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Lebanon

True to form, liberals are hopeful that the Beirut explosion, Macron’s visit to Lebanon, and the youthful demonstrations against the country’s Hezbollah-dominated government herald a new popular unity and a better day for all Lebanese citizens. Neither past nor present suggests that such a happy outcome is likely.
On August 4, 2020, a massive explosion occurred at a warehouse on the waterfront of the Port of Beirut, Lebanon. It killed at least 135 people, wounded at least 5,000, left approximately 300,000 people homeless, and devastated the port region of the city, causing damages estimated between $10 billion and $15 billion. The Lebanese authorities are blaming the explosion on mismanagement by port officials, but there is reason to suspect that it was the result of Hezbollah negligence.
The Islamic Republic of Iran established Hezbollah in Lebanon in the early 1980s, funded it, and equipped it with advanced weapons. In the process, it transformed the country’s Shiite community, which was once insignificant and oppressed, into a highly organized community with a powerful militia. The greater Lebanese Republic, however, is at its lowest point since it gained independence from France in 1943. Lebanon is barred from much international assistance because of the presence on its soil of Hezbollah, which seeks to exploit the country’s distress to push it once and for all into the arms of the Islamic Republic.
Twenty years after Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon, it is worth considering basic questions about its experience over years of warfare in a campaign that did not aim for victory. Those questions include what was going on, what Israel was fighting for, and what ultimately impelled it to withdraw. Such considerations have immediate significance in terms of clarifying the tenets of Israel’s security concept.
With the May 2000 abandonment of the South Lebanon Army, Israel signaled to its regional allies that it is not a reliable mainstay. This influenced the lukewarm response of the Golan Heights Druze to the Israeli offer of citizenship, as well as Israeli decision-making during the Syrian civil war regarding cooperation with Syrian militias in the villages near the Golan border. 

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