Introduction
Lebanon is an Arab country of 5.5 million in Southwest Asia. Smaller than Connecticut, it is bordered on the north and east by Syria, on the south by occupied Palestine and on the west by the Mediterranean Sea. This tiny country has had its striving for self-determination, sovereignty and independence repeatedly stifled and betrayed, and its people divided, traumatized and tortured by Western imperialism and its agents, the main one being Israel.
But the imperialists have never prevailed for long. Again and again the people of Lebanon have risen up to demand freedom from western and Zionist domination; the replacement of a stifling cast-like government imposed by colonialism with a democratic one granting and enforcing equal rights for all; for union with the Arab world of which they are historically, culturally and economically a part; and for the national rights of the Palestinian people whose freedom is bound to the freedom of the Lebanese.
Fought Ottoman control only to be colonized by western powers
Located strategically at the intersection of three continents and, in modern times, in the world’s most oil-rich area, foreign governments have long sought to control Lebanon. France first sent in troops in 1860.
The Arab world, including Lebanon, was under the control of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years until the end of World War I. At its peak, the empire included most of the predominantly Arab Middle East and North Africa, which also included Kurds, Armenians, Berbers, Assyrians and other nationalities.
Before and during World War, 1914-18, Ottoman rulers confiscated for its army the food that was normally traded to Lebanon. This caused the starvation deaths of 200,000 in the Mt. Lebanon region.
When angry Lebanese Arab nationalists rose up to demand independence, they were repressed and executed. Many aligned with the Allies because Britain and France and Russia (before the 1917 Russian Revolution) promised to support an independent Arab state if the population would rise up against the Ottomans.
Sykes-Picot Treaty and the Balfour Declaration
Following World War I, and after rising up against the Ottomans, the people of the region expected independence. Instead, they were saddled with new colonial masters.
The Allies had no intention of supporting Arab independence. Even before the war was over France and Britain divided the region between themselves as colonies in the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty. Then Britain issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration, supporting a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine as part of a plan to secure British domination of the Middle East.
The outraged Arab people saw the Sykes-Picot Accord and the Balfour Declaration as a double betrayal. They pushed ahead for independence, with the intention of creating a Greater Syria. They elected delegates from all the regions of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine who came together in the General Syria Congress in Damascus in 1919. The delegates unanimously repudiated Sykes-Picot, the Balfour Declaration and the Zionist project.
But the aspiring state of Greater Syria had a short life. In 1920, French troops entered Damascus, overthrew this fledgling government and occupied what is now Syria and Lebanon. An ensuing general uprising was also repressed.
The Arab world, which saw itself as one, was dismembered and carved into 22 countries. The new French and British colonial masters drew borders to hinder local organizing and to facilitate western penetration and domination. In the Arab West Asia, they sliced out as separate countries Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Lebanon, creating arbitrary borders with no regard to ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity, topography or trade routes. France was to rule Lebanon and Syria, and Britain seized as colonies Palestine, Jordan (then Transjordan) and Iraq.
“Divide-and-conquer” on steroids
Lebanon is the most religiously diverse Arab country, with 18 defined religious sects. Five are Moslem denominations (Shia, Suni and Druze are the largest), and 12 are Christian, with the Maronites being the largest. France imposed a constitution on Lebanon in 1925 designed to promote sectarian strife. It locks the country into a cast-like political system where each person is defined for life by which of the 18 religious sects they were born into. Rather than being a citizen of Lebanon, one is first a member of a sect, which determines every aspect of one’s life from education, to registering for a birth certificate or marriage license to garbage disposal.
Distribution of main religious groups of Lebanon according as of 2009, making it the most religiously diverse Arab country.
To run this fractured system France cultivated feudal family dynasties from the elite of each sect, the zuama, who controlled their fiefdoms through patronage. These zuama of each sect divide government funds among themselves with no oversight on how the funds are used or abused.
This system locks the vast majority of Lebanese in poverty, with virtually no say in government. The system has no mechanisms for implementing reforms, and no way to modernize the country as a centrally planned unit. It leaves Lebanon’s economy wide open to foreign penetration, as these tiny fiefdoms are easily controlled by outside powers, which grant favors to the zuama who are pro-western against the poor majority. It is divide-and-conquer on steroids.
At Lebanon’s 1943 independence a “National Pact” locked in a the zuama-run confessional system by decreeing that the president always be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Moslem and the Speaker of the House a Shia Moslem. Ratios in parliament favored the Christians and primarily the Maronite Christians. This formula applied to all government institutions, including Parliament and the Army. There was no direct vote for the President. Instead they were chosen by a vote of Parliament.
The justification for this divide is a 1932 census conducted by France finding Christians in the majority. This census was highly suspect even at the time. Today about 70% of the population is Moslem, with the Shia, at 30% or even 40%, being the largest of all the 18 religious groups. Maronites are about 20 percent. These numbers are approximations as, to this day, Lebanon’s ruling clique will not permit another census as it would call for a redistribution of power.
The overwhelming majority of Lebanese of all sects favor sweeping away this stifling political system and replacing it with a democratic and representative one. Every struggle in Lebanon since 1942 has raised this demand.
