Michael Rubin
Israel continues to battle Hezbollah, with diplomatic efforts for a ceasefire scuttled by the travel freeze that International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan imposed on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
While the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tries to uproot Hezbollah infrastructure and eradicate missiles acquired or tunnels dug under the watchful eyes of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), it has made significant progress. With the deaths of much of Hezbollah’s leadership, many in spectacular ways, the group’s bluster is gone or empty.
Certainly, Israeli leaders can celebrate Hezbollah’s demise in Lebanon and the United States, France, and United Nations can seek to negotiate Hezbollah’s disarmament inside Lebanon to put Lebanon into compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, but that alone addresses only half the Hezbollah problem.
Lebanon’s greatest export has always been its people. Historically, the country’s Shi’ite community was largely feudal. Shi’ites were subsistence farmers with little hope for political power or advancement. In The Innocents Abroad, American writer Mark Twain described his 1867 travels through Lebanon to Palestine; the Shi’ites whom he surely saw did not merit his inclusion. With little prospect for upward mobility, many Shi’ites emigrated to engage in business and trade, especially elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa, and South America. Today, the Lebanese diaspora population just in Brazil and Argentina is equal to Lebanon’s population. Not all Lebanese emigrants were Shi’ite, of course, but they were disproportionately so.
Into the mid-twentieth century, the lack of domestic prospects led Shi’ites who remained in Lebanon to embrace either Marxism or Arab nationalism. As the late historian Fouad Ajami explained in The Vanished Imam, Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935-2010) sought to channel Shi’ite identity and discord into Shi’ism. He became the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. His influence extended past Lebanon, however, to the Shi’ite communities abroad. As the Washington Institute’s Michael Eisenstadt and Kendall Bianchi showed, family permeates Hezbollah inside Lebanon. The same dynamics affect with the Lebanese community abroad. Many have close ties to those who remained inside Lebanon. As Hezbollah’s tentacles grew through the 1980s and 1990s, the Lebanese diaspora became an important component of Hezbollah’s broader network.
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