A HOOVER INSTITUTION ESSAY FROM THE CARAVAN NOTEBOOK

The Middle East and the Islamic World

The Hezbollah Paradox
NICHOLAS BLANFORD

On July 12, the Iran-backed militia-cum-political party Hezbollah released a combat

video to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the outbreak of a monthlong war with
Israel. The video was an extended version of footage originally aired in 2016 of the
operation to abduct Israeli soldiers in a cross-border ambush. Two soldiers were
kidnapped in the operation, and another eight soldiers were killed in the ambush
and subsequent clashes, the highest fatality toll for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)
in a single day at the hands of Hezbollah since 1997 and one that triggered the
Israeli government’s decision to go to war. Hezbollah released the video to highlight
its martial prowess in successfully crossing the border and snatching the soldiers,
a reminder to the party faithful of past glories on the battlefield.

But it was another video featuring Hezbollah fighters that emerged less than a month
later, on August 6, that captured national attention and spread like wildfire on social
media. The footage showed furious residents of the Druze-populated village of Shwayya
in southeast Lebanon blocking two Hezbollah vehicles from passing through. One of
the vehicles, a blue Isuzu flatbed truck, was mounted with a 122mm Grad multibarrel
rocket launcher. The crowd beat the plainclothes Hezbollah men—one of them, visibly
frightened, was pushed into the back seat of the lead four-wheel-drive vehicle. A little
earlier, the Hezbollah men had launched a barrage of twenty Grad rockets from near
Shwayya toward the Shebaa Farms, a remote Israeli-occupied mountain strip seized in
the 1967 Arab-Israeli war but claimed by Beirut as Lebanese territory.

Hezbollah scrambled to contain the embarrassing and unprecedented images. It quickly

released footage of the actual rocket launch, showing the Isuzu truck in a dense thicket
of bushes and olive trees, saying that the vehicle had been nowhere near a populated
area. Hezbollah’s veteran secretary-general, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, expounded on the
incident at length in a subsequent speech, explaining why the party had launched
the rockets in the first place and berating those who had intercepted the vehicles
afterwards in Shwayya. “The incident was one thing, filming it and circulating it
was disgraceful, sad, and very bad,” Nasrallah said.1

Nevertheless, the incident in Shwayya was a bold reminder that the national consensus
over Hezbollah’s “resistance” against Israel long ago ended, with a large segment of
the Lebanese population resenting an organization that is ideologically beholden to
another country—Iran—and that unilaterally determines matters of war and peace
with Israel.
2

Hezbollah finds itself in this position because of its determination to preserve what
it calls its “resistance priority,” the ability to maintain a military force independent
of the Lebanese state and to deploy it according to its own calculations (and those of
Iran). Almost all other activities pursued by Hezbollah—its extensive social welfare
apparatus, its parliamentary presence, its political alliances and participation in
Lebanese governments—are not ends in themselves but are intended to better
preserve the resistance priority.

This single-minded protection of the resistance priority has resulted in a paradoxical

situation. Hezbollah has risen from obscure roots in the early 1980s to become the
most powerful political and military force in Lebanon. It is essentially the kingmaker
in Lebanese politics because, despite its broad political alliances and unlike other
political parties, it wields the implicit threat of violence to achieve its ends. It is not
only a domestic power; it has become a regional military power. In the past decade,
Hezbollah has fought in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen on a scale that completely dwarfs its
forty-year struggle against Israel.

Yet, at the same time, Hezbollah has never faced such an array of challenges, some
perhaps inevitable with the passage of time, others particularly grave, potentially
threatening to undermine the organization from within. They include the increasingly
difficult task of maintaining the “resistance” narrative with a new generation of
Lebanese Shias born after the end of the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon in
May 2000. Hezbollah also must expend considerable energy in maintaining its fragile
alliances with fickle and often venal politicians. Even within the Shia community,
there are tensions and strains, with many chafing under the weight of Hezbollah.
Financial issues also have been a burden for Hezbollah, especially since 2006, when
the organization grew massively in terms of manpower. Perhaps most insidiously,
corruption has finally taken root in Hezbollah, a concept that was considered
anathema twenty-five years ago, when it had a reputation for financial probity.

In looking at how Hezbollah has reached this paradoxical state of affairs, it is perhaps
useful to explore the party’s evolution over the past forty years. Its life span can be
broken down into four distinct chapters: the 1980s; the 1990s; 2000 to 2006; and the
post-2006 era. An analysis of these four phases in Hezbollah’s evolution demonstrates
that the party’s dominance in Lebanon today was not the outcome of a preplanned
and implemented program but the result of the organization’s reactive behavior
aimed at safeguarding its resistance priority in the face of unfolding, and previously
unforeseen, developments. Indeed, Hezbollah’s dominance of Lebanese politics may at
times sit uncomfortably with the party’s senior leadership, because, despite the benefits
it brings, such primacy also confers responsibilities and headaches that Hezbollah
would perhaps rather avoid. While Hezbollah retains considerable tactical autonomy,

Nicholas Blanford  •  The Hezbollah Paradox

 3

especially in dealing with Lebanese issues, it ultimately remains subservient to the

demands of the Iranian leadership. Strategically, Hezbollah is Iran’s greatest force
enabler, helping Tehran exert influence in all corners of the Middle East and serving as
a deterrence against any country contemplating a potential attack on Iran. That is why
Hezbollah has spent the past four decades building and then safeguarding its resistance
priority. Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general, articulated the
fundamental importance of the resistance priority in 2012, saying that all the party’s
assets, “including leadership, members and different capabilities, are in the service of
the resistance and supporting the resistance, and we have nothing but resistance as our
priority, from the leadership down to the last fighter.”2

The 1980s: The Zealous Years

Hezbollah began to coalesce as an entity in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon
in June 1982. However, its ideological genesis was rooted in the religious seminaries
of Najaf in southern Iraq, where from the early 1960s Lebanese theological students
took inspiration from radical Shia ideologues such as Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr and
Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini articulated the concept of the Wilayat al-Faqih, or
Guardianship of the Jurist, a model of governance for an Islamic state that was later
adopted and followed by Hezbollah. For Hezbollah, the Wali (Guardian) al-Faqih,
currently embodied by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, is the
leader whose knowledge of Islam is unsurpassed and whose rulings must be obeyed.

Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, discussions were held between the
country’s new rulers and Khomeini’s followers in Lebanon about forming an Islamic
resistance to fight Israel in south Lebanon. Israel had staged a partial invasion of
south Lebanon in 1978 before withdrawing and leaving a Lebanese militia ally to
patrol a strip of territory to keep the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) away
from the Israeli border. The resistance plans only began to take shape after Israel
invaded Lebanon in 1982 and reached Beirut in a second, more ambitious attempt
to drive the PLO out of Lebanon.

In the wake of the invasion, a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards set up a

base in Zabadani, a town in Syria close to Lebanon’s eastern border. From there, they
infiltrated Lebanon and began a process of mobilization and recruitment in the dusty
Shia villages of the northern Bekaa Valley. From the Bekaa, the new Iranian influence
moved west into the Shia-populated southern suburbs of Beirut, commonly known as
Dahiye, then gradually, as the Israelis retreated toward the border, into the south.

These were Hezbollah’s zealous years, when it could do pretty much as it—and
its Iranian overseers—wanted, taking advantage of the chaos and lawlessness of

Hoover Institution  •  Stanford University

4

Lebanon’s civil war. It was the era of the mass suicide bombing spectaculars: the
US Marines barracks at Beirut airport, the French paratroop headquarters,
the US embassy (twice), the IDF headquarters in Tyre (twice). Passenger planes
were hijacked and Westerners kidnapped and held for years, shuffled between Dahiye
and the Bekaa Valley. Hezbollah operated under a roster of pseudonyms, such as
Islamic Jihad and the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, helping it earn the
epithet “shadowy” when written about in the Western media.

In February 1985, Hezbollah stepped out of the shadows to deliver its manifesto,

known as the “Open Letter,” a document that explained who Hezbollah was and
what it wanted.3 It explained the party’s main goals, which can be boiled down to
ending the Israeli occupation of Lebanon as a precursor to the liberation of Palestine
and Jerusalem from “the talons of occupation”; the departure of the United States,
France, and their allies from Lebanon; placing the (Christian and at one time
Israel-allied) Phalange Party on trial “for the crimes they have committed against
both Muslims and Christians”; and a commitment to Islamic rule in Lebanon. Some
of those goals have come to pass or are no longer relevant, but the struggle against
Israel and the aspiration to live in a state run under Sharia law remain fundamental
ideological pillars.

The Open Letter was released as Israel was retreating southward toward the border,
where it maintained an occupation zone for the next fifteen years. Resistance at
the time was mainly conducted by the National Resistance Movement, a coalition
of nationalist and leftist groups based north of the Israeli front line, and the
Amal Movement, a Shia organization and rival to Hezbollah that was founded in
1974 by the Iranian-born cleric Imam Musa Sadr. The Amal resistance was waged
from 1982 inside the Israeli-occupied area, mainly in the villages around Tyre. It was
led by Mohammed Saad, a disciple of Sadr who, with limited resources and under
daily threat of arrest or worse, led a potent resistance movement that in large part
led to Israel’s decision in early 1985 to retreat to a border strip. The Israelis killed
Saad and some of his top lieutenants with a bomb in March 1985, during the Israeli
withdrawal to the border area. His death left a vacuum that was quickly filled by
Hezbollah. In 1986 Hezbollah was responsible for assassinating several key members
of the Communist Party to undermine the National Resistance Movement as part of
a process of monopolizing resistance against Israel.

Between 1988 and 1990, Hezbollah fought a series of brutal turf wars with the
Amal Movement in Dahiye and south Lebanon, a conflict that continues to rankle
within the Shia community today. The end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 left Syria
as the dominant power broker in Lebanon, which necessitated a change of behavior
from Hezbollah in order to ensure the continuation of its resistance priority.

Nicholas Blanford  •  The Hezbollah Paradox

 5

The 1990s: The Golden Years

For Hafez al-Assad, then president of Syria, Hezbollah represented a useful tool with
which to pressure Israel during the on-and-off peace negotiations of the 1990s that
began in 1991 following the Madrid peace conference. While other Lebanese militias
were disbanded, Hezbollah was permitted to retain its arms with Syria’s blessing under
the rubric of national resistance against the Israeli occupation.

During the 1990s, Hezbollah steadily grew more adept at bleeding the IDF in
south Lebanon. The Islamic Resistance was given greater autonomy to wage its
campaign as it saw fit. Its leaders understood that a guerrilla army, like Hezbollah’s,
wins by not losing, while a conventional army, like Israel’s, loses by not winning.
They understood the need to develop flexible tactics to fulfill a fixed strategy. The
strategy was to expel the IDF from south Lebanon through force of arms—no
negotiated settlement, no compromises, no conditions. Hezbollah’s small mobile units,
no more than a few hundred fighters in total, picked weapons suited to their hit-and-run
tactics. Russian wire-guided antitank missiles emerged on the battlefield in 1993,
and four years later Hezbollah was firing US TOW missiles at IDF armor.4 The roadside
bomb, the main source of IDF casualties, went through a rapid evolution from
command wire-detonated Claymore-style devices packed with steel balls to remote
radio control detonation and, later, cell phone detonation. By the end of the decade,
Hezbollah had developed explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) detonated by infrared
beams and shooting slugs of molten copper at seven miles per second, capable of
cutting through 120mm of armor.

