The History Of Hezbollah In 45 Minutes

TITLE: The History of Hezbollah in 45 Minutes CHANNEL: Empire • World History DATE: 2026-04-23 ---TRANSCRIPT--- It is a very dark story we have to tell today. We left the last episode with the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the horrors of one of the worst massacres in recent Middle Eastern history. And today for this final episode in our series on the Arab-Israeli wars, we have the crucial story of the birth of Hezbollah, a story which of course leads us directly to the present and the current horrors that poor Lebanon is again suffering. And this is another dark moment in your history. And I’m sorry that as you sit with us here that your friends and neighbors are suffering attacks and rockets and the villages of South Lebanon are being dynamited on our social media as we speak.

Indeed, it is very painful to watch from from a distance. I wish I didn’t have to leave, which I know, as I said in the previous episode, sounds strange to people who might think, well, why wouldn’t you want to leave a country at war? It is my country. I grew up in the civil war there, very much at the heart of it. War very unfortunately is familiar to me. We know how it works, we know the rhythm, and we take strength from being together. And it is actually much more anxiety-inducing to be far away because you don’t have your finger on the pulse, you don’t know exactly what is going on. So I stay in touch very, very closely with friends and colleagues back back home. But really for me what has been most difficult almost to deal with is, as you may know, I have another book coming out in the fall, which interestingly enough is called The Best Kind of American, a title I chose because it was a quote of someone about the main character in my book, Malcolm Kerr, the American president of AUB, who was assassinated in 1984 in Beirut. But it is also incredibly interesting to have that as a title of a book in this time when we’re all wondering what is America about. And that book and the research I did for it brought me through the four, five decades that we’ve been exploring in our conversation, from 1982 up until today, and this latest paroxysm of violence that we’re watching unfold in the region, rippling across not just in Lebanon but Iran and the UAE and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and and Israel, with America very much at the center of it. And the argument I make in the book is that it really all started with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when it collided with the Islamic Revolution of Iran, and at the time the desire and the ambition of the leader of that revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to export the revolution outside of outside of Iran.

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Kim, I think what’s incredibly important about your last book, Black Wave, which is a book that we absolutely love here on Empire Pod, and we have promoted as as really one of the most essential books to understand this region, you make the crucial point that Iran’s interest and fixation with Lebanon predates the 1982 invasion, and it goes actually back to the 1979, to the Iranian Revolution. This is against the conventional narrative really that that Hezbollah grew out of the invasion.

Yeah. The conventional narrative, and that is not necessarily wrong, but it’s not the entire story. So the idea that Hezbollah grew in reaction to the 1982 Israeli invasion as a resistance movement is not the entire story. Iranian revolutionaries who wanted to bring down the Shah were training in Lebanon before 1982, before 1979 even, the the fall of the Shah and the birth of the Islamic Republic. They were training in Lebanon with Palestinian militants in Palestinian camps in Lebanon, military training camps with Yasser Arafat’s people from 1975 onwards, when Lebanon was in the middle of a war, pitting the Palestinians and their allies in Lebanon to the right-wing Christians. And Lebanon became a kind of free-for-all for training of all kinds of leftist groups…

Across the world.

From across the world. Including the Baader-Meinhof brigades, the Red Army, they all came to Lebanon. This was the era of, you know, the international left, right? It was not Islamist movements yet. And there’s a great book actually, I’d like to promote that book, by Jason Burke…

Revolutionaries.

The Revolutionaries. So that is the story of how these leftist movements, you know, changed the world at the time and how eventually some of it became Islamist groups like like Hezbollah. And so a lot of the revolutionaries who were training in Lebanon, leftists but also Islamists, and then succeeded in bringing down the Shah, had their eyes on Lebanon and wanted to export the revolution back to Lebanon to fight Israel. And even as early as late 1979 you had some engaged Shia zealots from from Iran who who knew Lebanon travelling back to Lebanon to try to go down to the border and fight Israel. And the Lebanese government at the time still had enough authority to say, you know, you’re crazy, we don’t want you here, go back home. Everything changes in 1982. Several things happen at the same time. Of course Israel invades Lebanon. Hafez al-Assad, who is now the President of Syria, who is not a fan of Islamist movements at all, he’s killing his own Muslim Brotherhood Islamists in Hama in in 1982, early 1982. His army is being kind of decimated by the Israelis as they invade Lebanon, because remember in the previous episode we talked about how the Syrian army had their surface-to-air missiles positioned in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley. And within the first few days of the Israeli invasion there’s a battle there including Syrian jet fighters, and Hafez al-Assad loses so much of his of his air force then and is very angry with the Soviets for having supplied him with such, you know, terrible…

Sub-standard, old-fashioned equipment. Exactly. Yeah.

