343. Lebanon: Hezbollah, Israel, & Fifty Years As A Battleground

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0:59William:hello and welcome to empire and i'm afraid you just got me again anita is busy but he's going to be back next week uh in uh full fettle but i am with my old friend kim gattis and friend of the show kim welcome great to be with you willy kim we last saw each other in slightly happier circumstances at the Jaipur Literary Festival only, what, a month ago, I suppose, about six weeks ago. But a lot has happened in that time. And you are now not quite a refugee, but you're an Airbnb displaced from your normal house in Beirut. Do you want to just take us up to speed on what's going on in a very general sense in Lebanon at the moment?

1:36It's been an eventful 10 days in Lebanon and in the Middle East, of course, since the US and Israel launched a renewed war against Iran, a war without any legitimacy, without UN authorization, without congressional approval, regardless of what we, you, others, millions of Iranians think of the Islamic Republic and of its oppressive regime. This war started, as I said, without any real preparation and clearly without a proper a war plan, but also without a plan for the day after. And I know we'll come back to that towards the end of the show. I live in Beirut, where I grew up and spent most of my life.

2:25And I have a knack for living on front lines or demarcation lines. I grew up very much on a demarcation line in a no man's land between East and West Beirut during the Civil War. On the green line. On the green Line. And I live now very close to what used to be the Green Line in a neighborhood that used to be a bit of a no man's land as well at the time, but is now a lovely, popular neighborhood, but is very close to what is commonly referred to as the southern suburbs, which is an area where Hezbollah has a lot of support, where it operates, where it has some of its infrastructure. And I want to explain to listeners what we mean with southern suburbs, because, you know, we're not talking about quaint homes with, you know, picket fences and gardens like in the US or in some parts of the UK.

3:22We're talking about the next neighborhood right after my block, in essence, in what is a sprawling urban jungle that extends from the center of Beirut to the suburbs. So the suburbs are kind of part of the city. And it's a densely populated area with, you know, high-rise buildings, a lot of people, not all of them from the Shia community and not all of them supporters of Hezbollah.

3:54William:But it is the area which, yeah, has been pointed at by the Israelis as the center of Exactly. Yeah. Because it is very much the popular base for Hezbollah. And there was an evacuation order, an area-wide evacuation order by the Israeli army. These evacuation orders come via Twitter, X, and several hundred thousand people fled. And this is very difficult for people who have nowhere to go, who have children, who may already be hosting families, relatives from South Lebanon who've already had to evacuate. So the city was jam-packed with cars of people trying to find shelter outside of the southern suburbs.

4:45My neighbors and I decided to leave our building as well, because the evacuation notice was simply too big to ignore. Strangely, we feel that we are safe in our neighborhood because it is not where Hezbollah operates. But we can hear it, the building shakes, and we chose to each leave. And you have a dog, Kim. And I have a dog, which is who freaks out when she hears shelling, when she hears drones. But I want to emphasize that we are the privileged ones because, you know, I have the ability to rent an Airbnb. My friends have the ability to go to their relatives' homes outside of Beirut. But there are thousands, if not several hundred thousand people who are really sleeping on floors of, you know, refugee welcome centers or crammed in an apartment of relatives, you know, two or three families in one, and who live in the uncertainty of not knowing whether they can ever go back and whose homes have already perhaps been destroyed.

5:48William:And in your case, just to clarify, you are now a little bit north of Beirut, near Byblos, in an Airbnb, waiting out the war. I mean, you may be here for a bit. Everybody has to make their own decisions about how they live through this. I happen to need to travel next week to go to the US to teach at a university there. And I have managed to, this was long planned, and I've now managed to rebook flights out, etc. to, you know, get through some various paperwork I have to do on the way to the US. So I'll be heading back to Beirut over the next few days to begin preparing for this trip. Incredibly enough, the airport is still open.

6:30William:Beirut airport is used to this kind of stuff, isn't it? We have several mottos for our national carrier, Middle East Airlines. In Arabic, people say, which means watch the airstrikes from your airplane. As you fly out, you can watch the southern suburbs being bombed because the airport is in essence, you know, just south of Beirut, adjacent as well to these densely populated southern suburbs. So, you know, some people in my neighbourhood, in my building, have chosen to come back home again, because nobody wants to leave home if they can avoid it. We'd prefer to, you know, be in our homes, with our community, with our neighbours, sleep in our bed.

7:15But like I said, for so many people, this is not an option at the moment.

