September 10, 2024: Hezbollah, the powerful, Iran-backed Shia militia in southern Lebanon, is having problems. The most recent ones have to do with the Israeli retaliation for Hezbollah firing rockets into northern Israel and killing and wounding Israeli Druze children. The Druze are a quasi-Islamic group that is considered heretical by most Moslems. Druze live on both sides of the Israeli borders with Lebanon and Syria. It is not known if Hezbollah deliberately fired those rockets at Druze children or simply considered them Israeli kids because they were playing on a field in northern Israel. The response involved Israel launching massive airstrikes against the Hezbollah rocket storage sites in southern Lebanon. Numerous large secondary explosions were seen as Israeli missiles detonated rocket stockpiles.

Israel responds quickly and harshly against anyone who injures Israeli citizens. Many Europeans and Americans don’t realize that 24 percent of the Israeli population is not Jewish. Most of this minority is Arab, but some are Druze or Christian. Many of those Arab Christians are descendants of the first Christians who appeared two thousand years ago. The term Christian was first used about a hundred years after the Jewish rebellion that the Romans put down with massive killings and the enslavement and expulsion of most Jews to other parts of the Roman Empire. Substantial numbers of Jews didn’t start returning to what is now Israel until the 12th century. Even then the numbers were small and Moslems were still the majority. It wasn’t until the 1800s that Jews began to return to what eventually became Israel in the late 1940s. The movement became a flood after World War II when survivors of the Nazi effort to kill all Jews in Europe and Russia were only partially successful. Millions of Jews survived and most wanted to move somewhere else. Meanwhile most chose European countries or North America. But a substantial number chose the newly established state of Israel, which was born in battle and continues to be a dangerous region for unarmed Jews. The Arab states then expelled almost all their 600,000 Jewish people, who had been there for almost two thousand years after the Romans expelled them from ancient Israel. These all went to the newly independent Israel.

The new state of Israel organized a cadre/conscript reserve army like most of Europe’s 1870-1960 countries, with an active army of small cadres of volunteer regular soldiers plus 2-3 years of conscript classes composed of most young men males who have just reached military age, and 10-20 years of yearly fully trained conscripts serving in reserve. Israel’s borders were so small that its army had to be kept in a much more constant state of readiness than those of any other cadre/conscript/reserve countries. Its active armed forces have comprised almost three percent of its total population, and its total mobilized army almost ten percent of its population, for about seventy years.

Hezbollah wasn’t the first armed group of Moslems to attack Jews in this region, but they were one of the better organized and heavily armed Arab militias to confront the Israeli state since the 1980s. In this part of the world persecuting and killing Jews has been going on for over two thousand years. Hezbollah has had a shorter and more violence history as the guardians of southern Lebanon against Jewish aggression. Israel never attacked Hezbollah unless attacked first.

The current violence with Hezbollah was preceded by a 2006 incident, when Hezbollah launched rockets into northern Israel. This triggered a massive retaliation by Israel attacking numerous military targets in Lebanon, some of them belonging to the Lebanese government. The Israelis wanted to show the Lebanese government and military that as long as they tolerated Hezbollah, all armed groups in Lebanon were subject to attack. This did not go as planned because the Israeli military had been run down, and the Israeli army got stuck in prepared Hezbollah fortifications. The Israelis prevailed anyway after a while, and Hezbollah’s militia survived only because of a hasty truce. Hezbollah claimed victory anyway, which was then normal for Arab-Israeli wars.

That calmed things down, but in 2020 there was an incident involving 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that had been stored in a warehouse in the port of Beirut for six years and ignored. This had nothing to do with Israel and was the fault of groups in Lebanon, including Hezbollah. The government had seized the ammonium nitrate from an abandoned cargo ship and stored it in a warehouse. Lebanon was going through another recession and poorly paid and corrupt port officials were inclined to ignore the volatile ammonium nitrate stored in an old warehouse. Ammonium nitrate is a crop fertilizer but also a key ingredient in explosives. Under the right conditions large quantities of ammonium nitrate will explode. In August 2020 there was a fire in another part of the ammonium nitrate warehouse and when the flames reached the volatile fertilizer and detonated with the force of a small 1.1 kiloton nuclear bomb. The Beirut mishap was one of the six largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded.

There was no radiation but the noise from the explosion was heard 240 kilometers away on the island of Cyprus. The force of the explosion registered as a 4.5 magnitude earthquake and was felt throughout the Middle East in Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and Israel, as well as parts of southeast Europe. Many other ships in the harbor were damaged or sunk. Half the city of Beirut suffered damage that was worth an estimated $15 billion. Only 20 percent of that damage was insured.