And so he’s trying to think how he can recover from that. He dallies a little bit with the idea of, maybe very quickly, but he does, of maybe he should ally himself with the Americans and leave the Soviet camp, but that idea doesn’t last very long because as we’ve seen also in the previous episode, he decides to start countering the American project by, for example, ordering the killing of Bashir Gemayel. The third thing that happens, which is crucial to our history and to this episode, is that Iran, which is now engaged in a war with Iraq since the end of 1980…

So only a year after the revolution, Saddam stages a massive invasion of Iran.

Absolutely. He thought that he would face a weak Iranian army and he was in for a major surprise. First he, you know, racks up some wins, but so tactical successes successes, strategic defeat again, not the first person to discover that while fighting the the Iranians. Because also by then Arab countries have realised that Khomeini is a threat to them. They were sorry to see the Shah go, who was their friend, including in Saudi Arabia, and then they thought, okay, well there’s a, you know, new Iranian leader who kind of speaks our language of religion, etc., we can do business with him. But they quickly realise that he he is actually going to be their their enemy.

And competition also.

And competition, absolutely, across across the Muslim world. Because Khomeini brandishes the Palestinian cause as his ticket to legitimacy across the Arab and Muslim world, and he promises to deliver for the Palestinians where Arab countries have only delivered defeat. He doesn’t do that either.

I remember around this time going to Tehran, and on the outer wall of the British Embassy in Tehran, the revolutionaries put up these very, rather brilliant cartoons, and there were all sorts of different cartoons. But on the street that they renamed Bobby Sands Street, it used to be Winston Churchill Avenue and they changed it to Bobby Sands Street after the IRA hunger striker, and on this wall was all these different causes, particularly the Palestinian cause all over the British Embassy back wall.

Absolutely. It was a cause of of the left. And so the reason why I mention the Iran-Iraq war and its importance is because by May 1982 the Iranians have regained most of the territory they’ve lost to Iraq, and they think the Iran-Iraq war is over and they’re victorious and they can move on. And then they see the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and they think, if we can take on Iraq, we can take on Israel.

So they move their forces in some numbers into the Bekaa Valley. Tell us about that. Give us the geography a bit, because you’ve got Mount Lebanon, which is where the cedars are, which is where the skiing used to be, which is a very Christian area. But then down below, backing onto Syria, you’ve got the Bekaa Valley, where Baalbek the great temple is, where the great festival used to be.

Great agricultural land also, of course, and orchards and agriculture. And very mixed also. Baalbek used to be very mixed Sunni-Shia-Christian town. Zahle also, big city in the Bekaa Valley, dominantly Christian. Lots of Shia villages, Christian villages, Sunni villages. But the Iranians decide to send a an exploratory mission first to Damascus to discuss this idea of sending men to fight Israel to Lebanon. And they discuss it with Hafez al-Assad, president of Syria, who, as I said, has just lost face and lost militarily to to the Israelis and sees the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and he can’t do very much about it. He’s lost two wars with Israel already, he can’t fight another one. He’s not a fan of these Islamist movements, but he ponders the possibility that they could be useful to him in fighting the Israelis in Lebanon by proxy instead of him having to do it. But they don’t want a traditional war. The Iranians come thinking that Hafez al-Assad will give them tanks and fighter jets etc. to fight the Israelis, and they are met with a flat no. So they send most of the contingent back to Iran, but they leave a small number of people who set up in the Bekaa Valley.

There’s a barracks, isn’t there, behind the behind the Temple to Baal?

So the barracks, that comes a bit later. It comes a year, a year later, when they are really already established. But they start just in the homes of local clerics who were their friends from when they were training back in the mid-70s. And they set up a training camp in a small village called Janta. And they start recruiting people to this new idea of a Party of God, a party that fights the enemy with the values of of, you know, the Quran etc. They never fight the Israelis themselves.

And this is Hezbollah.

And that becomes, yes, the Party of God, Hezbollah. The name is chosen quite early on, even though Hezbollah does not announce its official coming into existence until much later. But Hezbollah is born then, very much a creation of Iran and very much a project backed by at the time the Iranian ambassador in Damascus, Ali Mohtashamipur, a dour cleric as well, who knew Lebanon very well also from having trained in the camps and having visited.