Maintaining Lebanon’s Arab character
Lebanon is a historic, cultural and economic part of the Arab world. In earlier times, however, Lebanon’s coast was the site of independent sea-faring city states with different cultures later called “Phoenician” by the Greeks. British and French scholars created the that Lebanon’s Christians were Phoenicians, a separate and superior nation with racial and cultural identity distinct from other Lebanese. Attributed to this group was a “Mediterranean-focus,” in contrast to the “uncivilized” culture of the broader Arab region. This was meant to justify Western penetration under the guise of protecting the Maronites.
Some of the earliest and most militant Arab nationalists were Maronites, and Arab identity remained strong among many Lebanese Christians. At the same time, this “we are Phoenicians,” in opposition to being Arab myth took hold among many in the Maronite areas, and was especially encouraged by western-backed fascist Christian militias during Lebanon’s Civil War.
The Lebanon-Palestine bond. When Palestine was erased from the map in the 1948 Nakba, and close to 800,000 driven out, some 100,000 Palestinians walked into Lebanon, with the few possessions they could carry. Now into a fourth generation, today there are 489,292 Palestinian refugees registered with the UN in Lebanon, mainly living in 12 impoverished refugee camps.
Supporting the Palestinian right to return has always been a key focal point of the revolutionary movement in the Arab world and especially of Arab workers, including those in Lebanon. However, the creation of Israel in Palestine’s place on Lebanon’s border has had especially huge repercussions in Lebanon, binding the liberation of Palestine and Lebanon together.
Freedom from domination by the West and its proxies, especially Israel
The U.S. was the very first government to give diplomatic recognition to Israel. For most of its existence Israel has been armed by the U.S. and acted as a Pentagon proxy. It has bombed Lebanon at will from land, sea and air, for decades. It conducted six major invasions of Lebanon since 1978, besieged its capital Beirut for 2 months, occupied Lebanon’s south for 18 years and created its own puppet army there, engineered massacres such as the 1982 atrocity in Sabra and Shatila, repeatedly destroyed Lebanon’s infrastructure, sent in commando teams to assassinate Palestinian and Lebanese leaders and intellectuals there, dropped anti-personnel cluster bombs and white phosphorus on civilians and regularly interfered in Lebanon’s political affairs.
The U.S. emerged as the main imperialist world power after World War II and was keen to establish its dominance in the oil rich Middle East. In 1948 it was the first country to recognize the new Israeli state on stolen Palestinian land. In Lebanon it replaced France as the main sponsor of the Maronite Christian elite. In 1950 the Pentagon permanently stationed the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean to guard its interests. In 1957 it issued the Eisenhower Doctrine, declaring that the U.S. would give military aid to any country threatened by armed aggression.
The 1948 destruction of Palestine outraged the Arab world and helped fuel a wave of anti-imperialist and pan-Arab liberation struggles. In 1952 in Egypt the Free Officers Movement headed by Gamal Abel Nassar electrified the region when it overthrew the Britain-dominated monarchy of King Farouk and seized the government. In February 1958, Egypt and Syria came together to form the militant anti-imperialist United Arab Republic. On July 14 of that year a mass uprising in Iraq overthrew the brutal pro-British and pro-American monarchy of King Faisal.
Washington, keen to stabilize this oil rich and strategic region for its own exploitation, was determined to stifle these struggles. It installed in Lebanon the pro-west Maronite-based government of Camille Chamoun which became the only Arab regime to support this Eisenhower Doctrine without reservation. Chamoun was so thoroughly a U.S. client that he gave his approval to the Eisenhower Doctrine even before the U.S. Congress did. The U.S. had such control over the Lebanese government that it could select or reject cabinet posts.
But it looked like Lebanon too would be part of this revolutionary sweep. Chamoun’s endorsement of the Eisenhower Doctrine combined with internal issues lead to an armed rebellion, mass demonstrations and strikes, sometimes called Lebanon’s first civil war, which threaten to topple the unpopular Chamoun government. On July 15, the very next day after the Iraqi revolution, some 15,000 U.S. Marines landed in Lebanon to put down the uprising there and shore-up the Chamoun regime.
Lebanon was made “safe” for U.S. corporate exploitation. A decade later some 400 U.S. banks and corporations were operating out of Beirut. Corporations did not pay taxes, and the U.S. client government provided no social services. While U.S. businessmen and a handful of Lebanese grew rich, Lebanese workers and peasants were steadily impoverished.
In June 1967 Israel, with a green light from the U.S., attacked the Syrian, Jordan and Egyptian militaries and invaded and seized the West Bank, the Gaza strip and Arab East Jerusalem, all parts of historic Palestine. It also seized Syria’s Golan Heights, Lebanon’s Shabaa Farms and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. This same year Washington became the major funder of Israeli aggression, and Israel went from being a protector of western imperialist interests to a protector of U.S. imperialist interests.
The 1967 Arab defeat led to a surge in Palestinian nationalism especially in the states bordering Israel, where the majority of Palestinian refugees lived. In 1968 Israel’s response was to begin using its steady stream of Pentagon-provided weapons to systematically bomb Palestinian camps and Christian and Shia villages in south Lebanon.
