by brookings.edu — Lebanese Hezbollah’s role as an Iranian proxy and its provision of significant assistance to its allies in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq has been an area of justified focus for policymakers in many capitals but the organization’s evolving role inside Lebanon merits equal attention. While it is customary to characterize Hezbollah as a “state within a state,” it is more accurate now to define it as a “state within a non-state,” in view of the sheer inability of the Lebanese government to deliver even the most basic services to a desperate population plunged into its worst economic crisis in over a century. In the past, Hezbollah was able to distinguish itself from Lebanon’s ruling circles, capitalizing on its nonstate status and role as the “resistance” to Israel. However, in recent years, Hezbollah has become ever more entangled with the country’s kleptocratic ruling elites and status quo defenders, an association that has alienated many of their compatriots. It is this mutation in Hezbollah’s role which poses risks for the organization and opportunities to support efforts aimed at bolstering institution building and the return of the state as well as the injection into Lebanese politics of more independent and technocratic individuals via national elections organized for the spring of next year.
Iran’s investment in Hezbollah proved successful for many years after Tehran, with the assistance of Damascus, oversaw the establishment of the organization in 1982. It was exempted from the Taif arrangements in 1989 which forced the demobilization of Lebanon’s other sectarian militias and therefore benefited greatly from this “last man standing” status. Hezbollah served a useful purpose as the tip of the Iranian spear in the Levant against Israel, with its most celebrated achievement being the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, for which Hezbollah took full credit. Lebanese citizens and many in the Arab world rallied around Hezbollah during its destructive 2006 war with Israel. From that time until today, the south has remained relatively quiet, with an uneasy unofficial truce established between Israel and Hezbollah.
It was also in the post-Taif landscape that Hezbollah first formally entered politics with the election of 8 MPs in 1992 and then with the appointment of Hezbollah ministers in successive Lebanese cabinets — usually they have two ministers — starting in 2005, following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February of that year. In the 15 years since the 2006 war, Hezbollah has consolidated its influence over Lebanese politics, though designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Israel, and the Arab League. Many of those terrorized by Hezbollah’s cadre have been their Lebanese compatriots. Formally implicated in Hariri’s gruesome 2005 killing, Hezbollah has eluded accountability for other high-profile killings in which it is suspected they played a role.
Hezbollah’s increasing involvement in Lebanon’s internal affairs has occurred during a period in which the Lebanese state has imploded, as the beneficiaries of Taif — the so-called “company of five,” the zuama (leaders) of the country’s major sectarian movements, plus Hezbollah — have used the government to divide the spoils and continue in power. Hezbollah has built tactical alliances with several of these leaders, notably President Michel Aoun and parliament speaker Nabih Berri. The government has struggled to provide even the most basic services to the public, including electricity, while the value of the Lebanese lira has plunged, further driving the population into poverty and causing waves of Lebanese, particularly Christians, to leave the country in search of a better life.
By contrast, Hezbollah has its own army, its own schools, and hospitals, has established many charitable organizations and even founded its own version of the Boy Scouts. It places its acolytes typically in service ministries where they can extract rent from the state and uses its access to official institutions to ensure a cover-up for its criminal networks, money laundering, and collection of monies from the large Shiite diaspora. Taking advantage of its hybrid status, Hezbollah is able to maintain an autonomous existence, free from any accountability or even visibility into its own actions while simultaneously insisting on exercising a veto over anything the Lebanese government does.
But ironically, it could be Hezbollah’s over-involvement and its mutation from its outsider (and putatively reform-minded) status to the defender of the corrupt Lebanese political class which poses the most risk for the future of the organization. While its unilateral decision to send its forces to Syria to defend the Assad regime was not necessarily appreciated by the wider Lebanese body politic, it was Hezbollah’s response to the October 2019 cross-sectarian protest movement that perhaps most greatly affected its standing in Lebanon. When Hezbollah drew red lines and intervened on behalf of the ruling kleptocrats during the protests, its popularity in the country waned. Hezbollah’s standing took a further serious hit following the devastating explosion at the Beirut port in August 2020. Lebanese, after all, were well aware of the organization’s control of the port (and the Syrian border). Today, Hezbollah has placed itself in opposition to the investigation of the port explosion, something which is creating further deep divisions in the country given the popular demand for accountability and justice for the victims.