Hezbollah filmed some of its attacks against the IDF and broadcast them on its
Al-Manar TV channel, which began broadcasting in 1994. Some of the videos
made for dramatic viewing, bringing the simmering guerrilla war into the homes
of Lebanese and Arabs across the region.

Hezbollah’s ever intensifying battle against the IDF saw a significant narrowing of the
Hezbollah-IDF fatality ratio during the decade. In 1990, five Hezbollah fighters were
killed for every IDF fatality. By the mid-1990s, the ratio had dropped to 1.5 Hezbollah
deaths for each IDF soldier and remained roughly the same until 2000.

While the Islamic Resistance concentrated on fighting the IDF in south Lebanon,
Hezbollah was opening itself up. After internal debate, it decided that it would put
forward candidates in the 1992 parliamentary election, irrespective of its ideological
opposition to Lebanon’s confessional political system. It fared well, winning eight seats
in the 128-seat parliament, and formed a small but potent opposition bloc to the
lavish borrow-and-spend postwar reconstruction policies of Rafik Hariri, who served
as prime minister from 1992 to 1998. Unlike other political parties contending for

Hoover Institution  •  Stanford University

6

representation in government, Hezbollah was content with its parliamentary presence.

Basking under the Syrian protective umbrella, it had no need to join the government
and was unwilling to wade deeper into the quid pro quos and horse-trading of daily
political life in Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s social welfare apparatus expanded, providing schools, hospitals, and

clinics to win the hearts and minds of the Shia community, at the expense of its
Amal rival. It developed relations with the patriarch of the Maronite community and
opened up to the international media. Suddenly, it was possible for Western journalists
to sit down with senior Hezbollah officials and discuss the topics du jour over cups
of coffee and glasses of fruit juice. Hezbollah took journalists to the front lines in the
south to meet the fighters and see their weapons.

Gradually, a cross-confessional consensus began to emerge that supported, or at

least tolerated, Hezbollah’s resistance work. Even those Lebanese who were naturally
suspicious of Hezbollah’s ideology would concede respect for its martial activities in
the south. In April 1996, when Israel mounted a punishing two-week air and artillery
blitz against Lebanon, Hezbollah was able to drive into middle-class Christian
neighborhoods, like Ashrafiyah in Beirut, with donation buckets attached to the
car’s hood and receive fistfuls of cash from residents.

Political scientists began to refer to the “Lebanonization” of Hezbollah, a potential

model for how an Islamist jihadist organization could find accommodation within a
pluralistic multi-confessional society. But Hezbollah’s shift in the 1990s, compared to
its uncompromising actions in the previous decade, was a behavioral decision to better
preserve the resistance priority during the post–civil war era of Pax Syriana. It was not
a conceptual change in identity and belief. This was well illustrated years later in 2009
when Hezbollah released an update to its original 1985 Open Letter. The update
was a lengthy but pragmatic political treatise that tailored Hezbollah’s views to the
prevailing political realities at the time. Nasrallah read out the entire document at a
press conference. At the end of his oration, a reporter asked why there was no reference
to the Wilayat al-Faqih or the party’s preference for an Islamic state in Lebanon.
Nasrallah explained that these ideological pillars, originally articulated in 1985,
still applied, and therefore there was no need to repeat them in the new document.
In 2002, when Sheikh Naim Qassem told me in an interview that the party was mulling
an update to the Open Letter, he explained that Hezbollah had to be “flexible” in
politics, but “the resistance against Israel has been our core belief and that has never
changed.”5

By the end of the 1990s, Israeli public opinion had swung against the continued
occupation of south Lebanon. Ehud Barak was elected prime minister of Israel in

Nicholas Blanford  •  The Hezbollah Paradox

 7

May 1999 on the pledge of bringing the troops home within a year of taking office.
He proposed to achieve his promise by first striking a peace deal with Syria, which would
then allow for an orderly withdrawal from Lebanon. The peace deal never emerged,
however, and in a few chaotic days in May 2000, the last IDF soldiers pulled out of
Lebanese territory, ending an occupation that had begun twenty-two years earlier.

2000–2006: The Consensus Cracks

For Hezbollah, the Israeli withdrawal was a moment of triumph. Never before had an
Arab military force compelled Israel to retreat unconditionally from occupied territory.
But in many respects, the Israeli withdrawal was something of a Pyrrhic victory for
Hezbollah. It left the party to explain how it could continue justifying resistance when
there was no occupation left to resist. Nevertheless, the Israeli military presence in
the Shebaa Farms and the continued detention of Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails
were cited as reasons why it would be premature for Hezbollah to disarm. More
importantly, Hezbollah continued to enjoy the protection of Syria, which in June 2000
saw a new president in place, Bashar al-Assad, son of Hafez. Still, the consensus that
supported Hezbollah’s resistance activities in the 1990s was beginning to falter. Some
politicians began offering creative solutions in which Hezbollah would turn into a
southern border protection force under the Lebanese army’s chain of command. But
such suggestions would go nowhere while Damascus still held the balance of power.
For its part, Hezbollah continued low-level warfare against Israel, launching a sporadic
campaign against the IDF in the Shebaa Farms, what it dubbed “reminder operations,”
letting the Israelis know that they were still occupying Lebanese soil (as far as Lebanon
was concerned) and that Hezbollah was still around.

The ground began to shift, however, as the younger Assad flexed his muscles. In
February 2005, Rafik Hariri was killed in a massive truck bomb explosion in central
Beirut. His death came as opposition was mounting to Syrian hegemony over Lebanon.
Instead of cowing the nascent anti-Syrian opposition as the perpetrators of Hariri’s
demise may have anticipated, the murder galvanized it into action. Mass anti-Syrian
demonstrations in Beirut, combined with international pressure, forced Assad to pull
his troops out of Lebanon in April 2005.

