Defeating Hezbollah inside Lebanon is only half the battle

There appears no concerted action to hobble Hezbollah’s operations in Africa and South America.

By Michael Rubin, Middle East Forum

Israel continues to battle Hezbollah, with diplomatic efforts for a ceasefire scuttled by the travel freeze that International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan imposed on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tries to uproot Hezbollah infrastructure and eradicate missiles acquired or tunnels dug under the watchful eyes of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), it has made significant progress.

With the deaths of much of Hezbollah’s leadership, many in spectacular ways, the group’s bluster is gone or empty.

Certainly, Israeli leaders can celebrate Hezbollah’s demise in Lebanon and the United States, France, and United Nations can seek to negotiate Hezbollah’s disarmament inside Lebanon to put Lebanon into compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, but that alone addresses only half the Hezbollah problem.

Lebanon’s greatest export has always been its people. Historically, the country’s Shi’ite community was largely feudal. Shi’ites were subsistence farmers with little hope for political power or advancement.

In The Innocents Abroad, American writer Mark Twain described his 1867 travels through Lebanon to Palestine; the Shi’ites whom he surely saw did not merit his inclusion.

With little prospect for upward mobility, many Shi’ites emigrated to engage in business and trade, especially elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa, and South America.

Today, the Lebanese diaspora population just in Brazil and Argentina is equal to Lebanon’s population. Not all Lebanese emigrants were Shi’ite, of course, but they were disproportionately so.

As Hezbollah’s tentacles grew through the 1980s and 1990s, the Lebanese diaspora became an important component.

Into the mid-twentieth century, the lack of domestic prospects led Shi’ites who remained in Lebanon to embrace either Marxism or Arab nationalism.

As the late historian Fouad Ajami explained in The Vanished Imam, Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935-2010) sought to channel Shi’ite identity and discord into Shi’ism.

He became the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. His influence extended past Lebanon, however, to the Shi’ite communities abroad.

As the Washington Institute’s Michael Eisenstadt and Kendall Bianchi showed, family permeates Hezbollah inside Lebanon. The same dynamics affect with the Lebanese community abroad.

Many have close ties to those who remained inside Lebanon. As Hezbollah’s tentacles grew through the 1980s and 1990s, the Lebanese diaspora became an important component of Hezbollah’s broader network.

In the Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, for example, Hezbollah launders drug money and engages in organized crime.

Between 2007 and 2011, Hezbollah operatives ran a scheme to ship used and stolen cars to West Africa, with Hezbollah then using profits to fund its military operations.

The Lebanese Shi’ite diaspora in the United States also ran a cigarette-smuggling scheme to fund the terror group.

Nor does the diaspora only support Hezbollah financially.

Iran’s 1992 assassinations at the Mykonos Café relied on Lebanese sleeper agents, and the agents responsible for the Iran-sponsored 1994 attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires also drew upon the Lebanese diaspora community in the “triangle border” area between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.

There appears no concerted action to hobble Hezbollah’s operations in Africa and South America.

In essence, there are two Hezbollahs—one in Lebanon and one spread out across the world. Israel appears close to kneecapping Hezbollah power in Lebanon proper, but there appears no concerted action to hobble Hezbollah’s operations in Africa and South America.

President-elect Donald Trump is loath to deploy American forces abroad, especially in Africa, but allowing Hezbollah to use sub-Saharan Africa as a safe haven will have profound repercussions on American national security, especially as Hezbollah remains a terror group of global reach and the Iranian regime remains committed to targeting U.S. interests both inside and outside the United States.

Israel might then conduct targeted assassinations to degrade the Hezbollah network in both Africa and Latin America, but so too could Europe, if France especially recognizes the key to stability and security in Lebanon and the broader region is to defeat Hezbollah entirely rather than to appease the group.

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