Israel commandos entered all parts of Lebanon at will, assassinating PLO leaders and Lebanese progressives and destroying infrastructure with no opposition. For example, in 1968 an Israeli commando squad, which included current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, destroyed Lebanon’s entire civilian air fleet at the Beirut airport.
1970 PLO driven from Jordan into Lebanon. The Palestine Liberation Organization, based in Jordan, was then seen in the Arab world as the major anti-imperialist force, once again destabilizing the region for Wall Street. In 1970, in a U.S.-engineered attack known as “Black September,” the Jordanian army drove the PLO out of Jordan where it had been based, and into Lebanon, killing 20,000 mostly civilian Palestinians. The U.S. sent extra forces to the area to back up the Jordanian regime in case it couldn’t expel the PLO on its own.
From 1970 to 1982 The PLO’s social, educational, economic and military institutions operated from Lebanon. South Lebanon became the center of Palestinian resistance against Israel.
In 972, the Lebanese National Movement was formed. Lebanese progressives of many persuasions and sects, including Marxists and Pan-Arabists, organized into a loose coalition headed by Kamal Jumblatt, the traditional Druze leader and also head of the Socialist Progressive Party. The LNM program called for the replacement of the confessional-based government with a secular democracy, equality of opportunity for all Lebanese, direct popular vote for the President without regard to religion, the right of the Palestinians to be based in Lebanon, independence from the West, and the realignment of Lebanon with the Arab world.
By 1974 workers of all sects added their clout to the struggle with strikes for basic economic rights like a minimum wage and a regular work week. Some strikes confront the Lebanese Army. The LNM aligns itself with the PLO, which had a common tradition of struggle as the Lebanese, especially those in the south.
Meanwhile, the U.S. armed fascists. As the progressive movement grew, Washington feared that a revolutionary overturn in Lebanon would stop U.S. profit-taking there, and saw the PLO as an obstacle to its regional domination. The Pentagon began to arm rightwing Lebanese groups, especially the Kataeb, an openly fascist party that originally called itself the Phalange after the fascist party of Franco in Spain. This ultra-right Christian Maronite group was headed by the Gemayel family zuama. U.S. funds and arms were sent via private contractors, through NATO allies and clients like Iran, and finally through Israel, which had quickly become the Pentagon’s most reliable client state in the Middle East. Israel financial aid to these open Lebanese fascists can be traced as far back as 1951.
The Kataeb organized other right-wing militias into the Lebanese Forces with the goal of protecting the status quo and eliminating the LNM and the Palestinian presence in Lebanon.
1975-90 Civil War
Lebanon’s people paid a terrible for its 15-year Civil War.An estimated 150,000 were killed, tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands displaced and left destitute. Most accounts of the war do not explain one of the most important factors, that the civil war was fed and prolonged by international forces to serve their own interests. Just about every major militia in Lebanon established a proxy relationship with a foreign state. Along with arming the rightwing, the direct military intervention of Washington’s proxy assisting the fascists, Israel, was constant. The U.S., France, Britain and Syria also sent in troops, and the U.S. warships bombed Lebanese villages.
Deeply racist against the Palestinians and scapegoating them for all Lebanon’s problems, the Kataeb Party began the Civil War in April 1975 by attacking a bus load of Palestinians civilians, massacring all 27. Battles began between the Kataeb and the LNM-PLO. Israel gave the fascists cover by bombing Lebanon, sometimes daily, from the land, sea and air.
By early 1976 the LNM-PLO controlled 80% of Lebanon’s territory, had the allegiance of 75% of its population, and was about to win decisively. But Syria, which had backed the LNM-PLO, and even provided most of the LNM’s weapons, suddenly switch sides and stopped the victory of the progressives by sending troops to Lebanon to fight alongside the fascists. This was a severe blow to Lebanon’s workers and progressives. It was later revealed that Syria had sought, and gotten permission from the U.S. before it attacked the LNM-PLO.
Syria sought only to stabilize the situation in Lebanon, and bring the Palestinian resistance under its control. It did not to do away with Lebanon’s confessional system, a central LNM demand. The Damascus government was threatened by the possibility of full revolutionary overturn in its Lebanon neighbor, as it feared this might ignite revolution back home. It also feared a revolutionary overturn might prompt a U.S. invasion of Lebanon, and possibly of Syria as well. Syrian troops remained in Lebanon until 2005.
In 1977, Israel occupied south Lebanon and created a puppet army. Allegedly to protect Christian villages from the PLO, in 1977 Israel created and armed the South Lebanese Army (SLA). This proxy Christian militia of puppets and collaborators was Israeli trained, armed and equipped, given air cover by the IDF, and fought alongside Israeli troops. In addition to repressing the population, Israel and the SLA shelled and threatened Lebanese army units that attempted to reassert Lebanese sovereignty over the south.