I should say that Damascus has this Shia shrine to Zainab, which is full of Iranian pilgrims and is a kind of major centre of Shia activity in the region.

It becomes so after 1979, but before 1979 it was a shrine that was also visited by by non-Shias, by Sunnis. And it is really Iran’s project to turn all these shrines that were often visited by Sunnis and Shias into just a Shia-dominated symbolism of the Islamic Republic. And what is very important to mention here, and I wish actually we’d also mentioned it in the previous episode, but we’ll do it here, is that Ali Khamenei, who was supreme leader, killed in the first opening shots of this recent war, was president of Iran at the time, and it is his pet project to start these proxy militias, these Shia proxy militias outside of Iran.

These are his babies.

Right. It is very much Khamenei’s pet project to start all these proxy militias, because actually the supreme leader at the time, Ruhollah Khomeini, isn’t very keen on the idea. He wants, and he is the one who says, bring all the men back because we have to fight, we still have to fight Iraq. The war is not over. And so they leave this small contingent. But you know who else is on the scene, Willie, which we did not mention and who gets called in to the State Department after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, is the Deputy Ambassador of Israel to Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yes. He first appears in Washington at this point.

He first appears as Deputy Ambassador in Washington in 1982, where he is just arrived as Deputy Ambassador, deputy to Moshe Arens, Ambassador, who wants somebody who is not really a diplomat, he wasn’t a diplomat at all, but he was a very good man at PR.

So all the roots of of everything we’re seeing are gathering at this point. And what you’re also seeing, and this is something you you point out very prominently in your book, is that the Black Wave begins. The Black Wave of the title. You begin to see the the Iranian chador, this black outfit, spreading through the Bekaa Valley and even into southern Lebanon and and and the suburbs of Beirut.

Absolutely. Because these Iranian young Basij, the sort of the religious police, these Iranian Revolutionary Guards who have come from Iran to initially fight the quote-unquote Zionist enemy, then to set up Hezbollah, don’t actually do any of the fighting themselves. They are only there to train the young Lebanese. It’s like a force multiplier, right? They recruit all these young men who will become the fighting force, the young Shia who are driven by religion, by ideology, by testosterone, who, you know, feel as Shias in Lebanon traditionally oppressed, impoverished, discriminated against.

Yes, we need to make that point very… we haven’t said that, that the Shia are at the bottom of the social pyramid. And that South Lebanon, which has been the area that the PLO was first based in, which they’ve been driven out, and there’s a kind of vacuum of power there now.

Yes. There’s a vacuum of power. But the other story that is often misunderstood or mistold, and which I try to rectify in my next book, is that the PLO leaves a vacuum and young Shias start looking for an alternative. And it’s not quite like that either, because somebody like Imad Mughniyeh, who would later become famous or infamous as the architect and Machiavellian mind behind a lot of what Hezbollah will do, including bombings and kidnappings, Imad Mughniyeh is a young Shia who is an eager recruit to the newly founded camp, training camp by the Revolutionary Guards. Imad Mughniyeh is not suddenly at a loss what to do because the PLO has left and, you know, where should where should he go? Imad Mughniyeh was close to the Palestinians but not really a member of their guerrilla, guerrilla movement, Fatah, although it’s often thought that he was, but he actually wasn’t. But he had trained with the Palestinians. That’s where he got his training from. But he had already been to Iran before 1982. He wasn’t just picked up on the street as some, you know, stories or or movies depict, he wasn’t just picked up on the street by Iranians who arrived in Lebanon. He had already been in touch with the Iranians, he had travelled to Tehran with Lebanese clerics. In fact, on the day of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in June 1982, Imad Mughniyeh was in Tehran with several Iranian clerics who by pure serendipity had been on a pre-planned trip to Iran to ask for Iran’s help in setting up something to fight Israel. And Imad Mughniyeh flies back to Lebanon to begin the battle against the Israelis as they advance towards Beirut. But he had already been in that milieu of being close to the Iranian revolution, he was enamoured with the Islamic revolution, and was already in that context.

Now, Kim, the the first time that the world begins to wake up to realise what it is about to face is in April the 18th 1983, noon. The Middle East changes dramatically with a single attack.