The rapid pace of developments following Hariri’s assassination caught Hezbollah

by surprise. With Syria having disengaged from Lebanon, Hezbollah could no longer
rely on the cover of Damascus and had to become more proactive to defend its
resistance priority. Ahead of parliamentary elections in June 2005, Hezbollah reached
a formal alliance with its erstwhile rival Amal. From now on, calls for disarming
Hezbollah would be tantamount to disarming—thus weakening—the Shia community.
The anti-Syrian, Western-backed March 14 coalition triumphed in the elections and
dominated the next government, headed by a former Hariri lieutenant, Fouad Siniora.

Hoover Institution  •  Stanford University

8

But for the first time, Hezbollah had a position in the government, taking up the
energy portfolio. Hezbollah recognized that with Syria gone it needed a seat at the
table when vital decisions were to be taken.

Hezbollah consolidated its political alliances in February 2006 by signing a

memorandum of understanding with a major Christian party, the Free Patriotic
Movement, headed by Michel Aoun, a former commander of the Lebanese army. Aoun
had fled to France in 1990 when his quixotic and costly “war of liberation” against
Syria ended with his troops killed or captured, leaving Damascus to reign supreme
over Lebanon. In his Parisian exile, Aoun had railed against Hezbollah and Syria’s
domination of Lebanon. He even boasted of being an architect of the 2004 UN Security
Council Resolution 1559, which called for Hezbollah’s disarming and the removal of
Syrian forces from Lebanon. That Aoun was now allied to Hezbollah underlined the
fluid and unpredictable nature of Lebanese politics. The unspoken quid pro quo was
that in exchange for bringing a large segment of the Christian community in alliance
with Hezbollah, the party would use its growing heft to ensure that Aoun would be
able to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming president.

With the March 14 coalition in the ascendancy, the armed status of Hezbollah
inevitably came to dominate political discourse. In the early months of 2006, several
roundtable dialogue sessions were held in which the country’s top leadership
debated weighty issues of national interest, chief of which was the fate of Hezbollah’s
weapons. Hezbollah argued that its arms were necessary to defend Lebanon, because
the Lebanese army alone, as a weaker conventional force, was no match for the IDF.
Only Hezbollah’s hybrid style of warfare—a nonstate actor employing irregular
and conventional tactics and weapons in a single battlespace—could stand up
to the threat posed by Israel. Hezbollah had carefully crafted its public defense of
the Islamic Resistance, but it failed to convince its critics. However, the stark reality
was that the Lebanese government and army were in no position to forcibly disarm
Hezbollah.

While the debate over Hezbollah’s arms was under way, the party was not resting
on the laurels of its May 2000 ousting of the IDF from Lebanon. Amid great secrecy,
Hezbollah had built a Maginot Line in the hills and valleys of south Lebanon, a network
of underground tunnels, bunkers, ambush sites, arms storage facilities, and observation
posts in readiness for what was considered an inevitable future conflict with Israel. It
acquired new weapons systems, including advanced Russian antitank missiles, antiship
cruise missiles, air defense systems, and longer-range surface-to-surface rockets.

On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah ambushed an IDF patrol along the border, snatching
two soldiers to use as bargaining chips to secure the release of a Lebanese militant who
had been languishing in an Israeli jail since 1978. Hezbollah expected a brief flare-up

Nicholas Blanford  •  The Hezbollah Paradox

 9

in south Lebanon as a result of the abduction before things would settle down and
negotiations would begin for a prisoner swap. Instead, the government of Ehud Olmert
chose to go to war.

The Israelis anticipated that Hezbollah could be cowed through the use of air power
alone and that there would be no need for a ground assault into south Lebanon. But
the Israelis failed to recognize that the Hezbollah of 2006 was not the Hezbollah
of 2000. Despite heavy air strikes, the flow of Hezbollah-launched rockets battering
northern Israel intensified and steadily inched further south as larger systems were
deployed. Eventually, the IDF sent troops across the border in a somewhat scattershot
manner only for them to be confronted by well-entrenched and determined Hezbollah
fighters. IDF soldiers spoke of Hezbollah fighters popping out of the ground, firing
rocket-propelled grenades, and disappearing again. Hezbollah even disabled an
Israeli naval vessel with its antiship cruise missiles, an event that Al-Manar
broadcast live during a speech by Nasrallah.

The war ended after thirty-four days with Hezbollah declaring a “divine victory,”
leaving the Israelis humiliated and stunned in the aftermath. Hezbollah’s opponents
in Lebanon had bitten their lips during the conflict, but once it was over, calls for
Hezbollah’s disarming began to increase. Hezbollah may have proclaimed a divine
victory, but it was one that cost the lives of some 1,200 Lebanese civilians and caused
billions of dollars of damage.

Post 2006: Clawing Its Way to the Top of the Pile

Lebanese politics was further riven by the UN investigation into the Hariri
assassination. It was widely assumed that Syria was responsible for Hariri’s death,
as he had been shifting toward the anti-Damascus opposition in the last months
of his life. The formation of an international tribunal to investigate the crime and
try those indicted required the consent of the Lebanese government. But Hezbollah
deeply opposed the investigation and tribunal, accusing it of being a Western tool
to weaken its ally, the Assad regime. In November 2006, all five Shia ministers in
the government resigned on the eve of a vote to endorse a draft agreement with the
UN on the Hariri tribunal. Despite the resignations, the vote went ahead as planned.
A month later, Hezbollah and its allies launched a mass sit-in in downtown Beirut in
an attempt to collapse the Siniora government. Hezbollah thought that Siniora would
cave within days, but the former finance minister proved more resilient than expected.
As the months of stalemate ticked by, the tent city protest in central Beirut became
increasingly banal and was a stark example of how Hezbollah—still a novice at playing
the political game—had miscalculated. The sit-in, which lasted eighteen months, led
to the closure of shops, cafes, and restaurants, ruining the economy of central Beirut,
a state from which it has never recovered.