What is clear is that it is the Lebanese people themselves who are paying a terrible price caused by their country’s dysfunctional politics. The current display of ire by Saudi Arabia and several other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Kuwait) — including the withdrawal of ambassadors, recalling of their citizens, closure of the visa sections at their respective embassies, and especially the banning of Lebanese imports — does more damage to the welfare of the average Lebanese while strengthening the hand of Hezbollah and its political allies. This contretemps is the latest chapter in the use of Lebanon as a theater to settle scores, particularly between Saudi Arabia and Iran; an earlier version witnessed Riyadh’s forced detention of then-Prime Minister Saad Hariri in November 2017. Several weeks ago, an Arab League envoy was sent to explore a way out of the crisis but left empty-handed after Hezbollah vetoed a solution which would have involved the exit from the Lebanese government of the maladroit Information Minister George Kordahi, who irritated his erstwhile one-time Saudi paymasters by criticizing their intervention in Yemen. It thus appears that this particular rupture may be more difficult to mend as the Gulf states seem to have simply given up on Lebanon after years of trying in vain to support their allies in Beirut, notably prominent Sunni leaders, in the face of Iran’s hegemony in the country.
As Lebanon prepares for much-needed national elections next year, one can hope that independent candidates representing the cross-sectarian movement that emerged in October 2019 could help change the balance in the parliament. Hezbollah will continue to enjoy substantial support amongst its Shiite base, given the organization’s historical role as protectors of this once-marginalized community, but as their co-religionists recently demonstrated in the Iraqi elections, there are increasing complaints of an overreliance on Iran at the expense of the community’s Arab roots.
How the international community, led by the U.S. and France, manages Lebanon, with an eye to containing the country’s unraveling and supporting the Lebanese people’s yearning for a full return of their institutions, will be of critical importance. There should be continued strong financial and material support for the Lebanese Armed Forces, as the military remains the backbone of the vestigial state. Equally important is the need for unwavering support for the independence of Lebanon’s judiciary and advocacy for the physical protection of the judges themselves. This latter point is key given the frightening threats against Judge Tarek Bitar, who is valiantly investigating the Beirut port explosion.
Key Western countries must also provide determined guidance to Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s government in the formulation of a financial and banking strategy that will bolster Mikati’s efforts to work with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and to help Lebanon avoid the looming specter of complete state failure. In their discussions with GCC leaders, the U.S. and other leading Western nations should counsel against punishing the Lebanese public writ large for the sins of Hezbollah. They should encourage the promising outreach to Iran by key Gulf states, such as the expected visit of the Emirati national security advisor to Tehran next week for talks on deescalating regional tensions, in which the Lebanon file can feature. Washington’s support for maritime border negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, along with efforts to import gas from Egypt, also hold promise. Last, but not least, the international community must firmly support the organization of free and fair parliamentary elections in the spring and presidential elections in the fall, including the rejection of any efforts to illegally postpone these polls.
How a Hezbollah-backed game show host cost Lebanon its rich Gulf allies
For decades he has been one of the Middle East’s most famous TV personalities. George Kordahi, now 71, cemented his status as a household name when he began presenting the Arabic version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire in the early 2000s. He brags on his website that he holds the record for being the “highest paid television presenter in the Arab world”. He schmoozed with glamorous women, launched his own perfume and clothing lines, and would win the hearts of viewers as the host of Millionaire through his dapper charm, jokes and seamless recital of Arabic poetry. Now, with the backing of the militant Hezbollah movement, he is Lebanon’s information minister. And after little more than a month in the job, he has found himself at the centre of the country’s worst ever diplomatic rupture with the Gulf – a crisis that has already cost the bankrupt and collapsing state hundreds of millions of dollars. Comments he made on Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the Yemeni Civil War outraged the kingdom and caused diplomatic chaos for a country that desperately needs the financial backing of its traditional Gulf allies.
Since 2015, Saudi Arabia, which supports the internationally recognised government, has been leading a coalition fighting the Houthi rebels, who are backed by Iran. All sides of the war in Yemen, which has spiralled into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, have faced international backlash over human rights atrocities. In an interview with a part of the Al Jazeera network, Kordahi described the Houthis’ actions as “self-defence”. The interview, released in late October, had been recorded a few weeks before he was named as information minister. When asked about Houthi missile attacks that have targeted Saudi Arabia, Kordahi turned the question on to Saudi’s own bombing campaign: “You need to also look at the damages inflicted on them as a people. They are bombed in their homes, in their houses, in their villages, in their squares, in their funerals.”
