Israel to justify its military forces and arsenal at a time when war-weary Lebanese wanted an end to decades of conflict. Iran also had a heavy incentive to perpetuate the conflict, because it needed to maintain Hezbollah as a proxy force on Israel’s border, especially once Israel threatened to bomb the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities. As a result, Iran continued to supply Hezbollah with rockets and missiles to strike and provoke Israel. 

In 2006, a month-long war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah, which ended at a stand-still. Both sides declared victory. Lebanon incurred heavy damage, and it was enough of a deterrent for Hezbollah to cease major military operations against Israel.

Read More: Hezbollah Confirms Its Leader Hassan Nasrallah Was Killed In an Israeli Airstrike

During the 2010s, Hezbollah worked to become a state within a state.

The group's heavy hand generated protests from the Lebanese people — even Shi‘ite Muslims — who decried the corruption of Lebanon’s parliament, which Hezbollah essentially controlled, and its willingness to allow Iran to violate Lebanese sovereignty.

The Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, enabled Hezbollah to distract from its domestic woes. The group immediately began launching rockets into Israel, in solidarity with Hamas. It forced Israel to keep some military forces in northern Lebanon, while evacuating Israeli civilians.

Iran, too, sought to stoke the conflict against Israel to deflect from domestic unrest. It worked to resurrect what it called “The Axis of Resistance” — Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah. The Yemeni Houthis and Iraqi Shi‘ite militia Harakat al-Nujaba joined this Axis in targeting Israel as well.

Just as it did in 1982, Israel has responded with overwhelming force, and the smoldering conflict with Hezbollah now threatens to erupt into a full-blown war — possibly engulfing the entire region. 

Fundamentally, Israel has failed to learn the lesson of its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. While using massive military force achieved a tactical victory in the short term, it embedded trauma and violence in the Lebanese population for generations. That, in turn, spawned scores of recruits for Hezbollah. 

The Israeli military occupation also distracted from the ambivalence — or even hostility — felt by other Lebanese denominations and sects toward the extremist group, which helped it to become an established force within the country. Some Lebanese Christians and Sunni Muslims who wanted foreign troops out of their country had little choice but to rally around Hezbollah.

After four decades of Israel waging war against Hezbollah, the group continues to pose a threat. That raises the possibility that shifting gears is the best course: Israel could try to deescalate the conflict. Agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza would do much to deprive the already weakened Hezbollah of its stated justification for endless rocket attacks on Israel. Both the U.S. and France have pushed for implementing U.N. Resolution 1701, which would empower the Lebanese army and U.N. peacekeepers to monitor the area on the Lebanese-Israeli border, creating a buffer zone.

A cessation of hostilities would offer a more viable long-term solution — one that achieves sustainable security for Israel. So long as conflict continues, a new generation of Lebanese people grows up seeking vengeance, which fuels Hezbollah and sustains warfare that deprives Israel of what it most wants: security. 

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is associate professor of history at California State University San Marcos, and visiting lecturer at University of San Diego’s masters in international relations. He is co-author of A Concise History of the Middle East, 13th edition. 

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