Drawing the Levant: the fragile pearl

Lebanon’s present-day borders were drawn during the First World War. One of the objectives of the French mandate was to carve out an entity in which Christians, especially Maronites, would have a dominant political weight, in a geographical area where Islam in all its currents was the more than majority religion. So it was: in the first and only census in the history of Lebanon, in 1932, Christians were the majority of the population (52%). The entire country was a melting pot of very different faiths, and the Lebanese political system, founded on the National Pact of 1943, provided – and still provides – for the president to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shiite Muslim.

Lebanon became the pearl of the Middle East, often nicknamed ‘Switzerland of the Middle East’ and Beirut ‘Paris of the Middle East’. Economic prosperity and the relative freedom and coexistence of different faiths were taken as models and examples.

The war problem

Lebanon adopted a tactic that paid off in the short term, but later showed all its limitations. To avoid the risk of a military coup, Lebanon chose to keep a relatively weak army: limited in numbers, poorly armed. As time passed, however, problems emerged: as early as 1958, President Chamoun asked for US intervention to solve an internal crisis.

In 1970, after the PLO was violently expelled from Jordan in ‘Black September’, its guerrillas moved to Lebanon. This was a destabilising factor in several respects: the Palestinians were in the vast majority Sunni Muslims, thus altering the fragile balance between religious denominations, and they were well armed and trained, in a country with a small and poorly armed army. Their arrival grafted onto an already fragile system and accelerated its contradictions. It was only a matter of time before the accumulated tensions exploded, and indeed they did. In 1975, civil war broke out.

The war lasted from 1975 to 1990, was extremely harsh and bloody, and saw the direct participation of other actors: Syria since 1976, Israel since 1982, and the UN with peacekeeping contingents. Syria maintained a presence of tens of thousands of soldiers in the country for almost thirty years, exerting a pervasive influence on Lebanese politics. It did not withdraw until 2005, after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and the massive popular protests known as the ‘Cedar Revolution’. The UN has maintained the UNIFIL mission in southern Lebanon since 1978 – one of the longest-running and most expensive in its history, with over 10,000 blue helmets deployed. Its limited mandate and its inability to prevent Hezbollah’s rearmament have led to strong criticism. The situation remained extremely fragile, and to a large extent still is today.

The game changer: Hezbollah

During the civil war, an actor emerged that heavily influenced the history of Lebanon and the entire Middle East. Shia Muslims became the largest religious group among the country’s citizens, in the most reliable estimates, and the Shia-based group that emerged from the war was Hezbollah. A group that gained respect on the battlefield by challenging the IDF – which occupied southern Lebanon within the Litani river until 2000 – and thus gained sympathy from the large group of people hostile to Israel.

Hezbollah had a very important sponsor on its side: Iran. After 1979, when the Islamic revolution brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, Iran – despite the gigantic effort required by the war with Iraq – began to seek external support and expand its influence. Hezbollah became the main vector of Iranian influence in Lebanon and a key arm of the ayatollahs’ octopus. At the end of the civil war, peace agreements, brokered by Saudi Arabia, required all armed groups to disband or otherwise hand over their weapons.

All except Hezbollah, which had to fight against the Israeli occupation in the south of the country. This allowed the organisation to become not only an influential political party, but the most powerful armed group in the country. The Lebanese army is inferior in all relevant parameters: number of personnel, armament and equipment, training, support. Moreover, the army is also composed of Shias, some of whom sympathise with Hezbollah. Fragility and instability reign in the country: this has led Lebanese political leaders to accept the cumbersome presence of the Shia group to avoid new sectarian conflicts and a possible new civil war.

Hezbollah has been the protagonist of numerous attacks over the more than 40 years of its existence: among the most serious was the suicide bombing of US Marines and French paratroopers in Beirut in 1983, which killed 241 US and 58 French soldiers. The bloodiest attack against American forces between the Vietnam War and 9/11. In the 1990s, Hezbollah was linked to the attacks against the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires (1992, 29 dead) and against the Jewish community centre AMIA (1994, 85 dead). In 2020, the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon convicted in absentia Hezbollah member Salim Ayyash of organising and carrying out the 2005 attack in which Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 21 other people died, while stating that insufficient evidence had emerged to convict the group’s leadership or the Syrian government. Ayyash has never been arrested.

To date, more than 60 countries and international organisations, including the US, the EU (which has designated only its military wing since 2013), the UK, Canada, the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council and numerous Latin American countries have designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation. The UN has not included Hezbollah in its list of terrorist organisations, but has called for the disarmament of its military wing.