1978-89 Camp David Accords and the Iranian Revolution
Two regional events in 1978-9 would have a major impact on Lebanon. The 1978 Camp David Accords, a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, was hailed in the west. But it was seen by the Arab world not as bringing peace, but as a betrayal that heralded war. The accords took Egypt, the most populous Arab country with the largest army, out of the Arab camp and into the U.S. camp. With no need for a major troop deployment against Egypt on its southern border, Israel was free to launch a long-planned invasion of Lebanon to its north.
The second event was the 1978-9 Iranian Revolution which deposed the Shah of Iran, who ruled over one of the most repressive regimes in the world. Up until then Washington’s regional hegemony in the Middle East had been anchored by Israel and by Iran, a populous country whose huge oil reserves were controlled by U.S. companies while the population remained impoverished. The new government took Iran out of the imperialist camp, used its oil wealth to develop the country, to raise the standard of living of its people and to assist others in the area fighting imperialism.
1978-81 Israeli used violence to obstruct progressive reforms. During the Lebanese Civil War Israel raised its own demands that Lebanon’s sectarian government system be kept intact and that the PLO leave Lebanon. Increased Israel bombardment aimed to bolster its Lebanese fascist allies and thwart any agreements between the Lebanese government, Syria, the PLO, and the Lebanese political factions which might implement reforms. Tel Aviv’s attacks culminated in a 1978 invasion of the south that killed more than 2,000 Palestinian and Lebanese, used US-provided anti-personnel cluster bombs against civilians, and displaced 200,000 people. In 1981 Israel bombed Beirut killing 300 and wounding 800.
June 1982 Israel invaded, occupied half of Lebanon, besieged Beirut, killed 20,000. Israeli troops rampaged through Lebanon, indiscriminately bombing southern villages, killing 20,000. Within days they occupied half the country, then besieged Beirut for two months, demanding that the PLO and its fighters leave Lebanon as a condition for ending the siege.The PLO agreed only after U.S. special negotiator Philip Habib promised that neither Israel nor the Kataeb would enter west Beirut, and that Palestinians in Lebanese camps would be safe and free from reprisals.
August 1982 U.S. troops invaded, betrayed the PLO. President Ronald Reagan sent in U.S. Marines, as part of a multinational force that included France, Britain and Italy, allegedly to “keep the peace” but really to make sure the PLO and its fighters leave Lebanon for Tunisia, far from any Israeli border from which they might try to liberate their country. The colonial power militaries quit Lebanon on Sept. 10 as soon as the PLO evacuation was complete, leaving Israel in control of Beirut.
Israel immediately occupied west Beirut and allowed the Kataib militia to enter the now-unarmed Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps. For two days the Kataib tortured, raped, dismembered and murdered 3,500 Palestinian and poor Lebanese Shia in the camps.
Sept.16-18 1982 witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Israel immediately occupied west Beirut and allowed the Kataib militia to enter the now-unarmed Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps. For two days the Kataib tortured, raped, dismembered and murdered 3,500 Palestinian and poor Lebanese Shia in the camps.
1982 Israel began 18-year occupation of south Lebanon. On the same day that U.S. troops re-occupied Beirut, Israel withdrew from that city but remained in south Lebanon. Israel occupied 10% of Lebanon for 18 years, terrorizing the population and diverting water from the Litani River, crucial to Lebanese agriculture, to Israel.
End of the Civil War
By 1987, the Lebanese government hardly existed, the Lebanese pound had collapsed, the Army had divided by sect, and militias provided wages, mostly to fighters, and rationed goods. With the war at a stalemate for seven years, in 1990 the Arab League brokered the Taif Accord, ending the fighting. This agreement restored the same cast-like form of government with a few reforms. For example, the Parliament was made 50% Christian and 50% Moslem, the power of the Suni Prime Minister was enhanced over that of the Christian President, and Lebanon was defined as an Arab country.
Commitments were made, but never fulfilled, for the gradual elimination of confessionalism and for an end to Israeli occupation of the south. The agreement called for–but did not follow up on–disarming private militias. The agreement, however, exempted Hezbollah from the call to disarm because it was “the resistance” fighting Israeli occupation.
1985 Hezbollah born out of occupation and invasion. Several Shia groups emerged in response to the Israeli 1982 invasion and occupation of the mostly Shia south and the inability or unwillingness of the Lebanese army to defend the population there. Hezbollah (Party of God) was formed in 1985 out of the Shia community mainly as a military organization to defend Lebanon from attack. Inspired by the Iran revolution, it aligned with Iran and received assistance from it. In 1997 the U.S. declared Hezbollah a “foreign terrorist organization” and applied economic sanctions against it.
In 1990, Saudi Arabia replaced Iran as a U.S. proxy. The ending of the Civil War marked the beginning of Saudi involvement in Lebanon and the region as a key U.S. proxy, replacing Iran. Sunnis and Shia have coexisted peacefully for most of the history of Islam, and Saudi Arabia, whose rulers are Suni, and Iran, a mostly Shia country, got on amicably when both were clients of the U.S. After the Iranian revolution, however, things changed. Seeking to counter the growing influence of Hezbollah locally and anti-imperialist Iran regionally, the Saudis launched a propaganda campaign manufacturing a false “Shia-Sunni divide” to mask the class and anti-imperialist nature of the struggles in the region for self-determination. Saudi rulers blamed Iran, not Israel or the U.S., for the region’s problems.
