Listen to more stories on the Noa app. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. He was a middle-aged man with a thin white beard and the spent look of someone who had not slept for days. He was an academic of sorts, not a fighter, but his ties to Hezbollah were deep and long-standing.
It is a total war. He talked quickly, anxiously. Israeli bombs were destroying houses and rocket-launch sites across southern Lebanon, in the Bekaa valley, and in Beirut; many of his friends had been killed or maimed. He had even heard talk of something that had seemed unthinkable until now: Iran, which created Hezbollah around , might cut off support to the group, a decision that could reconfigure the politics of the Middle East.
Read: Hezbollah waged war against the people of my country. He kept talking rapid-fire, as though seeking to restore his self-confidence. The resistance still had its weapons, he said, and the fighters on the border were ready. But his speech slowed, and the doubts crept back. I estimate that none of them will survive. It took a moment for the historical analogy to register: He was telling me that he thought Hezbollah, the movement he was so devoted to, might well be on the verge of total destruction.
We both paused for a moment and sipped our tea. The only noise was the waves gently washing the shore outside, an incongruously peaceful sound in a country at war. T wo months of war have transformed Lebanon. Hezbollah, the Shiite movement that seemed almost invincible, is now crippled, its top commanders dead or in hiding. The scale of this change is hard for outsiders to grasp. Hezbollah is not just a militia but almost a state of its own, more powerful than the weak and divided Lebanese government, and certainly more powerful than the Lebanese army.
Hezbollah smuggles in not just weapons, but billions of dollars from Iran. It runs banks, hospitals, a welfare system, and a parallel economy of tax-free imports and drug trafficking that has enriched and empowered the once-downtrodden Shiite community. Hezbollah has long justified reckless wars against Israel with appeals to pan-Arab pride: The liberation of Palestine was worth any sacrifice.