7:19William:You seem incredibly calm, Kevin, despite everything. I'm amazed that you're looking sort of smart, but you're sort of half a refugee. I'm not a refugee, really. I'm not, William. I'm not. I could easily stay home. It's just the issue of my dog. So it's really not something to even mention when compared to the plight of other people. And like I said, I'm amongst the privilege I can afford to rent a place outside Beirut for as long as I need to. I look calm for two reasons. I try to remain professional as I report and talk and comment about the situation. But also, unfortunately, it's not my first rodeo.

8:01It's not my first war, not as a civilian and not as a reporter. And I chose as a young teenager to become a journalist because I had lived through the Lebanese civil war and because I wanted to feel less helpless. So I wanted to feel that I could do something about it. And my way of doing something about it was to become a journalist and to try to make sense of the chaos for other people. And that has been my life mission as a journalist and as an author. What I have found incredibly discombobulating is my recent research for my book, because the echoes of history with what is happening today are just so strong.

8:47William:Which is what we're going to be talking to you about. It has been difficult to write about the last 40 years and watch the next episode unfold in front of my eyes. I have lived through 15 years of civil war that includes an Israeli invasion, a Syrian invasion, Israeli and Syrian occupation, and a lot of, you know, internal domestic battles and internecine and Byzantine fighting. I then worked as a reporter and covered assassinations in Lebanon and uprisings and the Iraq war in 2003. I covered the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war. Then I lived through 2024, war between Israel and Hezbollah again. Before that, we lived through the Beirut port explosion, the financial crisis, and now another war.

9:37That's 50 years defined by war. I do worry sometimes, despite, you know, my clear, you know, as I said, a privilege, my ability to get on a plane and travel and leave if I want to. I could live wherever I want to if I chose to do so. But I chose to stay because I want to tell the story without, you know, sounding self-important. A lot of people ask me, are you leaving or are you staying? Oh, you're staying. Oh, OK. So maybe it's OK to stay. Maybe you still believe in this country and maybe I'm the crazy one to stay, but I still believe in this country and I stay for that. And when I leave, I always make very clear that I'm leaving temporarily because I have an assignment, because I'm going to teach, etc.

10:21William:Oh, Kim, we're a history podcast. It's history in the making, William. It's history in the making, exactly. But we should go back and take a little historical view of this. First of all, I mean, just very, very briefly, for those who don't know, and it's an important part of the story, Lebanon did not exist till it was created after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and in the aftermath of the First World War. Can you give us just a quick sketch of how Lebanon came to be created and why, in a sense, it is so fragile, why these different communities have to live with each other here in the manner they do?

10:53Yes, that's a whole different podcast that you should consider putting together about how the modern Middle East came into being. And I'm sure you've covered some of that. After the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, world powers, France, European mostly, France, Great Britain, the United Kingdom carved up the Middle East. Lebanon, which was Mount Lebanon before it became Greater Lebanon, was carved up. Syria was carved up. They were both under French mandate until 1943, 1946 for Syria, I believe. And they became, you know, modern entities as we know it. The French chose to carve up Lebanon in such a way that it included different minorities.

11:38So they added parts of, you know, in northern Lebanon that were mostly Sunni and in southern Lebanon that included Shia population, which traditionally looked more towards Palestine and in northern Lebanon looked traditionally more towards the Syrian hinterland. And the dominant majority was at the time the Christian Maronites, you know, allies of France. And of course, you have the Druze as well, the Druze community, and offshoot of Shia Islam that is also part of this mosaic. And the idea at the time was that Lebanon, when it became independent, would be neither pro-West nor pro-East. And famously, a Lebanese statement said, you know, that does not make a nation.

12:27Deux négations ne font pas une nation. It is not because we are neither this nor that, that we are something. But I really do believe that across the past decades, over time, Lebanon has become a nation. You don't hear anybody today anymore saying, we want to be part of Syria or we want to be part of Palestine, should it still, you know, become Palestine or part of Israel or etc. It is a country where communities still look to the outside for support. The Christians still look to France and Europe and America. The Sunnis look to Saudi Arabia and the Shias look to Iran. Because since 1979 and the Islamic Republic, the Shia community has become beholden to the Islamic Republic through the growth and the birth of Hezbollah.

13:21I want to make one more point. I know that very often when these conflicts happen, there is a tendency to talk about whether the region is going to split up again, whether Syria is going to splinter or Iraq is going to break up into three parts or Lebanon is going to be broken up.