The kingdom cultivated an elite in Lebanon’s Suni population, granting them dual citizenship with Saudi Arabia and assisted them in acquiring homes and businesses in the kingdom and in accumulate fortunes there. In exchange, the kingdom expected them to promote belligerence towards Hezbollah and Iran back home. Members of the Hariri family, the main pro-Saudi clients, become Lebanese prime ministers.
The people liberate the south
In 2,000, the people liberated in the south. Israeli and its SLA puppet occupiers of south Lebanon were seen as torturers and murderers by the 180,000 Lebanese under their rule. In a long war of attrition, people from every Lebanese sect and many organizations, women and men, resisted this occupation. Hezbollah became the strongest and the defining fighting force, finally driving Israel and its Lebanese puppets out in 2000. As fighters liberated village after village they were joined by thousands of jubilant civilians. Reaching the notorious prison and torture chamber at Khiam, 3,000 Lebanese stormed the site of infamous torture of Lebanese resisters, breaking the locks with axes and crowbars and freeing the prisoners. It was a deep humiliation for Israel. Its troops fled Lebanon hurriedly, leaving behind unused artillery, abandoned villas and deserted cars along the roadsides, their keys still in the ignition.
Tanks abandoned by Israeli soldiers fleeing the Hezbollah advance in 2006, now flying the Hezbollah flag. Joyce Chediac.
2006 Hezbollah defeated Israel invasion. Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on its border to exchange them for Lebanese prisoners. Backed by the U.S. and Britain, Israel responded with a full-scale assault on Lebanon by land, sea and air, carpet bombing the south and the Dahiya neighborhood in south Beirut. Bombed were key parts of the civilian infrastructure including hospitals, a fuel storage facility, factories and the Beirut airport. Numerous strategic roads and 55 bridges were destroyed, airport runways were bombed, and Israel enforced a naval and air space blockade of the country. Entire blocks of apartment buildings in Beirut were leveled and villages across south Lebanon reduced to rubble.
Israel’s ground invasion killed 1,000 and displaced a million Lebanese. Hezbollah fighters, however, stopped the Israeli ground advance, captured IDF tanks and other vehicles, and forced the Israelis not only to retreat, but also to agree to a cessation of hostilities without having made any gains.
This was hailed as a victory. Not once but twice, an Arab militia had defeated Israel when no regular Arab army could or would. Hezbollah’s fighters were celebrated as heroes in Lebanon and across the Arab world. The organization was known as “the resistance,” and a defender of Lebanese sovereignty.
While conditions of a ceasefire were being worked out, however, Israel vindictively dropped a million unexploded cluster bomblets provided by the U.S. on southern villages. The use of these weapons in civilian areas is a war crime, yet Israel was not held accountable. Many of these unexploded bomblets, mines and other munitions remain to this day, with villagers and farmers regularly maimed and killed if they chance upon them.
The U.S. government and its corporate media have branded Hezbollah “Iran’s proxy” reducing it to a foreign imposition without a mass base. For many Lebanese citizens, however, Hezbollah did what the Lebanese Army never could or would. It protected their country from an Israeli military that has aggressively interfered in its affairs and killed tens of thousands of its people over decades, long before Hezbollah even existed. Hezbollah’s strong military presence on the border with Israel acted as a deterrent, defending Lebanese sovereignty and freeing it, and especially the people of the south, from Israeli bombing from 2006 to 2023. This was a first.
In 2013, Hezbollah played a regional role and sent fighters to support the Syrian government against western-backed Islamic extremists. Hezbollah fighters pushed back ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other U.S.-and-Gulf state-backed extremist groups in both Syria and Lebanon, after these groups had penetrated the Lebanese border and exploded car bombs in Beirut, and threatened to overrun Damascus.
Hezbollah organized a political party
In addition to being a military force, within the confines of the position allotted to Shia in the confessional political system, Hezbollah ran for office, entered parliament and secured cabinet positions in 2005. Hezbollah allied with other Shia groups and with the Maronite Christian based Free Patriotic Movement of Michel Aoun to form the “Loyalty to the Resistance Block.” This became the most powerful coalition in the Lebanese government, as Aoun, who is a Maronite, becomes President from 2016-2022, an obligatory Maronite position, usually held by pro-Israel fascists who seek to disarm Hezbollah. In parliament this block advocated for the rights of Shias and the Lebanese working class.
Hezbollah took on administration of Shia regions including those in the south, an area long looked down upon by Lebanon’s elites as a lower-class backwater, in southern Beirut and in the Bekaa valley, the areas bombed by Israel in 2023-4. The group developed a vast network of social services in these areas, including hospitals, schools and youth programs, which never existed before in these Shia communities.