Hoover Institution  •  Stanford University

10

In May 2008, the Siniora government itself overreached by issuing a set of decisions

that crossed a Hezbollah red line, including launching an investigation into the party’s
private telecommunications network and firing the pro-Hezbollah head of security
at Beirut airport. In response, Hezbollah dispatched its fighters along with allies into
west Beirut to besiege the homes and offices of leading March 14 politicians. The
unprecedented action triggered a week of fighting that left more than one hundred
people dead and brought the country to the brink of civil war.

An agreement brokered by Qatar saw an end to the fighting and the election of a new
president, Michel Suleiman, a former commander of the Lebanese army. But Lebanon
remained bitterly divided between the pro- and anti-Hezbollah factions.

Then, in early 2009, reports began to emerge that the UN investigation into Hariri’s
death had shifted direction from Syria toward Hezbollah. As it transpired, an analysis
of cell phone calls had teased out several networks linked to Hariri’s assassination.
One of the networks led directly to Hezbollah. The Lebanese police captain who had
almost single-handedly conducted the analysis and discovered the networks was killed
in a car bomb explosion in January 2008. That the Shia Hezbollah could have been
responsible for the death of an iconic Sunni leader was a staggering development and
further poisoned the already strained relations between Lebanon’s Sunni and Shia
communities. It also raised ominous questions about the identity of the perpetrators
of a host of assassinations and attempted assassinations of politicians, security
officials, and journalists that plagued Lebanon after Hariri’s murder in 2005. Could
Hezbollah have been behind them as well? In 2012, two potential Christian rivals
to Aoun for the presidency were targeted for assassination. In one attempt, involving
a booby-trapped elevator in the intended victim’s building, a Hezbollah man was
identified on camera when he scuffled with the politician’s bodyguards. He was never
arrested. The other assassination attempt involved a team of at least three snipers
armed with 12.7mm rifles firing simultaneously at the targeted individual, walking in
his garden, from a hilltop nine hundred yards away. The bullets missed the Christian
leader by inches, but for many Lebanese, including the politician, the modus operandi
clearly pointed in only one direction. The sheen of noble resistance against Israel was
becoming increasingly tarnished.

As for the speculation that Hezbollah was behind the Hariri assassination, such was
the seriousness of the claim that it was treated as a taboo subject in the Lebanese
media for almost a year until Nasrallah finally addressed the accusations in an
interview in March 2010. In subsequent months, Nasrallah expounded upon the
accusations repeatedly, declaring that it was part of a plot against Hezbollah, that
the Israelis were responsible for Hariri’s death and warning, “Mistaken is he who
believes that we will allow the arrest or detention of any of our mujahideen. The hand
that attempts to reach them will be cut off.”6 In June 2011, the Special Tribunal for

Nicholas Blanford  •  The Hezbollah Paradox

 11

Lebanon, headquartered in the Netherlands, issued four indictments against Hezbollah

members, including Mustafa Badreddine, a top Hezbollah security officer.

Foreign Interventions
The indictments were issued just as unrest against the Assad regime in Syria was
turning into open rebellion. The conflict in Syria, which had morphed into civil war
by the end of 2011, presented a new challenge for Hezbollah. The Assad regime was
the critical geostrategic linchpin connecting Hezbollah to its patron Iran on the other
side of the Middle East. Syria provided strategic depth for Hezbollah and was the main
conduit for the transfer of weapons and military equipment. If the Alawite-dominated
Assad regime was toppled and replaced by an entity better reflecting the majority
Sunni demographic, it could entail the end of the Syria-Iran alliance of three decades,
leaving Hezbollah isolated from Iran and potentially facing a newly emboldened
Sunni community in Lebanon. By early 2012, Assad was clearly in trouble as rebel
forces began encroaching on the outskirts of Damascus amid mass defections from
the Syrian army.

Gradually, reports began to emerge in Lebanon about secret funerals being held
in Shia villages in south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. Speculation mounted that
Hezbollah was dispatching fighters to assist the Assad regime in its existential struggle.
Hezbollah leaders initially rejected such claims outright.

“This is absolutely untrue. There are no thousands or a thousand or even half a soldier
[in Syria],” Nasrallah said in an interview on Al-Manar in November 2011. “In this
issue we do not interfere at all.”7

The rumors persisted, however. In October 2012, a senior Hezbollah commander was

killed just across the border inside Syria in clashes with rebel groups. He was given a
lavish military funeral in his village. Nasrallah admitted that the commander had been
helping defend villages populated by Lebanese that lay inside Syria. By December 2012,
videos were emerging of Hezbollah fighters in Damascus. Nasrallah later justified the
deployment by saying that they were protecting the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab, the
Prophet Mohammed’s granddaughter, from being demolished by “Takfiris,” a term
used to describe extremist Sunnis.

By early 2013, it was common knowledge that Hezbollah had deployed sizable numbers
of fighters in Syria. In May 2013, the group’s militia led an assault on the rebel-held
town of Qusayr, lying five miles north of the border with Lebanon. During the battle,
Nasrallah finally admitted that Hezbollah was aiding the Assad regime. He justified
it essentially on two grounds. First, the Assad regime was the backbone of resistance
against Israel. If Assad was to fall, it would mean the end of the Palestinian cause.

Hoover Institution  •  Stanford University

12

The second reason was that the rebel forces in Syria were largely composed of Takfiris
who viewed anyone that did not share their austere interpretation of Islam as a heretic.
It is better that we fight them in Syria than have to face them in Lebanon, Nasrallah
explained.