Indeed. It is the first time that America becomes the target of a bombing in the Middle East. And it is a result of everything we’ve discussed in this episode so far and the past, the previous episode. Of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon colliding with the Islamic Revolution of Iran, and meeting on the shores of the Mediterranean in a project that Iran and Syria spearhead to push America out of the Middle East. And after Imad Mughniyeh organises the bombing of the Israeli army headquarters in Tyre, they go for the next big thing, with an action coordinated, I’m sure, with the capital Tehran, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus, and most definitely with the knowledge of Hafez al-Assad in Damascus and and his people. So a pickup truck loaded with some 2,000 pounds of explosives…

Which is a lot of explosive.

A lot of explosives, which one young man like Imad Mughniyeh cannot necessarily gather on his own, which is why this is a much bigger plot. It drives through the front, into the front door of the embassy, because the embassy had not yet installed the the barriers, they had some thought that perhaps suicide trucks could become a problem because they’d seen what happened in Tyre, but they were, you know, not ahead of… they were behind, behind their planning. And it drives through the central section of this eight-storey building, a three-tower compound, which collapses entirely. 63 people are killed, including 17 Americans, and the whole CIA station is killed as well. Eight CIA officers, including Robert Ames, famously depicted in Kai Bird’s book The Good Spy, who was the head of Middle East at the CIA. It’s the deadliest attack on an American diplomatic mission up to that point.

But it’s not the last, because another one comes soon after.

It’s not the last. But crucially it’s the opening salvo in this war by Iran and Syria to drive America out of the Middle East. And yes, absolutely, it’s not the first… it’s not the last. By October, we have the tragedy of the Marine barracks, which get bombed as well on the morning at 6am on a Sunday, on October 23rd.

And this is an even bigger death toll, isn’t it? This is an absolutely vast…

Even bigger, dramatic death toll. Two trucks, one into the Marine barracks and one into the French barracks. Remember, we didn’t go over that in the last episode, after we finished on Sabra and Shatila, but Willie, after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Reagan decides to send the Marines back to Lebanon. And it is out of a guilt because they have failed in their mission.

They’d meant to have been there protecting the Palestinians, they’ve given their guarantee that they will be safe, but Weinberger brought them out, and so now they go back in.

They go back in. And with an undefined mission, other than to sort of help the Lebanese government and the Lebanese army, you know, prop themselves up. And on October 23rd, they are targeted in this Marine barracks bombing. The worst, deadliest day for the US Marines since the battle of Iwo Jima in the Second World War. A total of 241 American soldiers are killed, and 58 French paratroopers. And it’s it’s a moment that is also defining for the history of of the Middle East and America’s role in the Middle East.

Kim, I want to talk now about something which was very much something I was afraid of as a young journalist in the Middle East at this time, which was the the kidnappings, which which also begin around this time. Tell us about this.

So one episode that is a little bit forgotten in these layers of tragedy that that happen in in Lebanon at the time, is a separate string of attacks, bombing attacks, in Kuwait in December of 1983. So after the embassy bombing in Beirut, after the Marine barracks bombing. The US embassy and various other targets are targeted with bombs in Kuwait. There are several casualties, but the attacks mostly fail, and the people who carry out the attacks are caught by the Kuwaiti authorities. This is not lawless Lebanon in the middle of a war where the Lebanese central government is incapable of finding anyone who’s done anything. They are caught. One of them is the brother-in-law of Imad Mughniyeh, and he is sentenced to jail for life. He is… Imad Mughniyeh… stay with me because family ties are complicated. Imad Mughniyeh’s brother-in-law and also his cousin, right? And Imad Mughniyeh’s wife, whose brother is now in jail in Kuwait, Mustafa Badr al-Din is his name, Imad Mughniyeh’s wife wants her brother back. And so Imad Mughniyeh comes up with the genius idea of starting to kidnap Western hostages in Lebanon to demand the freedom of Mustafa Badr al-Din in Kuwait.

And at this point, despite everything, people like your mother, who was who was Dutch, are living in Lebanon. They’ve they’ve been… this was a place where many Westerners had settled, there were people that loved Lebanon. And this was a popular a popular spot. The British at this point would send all their their foreign office people that wanted to learn Arabic to to Beirut. It’s famous for it still, despite everything, for its nightlife, for its music, for its food.

There is a famous story anecdote that Thomas Friedman tells, or it’s famous because he tells it in his book. Thomas Friedman’s also excellent book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, where he talks about how normal life continues in in in Lebanon even throughout the war.

Yeah.

And there are these dinner parties and, you know, clubs and depending on where the fighting is, the party moves a little bit. It’s just part of social life, it’s just part of how people cope as well. There are some incredible descriptions also of people from opposing factions coming together for dinner, which is a lost art in today’s world that is so partisan.