In 2017, the Saudis kidnapped Lebanon’s Prime Minister. For decades the U.S. and its proxies curried favor with the elite of various sects in Lebanon who in turn were expected to promote the positions of their sponsors, even if it was at the expense of Lebanese sovereignty. The Saudis, who expected their clients to attack Iran and Hezbollah, were angered when Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who they saw as “their man,” refused to confront Hezbollah in 2017. Instead, Hariri, putting Lebanon first, entered into a coalition government with Hezbollah and its allies, making it the first government in 13 years able to bring enough stability to Lebanon to develop a national budget.
The Saudis responded by kidnapping the Prime Minister on a visit to his villa in the kingdom and holding Hariri under house arrest. They forced him to resign as Lebanon’s PM with a statement that Iran, not Israel, is the main threat to Lebanon, and to provoke an internal split in Lebanon. This backfired badly, as all Lebanon united, defended their sovereignty and demanded the release of their Prime Minister.
2019 economic collapse sparked a mass uprising
For years, entrenched zuama adhered to an IMF plan charging the population ever-higher taxes to shore up an economy sucked dry by predatory western banks. At the same time, in a giant Ponzi scheme, Lebanon’s oligarchs borrowed money from international banks and then borrowed more to pay these loans. All the while these oligarchs looted billions in public funds to build personal fortunes, putting no money into infrastructure. By 2019 the government had become so dysfunctional that it could not even provide 24-hour electricity, tap water, or pick up the garbage.
Then, Lebanon’s rulers announced new tax increases, including an October 2019 tax on the widely used and free WhatsApp phone calls, relied upon by many Lebanese to keep in touch with relatives, especially those abroad. This was the final straw. It sparked a grassroots explosion of rage engulfed the country and brought down the regime. Protests, unprecedented in size, targeted austerity, corruption, dysfunction and widening inequality, and charged Lebanon’s politicians, elite and bankers with embezzling funds from the people. Demonstrations united people from all 18 religious sects. On one day alone a quarter of the population took to the streets. Participants carried Lebanese flags, opposed sectarianism and chanted “One, one, one, we are one people!”
Foreign exchange dried up and dollars left the country. Banks no longer had enough dollars to pay depositors lining up outside, so they shut their doors. The financial and economic collapse sunk half of the population into poverty and left millions jobless. Many were reduced to stealing food to feed their children and borrowing from banks to pay the rent. The exchange rate of the Lebanese pound to the U.S. dollar fell to 8,000-to-1.
In 2020, a mass blast ripped through the Beirut harbor destroying much of it, flattening whole neighborhoods, killing 200 people, wounding 3,000, displacing 300,000, and destroying hundreds of port-based jobs. The source was highly flammable materials unloaded from a disabled ship into the port six years before but never disposed of. Various government agencies had known about the hazardous materials, but none sought a disposal solution.
This gross and criminal negligence enraged the people against the entire ruling establishment and underscored the dysfunctionality of the sectarian and patronage-based political system. Huge demonstrations denouncing the ruling elite and the confessional system once more rocked the country.
This financial and economic crisis continues. With a population smaller than New York City, Lebanon has a $33 billion debt, the worst debt-to-GDP ratio in the world. Inflation in 2023 was 221.34%. Today, 80% of the population lives in poverty. There are few jobs in Lebanon so a great many Lebanese are forced to work abroad. Remittances sent back to Lebanon make up 37.8% of the Lebanese GDP in 2024. Lebanon also has the largest refugee population per capita in the world–close to half-a-million Palestinians and 1.5 million Syrians, according to the Lebanese government.
While the Lebanese system itself is the problem, recovery is hampered by the fact that, thanks to the U.S., Lebanon’s closest neighbors are off limits for trade. Syria, Iran and even Hezbollah are under U.S. sanctions, which include severe punishments for any company, government or individual that does business with them.
October 2023: Opening a second front in solidarity with Gaza
Oct. 8, 2023 Hezbollah opened a second front in solidarity with Gaza. In neighboring Palestine, the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip had been under Israeli siege for 16 years, with Israel restricting food and regularly bombing the population there. On Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas and other Palestinian groups in Gaza launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” an unprecedented military offensive that inflicted a shattering blow to Israel’s army bases and militarized settlements which have besieged Gaza’s inhabitants for decades. Israel responded by launching a genocidal attack on Gaza’s civilians. They seized 251 Israelis, mostly military personnel, to exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, many held indefinitely without even being charged. They also demanded the lifting of the siege of Gaza. Israel responded with a genocidal war against the entire population of Gaza, nearly half of whom were children.
On Oct. 8 Hezbollah opened a second military front against Israel in solidarity with Gaza, daily launching rockets from Lebanon at military targets in northern occupied Palestine for more than a year. The aim was to drain the Israeli army’s resources and thereby limit its capacity to wage war on Gaza. The sheer savagery and depravity of the Israeli assault on Gaza united the people of Lebanon and caused them to support Hezbollah’s solidarity action. The Hezbollah assault forced the Israeli government to evacuate 70,000 Israelis settlers in occupied Palestine near the Lebanon border, an unprecedented development.