In general, the Hezbollah support base accepted that rationale, while the rest of
the country opposed it. Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria contradicted the Baabda
Declaration of 2012 in which President Suleiman had persuaded political leaders to
agree that Lebanon would not interfere in the war raging next door. Also, the sight
of Hezbollah fighters battling fellow Muslims—albeit Sunnis—who were trying to
overthrow a brutal regime flew in the face of the party’s original credo of championing
the oppressed and subjugated. Even its original Open Letter of 1985 was addressed to
“free downtrodden men.” More practically, Hezbollah turned its Shia constituency into
a target of revenge from Sunni extremist groups. Between July 2013 and June 2014,
suicide bombers struck multiple times in Dahiye and parts of the northern Bekaa, killing
more than one hundred people and wounding more than a thousand. As the conflict
dragged on, Hezbollah’s fatality rate increased in tandem with doubts and contention
within the party’s support base, which was tiring of seeing sons, brothers, husbands, and
fathers returning in body bags. Brightly colored portraits of new “martyrs” smothered
the walls of Shia villages alongside the sun-bleached pictures of earlier generations of
fallen fighters. Some fighters returning from the horrors of the Syria war suffered from
post-traumatic stress disorder. Petty crime and drug use increased in the cramped streets
of Dahiye. Other fighters returned with booty captured on the battlefield, an act strictly
forbidden by the Hezbollah leadership, but it occurred nonetheless. The black-market
price of an AK-47 assault rifle plummeted as so many were brought back from Syria.

But Syria was not the only foreign intervention. After the Islamic State swept across
northern Iraq and a swath of eastern Syria in 2014, Hezbollah dispatched some
four hundred fighters to Iraq to help provide advice, training, and intelligence to the
Shia-dominated Hashd al-Shaabi volunteer force. Nasrallah was able to justify that
intervention on the basis that Hezbollah was assisting the anti–Islamic State coalition,
which included US forces. But Hezbollah has remained silent on its third foreign
excursion. Following the Saudi-led coalition’s offensive in 2015 against the Houthis of
Yemen, Hezbollah sent specialists to Yemen to assist their ally with rocket launches,
intelligence gathering, communications, and training. The closest Nasrallah has come
to admitting a Hezbollah presence in Yemen was in June 2018, when he coyly denied
reports from Saudi Arabia that eight Hezbollah fighters had been killed there.

“It is true that one day I clearly said that we did not send fighters to Yemen because our
brothers in Yemen do not need fighters. Is there something else—counselors, military
aid . . . ? We do not confirm it nor deny it due to a number of interests,” he said.8

Nicholas Blanford  •  The Hezbollah Paradox

 13

Hezbollah could justify its roles in Syria and Iraq as being in the interests of Lebanon,
arguments that one either accepted or rejected. But Hezbollah’s reticence over the
Yemen engagement owes to the fact that there is no Lebanon-centric reason why it
should be there essentially helping the Houthis fight a country, Saudi Arabia, that
has long been a close ally and supporter of Lebanon. Small wonder, perhaps, that
in recent years the Saudi Arabia of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman has washed its hands of Lebanon, considering it having turned into a
Persian satrapy.

In May 2014, President Suleiman’s six-year term in office came to an end. In honor

of its 2006 agreement, Hezbollah backed its ally Aoun to be the next head of state
while the March 14 coalition—by now greatly weakened—offered alternative names.
In Lebanon, presidents are elected by the 128 members of parliament rather than a
popular vote. However, a stalemate soon arose, because Hezbollah and its allies refused
to attend parliamentary sessions to vote for the president unless they could guarantee
that Aoun would win. Without quorum being achieved, each session was canceled.
The deadlock persisted for two and a half years, leaving the government in a caretaker
capacity, unable to fully enact legislation. The economy declined significantly during
this period. Eventually, the last browbeaten holdouts in the March 14 block caved to
the inevitable and accepted Aoun as president. The vote was held in November 2016,
and Aoun was installed in Baabda Presidential Palace.

In October 2019, mass protests erupted across the country in response to a government

decision to impose a tax on the use of WhatsApp messaging service in a crass attempt
to raise desperately needed state revenues. By now Lebanon was essentially bankrupt,
the result of three decades of mismanagement, corruption, and outright theft by
a cabal of political bosses, most of whom had headed militias during the civil war
and swapped military fatigues for suits in 1990. The banks imposed capital controls
on US dollar–denominated accounts and the Lebanese lira, pegged since 1997 at
LL1,500 to the dollar, began to tank.

The “thawra” (Arabic for revolution) spread across the country, even into areas where
Hezbollah had influence, such as south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. But while
the sentiment of outrage against the political elite (including Hezbollah) remained
undiminished, public opposition in these areas shrank because of the intimidation
tactics of Hezbollah and Amal. Even the huge protests in central Beirut were disrupted
when Amal and Hezbollah supporters attacked demonstrators with sticks and stones
and claimed that the thawra was engineered by the United States. It was the ultimate
irony: Hezbollah, a party that originally claimed to represent the oppressed and openly
rejected Lebanon’s confessional political system, had become, by the end of 2019, the
greatest defender of the corrupt and sclerotic status quo.

Hoover Institution  •  Stanford University

14

Multiple Challenges
Of all the challenges facing Hezbollah today, corruption is arguably the greatest threat.
It began to take root during Hezbollah’s massive post-2006 expansion in manpower. The
party leadership attempted to stamp it out at first, but corruption is like a cancer that
is hard to fully excise. It eats away at the moral fabric of an organization and causes
internal resentment and jealousies. Corruption breeds disrespect from the cadres and
supporters alike, weakening Hezbollah’s traditionally strong sense of discipline and
obedience, the glue that binds the constituent parts of the organization into an effective
whole. Fighters grew disillusioned at the sight of mid-ranking party functionaries
building apartment blocks and buying Range Rovers for their children while they have
been sacrificing themselves on Syria’s bloody battlefields. There are many anecdotes of
veteran combatants leaving the party, claiming that the Hezbollah of today is not the
Hezbollah they originally joined.