And polarised, yeah.

Yeah, polarised. You should still be able to sit down over a meal and discuss things. But Tom Friedman tells this incredible story of being invited to a dinner party for Christmas or something, and the shelling around them is is is insane and the hostess is waiting for things to calm down, and she finally says, well, would you like to have your dinner before or after the ceasefire? I mean, let’s just proceed with with things. So there are still many foreigners living in Lebanon at this stage, including my mother, who does not, you know, who we all somehow miraculously come out of this war completely unscathed. My father had a business partner or acquaintance rather who was kidnapped. He was an Italian, not a very well known incident, but he was a man who’d lived in Lebanon for 30 years, who was in the import export insurance business, and who gets kidnapped. And I will never forget, William, I will never forget the phone calls of his wife to our house, asking my father if he knew anything, if he’d heard anything. And it was just so haunting, this woman, Madame Molinari would call. And I didn’t know what it was about, I was a child, I was, you know, six or seven. And I would say, Papa, Madame Molinari is on the phone. And I didn’t know what it was about, and I would ask him, and he’s like, well, you know, she she’s looking for her husband. And he probably didn’t want to tell me too much more because it was just so distressing that somebody could disappear.

Our mutual friend Charlie Glass got taken at this time.

Absolutely, absolutely. And and it stayed with me. These haunting phone calls that stayed with me forever. And I always wondered, what happened to Mr Molinari? Where is he? Did she find him? Did she… what happened? And in this terrible saga of of hostages, some of them survived, some of them were released.

Terry Anderson.

Terry Waite, John McCarthy. John McCarthy, British, lots of Americans also.

All tied to to radiators in basements. I mean, terrible stories.

Terrible, terrible, vengeful, sick, psycho stories of of torture, of of pain, of of punishment by their by their hostage takers. Some of them died in captivity, they were sick. Michel Seurat, a famous French, you know, political scientist, who was also taken hostage and died from hepatitis apparently or possibly leukaemia, we’re not sure, died in 1986. Terry Anderson, longest held American hostage, finally released in 91. But during my research for the book, my next book, as I was exploring this this hostage crisis, I finally looked up Mr Molinari. And I found the news reports about him. After 91, when the hostage crisis comes to an end, people are still looking for Mr Molinari, because he has not come out and they’re looking for information. And he had actually been killed almost immediately after he was taken hostage. And so his wife had been looking for him all these years, but he was already dead. And the cruelty of it will never leave me. You know, researching this chapter nearly made me want to give up this book because it was just too painful to imagine that somebody could be so cruel to do this to another human being, and also to live through the pain that these hostages had gone through. And I understand that Imad Mughniyeh was trying to get his brother-in-law out of jail in Kuwait, but his brother had a trial in court for something that he had done, which was considered to be a terrorist action. And the Kuwaitis were adamant that they would not release him and undo their own justice system. But crucially, and I know that this is where you want to go next, William, this crazy idea of Imad Mughniyeh, which begins with a previous kidnapping episode which I will not reveal here, and you’ll have to read my book, because it is the genesis of it all.

It is the genesis also of Imad Mughniyeh as Iran’s man in Lebanon.

And so Imad Mughniyeh’s kidnappings with his people, and this can be done very quickly and very easily in Beirut where people walk on the streets freely.

Now, Kim, let’s refocus on Hezbollah again. Hezbollah, who’ve been behind these these hostage attacks, who’ve been behind in some form both the Marine and the embassy bombings, although there have been different groups named at the time, such as Islamic Jihad. It’s the same complex of of Shia groups behind this. Now, the moment that people realise what Hezbollah has really become is in 2006. What happens then?

2006 is the next big war between Israel and Hezbollah. Very briefly, in the 1980s, Hezbollah is mostly busy proselytising and fighting America, holding hostages and attacking American targets. It is also busy killing what was then known as the Lebanese resistance against Israel, which was mostly leftist and communists. Hezbollah wants to dominate the scene of the fight against Israel and wants to Islamise it. So actually they start by killing first their own as well, including within the Shia community. 1990, the Lebanese war ends. Syria is occupying Lebanon fully, except for the part that Israel is still occupying. And Syria and Iran agree that although all militias should disarm, Hezbollah can keep its weapons as a national resistance movement against Israel. It is now the dominating force, the dominant force on that scene. The communists are out of the picture, they’ve all gone home or they’ve been killed. And the other part of the agreement is that 3,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers or members can stay in the Bekaa Valley. And that is crucial to understand today how it is that we still have Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps members in in Lebanon. The 90s is fairly peaceful. By 2000, the Israelis decide they’ve had enough of occupying southern Lebanon.

