The saying attributed to Lenin that there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen has never been truer than the week that Lebanon just experienced. It started on 17 and 18 September with the shocking explosion of thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah operatives and concluded with an unprecedented wave of Israeli air strikes across Lebanon that marked one of the deadliest days in the country’s already bloody history.
To top that off, a few days later, a massive Israeli strike hit the bunker in which Hassan Nasrallah was hiding, levelling several civilian buildings and killing the head of Hezbollah.
In the space of a few days, elements of deterrence that long explained the complex dynamic between Israel, Hezbollah and Iran have been upturned. For decades, Iran has built up Hezbollah not only as one of its main proxies but as a critical element of the Islamic Republic’s own security doctrine.
The group’s estimated 150,000 missiles and thousands of drones, all acquired with the help of Iran over more than a decade, represent Iran’s own “insurance policy” against an attack by Israel. It offered Tehran the ability to saturate Israel with missiles in case the Israeli government acted upon its threat to bomb nuclear sites in Iran.
For more than a decade, this has led analysts and Middle East watchers (including myself) to view the dynamic between Hezbollah and Israel as almost similar to the “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) dynamic that portended the rivalry between the two nuclear-armed Cold War superpowers, the US and the USSR. The certainty of being utterly destroyed in a conflict is partly what explained the lack of a full-scale and direct war between the US and the USSR.
The same was said of Israel and Hezbollah (and, by extension, Iran): Both Hezbollah and Israel were viewed as having the ability to inflict so much damage on the other that this paradoxically restrained both sides from all-out war.
Deeply penetrated
But a series of events have changed this dynamic. The explosions of the pagers and talkie-walkies, the methodical elimination of Hezbollah commanders that ended up killing Nasrallah himself, and the massive aerial bombardment have highlighted what few observers had seen: Israel has been preparing for this major conflict for more than 15 years.
The attacks showed the group was deeply penetrated by Israeli intelligence—oddly, the same intelligence that failed to predict and pre-empt Hamas’s 7 October attack. It showed the enormous gap both between Hezbollah and Israel, but also inside Israel, between preparations made for a conflict in the north and preparations made for a conflict in Gaza.
Up until this point, most of the focus had been on Hezbollah’s own preparations and ability to improve its military capabilities. With the help of Iran, the group has stockpiled precision-guided missiles while battle-testing new “conventional” military capabilities in Syria. The group participated in large-scale battles, including the battle of Qusayr in 2013 on the side of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, as well as the infamous siege of Madaya, during which it starved residents of towns in the Qalamoun region of Syria.
Hezbollah certainly lost the support of many in the region at that time, but it also gained experienced troops, even fighting and coordinating with Russian special forces at times in Aleppo. This gave Nasrallah’s threat to “conquer the Galilee” (Israel’s northern region) more bite, as Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit showed that they were capable of carrying out offensive operations rather than just defensive guerilla tactics. In a massive blow to Hezbollah, Israel took out the entire Radwan leadership in a single strike in Beirut just days after the pagers explosions.
This is also what makes this conflict different from the previous first and second Lebanon wars, which have served to build Hezbollah as a central piece of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”. During these two conflicts, Hezbollah was more clearly the underdog. Both those conflicts tarnished Israel’s image of “invincibility” (already damaged by the 1973 Kippur war).
But since 2006, Hezbollah has grown into a regional power of its own and built up its image as an impenetrable fortress with state-like capabilities. The conflict in Syria has also contributed to a narrative shift, as Hezbollah became an aggressor in a foreign country rather than a defender of its own nation. And despite contributing to the stalemate in Syria and helping al-Assad stay in power, the Syrian President appears in no rush to return the favour.
For its part, Iran itself has sent mixed messages as to whether it wants to intervene on the side of Hezbollah. Its focus has so far been on an ongoing effort by newly-elected President Masoud Pezeshkian (a “moderate”) to negotiate relief from continued Western sanctions. But more broadly, it should be noted that Hezbollah was created to protect Iran, not the other way around.
Read more: Eyes on Iran as Israel sets its sights on Tehran’s golden child