Israel is the aggressor, not the victim. While the western media branded Hezbollah as “the aggressor,” and Israel “the victim” after the Lebanese group began bombing Israeli military sites on Oct. 8, this ignored Israel’s decades of aggression against Lebanon and its murder of tens of thousands of Lebanese. Even between Oct. 7, 2023, and Sep. 6, 2024, when Hezbollah was shelling military sites in Israel, Tel Aviv was attacking Lebanon much more severely. In that time period Israel was responsible for 82% of all attacks on either side of the Lebanon/Israel armistice line.
The Axis of Resistance and fall of the Syrian government
Hezbollah’s solidarity with Gaza took place in a regional context of solidarity with Gaza. Ansar Allah (the Houthi) in Yemen blocked ships headed to trade with Israel from entering the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Withstanding bombings by the U.S., Britain and Israel, Anasr Allah attacked 100 such ships, and sunk two. They also launched missiles and drones at Israel while the Islamic Resistance in Iraq launched missile attacks on Israel.
After Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas while he was visiting Iran, the Iranian government, which gave key material support to Hezbollah and Yemen, also launched missile attacks on military targets in Israel. These forces in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran and Syria, (which was not actively fighting but which provided the land route for supplies from Iran to Hezbollah) became known as the “Axis of Resistance.”
The Axis of Resistance received a major blow on Dec. 8, 2023 when the Syrian government of Bashir Assad fell to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group with roots in Isis and al Qaeda, reactionary Islamic groups funded by the U.S., its Gulf allies and Turkey. Syria has been weakened by 13 years of very harsh U.S. sanctions and a Western-fueled civil war which impoverished the country and displaced half of its population.
On September 18, 2024, Israel expanded its war to Lebanon with a coordinated terrorist attack on the pagers and walkie-talkies used in Hezbollah-administered areas, many of them in its medical and administrative divisions. Thousands of men and women and children were set afire by the explosions in the streets, in markets, in their homes, in their cars. A second round of explosions the following day killed and maimed Lebanese attending funerals of those killed the day before.
Israel then used its U.S.-supplied weapons to repeat the genocidal tactics it used in Gaza, flattening south Lebanese villages, bombing escape routes and ambulances, deliberately targeting journalists and medical personnel, hitting mosques, markets and irreplaceable cultural heritage sites, carpet bombing entire neighborhoods, setting fire to olive groves, dropping internationally-banned white phosphorus and cluster bombs in civilian areas, and displacing 1.2 million people, a fifth of Lebanon’s population.
All of Lebanon opened their hearts and homes to the more than a million made homeless in the south. Israel tried to break this solidarity by bombing the small Christian village of Aito in the north just because it had provided homeless southerners with shelter.
In a little more than a month of bombing, Israel killed 3,700 Lebanese, flattened 32 villages and assassinated the leadership of Hezbollah. Despite these blows, when Israel launched a ground assault, Hezbollah fighters stood firm, protecting their south Lebanon hometowns where their families have lived for millennia. They repeatedly rebuffed a heavily armed Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, leading Israel to call for a ceasefire without making military gains.
Terms of the ceasefire agreement
Brokered by the U.S. and France, a ceasefire was agreed upon on Nov. 27, 2024. It calls for Hezbollah fighters to withdraw about 18 miles from the Israel border to the Litani River, for IDF invading troops to be replaced by the Lebanese Army and UN forces on the border, and for a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon within 60 days.
As with past U.S. political interventions, Washington did not broker the accord as a neutral party, but rather to push its own colonialist agenda. It seeks to significantly weaken and even disarm Hezbollah, the resistance, so that Lebanon has no way to defend itself against Israel. U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller explained, “What we want to see come out of this situation, ultimately, is Lebanon able to break the grip that Hezbollah has had on the country.”
A pro-Israel U.S. proxy in the Christian sect, Samir Geagea, head of the ultra-right Maronite Lebanese Front, is currently echoing the U.S. line in Lebanon. He is calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah because it is a non-governmental militia, even though Hezbollah’s right to keep its arms was part of the 1990 Taif Agreement ending Lebanon’s Civil War because Hezbollah resisted the Israeli occupation of the south. Geagea did not mention that his group, the Lebanese Front has a long and bloody history as non-governmental militia — an ultra-rightwing one armed by the U.S. through Israel since before the 1975 Civil War.
Washington is also determined to maintain Lebanon’s sectarian political system, as it keeps Lebanon’s communities easily manipulated by colonialist powers. To this effect, it wants to weaken Hezbollah politically as, in recent years, the resistance group built a strong coalition inside the Lebanese government. Washington wants to open the way for its main Arab and anti-Hezbollah client, cash-rich Saudi Arabia, to buy its way back into the Sunni community as the main power broker there.
The ceasefire calls for the Lebanese Army to replace Hezbollah on the border with Israel. The Pentagon is the main funder of the Lebanese Army, and has provided it with $3 billion in military aid starting in 2006 after Hezbollah defeated Israel. The U.S. has trained more than 32,000 Lebanese troops since then. In 2023 it agreed to pay the majority of the Lebanese Army’s salaries in U.S. dollars. For years the U.S. has operated a proxy commando unit connected with the Army run by U.S. Special Operations forces and codenamed Lion Hunter.