Hezbollah’s long-term survival is less dependent on the financial and material largesse
of Iran and its own revenue-generating activities than on maintaining the support of
Lebanon’s Shia community. Without that support, Hezbollah cannot survive. That is
why it has expended so much energy and money into providing social welfare support
for the community since its first days in the early 1980s. Hezbollah still retains the
support of the majority of Lebanese Shias, but cracks have emerged in that consensus.
The intensity of support is not what it was, waning even further amid the gravity of
Lebanon’s economic depression.

Since the 1980s, Hezbollah has cultivated what it calls a “society of resistance”
in which all members of the community in one way or another contribute to the
cause. This could mean joining the Islamic Resistance as a fighter, donating funds to
Hezbollah, attending rallies, or even stoically enduring Israeli air and artillery strikes
at times of war. The process begins at a young age when a toddler is dressed up in
military fatigues, is handed a toy gun, and participates in the annual Jerusalem Day
parades. As a teenager, he may attend one of Hezbollah’s Mustafa schools and during
the holidays join the Islamic Scouts for summer camps where they study Islam and
engage in some pseudomilitary training. By the age of eighteen and eligible for
recruitment into the Islamic Resistance, he is firmly committed to the cause. It is a
cyclical process running from generation to generation.

But that process is growing harder with each passing year as memories of the conflict
with Israel fade. Israel withdrew from Lebanon more than two decades ago. For many
young Shias, the only experience they have of the Israeli threat is observing the
contrails of Israeli jets flying reconnaissance patrols high above the Bekaa Valley. The
fervor of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution is but a distant memory for aging Hezbollah
warriors and has no resonance nor allure for young Lebanese Shias. Hezbollah has not

Nicholas Blanford  •  The Hezbollah Paradox

 15

fought a sustained battle against Israel for fifteen years. In that time, it has only staged
eight claimed attacks against Israel, all of them retaliations for Israeli actions.

Hezbollah also has to deal with the differing dynamics of the three main Shia
population centers in Lebanon: the south, the Bekaa Valley and Dahiye. The Shia
community in Lebanon is not homogenous. The south remains generally supportive of
Hezbollah because of its proximity to Israel and stronger memories of Israeli occupation.
But anecdotally, support is declining, turning from heartfelt emotion to paying lip
service to a powerful party. That is especially true as the harsh realities of Lebanon’s
economic collapse bite ever deeper. The notion of resistance against Israel seems almost
a luxury when a father has seen his salary depreciate by 90 percent in the past two years
and he struggles to provide food for his family.

The Bekaa Valley is dominated by powerful tribes and clans that have always resented
the presence of Hezbollah, which they view as a rival, even though the area provides the
greatest source of recruitment into Hezbollah’s ranks. A commonly heard refrain in
the Bekaa is that Hezbollah and the Amal Movement deliberately keep the area starved
of government funds in order to make residents dependent on the largesse of the
two parties.

Dahiye is a melting pot of Shias drawn to Beirut from the south, and the Bekaa and
has its own unruly urban dynamic. The economic crisis in Lebanon has seen crime
soar in the district, with shootings commonplace.

Even the caliber of Hezbollah’s fighters is more varied than a quarter century ago.
In the mid-1990s, the average Hezbollah fighter underwent an extensive process of
ideological and military training to become a disciplined combatant and a committed
adherent to the Wilayat al-Faqih. Those fighters still exist as a majority in the Islamic
Resistance today, but there are secondary and tertiary tiers as well. In the wake of the
2006 war, Hezbollah underwent a massive recruitment drive, in part to strengthen
its ranks in the event of another round with Israel but also to bind more Shias to the
party at a time of confrontation with the March 14 parliamentary coalition. The rapid
pace of recruitment continued during the Syria intervention. Theoretically, Hezbollah
accepts only carefully vetted modest young men motivated by Islam and believers in
the cause against Israel. But many of today’s new recruits are drawn by the promise
of a monthly salary of some six hundred dollars, as well as the social welfare perks of
membership. For the new recruits about to go to Syria, the rigors and thoroughness
of the usual religious and military training process have been often abandoned. The
recruits are given a month of basic military training in the Bekaa Valley before being
deployed to Syria, where they undergo a Darwinian process in which the unlucky
or inept are killed off while the luckier and more skillful survive. Hezbollah attempts
to inculcate the new recruits with the party’s religious credo while they serve as

Hoover Institution  •  Stanford University

16

combatants. Traditionally, the religious lessons come first, long before a recruit handles
a weapon for the first time. These second- and third-tier fighters lack the religious and
moral discipline of earlier generations of Hezbollah combatants, leaving them more
susceptible to corrupt practices and indiscipline.

Navigating the Paradox

Since 2005, Hezbollah, out of the necessity of defending its resistance priority,
has clawed its way to dominance in Lebanon. While its power is unrivaled and its
resistance priority faces no realistic domestic challenge, Hezbollah’s rise to the top
has come at a cost. Twenty-five years ago, Hezbollah was a lean, sufficiently financed,
internally secure organization sharply focused on the confrontation with Israel in
south Lebanon and aloof from the fickle complexities of Lebanese politics. It had
earned a general consensus of support from Lebanese of all confessions, and it had
a reputation for financial integrity; any donor could be assured that his or her funds
would go toward supporting a school or clinic or purchasing arms but would not end
up in someone’s back pocket.