13:39William:Or Persia indeed now, Iran being split. Or cantons. I think we underestimate the sense of nationalism in these countries. We really do. We are not tribes with flags anymore. I don't think so. I think we really are nations. You know, we have our inner divisions and our disputes and our foreign patrons, especially in Lebanon. But over time, the sense of national identity, and I don't think I'm fooling myself, is quite strong. There are external allegiances, and we'll get to that, because there is a lot of anger today in Lebanon about what Hezbollah has done, which is to drag Lebanon back into this war because they decided to avenge the supreme leader of Iran.

14:28Why would you do that? Why would you want to avenge a foreign leader and drag your own country into a war with Israel? When over the last year, Israel has broken the ceasefire that has been in place since November 2024 with 2 ,000 strikes against Lebanon and hundreds of dead from Hezbollah's ranks. And not once did Hezbollah think of avenging any of its own people. Not that we would have wanted that either. We wanted Israel to stop striking Lebanon. But why suddenly avenge the supreme leader of Iran? So that is where foreign allegiances become very problematic. But that is a lesson that other communities have already learned in Lebanon, but we have not seen that yet from the Shia community.

15:18So in Lebanon, you have the Christian community, which at some point allied itself with Israel, of course, famously in the 1980s, and collaborated with the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in the hope that they could rid the country of Palestinian armed guerrillas. And over time, that lesson was learned as well. With the Sunni community, and particularly we have to point out that the Christian community lost its leader at the time because Bashir Jumayel, who had just been elected president, was assassinated in 1982 in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion. Fast forward 2005, and Rafiq Hariri, former prime minister of Lebanon, was assassinated as well by Hezbollah, Syria and Iran working together under the Assad regime.

16:05And the Sunni community, which still had a bit of a sense of, you know, belonging to Syria or looking towards Syria suddenly rediscovered or discovered its sense of national identity. And so those two communities, the Sunnis and the Christians, have understood that their national allegiance is to Lebanon. And now the Shia community has lost its leader with the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, but we have yet to see a sense of awakening within the majority or a minority of the Shia community to feel that our allegiance is to Lebanon and we should not be avenging foreign leaders or taking orders from foreign countries.

16:45William:Kim, in your book, Black Wave, you show how three foreign powers have, in a sense, impinged on the life of Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Yes. And if I may, Syria. I mean, I don't talk about that that much in Black Wave, but I do in my next book, which is coming out in October. Is it called The Best Kind of American? Yes, The Best Kind of American Murder, War and America's Undoing in the Middle East. An investigation into the murder of an American in Beirut in 1984, Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut at the time. And through the arc of that investigation, I also unpack the story of what happened in Lebanon during the 1980s, when the U.S.-Iran enmity turned violent.

17:38In the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when that invasion clashed, collided with the Iranian revolution of 1979, and it gave birth to a whole new dynamic and a regional architecture of Iran's proxy militias and its efforts to export its revolution. And in a way, it's a clash between two different visions for the Middle East, Iran's vision and Israel's vision.

18:06William:Let's unpack that slowly in those three elements. Let's look first of all at Israel and go back to the 1982 invasion. Just for those who don't know this history, give us a brief picture of what Israel was doing invading in June 1982. What was it trying to do and what was the effects of that invasion. So since the late 60s, Lebanon was a base for Palestinian guerrillas led by Yasser Arafat at the time, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, leader of a movement, armed movement he had founded called Fatah. And after having been expelled from Jordan, they based themselves in Lebanon.

18:48And from here, they launched guerrilla attacks against northern Israel, which killed both Israeli civilians and soldiers. There were many retaliations against Lebanon by the Israelis, including commando operations inside Beirut, including, for example, in 1973, famously portrayed in Steven Spielberg's film Munich, where they came after several Palestinian leaders. And one of the commando operation members was Ehud Barak, later Prime Minister of Israel. So there were these repeated attacks against Lebanon, including the targeting of and destruction of several airplanes on Beirut Airport Tarmac, and then this commando operation in Beirut, and then an incursion into Lebanon in 1978, where they created a buffer zone.

19:39But that still did not protect Israel enough from the launch of Katyusha rockets from southern Lebanon by Palestinian guerrillas. Lebanon was also in the middle of a civil war with on one side, the right-wing Christian nationalist faction led by, amongst other, Bashir Jemayel, a son of Pierre Jemayel, founder of the Falange Party, the Qata 'a party, modeled after Hitler Youth. Fascist. With a fascist outlook. And on the other side, on the left, the majority leftist, Muslim, secular and religious pro-Palestinian factions who supported the Palestinian and saw in the Palestinians and their weapons a way for the Muslim minority at the time of Lebanon to win this fight with the Christians and take more political power.