They pull back.

They pull back. It is a victory for Hezbollah. The Israelis had made the decision anyway, but it is a victory for Hezbollah.

And they claim it very much as such.

Absolutely. And they claim it and they are revered and lauded not just within the Shia community but in Lebanon generally, including by Christians, and across the Arab world. They have won where no other Arab army has managed to win. They have won against Israel. They have liberated Arab land against occupied by Israel, which no other Arab army, no other Arab faction, no other Arab country has managed to do.

The Egyptians had got Sinai back through a peace agreement, but this is the first time that there is Arab land that has been won through a force of arms. But 2006, tell us what happens then.

So to clarify, that after 2000, everybody thinks, okay, you know, Hezbollah has done its job, it’s gonna go home. But it doesn’t, for various reasons they find ways to maintain their raison d’etre.

Keep their weapons, and yeah.

Keep their weapons, with support from Syria and Iran, and also because of major policy failures on America and Israel’s side. Major policy failures that have to do with why Israel withdrew unilaterally and not as part of a peace accord. That was a failure of the Clinton administration in its in its waning days. So fast forward to 2006, Hezbollah kidnaps a couple of Israeli soldiers on the border, and ignites a 34-day war with with Israel. In the backdrop, there’s also a war happening between Israel and Hamas in in Gaza. So a lot of similarities again with what we’ve seen over the last couple of years. It’s a devastating war for Lebanon, but Israel, which has told the Americans, we need 30 days to finish the job, realises it cannot defeat Hezbollah.

It had asked the Bush administration, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had asked the Bush administration, give us 30 days, don’t ask for a ceasefire, we can do it. And after 30 days they told the Bush administration, we can’t do it, we need a ceasefire.

So again, Hezbollah victorious, venerated around the Arab world for giving the Israelis a bloody nose and not losing the war even though they didn’t win it. There is a complicated element here which we need to insert, William, which is very important for people to understand the very mixed feelings that people have in Lebanon about Hezbollah. Hezbollah also now stands accused of murdering, assassinating Lebanon’s prime minister in a plot organised by Imad Mughniyeh and his brother-in-law, since freed since the end of 1990, who’s now, you know, working with Imad Mughniyeh. Mustafa Badr al-Din is back in Lebanon. With Iran’s support and Syria’s support and and and help, they assassinate Lebanon’s prime minister. And there’s a series of assassinations, including friends of mine, Gebran Tueni, editor of the newspaper An-Nahar, Samir Kassir, a writer for An-Nahar, author and historian, who are assassinated because they stand in the way of Iran’s vision for the region. By now in Syria you have Hafez al-Assad’s son as president, Bashar al-Assad.

Bashar. A former ophthalmologist from from West London.

Yeah, and there are even doubts about whether he ever finished his diploma actually.

I’ve heard that he’s practising again in Moscow, but then maybe that’s not true.

Gosh, I wouldn’t want to go see him as a to to check my eyes. But he is he is weak, he needs legitimacy, and he is enamoured with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, who has been leading Hezbollah since the early 90s. And they form this sort of, you know, a very interesting trio, you know, Hezbollah, Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, and the Iranians in in Tehran, who, if we can remind our listeners also, all of this is happening with the backdrop of the US-led invasion of Iraq, where the Americans are now occupying Iraq and facing two insurgencies, one Sunni and one Shia. The Iranians are worried that America is gonna come for them. Damascus is worried that the Americans are gonna come for them. And so they start using the playbook they learnt in the 80s in Lebanon, is to use violence against the Americans, blow things up, kill people. And so the project of ejecting America from the Middle East continues with these assassinations in Lebanon and of course with the insurgency in in Iraq. And guess what? I mean, eventually the Americans leave Iraq, right? And and in Lebanon Hezbollah rises as a political power with veto power over Lebanon’s politics, and in Iraq Iran becomes, you know, also the kingmaker.

So let’s fast forward again, Kim, now to October the 7th. We’re now in the present. Hezbollah’s role in all this. Because Iran is supporting Hamas, but it’s also supporting Hezbollah, and there is an axis which is running from Tehran, through Damascus, through Beirut and southern Lebanon, into into Hamas land, into into Gaza.