The Lebanese Army did not fight Israel, yet with all this support, when Israel began its ground invasion of Lebanon, the Lebanese Army stood down. Faced with the prospect of actually fighting Israel, it withdrew its soldiers from observation posts along the Israeli border and moved north out of the range of fire. All the fighting was left up to the young Hezbollah militia members, who successfully and heroically repelled the Israeli advance on their hometowns. This is because the Army, even after receiving all that U.S. aid, had neither the equipment nor the will to fight Israel.
In fact, the Lebanese Army has never defended Lebanese sovereignty, and the U.S. wants to make sure it can’t. Washington’s aid is not designed to make the Lebanese Army strong, but to keep it weak. The Pentagon supplies the Lebanese Army with weapons that are three generations behind, with many being obsolete, and provides no air defense. This is so the Army could never mount a significant confrontation against Israel, which receives the latest and best spyware and armaments. This fact is not lost on the Lebanese Army’s officers.
U.S. guarantees Israeli military superiority
“It is my personal opinion that the United States does not allow the (Lebanese) military to have advanced air defense equipment, and this matter is related to Israel,” said Walid Aoun, a retired Lebanese army general and military analyst.
This is actually a matter of U.S law. Providing the latest killing hardware to support Israel’s qualitative military edge (QME) relative to all other regional militaries is codified in U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. government is so enthusiastic about this policy that having it clearly defined by the State Department was not enough. It was also twice affirmed in laws passed by Congress in 2008 and 2012 . QME is defined as:
“the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors … through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or non-state actors.”
This is a force meant to suppress domestic dissent, not confront Israel. Purposely hobbled so it cannot defend Lebanese sovereignty, the U.S. is arming the Lebanese Army to suppress Lebanese domestic opposition to U.S. policies, to counter Hezbollah and even, through it Lion Hunter special operations program, to use Lebanese Army forces for counter terrorism.
The U.S. State Department says so itself. “Support for Lebanon’s security agencies and other strategic partners remains at the core of our efforts to preserve stability while countering and delegitimizing Hizballah’s false narrative and justification for retaining its arms in Lebanon and in the region.” And the “stability” the U.S. wants to preserve is Lebanon’s unequal confessional political system.
It is precisely because the imperialists keep Lebanon weak, defenseless and entirely vulnerable to the massacres regularly inflicted by Israeli attacks that Hezbollah arose. If Hezbollah did not exist, another grassroots group would arise to fill this urgent need to defend the population.
Meanwhile, the U.S is building a massive embassy in this tiny country. The second largest in the world, the embassy will be a fortress. Its 19 buildings will cover 44 acres and employ 15,000 people. It is seen by area progressives as a hub for Washington’s political, economic and military and intelligence domination of the entire region.
It remains to be seen whether the ceasefire with Israel will hold, as Israel violated it hundreds of times just in the first month, bombing villages in Shia areas in the north as well as in the south, attacking medical facilities, even uprooting ancient olive trees and taking them to Israel. Imperialist capitals and the western corporate media hardly mention these attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. They instead concentrate their invective against the young Hezbollah fighters, the only forces that has ever defended the people.
The arrogance of the Trump envoy
The people of Lebanon know that the U.S. and Israel are one, and that U.S. ceasefire mediation is designed to bolster Wall Street’s and Israel’s interest at the expense of Lebanese sovereignty. In case there was any doubt, the new Trump administration has made this perfectly clear. On February 7, right after meeting with Lebanon President Joseph Aoun, before she even left the presidential palace, U.S. Special Envoy Morgan Ortragus made a crass statement to the media actually thanking Israel for “defeating Hezbollah.” She then threatened the new Lebanese government that if it did not exclude Hezbollah it would be crossing a U.S. red line.
This sparked immediate demonstrations and condemnation from a variety of Lebanese political, religious and other organizations defending Lebanese sovereignty and denouncing U.S. interference. Jaafari Mufti, Sheikh Ahmad Qabalan — a senior Shiite cleric, explained, “Hezbollah is a national and representative force of Lebanon.” He added, “Hezbollah has not been defeated and will not be defeated… Sovereignty belongs solely to Lebanon and its national components, not to America and its exclusionary and destructive projects.”
Lebanese grandmothers face off against Israeli tanks
Washington may have its plans, but the people of Lebanon and their progressive organizations also have their plans. Their determination has not wavered both to defend themselves against Israeli aggression and to replace the divide-and-conquer political system saddled on them by imperialism with an equitable one.
Today the people of south Lebanon, even though they have sacrificed much, remain strong and proud. The U.S. may think that Hezbollah has been defeated, but the people of the south see that for the third time their sons have pushed out Israeli ground forces armed and backed by every imperialist government in the world. This is being celebrated as a sign of strength and a victory in their protracted struggle.
Like the people of Gaza after the January 17, 2025 ceasefire there, thousands of the 1.4 million Lebanese people displaced by Israeli bombings are streaming home in long lines to their villages, even though Israel reduced scores of towns to rubble. They are defying the Israeli military which still has tanks and troops on the ground. Grandmothers own the day. Social media videos of them have gone viral. They stand alone, unafraid, their arms raised, facing off against Israeli tanks and snipers. They are going home.
