Hezbollah’s Main Headache May Be at Home

Mounting domestic resentment toward the party in recent years is why the war with Israel may potentially pose a threat to its power.

One dimension of the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel that is rarely taken into consideration these days in news reports on Lebanon is how domestic Lebanese factors constrain Hezbollah. For most Western outlets, local political dynamics are simply not that important, amid a general (and lazy) consensus that “Hezbollah controls Lebanon.”

No one can deny that the party has maintained a form of hegemony over the political system for over a decade, but ending things there risks ignoring that the thorny Lebanese environment in which Hezbollah navigates has been marked repeatedly by signs of hostility to the party, explaining why it is increasingly isolated domestically in its war with Israel today. Yet this isolation does not necessarily mean an absence of solidarity with the Shia population, which has been paying a heavy price for Hezbollah’s opening of a southern front last year. Lebanon is full of paradoxes, which is perhaps why so many observers have sidestepped its complexities.

A further paradox is that none of the party’s critics in the other religious communities, particularly the Christian Lebanese Forces, has aggressively confronted Hezbollah for carrying Lebanon into a conflict that few Lebanese want. Notably, the Druze leader Walid Joumblatt has been coordinating with the party for the past year to ensure that any Shia displaced have shelter in districts over which he has influence. Rather, Hezbollah’s Christian, Sunni, and Druze counterparts have expressed sympathy for those killed by Israel, alongside quiet disapproval of the war itself. Yet once the conflict affects communities other than the Shia, much may change.    

The calculation of the sectarian leaders is that they do not want a return to 2006, when Hezbollah absorbed popular discontent in the Shia community after the July–August war by turning it against the party’s domestic opponents—at the time joined in the March 14 coalition. Hezbollah’s Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, accused the party’s enemies of having betrayed it during the conflict, instigating a period of postwar sectarian tensions, even armed conflict, that only ended in May 2008.

Resentment of Hezbollah’s behavior nonetheless remains broad within the other communities, and even the party’s erstwhile allies have questioned its involvement in the Gaza war. According to a diplomat, not long after Hezbollah began firing at northern Israel, former president Michel Aoun, a Hezbollah partner for many years, told Mohammed Raad, the head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, that the party was embarking on a war “you cannot win and that will carry Lebanon into the abyss.”

But even before October 2023, each community had a big bone to pick with Hezbollah. Many Lebanese regard it as responsible for the assassination of the Sunni former prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, in 2005, and the subsequent elimination of March 14 figures. In 2008, Hezbollah and its allies militarily took over western Beirut, in reaction to a decision of the Lebanese government at the time, headed by Fouad al-Sanioura, to investigate the party’s closed communications network. Hezbollah also moved on Druze areas in the mountains, but was beaten back by Joumblatt’s partisans, although he never regarded this as a victory. For Joumblatt, Hezbollah has the means to surround his mainly agricultural mountain areas and suffocate them, effectively cutting off their lifeline to other parts of Lebanon.

In the last four years alone, Hezbollah has repeatedly faced pushback. After the financial collapse of 2019–2020, it was mainly Hezbollah that defended the sectarian political leadership that most Lebanese held responsible for their predicament. In 2020, many Lebanese, rightly or wrongly, blamed the party for the devastating explosion in Beirut port, which led to the destruction of large parts of the capital, especially nearby Christian areas.

However, it’s what happened afterward that really led to a break with many Christians. When an investigating judge sought to uncover responsibility for the port explosion in October 2021, Hezbollah and its allies organized a demonstration against him. For some reason, the demonstrators entered the mainly Christian neighborhood of Tayyouneh, as if to say that if Christians pushed for the truth, this could provoke a civil war. Several armed demonstrators were killed that day, both by inhabitants of Tayyouneh and it appears by the Lebanese army, which intervened to prevent a sectarian conflict. This blocked the judge’s investigation, and many Christians never forgot, or forgave, what had happened.

Only two months earlier, tensions had flared up elsewhere, this time between Hezbollah and Sunni tribal members in Khaldeh, and in southeastern Lebanon between Hezbollah and Druze villagers in Chouaya. In the first incident, clashes between the tribes and Hezbollah heightened Sunni-Shia tensions, which were quickly neutralized by the deployment of the Lebanese army. In the second, the Druze forcibly stopped several Hezbollah members from firing rockets at Israeli positions from their village. While order was restored in both cases, these were telltale signs that anger with Hezbollah was growing.

