Israel’s policy of total war has brought devastation across Lebanon. Yet despite the brutality, signs of resilience are emerging from the rubble. Simon Assaf explores how Lebanon’s deep-rooted solidarity is standing firm, confronting new invasions as a defiant center of resistance.
From the Dahieh Doctrine to the Gaza Doctrine, Israel’s policy of total war is spreading terror across Lebanon. Mass killings of resistance leaders, pager bombs, murder of rescue crews and Red Cross first responders, bombing homes, hospitals, the ancient city of Tyre, the Roman ruins of Baalbek, and threats against all sections of the Lebanese population—have shaken the country.
Lebanon is reeling under the barrage, the levels of suffering surpassing anything Israel has thrown at us in over 75 years of war. So why does this feel like the beginning of a defeat for Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli army?
Israel is facing a meat grinder defence in the south. Invading troops cannot move more than a few hundred metres across the border. In one 24-hour period, Israel lost scores of tanks and soldiers, many of them high-ranking officers. Hezbollah missiles still rain on the occupied territories, hitting military outposts and even bases outside Haifa, way beyond the range of previous wars.
The resistance is dug into networks of tunnels; they are highly motivated and trained, drawing on decades of guerilla war and familiar with every hearth and hill. Of course, these fighters are from the south, and the resistance is deeply woven into the social fabric of south Lebanon.
It is not unusual for a household to own a collection of weapons spanning the years of resistance, old captured Lee Enfield rifles from 1947-48, ancient Kalashnikovs dating to the 1960-70s, alongside modern weapons.
Faced with an entrenched enemy, Netanyahu is forced to break the back of the resistance by targeting wider Lebanese society. This is the lesson they learned from their defeat at the hands of Hezbollah in 2006.
In that war, an unprecedented movement of solidarity rose in defence of the south and the mainly working-class neighbourhoods of south Beirut, known as the Dahieh. Israeli warplanes pounded the neighbourhoods, and the destruction was terrible. Yet its population found refuge in other areas, often crossing dividing lines that marked decades of sectarian civil war.
This solidarity movement stripped Israel of its greatest advantage, targeting civilians as a tactic to undermine support for the fighters. Instead, ordinary Lebanese (the state had disappeared) opened their doors. Tales of elderly middle-class Christian widows sharing their homes with the displaced, often poor labourers from the South or working-class families from the Dahieh, came to symbolise this movement.
Lebanon has changed over the past half-century, as has most of the Arab world. The country is now overwhelmingly urban, some 90 percent of the population lives in cities or large towns. In the 1960s, and even on the eve of the 1982 Israeli invasion, some 80 percent lived in villages. Despite many neighbourhoods boasting a majority of residents from one sect or another, workplaces are mixed, as are most marriages, friendship groups and social circles.
The solidarity that emerged in 2006 grew out of a background of social change and rising working-class struggles, many crossing old sectarian lines: strikes by teachers, municipal workers, factories and so on. After some thirty years of neoliberal economics, the major division has become class.
In several key disputes, such as by electricity workers, attempts to divide workers along religious lines backfired spectacularly. On one picket line in the mainly Christian east Beirut, attempts by sectarian gangs to attack Muslim workers were driven off by their Christian colleagues. A strike in a power plant in a Christian area spread to a Muslim area, although the disputes were not linked. Solidarity is built from below.
Modern Lebanon, defined by its social mixing and secular practice, is breaking out of the old sectarian system implemented by France in the 1920s (a mirror of Britain’s policy in Palestine). This came to a head in the first waves of protests on the eve of the 2011 Arab Spring but found its real expression in the so-called 2019 October Revolution.
This revolution, more a series of mass protests and demonstrations, spread to every corner of the country, irrespective of sect and religion. The economic collapse brought about by rampant neoliberalism does not differentiate by sect. Lebanon has a saying: “Hunger is an infidel that does not care which day you pray.”
The spirit of 2019 runs deep in the minds of ordinary Lebanese. The old symbols of sectarianism, such as posters and banners of sectarian groups and leaders that normally adorn the entrances to neighbourhoods, have faded. Police stations and government institutions (as well as richer parts of the city) are barricaded behind razor wire.