So I want to be careful here to make clear that as far as we know there is no clear information that Iran knew the details or supported or helped with the planning of October 7th.

That’s very important. What’s your source on that, Kim?

Western officials, high ranking American officials. I think even the Israelis have have said it.

What what is the nature of that, if they didn’t know about October the 7th? Is it funding? Is it weapon systems, or what’s going on?

It is funding and weapons, but it is not operational knowledge. Hezbollah and Iran were not aware of the operational details, and this is not to justify or excuse or make them sound like moderates, but from my conversations with Western diplomats based in Beirut who speak to Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah was shocked by the savagery of the images of October 7th. This is from a man who, you know, is thought to have been behind the the the assassination of Rafic Hariri, Prime Minister of Lebanon. And it’s a moment which I think, you know, we will need a lot of years of hindsight to understand exactly what happened. Hamas was expecting that the axis of resistance would rally and inflict Armageddon on Israel on that day. And it didn’t happen. I know that missiles rained on Israel, but it wasn’t what Hamas had anticipated.

And instead there is an extraordinary Israeli operation with the bleepers, famously, which wipes out a great deal of the the Hezbollah fighters and and commanders, as well as obviously a number of civilian casualties.

Absolutely. A year later, it is Lebanon that is at war, or Hezbollah that is at war with Israel. Hassan Nasrallah has tried during all this time to do a very careful, calibrated tit-for-tat with Israel. He wants to show support for Hamas, but he doesn’t want to drag Lebanon into a war, because the lessons of 2006 were terrible for the Shia community. Hezbollah was not defeated, but it was devastating. Iran’s key goal is survival of the regime. It does not want to have a direct confrontation with Israel. It plays also a choreographed game of missiles and replies and tit-for-tat and very choreographed messaging. Because, as I said, you know, everybody is guilty of hypocrisy, the Israelis, the Iranians, the Americans, and everybody is is deploying weaponry and and missiles and AI with full impunity, and and this is what, you know, is so difficult for us in Lebanon, because we find ourselves in the middle of it, a battleground just as in 1982. I mean, we’re not even caught between a rock and a hard place, we’re caught between three rocks that are pounding, you know, on us.

Kim, we have a a couple of very important questions to ask. First of all, following the pagers and following the the assassination of Nasrallah, you get the impression that that Hezbollah is, if not beaten, at least severely on the back step at the moment. Is that is that a a correct impression?

That’s what the Israelis thought at the end of the conflict in 2006 when they carried out a ceasefire, that Hezbollah was decapitated, that they could no longer inflict damage on Israel, and that 70% of their capacity was diminished. And then, you know, Israel did not do what it should have done, which is to try to begin diplomacy through the Americans or however which way they wanted and reach out to a Lebanese government that was the best government and president that we’ve had in in decades since before the war, to try to turn this tactical military success into a diplomatic strategic victory. And this is a pattern that is repeating everywhere across the Middle East with every conflict that Israel is is engaging in, and similarly with Iran, similarly with Gaza and the Palestinians, and with with Syria. So fast forward to February this year, when Israel and America launched their first strikes against Iran and killed Ali Khamenei, whom we were discussing previously, who was president of Iran in the 80s, now supreme leader. With Benjamin Netanyahu, Deputy Ambassador to Washington in 1982, today Prime Minister of Israel, you know, Hezbollah decided to avenge Ali Khamenei’s killing and launch missiles against Israel, even though Israel had been bombing Lebanon throughout the prior year. Despite the ceasefire, so Israel was in breach of the ceasefire. And they were able to rebuild their capacity during that year even though they were being bombed by Israel and Lebanon was being bombed by by Israel. Probably because the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, were very actively working to rebuild Hezbollah’s capacity, because they knew that another war was coming. You know, Israel and Trump last summer also said that Iran’s nuclear capacity had been obliterated, and this was the war to end all wars, but it was very clear to me and many of us in the Middle East that this was not going to be the last war, and that Iran felt that if it did not strike back hard the next time, that this would be a recurrent pattern, that it had to show its enemies, and again I’m not justifying, I’m explaining, it had to show its enemies that it could actually inflict real pain to others, and that it would not just send choreographed missiles anymore.

But Kim, nonetheless, there isn’t the sensation that Nasrallah is assassinated, the Israelis are wiping out great swathes of southern Lebanon, a lot of the Shia villages and towns have been destroyed in front of us every day. Syria is no longer under the Assads, and they are no longer supporting Hezbollah. And Iran is obviously now under direct attack. On the face of it, you could take the view that Israel has made some strategic successes here and that they have degraded their enemies more than we would have thought possible a few years ago. Do you agree with that, or do you think that there is no reason to think that this story is over?