A diplomatic firestorm broke out. Saudi, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain quickly recalled their envoys and expelled Lebanese ambassadors. Then Saudi banned imports from Lebanon in order to “protect the security of the kingdom and its people”, citing what it claimed was “Hezbollah’s control of all ports” in Lebanon. The ban spelled catastrophe at a time when Lebanon is in the throes of what the World Bank claims is one of the worst economic crises in modern history. The UN estimates that 78 per cent of the country now live beneath the poverty line as everything from healthcare to education collapses.
The Gulf, including Saudi, is cash-strapped Lebanon’s biggest export destination. In the first three months of this year, Saudi on its own rose to become Lebanon’s second-largest market. Lebanese exports were valued at nearly $250m last year, according to official customs data. While the Saudi import ban is damaging on its own, if its Gulf Cooperation Council allies follow suit, they could devastate what is left of Lebanon’s bludgeoned economy and cost Lebanon over a billion dollars a year. “We would be out of oxygen if that happened,” said Roy Badaro, a Lebanese economist. “No country would be able to bear such a price.” Between the remittances sent home by Lebanese nationals working in Saudi and the export market, the kingdom is “one of the lungs of Lebanon”, he added. “The main source of fresh dollars in Lebanon [since the economic crisis began] is exports,” said Talal Hijazi, the general manager of the Lebanese Association of Industrialists.
It is a crisis that has been brewing for years: Lebanon’s traditional Sunni allies in the Gulf no longer want to bankroll a state in which Shia Iran backs the most powerful political and military force. “We see no useful purpose of engaging with the Lebanese government at this point in time,” the Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud told France 24 television in an interview aired on 13 November. “We think that the political class needs to step up and take the necessary actions to liberate Lebanon from the domination of Hezbollah, and through Hezbollah, Iran.” “Saudi Arabia is troubled because it could not dominate the political decision in Lebanon, despite the money it paid,” said Hezbollah deputy secretary-general Naim Qassem. “No one can twist the arm of Hezbollah.”
As Hezbollah – a group created by Iran – grew in power, so too did the strains on the Saudi-Lebanese relationship. Matters came to a head in 2017, when the kingdom detained then-prime minister Saad Hariri on a visit and made him resign from his position on TV. Joining Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE have now called on their citizens to leave Lebanon, while Kuwait has said that it will limit the number of visas it will grant to Lebanese citizens. As the crisis drags on, there is a growing anxiety that Saudi could ban remittances of money being sent to Lebanon. With a failed banking sector, funds sent back from abroad are the only survival mechanism for much of the country. Sixty per cent of those remittances come from the Gulf, the central bank estimates.
The rift in diplomatic relations has already created stumbling blocks for Lebanese who have secured jobs abroad but are struggling to get visas. “The crisis will negatively impact those ordinary Lebanese whose livelihoods are dependent on Gulf economies and will further fragment the political front opposed to Hezbollah,” said Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at the Chatham House think tank. “If the cut in relations continues, Lebanese Sunni political figures who have traditionally relied on Saudi backing will find it difficult to contest the anticipated parliamentary elections. This will further empower Hezbollah, which benefits from weakness and divisions among its opponents,” she added. After the port explosion in August 2020, Lebanon was without a functioning government for 13 months. Najib Mikati, the prime minister, managed to form a “rescue government” in September 2021, but even before this diplomatic spat, it was already paralysed.
The cabinet has not met since 12 October, split over whether the judge investigating the Beirut explosion should be removed. That dispute led to deadly street fighting just two days later when snipers opened fire on a Hezbollah-organised protest to demonstrate against a judge they claim is biased. Now the decision of how to deal with Kordahi has caused another fissure, sparking fears that Mikati’s government could resign before anticipated elections next year. Kordahi – who is backed by Marada, a Christian party that is allied with Hezbollah and close to the Syrian regime – has refused to apologise or resign over his comments and the ensuing fallout. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has reiterated his support for Kordahi, claiming that Saudi Arabia is trying to incite sectarian instability in Lebanon over the “fabricated” crisis. “If we sack Kordahi, what will we get from the kingdom? Nothing… they’ll ask for more,” Lebanon’s foreign affairs minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, said in a leaked audio recording, adding further tension to the dynamic.