Finally, last year, Hezbollah was transporting weapons through the Christian town of Kahaleh, when one of the party’s trucks turned over at a sharp corner. When the inhabitants came to assist the driver, Hezbollah members reportedly threatened them to keep them away. Once the villagers realized the truck was transporting arms, they became more belligerent, and one villager began firing at the Hezbollah gunmen, killing one of them, before he himself was killed. It was revealing that the man in question was a local supporter of Michel Aoun, therefore someone, at least officially, on good terms with Hezbollah.

All these episodes indicated that under the surface, there was animosity toward the party and its domination of Lebanese affairs. This was only exacerbated when Hezbollah demanded last year that its candidate Suleiman Franjieh be elected president, though he has little support within the Maronite Christian community, from where presidents are elected. This led to deadlock and the ensuing presidential vacuum has created a sentiment among Christians that Hezbollah now even seeks to name a Christian president against their preferences.

The opening of a front in the south on October 8, 2023, was the final straw. Hezbollah consulted none of its Lebanese partners in initiating a war in defense of its ally Hamas in Gaza. It did so in the name of the so-called Unity of the Arenas strategy, formulated with Iran, that sought to coordinate the military actions against Israel of parties in the pro-Tehran Axis of Resistance. Hezbollah displayed remarkable hubris in being completely indifferent to the fact that Lebanon paid a heavy price in the past for the Palestinian cause—especially the Shia community itself. After hubris comes nemesis, however, and today Hezbollah is largely alone in facing the violent Israeli campaign against Lebanon that began last week. Many Lebanese sympathize with their countrymen, but there is also an unhealthy dose of schadenfreude that Hezbollah is now feeling the pain it previously inflicted on others.

What does this mean for Lebanon in the ongoing war with Israel? It is surprising that Hezbollah, which has always been so careful to protect itself by retaining cross-sectarian ties in Lebanon’s political landscape, finds itself in precisely the opposite situation today. For the moment, it appears that the Israelis are reinforcing this trend by bombing mainly Shia areas, thereby creating a major humanitarian crisis for the party through the suffering of its own community. By being so overconfident in its power in recent years, despite rising antipathy, Hezbollah reinforced an ambient sense that it could keep everyone in line through intimidation. By and large this worked, but now that Israel is hammering the party, Hezbollah looks vulnerable.

The sectarian game in Lebanon is a treacherous one. When communities have allied themselves with outside actors to bolster their domestic power, the results have usually ended up being to their disadvantage. The Sunnis tied their wagon to the Palestinian cause after 1975, but when this provoked a Syrian military intervention in 1976, the community paid for it in terms of its diminished influence. When the Maronites did the same with Israel in 1982, the aftermath proved to be a disaster, as Christians were displaced from the Druze-dominated mountains and the region east of Sidon. Many are wondering whether today it is the turn of the Shia community to follow in this path, its alliance with Iran having pushed Hezbollah into a war with Israel that may ultimately destabilize its authority at home.

Such thinking is premature. For now, Hezbollah is still firing at Israel, and there are no signs that its relationship with Iran is under major stress (despite reports that the party reportedly asked Tehran to attack Israel, and was refused). However, Hassan Nasrallah probably realizes that if the Lebanese were to hold Hezbollah responsible for any escalation in the conflict that leads to Lebanon’s destruction, it would be very difficult for the party to reimpose its writ in the country. Indeed, it could be near impossible to reconstitute Lebanon as we know it, since the sectarian social contract has been largely eroded by years of abuse from the country’s political leadership and Hezbollah’s repeated transgressions of its unwritten rules.

Yet we may also be at a transformative moment in Lebanon’s political development. Now, more than ever, many Lebanese understand that unless the religious communities take action in a national context, as part of a functioning state, Lebanon will continue to drift from one catastrophe to the next. Without the state, for example, it’s a mystery how Hezbollah will rebuild destroyed villages in the south and the Beqaa Valley. A failure to do so could cripple the party’s ability to regain communal validation once the Shia grasp the terrible magnitude of their losses.

Much may change in the interim. Israel has not won yet, and the Israelis have a way of allowing their brutality to undercut their political gains. If they decide to invade Lebanon, this may provide a valuable lifeline to Hezbollah, which is at its best when acting as a resistance force on the ground. However, for now the party has managed to persuade no one that the war with Israel benefits Lebanon, and it remains inhibited by its profound reluctance to escalate to an all-out conflict that annihilates Lebanon. This may have a decisive impact on how Hezbollah manages its power in the future, in a Lebanese society that increasingly refuses to give the party a blank check.