Hezbollah Vs Tzahal

Battered for decades, southern Lebanon is, once again, witnessing people fleeing to safer places as Israel's operation in Iran spirals into Lebanon

- Vijay Prashad

A few years ago, during the heat of the Syrian war, I was in southern Lebanon near the small village of Deir Kifa. There was no sign of the Hezbollah fighters who defend southern Lebanon. This region runs from below the Litani River to the Blue Line that divides Lebanon from Israel. The United Nations troops—in fact, from the Punjab Rifles—sat at their camp not far away, outside the town of Marjayoun. I asked one of their commanding officers, Colonel Sajesh PG, if they had ever seen the Hezbollah fighters in a show of force. “No”, he told me. “They respect the understanding that is in this area: that our UN troops have a mandate to disarm them if we see them”. There was no sign of the Hezbollah, but neither did I see any Lebanese Army forces in the region. It appeared as if entire southern Lebanon was already disarmed.

But this was a mirage. “Secrecy,” said Naim Qassem, the Hezbollah deputy leader at the time, “was the key to success on the battlefield”. What he meant was that the Hezbollah fighters had to deal with the asymmetrical relationship of their conflict with Israel, which had been heavily armed by the United States and had already demonstrated its ability to bombard Lebanon from the air with almost no challenge from the ground.

Neither the Lebanese Army nor the Hezbollah, which was more adept than the official army, was able to bring down the US-delivered Israeli aircraft when they tore in from the sea to bomb the land. There was only one day when I saw the fighters in southern Lebanon with a public display: this was when their military wing ran down the street of the village with their guns aloft for the funeral of a fighter killed in Syria, chanting “Labayka ya Zaynab” (We are with you, Zaynab—the eldest daughter of Imam Ali, whose shrine is in Damascus, Syria).