The explosion destroyed the port of Beirut along with housing near the port area. About 300,000 people were left homeless. Over 200 people were killed and nearly 7,000 injured. The explosion also weakened nearby grain silos that collapsed and caught fire. That meant there was a grain shortage in the region and the port of Beirut no longer existed to bring in additional grain. There are other, smaller, ports in Lebanon but the impact of the Beirut port explosion was felt by many Lebanese for a long time. Unrest in the city continued for several years. This put tremendous pressure on Hezbollah to keep the peace, which was hard to do because Iran was supplying Hezbollah with weapons and military advisors that often led Hezbollah to fight when most Lebanese were not looking for a fight with Israel. The explosion led Hezbollah gunmen to operate in damaged areas of Beirut, where they encountered resistance from Christian and other Islamic militias, soldiers, police and armed civilians.

This involvement in Beirut was partly because Hezbollah also operated as a political party and had considerable influence over how Lebanon is governed and by who. Hezbollah is also a state within a state inside Lebanon. Hezbollah operates its own military, judiciary, Shia religious facilities and maintains what can best be called an Iranian embassy. Hezbollah is financed by Iran and takes its orders from Iranian officials and commanders of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps). The IRGC exists to defend the Iranian religious dictatorship. The IRGC has land, air and naval units and in many respects is more powerful than the Iranian military.

Hezbollah has been around since 1985, when a Lebanese Shia militia renamed itself the Party of God, or Hezbollah in Arabic. The Shia militia had been organized in 1982 to oppose an Israeli incursion into Lebanon. Hezbollah is also a political organization and campaigns successfully to get some of its members elected to the Lebanese parliament. Currently Hezbollah holds fifteen seats in the 128 member parliament.

By 1985 Hezbollah had become a more formal organization and grew rapidly by absorbing smaller Shia militias. Hezbollah had become the favorite of Iranian officials and military advisers. Iran wanted Hezbollah to attack Israel, which Hezbollah was reluctant to do. Hezbollah was willing to store and safeguard Iranian weapons delivered by truck, air freight and ship. These rockets were being stockpiled for an eventual attack on Israel. The intended victim was aware of this and tried to keep the peace. For example, in 2021 Israeli aircraft dropped thousands of leaflets on Syrian villages near the border warning residents to stay away from nearby Iranian or Hezbollah bases. The civilians know where these bases are and some will do business with people working or living there. These leaflets made it clear that Israeli airstrikes on these Iranian bases and camps would be a regular occurrence. Some leaflets also call on individual Syrian unit commanders in the area to stop cooperating with the Hezbollah and Iranian Quds Force men in their area and order them to leave and not endanger local civilians.

Despite, or because of, the increased Iranian presence in southern Syria, a lawless chaos exists in its Damascus suburbs and gets worse south of the city along the Israeli border area. This is where Iran is making an intense effort to gain the support of Sunni Arab civilians. The hostility and violence are a side effect of the poverty, high unemployment and hostility towards the Assad government and their Iranian sponsors. In this respect the local gangsters see their crimes as patriotic resistance to their brutal and hated Shia overlords.

The Iranians are spending a lot of money to buy, or just seize, and rehabilitate abandoned property for the locals. Iran seeks to encourage new businesses to start or defunct ones to revive. Iran will supply loans and access to supplies. The Assad government can’t do any of this and can’t openly criticize the Iranians either for seeking to buy the loyalty of Syrians along the border.

Israel is seeking to support this resistance but is silent about details, other than its constant airstrikes against Iranian targets and seeking to maintain their informant network along the border. The informants make it possible to hit Iranian targets with smart bombs, missiles or artillery even if the Iranians have gone to great lengths to conceal the locations. This includes storing missiles, rockets and other weapons in residences and commercial buildings. In an effort to evade the precision attacks the Iranians are storing weapons shipments in civilian warehouses closer to the Iraq border, where the Israeli intel is less effective. Israeli airstrikes have reached the point where just about any concentration of Iranian forces or stored weapons Israel can locate is attacked. This is an endurance contest in which Israel has an edge. Iran has money problems and maintaining a military presence in Syria is not a necessity. For Israel it’s essential to keep the Iranians out of Syria, at least as long as Iran openly calls for the destruction of Israel. The Iranian war effort in Syria has another problem in that more and more Iranians openly oppose the expense and risk of operations in Syria. No such domestic opposition exists in Israel. This is why Israel keeps carrying out the airstrikes in Syria and doing so more often and accurately because a lot of Syrians are willing to provide target information.