20:31The Christians allied themselves and started working first with the Syrians, ironically enough, to try to quash the Palestinians. Then they realized that the Syrians had their own ambitions in Lebanon and turned against each other. Then the Christians started working more and more with Israel and, in essence, invited this invasion of Lebanon with Ariel Sharon, the Minister of Defense at the time, who, as I detail in my book, slightly misled both his own cabinet and the U.S. government in terms of the expanse of this invasion, which was only meant to go 40 kilometers into Lebanon, which was the range of the Katyusha rockets at the time.

21:08Instead, he ended up all the way in Beirut.

21:11William:Culminating in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Yes, first the siege of Beirut. The Sabra and Shatila massacre was a result of the assassination of Bashir Shumayel. It was a revenge action by his militia and the Lebanese forces, more precisely, to go into the Palestinian camps. So just to keep it sequentially, the Israelis invade, They besiege Beirut, and eventually the Palestinian guerrilla fighters and Arafat leave into exile. They go to Tunis. And Israel and America feel like, wow, maybe this could work. Maybe this could transform the region. Push the Palestinians out. We've had Bashir Jmeil elected in Lebanon.

21:51There's been a standoff between military battle, rather, between Syria and the Israelis in the Beqar Valley of Lebanon, where Syria had positioned anti-aircraft missiles and troops, and Israel won that battle. And so Ariel Sharon's vision of transforming the Middle East was unfolding according to plan. And this is where the echoes of 1982 today are so incredibly alarming, almost, because when the war started in Gaza after the massacre of the 7th of October, Benjamin Netanyahu also said this is an opportunity to change the Middle East. So this idea of changing the Middle East keeps coming up.

22:36William:And the young Benjamin Netanyahu at that point was in Washington as a spokesman. He was deputy ambassador and he was called into the State Department with his ambassador, Moshe Arendt, to listen to Secretary George Shultz, you know, remonstrate them about the terrible thing that had just happened, the terrible massacre in Sabra and Shatila, which was what also led to the Marines coming back into Beirut. They had come to oversee the evacuation of the Palestinians. Then they left and then they came back after the massacre because they felt guilty for having allowed this to happen. They did not have a real mission.

23:16They were dragged back into Lebanon and became a target for the first time of bombings in the Middle East. So America became a target of bombings in the Middle East for the first time in the wake of this Israeli invasion of 1982, when the Marines and the embassy were bombed in Beirut in 1983.

23:36William:Not just bombed, but it was famously a suicide bombing, one of the very first suicide bombings. One of the very first. Which brings us to the role of Iran. So we've talked, Kim, about the Israeli invasion, Sabran Chattila and Erdogan. After the break, let's look at Iran and how Iran came to be here, too.

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24:39William:Welcome back. We're talking to Kim Gattis. We have looked at the formation of Lebanon. We've had a canter through the Israeli invasion of 1982. And we're now going to look at how Iran gets entangled into this mess too. Kim, tell us about the suicide bombing that attacked the American embassy and tell us about Iran's role in that and in Lebanon in general. So Iran traditionally has, as a former Persian empire, has regional ambitions under the Shah, but of course also under the Islamic Republic. Under the Shah, it was much more benign. It was through political influence, social influence, etc. But in Lebanon, during the late 70s, already during Lebanon's civil war, Iranian revolutionaries were training with the Palestinians in their camps to work to get the military training necessary to overthrow the Shah.

25:36Amongst these revolutionaries' training in Lebanon, you know, it ran the gamut from far left to fascist right, from secular to Islamist. And those Islamists, of course, overcome everything. When the Shah leaves and Khomeini returns to Iran, the Islamists take over and hijack the revolution. It becomes the Islamic Republic of Iran. And what I detail in my book, Black Wave, is how this then also launches the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, who were actually allies before and twin pillars of U.S. policy in the region. But Khomeini has grand designs to be a leader beyond the Shia community, beyond Iran's borders, and he wants to lead the community of Muslims around the world.

26:23And the way to do that is to export the revolution and also latch on to the Palestinian cause, where Sunnis have, in essence, failed to deliver. The powers like Egypt, Syria have lost more and more territory. The Saudis aren't showing up for battle. And so he decides that he's going to latch onto this cause, make it his own. And in fact, Yasser Arafat is one of the first foreign dignitary to travel to Tehran to celebrate the coming of Khomeini. And he believes it's also his own victory because revolutionaries of Iran trained with him. And he says, today, Tehran, tomorrow, Jerusalem. Of course, that's not how it works because Khomeini wants to be the ultimate leader.