Hezbollah’s takeover of Lebanon has strangled a nation ravaged by chaos and in-fighting

Lebanon was once so accustomed to the sounds of war that its parrots learned how to imitate the whistle of incoming shells.

An African Grey called Coco, which inhabited the lobby of Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, was so good at making the noise that unwitting guests would fling themselves under tables to take cover.

Lebanon’s civil war ended 34 years ago and with it the days when the Commodore’s deadpan receptionist asked new arrivals if they preferred a room “on the car bomb side or the rocket side” of the hotel.

Like Coco, eventually abducted by gunmen and never seen again, the fighting is now a distant memory.

But it has left as its twin legacy a neurotic country ever fearful that war will break out again and a sectarian quagmire in which Hezbollah often seems the only real winner.

Playing on both fears, the Iran-backed group has exploited years of political decay to create what many analysts call “a state within a state” so powerful that many Lebanese fear they are now being drawn into a war with Israel they do not want.

Lebanon is a country of the starkest contrasts. With 18 religious denominations encompassing all the Abrahamic faiths, it is hardly surprising that Beirut, its capital, is an uneasy cohabitation of Paris and Tehran.

A visitor crossing Beirut will encounter women in low-cut spaghetti straps tottering along bar-lined cobblestones in its mainly Christian eastern districts, and women covered head to toe in the Hezbollah-dominated Shia Muslim southern suburbs.

Few in such a diverse country therefore take kindly to assumptions that they speak with one voice about a possible war with Israel, the prospect of which has grown following an extraordinary week in Lebanon.

True, even Hezbollah’s detractors are angry about Israel’s synchronised sabotage of the movement’s electronic devices, with many saying it showed little regard for civilian collateral damage and spread fear throughout the country.

Likewise, except perhaps on the fringes of Christian society, there are few who do not express sympathy with Palestinians and condemn Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

Yet this does not, at least not beyond Lebanon’s Shia Muslim community, translate into support for Hezbollah’s decision to fire thousands of rockets into northern Israel following the start of the war in Gaza last October.

“We empathise with Gaza and believe that Palestine should be free but Lebanon cannot start a war on behalf of the Palestinian people,” says Dina Abou Zour, a lawyer and civil society activist from the Druze minority. “We have our own problems.”

Such views are made even more forcefully by some Christian politicians. Samy Gemayel, leader of one Christian party, has accused Hezbollah of seeking “to drag everyone in the country into a war that neither Lebanon nor the Lebanese people want”.

Population figures are a touchy subject in Lebanon, which has not conducted a census since 1932, so it is difficult to know how large Lebanon’s Shia community is, yet most analytical studies reckon it only accounts for a third of the population.

Sunni Muslims, who probably make up similar numbers, are often deeply sceptical of Hezbollah.

Some blame it for the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri, a popular Sunni former prime minister, which the movement denies.

Most bitterly opposed Hezbollah’s military intervention in Syria’s civil war to prop up the Assad regime, which occupied Lebanon until 1995.

Christians, no longer the country’s largest community, are often hostile too, even if some Christian parties have allied with Hezbollah for reasons of political expediency.

Political division

That Hezbollah has become so powerful despite such a narrow base, and in the face of widespread hostility, is in part because Lebanese politics is so split. Forming a coherent position on anything is near impossible.

The 128 MPs in Lebanon’s parliament are drawn from 41 political parties. Another seven sit as independent MPs.

Even agreeing on matters that should be uncontroversial is problematic.

Last year the country which is smaller than Yorkshire briefly operated in different time zones after an argument over Ramadan saw the government abandon the start of daylight-saving time at the last minute, while half of the population put their clocks forward anyway.

In such a fraught political climate, opposing Hezbollah would be tough at the best of times. But Lebanon has rarely lived through the best of times.

The 1975-1990 civil war aside, it has also lived through foreign interference by Middle Eastern powers, chronic political corruption and, since 2018, the deepest economic depression any country has experienced for 150 years.

If things were not bad enough, half of Beirut was damaged in 2020 when badly stored ammonium nitrate detonated, triggering one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history.

The crisis cannot be overstated. Lebanon’s economy is half the size it was. Its currency has collapsed. Inflation last year averaged 222 per cent. With poverty levels soaring above 80 per cent, many middle-class Lebanese have left the country.

With the state collapsing, Hezbollah is pretty much the only coherent entity left – and it has moved quickly to take advantage of the chaos.

Bolstered by funds from Iran, it has shored up its position among the Shia, traditionally the poorest and most marginalised community in Lebanon.

In Shia-dominated areas, it supplies welfare, operates schools and runs municipal services, such as providing water and collecting rubbish.

Hezbollah’s dominance over the security sector is equally dominant.

Under a UN resolution that ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the group was meant to withdraw from areas close to the Israeli border and disarm.

It has done neither and has used the intervening period to become arguably the best-armed non-state force in the world.

Hezbollah fighters get paid twice what Lebanese soldiers do. So cash-strapped is the Lebanese army that it has resorted to taking tourists for rides in its helicopters to raise money, while the US and Qatar had to step in last year to cover soldiers’ salaries.

It is not hard to see that the Lebanese army could not stand up to Hezbollah even if it wanted to.

Nor can most of Lebanese society. Although protests in 2019 erupted against Hezbollah and other political parties, there is little evidence of much change in Lebanon’s overall direction.

Lebanon was once known as the Eastern Riviera. In its heyday in the 1960s, the likes of Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra would sail their yachts into Byblos, a Lebanese town that earned the moniker “the Cannes of the Middle East”.

Echoes of its glamorous past are still to be found but, for all the extraordinary resilience of its people, the country is changing.

Hezbollah is loved and loathed in equal measure in Lebanon. But it calls the shots. Soon it may be firing them in earnest – and there seems to be little that those who oppose the group can do about it.