Saudi newspaper Okaz claimed that Bou Habib’s comments revealed his “hatred” towards Saudi Arabia. With the paralysis of the cabinet, little progress has been made on negotiations to allow the government to unlock desperately needed International Monetary Fund assistance, or on the allocation of a long-delayed ration card system that was designed to help the poorest. Lebanon’s interior minister Bassam Mawlawi on 13 November called for Kordahi to resign. The prime minister has stopped short of asking Kordahi to step down, but has said that his government will not collapse. Even before his venture into politics, Kordahi was open about his views. In 2018 the TV star was asked to pick a man of the year. He narrowed it down to three: Hezbollah leader Nasrallah as Lebanon’s man of the year; Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as regional man of the year; and Russian president Vladimir Putin as international man of the year. Assad “proved he is a man cut from a different cloth” during the devastating ten-year Syrian war, Kordahi said. “Had this man not resisted, Syria would no longer exist. Lebanon would no longer exist. Jordan and the Gulf neither.”
Without a Saudi market, industrialists “will start to invest outside Lebanon in other Gulf or Arab countries, such as Egypt or Oman,” warned Hijazi. “If Lebanon does not recover, they may start to move their businesses away altogether. It can take ten years to build up a good relationship with distributors in a new market. This is not a quick or easy change that you can make.” And there are other factors too. In April, Saudi authorities found 5.3 million pills of captagon – dubbed around the region as the “poor man’s cocaine” – in pomegranates that had been imported from Lebanon. Several high-profile captagon seizures have been traced back to areas controlled by the Syrian regime and Hezbollah. Riyadh responded by banning the imports of Lebanese food and agriculture. The results were devastating for Lebanese farmers – though many circumvented the ban by smuggling produce through Syria, from where it was then sold on to Saudi. As Hijazi explained, 60 per cent of Lebanon’s agricultural exports are usually sent to Saudi. For the export market as a whole, the Gulf market makes up 25 to 30 per cent. <
The ban on Lebanese imports is almost “a type of sanction that Saudi Arabia is putting on the Lebanese government for not doing enough to control the drugs – mainly captagon – and its exporters,” said Badaro. Memes that read “who wants to steal a million?” swarmed social media after Kordahi’s appointment, nodding at the entrenched corruption of Lebanon’s political class, which for decades has siphoned resources from the state. “Who will make us beg for yet another million?” a political cartoon read the day after Kordahi sparked the latest episode in the crisis. It will take more than a game show windfall to rescue Lebanon from its catastrophic economic decline.
Kuwait detains 18 associated with Hezbollah
by reuters — CAIRO: Prosecutors in Kuwait have detained 18 people suspected of financing Lebanon’s powerful Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah, the newspapers Al-Qabas and Al-Rai reported on Thursday. Al Qabas said the prosecution ordered the detainees to be held at the central prison for 21 days while investigations continue into alleged “membership in a prohibited party, money laundering and spying.” The Interior Ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Gulf Arab states in 2016 designated Iran-allied Hezbollah a terrorist oganization. Lebanon is facing a diplomatic crisis as Gulf states become increasingly dismayed by Hezbollah’s expanding influence over Lebanese politics. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain last month expelled Lebanese diplomats and recalled their own envoys following a minister’s critical comments about the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen. Riyadh banned all imports from Lebanon. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said the measures were driven not just by the comments by information minister George Kordahi, made before a new cabinet was formed, but rather by Riyadh’s objections to the “domination” of Hezbollah. Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran have been locked for decades in proxy conflicts across the region.
Kuwait has long maintained balanced ties between its larger neighbors, but in 2016 it convicted a group of Shiite Kuwaitis for spying for Iran and Hezbollah, accusing Tehran at the time of seeking to destablize it. Iran had denied any connection. Earlier this month, several of those convicted in that case were released under a pardon issued by Kuwait’s ruling emir under an amnesty aimed at defusing a domestic deadlock between the government and opposition lawmakers.
