Who Is Supposed To Rebuild Lebanon? Again And Again?

Israeli media on October 30th leaked the draft of an early proposal for a peace deal between Lebanon and Israel. The plan calls for the implementation of the 18-year UNSC Resolution 1701 that calls for Hezbollah to be removed from South Lebanon and replaced by the Lebanese Army with the help of UN peacekeepers. Because such an agreement has never taken place since 1701's passing in 2006, the draft included a side-deal between the U.S. and Israel where an Independent Monitoring and Enforcement Mechanism (IMEM) is created to ensure that, this time, Hezbollah actually does evacuate from the South. In it the U.S. recognizes Israel's right to respond to Hezbollah violations and to have military overflights "invisible to the naked eye" over Lebanon.[1]

The draft does not seem to have progressed and indeed some observers said that it was inacceptable to Lebanon, to Hezbollah and, it seems, to Israel. The fighting continues. Catastrophically for a country in deep economic, social, and political crisis, Lebanon is not only technically at war since 1948 with Israel, but since the late 1960s, has served as a convenient battleground for others' wars with Israel, an agenda promoted through the decades by Egypt's Abdel Nasser, the PLO's Arafat, the Assad regime in Syria, and Iran and its main regional proxy Hezbollah.

On October 8, 2023 Hezbollah, with the silence or tacit approval of what passes for a Lebanese state, decided to join the war between Israel and Hamas. After months of degrading and defeating Hamas in Gaza, Israel in the Summer of 2024 turned its attention to Lebanon. First it targeted the Hezbollah leadership and many of its cadres, then it began ground operations on October 1st, securing much of the immediate border area in South Lebanon. Over 1.2 million Lebanese (over 20 percent of the population) has been displaced and the number is climbing. Most are Shia Muslims from the South, Beirut's Dahiyah and the Beqaa Valley. Some have fled into neighboring Syria but most seem to have fled north and west further into Lebanon, from traditional Shia Muslim majority areas into areas inhabited by other Lebanese confessional groups – Sunni Muslims, Druze, and Christians. Those populations have been both welcoming and also extremely nervous about the risk of changing demographics. All three communities have suffered at the hands of or clashed with aggressive Hezbollah supporters in recent years. It seems that even the Assad regime in Syria is nervous about hosting these new guests.[2]

Israel is, not surprisingly, not making it easy for the Lebanese state. By rooting up the entrenched Hezbollah military infrastructure of tunnels, arms caches, and safe havens, it is devastating these Shia-majority areas, turning towns and villages into rubble and in a sense creating a free-fire zone out of what had been Hezbollah's launchpad for rocket fire and invasion into Israel.

Despite the grim situation today, the war in Lebanon will end, perhaps within the next few months. For now, Iran still wants the Lebanon front against Israel active as it decides on its own counterattack against Israel, either directly, or through its pawns in the region, or both. But when the Lebanon War does end, the country will face new dilemmas.

The end of the current war is unlikely to bring real peace to Lebanon. Indeed, Hezbollah is very likely to be both extremely weakened at war's end – weaker than it has been in decades – and also ready to lash out against its enemies inside Lebanon. Pro-Hezbollah propagandists have already bitterly attacked the country's Christian leadership – those Lebanese Christians who are vocal against Hezbollah's weapons – and also hurled vitriol against Christians in South Lebanon who want to be left in peace. An assassination campaign targeting Christian leaders, even figures like Lebanese Forces head Samir Geagea or prominent members of the Gemayel family, is quite possible.[3]

Anti-war publicity contrasting a Christian village and a pro-Hezbollah one in South Lebanon

In addition to worrying about what Hezbollah will do once the shooting stops with Israel, Lebanese will also face a country which is even poorer and more in crisis than it was in October 2023, with large portions of the South, the East (in the Beqaa Valley), and South Beirut, flattened and uninhabitable.

In 2006, after the month-long Tammuz War with Israel ended, it was Hezbollah that rushed in to rebuild the South – or at least look like it was rebuilding what was destroyed. Senior Hezbollah cleric Nabil Qaouk held a press conference while perched on top of a demolished apartment block in the southern city of Tyre and promised cash payments to locals to help them rebuild, money to come from Hezbollah and Iran but not to be distributed by the Lebanese state.[4]

Eighteen years later, Qaouk is dead; killed, like so many other senior Hezbollah leaders, in an Israeli airstrike. The destruction is much broader and more systematic and the war isn't even over. Israel has also successfully targeted at least some of Hezbollah's coffers and money-making activities. Iran has its own deep financial problems and Lebanon as a whole is much poorer than it was in 2006, even after that war. There is far less left for Hezbollah to leach from the Lebanese milk cow.

There is no doubt that some Western countries will pitch in. France has a soft spot for Lebanon, even for Hezbollah, and can be counted upon to press the Lebanese cause among the EU elite. The United States is a frequent donor to Lebanon. It is also quite possible that Qatar – which is both friendly to Iran and a booster of the Axis of Resistance against Israel – will be generous. Other Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAEd, are unlikely to spend much to support a country still under the thumb of Iran and Hezbollah. 

But this war seems very different indeed from the 2006 Lebanon War – longer, precise, more destructive, more definitive. So far, at least a quarter of all buildings – almost 6,000 structures – in Lebanese towns and villages near the Israel border have been destroyed.[5]

A logical way for Lebanon to maximize its chances to rebuild and to flourish is to assemble a government, including a president and military, not under Hezbollah's thumb and to reach a political situation where it is no longer part of the expensive "attack Israel/get beaten and destroyed/get a ceasefire/attack Israel again" cycle of violence and destruction. But that is precisely the scenario that Hezbollah and its Lebanese political allies want to return to, again and again.

*Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice President of MEMRI.