Today, certainly, Hezbollah has proven to be part of the greatest success Iran has had
in exporting the Islamic Revolution. It has evolved into arguably the most formidable
nonstate military force in the world. Hezbollah fields in excess of 30,000 trained
fighters, many of whom will have gained invaluable combat experience on the bloody
battlefields of Syria. Israel estimates Hezbollah’s arsenal includes up to 150,000 rockets
and missiles. Some of these guided missiles carry 1,100-pound warheads and
reportedly are capable of striking within ten yards of their target. Hezbollah has
advanced antiaircraft capabilities as well as an air wing of reconnaissance and combat
drones, and an amphibious warfare unit for potential seaborne infiltrations of Israeli
territory. Small wonder, perhaps, that in recent years Israel has classified Hezbollah as
its number one threat.

Yet at the same time, Hezbollah has become a bloated behemoth, fielding a cash-
swallowing army along with a vast supporting bureaucracy, saddled with corruption,
linked to unreliable political allies, pressured by US sanctions, treated with outright
hostility by many Lebanese, facing questionable long-term support from Lebanese Shias,
and vilified by Sunnis in Lebanon and the broader region. This is the paradox
Hezbollah faces.

How Hezbollah navigates its multiple challenges amid Lebanon’s economic

collapse remains to be seen. But for as long as Iran has a use for its Lebanese proxy,
Hezbollah’s leaders will do what it takes to preserve the resistance priority, regardless
of the consequences for Lebanon. Such is the single-minded obligation of fealty to the
Wali al-Faqih.

Nicholas Blanford  •  The Hezbollah Paradox

 17

NOTES
1 ​“The Speech of Hezbollah’s Secretary-General His Eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on the
15th Anniversary of the Great Victory in the July 2006 War,” Alahed News, August 7, 2021, [Link]
.­alahednews​.­com​.­lb​/­61792​/­602. The rockets were launched a day after Israel staged air strikes in
south Lebanon, the first to hit the area since the 2006 war. The air strikes were a follow-up response to the
launching of rockets on August 4 from south Lebanon into Israel. Two rockets landed in northern Galilee
without causing casualties or damage. Israel initially responded with artillery fire, but the subsequent air
strikes marked a small retaliatory escalation, although the Israelis were careful to note that the air-to-
surface missiles struck open, unpopulated areas. Hezbollah felt compelled to respond to the air strikes
but also made sure to note in its statement that the rockets struck “open areas.”

2 ​Sheikh Naim Qassem, “We Do Not Hide Our Martyrs, and All We Do in Hezbollah Is to Serve the
Resistance,” Alahed News, October 6, 2012, [Link]
.­WU8rnujys2x.

3 ​For a full English-language translation, see Augustus Richard Norton, Amal and the Shia: Struggle for the
Soul of Lebanon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 167.

4 ​Ironically, the TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) missiles were originally sold to Iran
by Israel in the 1980s as part of what became the arms-for-hostages scandal. Iran shipped the TOWs to
Hezbollah from 1997 to use against the IDF in south Lebanon.

5 ​See Nicholas Blanford, Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel (New York:
Random House, 2011), 480.

6 ​“Sayyed Nasrallah Full Speech on Martyr’s Day November 11 2010,” retrieved October 18, 2021,
Alahed News, [Link]

7 ​“Full Script of Sayyed Nasrallah’s Interview with Al-Manar TV on 24-10-2011,” Alahed News, retrieved
October 18, 2021, [Link]

8 ​Sayed Hasan, “Hassan Nasrallah: Hezbollah Is Ready to Fight Saudi-US Coalition in Yemen,” Dailymotion,
retrieved October 18, 2021, [Link] ww​.­dailymotion​.­com​/­video​/­x6o4ac4.

Hoover Institution  •  Stanford University

 19

The publisher has made this work available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 4.0 International license.
To view a copy of this license, visit [Link]

The views expressed in this essay are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff,
officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

hoover​.­org

Copyright © 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

27 26 25 24 23 22 21   7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Hoover Institution  •  Stanford University

 About The Caravan Notebook
The Caravan Notebook is a platform for essays and podcasts
that offer commentary on a variety of subjects, ranging
from current events to cultural trends, and including topics
that are too local or too specific from the larger questions
addressed quarterly in The Caravan.
About the Author We draw on the membership of Hoover’s Herbert and Jane
Dwight Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic
World, and on colleagues elsewhere who work that same
political and cultural landscape. Russell Berman chairs the
project from which this effort originates.

The Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group

on the Middle East and the Islamic World
NICHOLAS BLANFORD
The Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on the Middle
Nicholas Blanford is a Beirut-
East and the Islamic World studies a range of political,
based consultant, author, and
social, and cultural problems in the region with the goal
nonresident senior fellow
with the Atlantic Council’s of informing American foreign policy choices and the
Middle East Programs. He wider public discussion. The working group draws on the
is the author of Warriors intellectual resources of an array of scholars and practitioners
of God: Inside Hezbollah’s from within the United States and abroad to foster the
Thirty-Year Struggle against
pursuit of modernity, to combat Islamist radicalism, to
Israel (Random House, 2011)
promote human flourishing, and to spread the rule of
and Killing Mr. Lebanon: The
Assassination of Rafik Hariri law, human rights, and democratic governance in Islamic
and Its Impact on the Middle lands—developments that are critical to the very order of
East (IB Tauris, 2006). the international system. The working group is chaired by
Hoover fellow Russell Berman.

For more information about this Hoover Institution Working

Group, visit us online at www​.­hoover​.­org​/­research​-­teams​/­middle​
-­east​-­and​-­islamic​-­world​-­working​-­group.

Hoover Institution, Stanford University Hoover Institution in Washington

434 Galvez Mall 1399 New York Avenue NW, Suite 500
Stanford, CA 94305-6003 Washington, DC 20005
650-723-1754 202-760-3200
Author Name  •  Essay Title