The limits of reassessing Hezbollah’s record in the noise of battle

The late Sheikh Hafiz Salama, known as the leader of Suez’s popular resistance against the Israeli occupation, once told me about an episode following Israel’s July 2006 war on Lebanon. A pro-resistance Lebanese group had organized a solidarity visit for him, in which he would meet Lebanese officials opposed to Hezbollah as well as leaders of the party, as part of an effort to bring positions closer. Salama objected.

He said he had met only those who had stood openly “on the side of the resistance in the war”, and he affirmed, sternly, his support for a position shared by many who hold symbolic capital in the anti-Israel milieus of the Arab world. This was on the sidelines of an interview I conducted with him in 2012, just as Hezbollah was starting to draw down the capital it had built up in 2006 and to bleed moral standing in Syria, in the early days of the Arab Spring, when popular revolutions were beginning to tangle with civil wars.

It is a scrap of memory I return to now, nearly two years after the assassination of the party’s Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah, and three years after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7, which set off reactions that have yet to run their course.

I return to it because that moment points to one of the gravest dilemmas facing the party and the discourse it represented. The party chose to deal with it by putting the conflict with Israel first, and so standing with Syria’s former government, and by following the strategic logic that this priority dictates.

After all this time, Hezbollah’s experience has not undergone a serious “reassessment”. With every possibility still open and conditions on the ground so harsh, such a reassessment looks to the party like a luxury it cannot afford. Nor, for the most part, does it have the means to carry one out, especially now that those with the standing to conduct or oversee it are absent, chief among them its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Selective reassessments

Hezbollah is meeting its extraordinary circumstances, and the enormous blows it is still taking, with the instinct of survival. It is trying to get through by playing for time, rationing confrontations and shrinking its fronts (the political ones included), in the hope of repairing what it can of its organisational structure. It does so knowing full well that Israel, and its adversaries at home and abroad, are playing the same game, each working the same clock to bleed the party of fighters and resources or, at the very least, of morale.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese factions that present themselves as the alternative to Hezbollah and its project in Lebanon read the past few years only as a chance to refute the party’s narrative and record, root and branch. They are offering no real reassessment. They are seizing the chance to pounce on a wounded organization, one that fought more direct wars with Israel than anyone in the history of the conflict and yet secured the longest stretch of stability south Lebanon has known in its history.

Which is why this “alternative,” whether at the national and governmental level or in local representative politics, and whatever its habit of invoking the party’s record as the mother of all Lebanon’s problems, is not rejecting the organization or its project so much as the very idea of refusing to submit to Israel on principle. 

It does so either to avoid the costs submission might bring, as it sees them; or because the cost of submission does not fall on it directly, unlike the majority of people in south Lebanon and the Bekaa, say; or because it finds that submission gives its own political presence room to expand.

The logic of this selective “reassessment” extends to the discourse of some influential players outside Lebanon too, though their tone today is not necessarily hostile. Syria’s fledgling government, for instance, has shown, through its interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, a striking pragmatism, signalling a readiness to open a new page with Hezbollah while placing itself in the camp of “the logic of the state” and the party at the opposite pole.

Of course, it is not hard to spot the contradiction between the present of the main component of Damascus’s new authority and its past as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and, before that, the Nusra Front.

But the problem here is not that organisation’s crossing over into the state in itself, since that is what many fighting groups do once their reason for being has fallen away. It lies chiefly in whether those who hold power over communities in the Levant can undertake reassessments that are not selective and spare no one.

That means not loading parties now in retreat because the balance of power has flipped, Hezbollah among them, with more responsibility than they should rightly bear, whether under the weight of propaganda or in the scramble to clean up their own records.

Fairness before reassessment

The truth is that “the logic of the state” is one of those glittering slogans chewed over for years until they were all but hollowed out, like “sovereignty”, “realism”, “development” and the rest.

Hezbollah cannot be absolved of much responsibility here, in Lebanon or in the region. Yet I’d argue that its primary responsibility predates October 7, 2023, and that it is hard to charge it with that responsibility after that date in any fair reading, whatever the anti-Hezbollah propaganda machine says today.

It is hard to imagine the genocide in Gaza unfolding without the intervention of an ideological organization whose entire philosophy rests on a call to confront Israel’s “arrogance” (istikbar, in the movement’s own term). It is hard to picture the sheer scale of the sectarian incitement there would have been had the party kept its “neutrality” in the face of the slaughter in Gaza, though such incitement has been under way since the liberation of most of south Lebanon in 2000 at the latest. 

Nor is it easy to see Israel, which finds itself at a moment of second birth after 1948, stopping at the edge of Gaza, or not going to war with Iran twice and preparing now for a possible third, but for Hezbollah’s support front, which paved that road for it.

This is a heresy that is hard to digest. It is of a piece with the heresy of treating the party and its local and regional roles after 2000 as though it were a troublemaker in a region teeming with development projects and ruled by stability.

In fact it was a party targeted after the occupation of Iraq in 2003; then accused of assassinating Rafik Hariri, who had been careful to keep a line open to it despite their differences; a fighter in a war waged against it in 2006 under the banner of the “birth pangs of a New Middle East”; the object of an information war into which enormous sums were poured to demonize it, as US government documents later revealed; and a party dealing with the fallout of the Syrian war inside Lebanon, not only in Syria, at a time when Nusra and ISIS held territory in Lebanon’s Bekaa and kept Lebanese soldiers captive, and when Joseph Aoun, then army commander and now president, was fighting his battles alongside the party and in coordination with it, if unofficially.

The reassessment to come

None of this, as I said, absolves Hezbollah of reassessment or of responsibility. Those begin with its failure to give the plight of a large section of Syrians the weight it deserved during the Syrian war, or revolution, even if it judged that its strategic interest lay with the government. 

They run through a casual approach to Israel’s strength, and the spread of a discourse built on certainties that omits criticism and pushes it to the margins. They include answering the Gulf-funded sectarian discourse against it with an inflammatory counter-discourse of its own, as when it mobilized fighters for Syria by invoking Sayyida Zaynab.

The same goes for treating the Lebanese state as an optional extra, even when its own presence in it was strong. It overlooked the sensitivity of issues at home that can easily produce vertical social divisions, as with the May 2008 clashes. And it handled the demands of running an economy, and the dynamics of social protest, with a simplification that undermined even the most basic conditions of sustainability, as happened after Lebanon’s economic collapse in 2019 and the protest movement that followed, and more besides.

A deep and serious reassessment by Hezbollah is bound up with its efforts to tend its bereaved base, for one thing; to bring forward a leadership able to match an exceptional moment in Lebanon and the region, for another; and to prepare for wars that pass from country to country, which the region may live under for years. 

Yet whoever treats Israel lightly as it relives its expansionist founding moment, and reads the party’s origins, its spread and the durability of its presence only through the lens of its being an arm of Iran, is in no position, I think, to offer serious criticism that goes beyond taking sides and putting the party to direct political use.

One might argue that until a calmer hour than this loud and inflamed moment arrives, it will be hard for reassessments to take hold over the noise of battle. It is a battle of which Hezbollah, by its own doing or by its effects, still finds itself a central part, and in which its adversaries and its enemies find it so too.