This story is not over. Brilliant brilliant tactics. You know, I could sit here if I were an American general or an Israeli general and describe in detail the brilliance of the military strategy and the the targeting and the penetration of intelligence also and yeah…

Penetration of intelligence, including because the enemy is not as smart on both sides, right? I mean, Hezbollah exposed itself dramatically to the outside world via social media as it bragged about the massacres it was carrying out in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad, and so the Israelis were just hoovering up all this information about who was going where and the videos and the posts and the funeral announcements and it hoovered up all that information. And the pager operation which killed and maimed so many in Lebanon, yes, you could describe it as tactically brilliant, but Leon Panetta, former CIA chief in America, also described it as state-sponsored terrorism. Because it they blew up amongst the people, just regular civilians.

Yeah, in supermarkets, in in houses, in in restaurants, yeah.

In supermarkets and clinics and and and homes. So my concern is that just as in 1982, you know, Israel claims victory because they’ve have gotten rid of the PLO, which is gone into exile, which was the goal of all this. Syria looks like it’s on its knees, but it gives birth to something else: Hezbollah. We don’t know what this is going to give birth to, but I suspect it is not the end of the story. And my deep concern is that if Israel occupies Lebanon, it will give renewed justification and raison d’etre for Hezbollah…

For new generations of of resistance.

And at a time when Hezbollah is, you know, resented by I would say a majority of the Lebanese population…

So just as you can see in Iran, even those who hate the regime rallying around their country, are you seeing a situation in Lebanon where despite everyone being very irritated by Hezbollah bringing a new war on Lebanon, that that that again there will be rallying of future generations to support against this coming occupation?

It depends how the war ends in Lebanon, whether there is occupation or or not. Beyond the wholesale destruction of Lebanese villages, it’s not clear yet that Israel is going to physically occupy the south.

They’ve said they will.

We’ll have to see. I think they’ve learned some lessons from their occupation. They can control this uninhabited area from from the sky. They don’t need to be physically present, actually. So that may be one of their military strategies. Um, I don’t discount two things. One, that the regime in Iran could still fall under the pressure. And in Lebanon, um, if there are enough smart people, uh, in America, and Israel, in Lebanon, in Damascus, in Europe, uh, there could still be a diplomatic outcome to this. Lebanon is much more complicated than Iran when it comes to Hezbollah in the sense that the sectarian tensions that are bubbling up, that is pitting the country against the Shia community, you know, all of that is, you know, for another episode maybe. But I don’t see a wholesale rallying of the country against Hezbollah. No. I see maybe pockets of the Shia community rallying again despite their anger at what Hezbollah has done to Lebanon.

And finally, one last question, a brief answer, Kim. The fate of the Palestinians, this remains the great unsolved sore at the heart of all Middle East.

Israel tries to resolve all problems militarily. The Palestinian question remains at the center of of everything. Um, despite what the Israelis may try to say, that it’s not important, that they can solve, that they can make peace with the whole of the Arab world and ignore the Palestinians, which is often what they try to do. I know we’ve had the Oslo Accords, the Madrid conference, the Abraham Accords, which uh, um normalize Arab-Israeli relations, again without resolving the Palestinian question. I think there is no way around this Palestinian question. And if I may end our episode with a quote by an American scholar of the Middle East, and president of the American University of Beirut, who was assassinated, as I said, in 1984, Malcolm Kerr. He wrote something in 1977, William, 1977, with so much prescience. And he says: ‘The central Arab grievance has always been the dispossession of the Palestinians. Personal dispossession for half of them, political dispossession for the other half. Because of the connotation of injustice and shame, overwhelming in their eyes, the Arabs have never been able to drop the issue. Because it casts into question the whole basis on which Israel came into being, the Israelis have never been able to face it. Efforts on one side or the other to bury or sidestep the question are always suspect. It is the common curse of all concerned, including the Palestinians themselves. This is the main reason why separate deals in the Arab-Israeli conflict are always likely to come unstuck.’

Kim Ghattas, thank you very, very much. An extraordinary marathon. That brings to an end our series on the Arab-Israeli wars, but sadly this is an ongoing story which has no end in sight.

Yes, I’m I’m afraid we’ll revisit this in a few months or a few years.

Goodbye for me, William Dalrymple.

Thank you so much.