But Hezbollah is not just a military and terrorist organisation. Over the decades it has expanded its operations: it has become a ‘State within the State’ that bears many similarities with the organised crime we know so well in Italy. Remarkable similarities: capillary control of the territory, supplanting the State through social services (hospitals, schools, micro-credit), an informal justice system parallel to the official one, and an economy that mixes licit activities and illicit trafficking – drug trafficking and international money laundering that have moved hundreds of millions of dollars. Like the Italian mafias, Hezbollah thrives where the state is absent: the deeper the institutional vacuum, the stronger the entrenchment. However, it is important to underline the context: Hezbollah enjoys an ideological and confessional legitimacy – rooted in resistance to the Israeli occupation – that Italian mafia organisations have never possessed. Mafia consensus is pragmatic; that of Hezbollah, for a significant part of the Shia community, is also identity-based. When the conflicts with Israel (2006, 2023) occupied the front pages of the media, there were major absentees: the Lebanese army and the Lebanese government. Both military operations and negotiations almost exclusively involved Israel and Hezbollah.

Recent developments: Lebanon to the Lebanese?

Since 2019, the country has experienced a severe economic collapse: the Lebanese lira has lost over 90 per cent of its value, the banking system has imploded, and the savings of millions of citizens have been effectively confiscated. In August 2020, the explosion at the port of Beirut – one of the most powerful non-nuclear deflagrations ever recorded – devastated the capital, killed over 200 people, and laid bare the incapacity and corruption of the institutions. For more than two years, from 2022 to January 2025, the country was without a president. This institutional breakdown has eroded the Lebanese people’s trust not only in their own state, but also in Hezbollah, perceived by a growing part of the population – including a minority of the Shia community itself – as co-responsible for the disaster.

The military operations following the 7 October attack by Hamas dragged Hezbollah – and with it Lebanon – into a new spiral of conflict. In this already fragile context, the post-7 October war has inflicted unprecedented damage on Hezbollah. The killing of historic leader Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024, the spectacular pager sabotage operation, and the loss of numerous commanders and fighters have drastically reduced the group’s operational capacity. The weakening of Hezbollah was one of the factors that contributed to the fall of Assad in Syria, another arm of the Iranian octopus: the group was too exhausted to support its ally.

On 9 January 2025, the Lebanese parliament elected Joseph Aoun president of the republic, ending two years of institutional vacuum. Under his presidency, an idea began to take hold that was unthinkable before the war events of 2023: disarm Hezbollah. As early as July 2025, Aoun declared his intention to disarm the Shia group. With the outbreak of the US-Israeli war against Iran – and Hezbollah’s subsequent decision to launch rockets and drones against Israel – the Lebanese government took an unprecedented step: on 2 March 2026, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam declared all of Hezbollah’s military and security activities illegal, limiting its role to the political sphere and ordering the army to prevent any attacks from Lebanese territory. Aoun called the decision “sovereign, final and irreversible.”

An historic step, but will it be enough? The unknowns remain enormous

Hezbollah ignored the ban and continued to launch attacks against Israel even after the government’s decision. The Lebanese army, which has never been able to confront the group militarily, failed to stop the launches. Israel responded with massive bombing raids on south Beirut and southern Lebanon causing deaths and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people – a huge humanitarian cost for the Lebanese. For its part, Iran is under unprecedented military pressure after the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei and continued Israeli-American attacks, but the regime has not yet fallen.

Should the Iranian regime actually collapse, Hezbollah would lose its main source of funding and strategic support – a potentially fatal blow for an organisation that depends on Iran for hundreds of millions of dollars of its budget. This is also why choruses chanting ‘neither for Gaza nor Lebanon’ were often heard during the uprising against the regime that began in December 2025: the Iranian people know that a lot of money is being sent to Hamas and Hezbollah, while living conditions in the country continue to get worse.

But even in that scenario, the path to a ‘Lebanon for the Lebanese’ would be anything but easy. The country remains deeply divided along confessional lines, and part of the Shia community continues to see Hezbollah as a legitimate representative, not an entity to be dismantled. Disarming such an entrenched organisation without triggering a new sectarian conflict would require an army that does not currently have the means to do so, an internal political consensus that does not yet exist, and massive and prolonged international support.

What is certain is that Lebanon is faced with an unprecedented situation. Hezbollah’s monopoly on Lebanese force and foreign policy has been openly challenged for the first time – not by outside powers, but by the Lebanese government itself. It remains to be seen whether this challenge will have the strength, resources and durability to translate into real change.