The fundamental division is between the haves and have-nots. Modern Lebanon is defined by class, not sect. (The country has some 18 religious sects, each with civil courts, while the political system is distributed according to sectarian affiliation, as is access to medical care, education and so on).
In this war, Israelis are targeting the whole country, destroying infrastructure and spreading terror everywhere. Airstrikes have caused huge damage across the South, targeting hospitals, demolishing villages, tearing up roads, orchards and poisoning wildland with firebombs of white phosphorus.
Warplanes even struck the Rafic Hariri hospital in western Beirut (Hariri was the Saudi-backed Sunni Muslim prime minister allegedly killed by a Hezbollah car bomb in 2005). Israeli warplanes attacked the Maronite Catholic village of Aitou, in the most northern part of the country and far from any frontline, to house Shia families displaced from the south. Some 23 people were killed.
The town of Zhale, with a Shia population of less than two percent and a one-time stronghold of right-wing Christian militias, was also struck by Israel for providing shelter to the displaced. Monasteries have opened their doors to Muslim refugees, often defying Israeli threats to destroy them.
There are hundreds of such examples.
The Gaza Doctrine of total annihilation has a particular purpose for Israeli strategy in Lebanon. Netanyahu hopes to create the conditions for a new civil war. By targeting the solidarity networks, Israel is hoping to isolate the Shia Muslims and, in so doing, break the back of the resistance as a prelude to occupation and settlement of the south. And for a brief period, this appeared to be working.
The murder of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, alongside many other resistance figures, opened the door to sectarian forces and pro-Western parties to seek the terms for surrender. Lebanon would kneel to Israeli power, and as Netanyahu spelt out in his now infamous address to the Lebanese people, “If you do not destroy the resistance, we will destroy the country.”
Planeloads of Western diplomats landed in Beirut waving fistfuls of Dollars and Euros to aid this process, among them German Foreign Minister and Green Party MP Annalena Baerbock, who, after Netanyahu, is probably the most hated person in Lebanon. Talk of the Lebanese army enforcing Israel’s peace in the south grew in volume. The resistance is over, they said, it is time for a Jordanian-style agreement with Israel, for normalisation, the abandonment of Palestine, and all that entails.
Yet, this is running into the sand. The popular outpouring of solidarity is reemerging from the rubble. Community kitchens have sprung up, high-end nightclubs given over to shelters, abandoned buildings repurposed as housing.
One case highlights this, although not the only example and unfortunately not the same outcome: The fight over an abandoned hotel in the once up-market central Beirut district of Hamra. Here, poor Shia families took over an old hotel, reconnected the water, fixed the electricity, and cleared out the vermin. Only for a judge to order them gone and squads of riot police to enforce the edict. A stand-off ensued, and the refugees were thrown out, only to re-occupy the building again. The state stubbed its toe on efforts to isolate the refugees. Its security forces were pelted with rubbish, stones and chunks of wood.
Yet, the new divisions have also emerged. Thousands of foreign domestic workers were abandoned to their fate, and many Syrian and Palestinian families refused entry to “Lebanese-only” shelters. Thousands have fled to Syria; others left to fend for themselves on the streets.
In other articles, I have spelt out the problems with Hezbollah, especially the part it played in suppressing the revolution in Syria, as well as its accommodation to the sectarian structure of the Lebanese government and institutions. Yet, the resistance is much bigger than one party; it runs through to the very creation of Lebanon as a French colonial outpost in the Levant. In 2006, the mass of ordinary people came to the aid of the resistance, today, under conditions that are ten times harder, it has reappeared.
Yet the country is fragile, facing economic meltdown, and for Western powers, low-hanging fruit. The US has built its second biggest embassy in the mountains above Beirut, and following its humiliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, the new hub for counter-insurgency in the Middle East. Yet Israel is now talking about ending its war in the South, having accomplished none of its military objectives. There is everything to play for, Lebanon remains a centre for resistance and, despite the ferocity of this latest war, remains unconquered. (1523 WORDS)
Simon Assaf is a Lebanese revolutionary socialist based in London. He is on the editorial board of The Public Source and contributed to many articles in Socialist Worker and the International Socialism journal.
