I. Introduction
At the end of 2025, part of the Redspark collective traveled to Lebanon to meet with various members and organizations of the Resistance and to learn more about the country’s current situation. The following article, presented in two parts, is a political overview of our trip and meetings.
Over a week’s time, we crossed Lebanon from north to south. Lebanon is often reduced to its capital, Beirut—a simplification that our hosts warned us against even before we arrived. Indeed, our trips to Saida (Sidon), Trablus (Tripoli), and Nabatiye allowed us to witness the diversity of political, economic, and cultural experiences that exist across the country.
More than a year after the so-called end of hostilities (October 8, 2023–November 27, 2024) between the Forces of Resistance and the Zionist entity—which continues, despite the ceasefire, to bomb the Southern provinces undeterred—the atmosphere remains tense or torn, between the clear foreboding of a new war to come and the calm of a pacified, even depoliticized, society.
The following articles do not aim to provide a detailed overview of Lebanese politics—from the Resistance, the Palestinian camps, the agents of imperialism, to the rebellious elements of civil society. Rather, our intention is to share our experience, while providing context where necessary for a clearer understanding of our observations. The first article will focus on the history of the peoples inhabiting the country, the creation of Lebanon by French and British imperialism, and the numerous struggles and conflicts that have unfolded over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition, it will address the current political context, shaped in the wake of October 7, 2023.
The following articles will focus on the various forces involved in or affiliated with the Resistance. It will also discuss the concrete conditions in the Palestinian camps—the historical cradle of the Palestinian and Arab Resistance—which today stands at a crossroads between continued pacification and the hope for a renewal of vigorous struggles.
II. Historical Context
The historic tragedy, or crime, of which the peoples of the region have been both victims and actors is the artificial creation by foreign powers of the states in which they have come to live since the beginning of the last century. This condition, and the indignation that continues to accompany it, is illustrated by a recurring remark made by several comrades we met during our visit: “Lebanon should not exist.”
The history of Lebanon is precisely that of its colonial borders: between itself and the “countries” that surround it—all of which are, in essence, part of the Arab nation; between religious and ethnic communities divided in order to weaken them all—some manipulated by imperialist forces, others demonized and vilified by those same powers.
In this context, the anti-Zionist struggle of the Lebanese and their Palestinian brothers and sisters is just one expression of the struggle against this century-old wound, inflicted by the same agents who once drew the Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Jordanian, and other borders on a map laid out on a desk in London or Paris.
History of the people in the region
The region known in Arabic as the Asian Masriq—referred to in the Western tradition as the Levant and Mesopotamia—is part of the Arab world, the Arab nation. The Arabic language, spoken by the majority but not the entire population, has been present since at least the 7th century. In areas close to the Mediterranean coast, of which Lebanon is a part, a mosaic of different peoples and religious communities has constituted the demographic reality for many centuries: Sunnis, Shi’as, and Druze make up the larger Muslim majority; Eastern Catholics (Maronites), Greek Orthodox, and Greek Catholics (Melkites) constitute the Christian minorities; Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds, and Arab Jews also inhabit the region, forming pockets that are interwoven into the wider social fabric.
Division by imperialist states
Under the Ottoman Empire, life in Lebanon was organized through the millet system—legally recognized religious and/or ethnic communities—which granted legal autonomy to these groups in exchange for the jizya, a poll tax paid by non-Muslims. While this tax symbolized a form of protection (note that in most Christian countries, no similar form of protection for non-Christian religious groups existed), it also established a second-class citizenship which, although tolerated for centuries, became a source of resentment with the rise of nationalism, with some seeing it as humiliating fiscal discrimination.
The country’s geography strongly dictated socio-economic distinctions: Sunnis and Greek Orthodox Christians dominated the coastline and its trading cities, while Maronites occupied the north of Mount Lebanon and Druze the south of the mountain. The Shi’as, for their part, formed the majority groups in the plains and valleys of the Beqaa in the east and in Jabal Amel in the south.
In the 17th century, the Maronite Church aligned itself with the authority of Rome, creating an institutional bridge with Europe. This link enabled the formation of a local elite with ties to Western nations, which could serve as commercial intermediaries. The major economic turning point came when France, and more specifically the city of Lyon, sought to secure its supply of unprocessed silk. The temperate climate of Mount Lebanon and its steep terraces were ideal for planting mulberry trees for silkworm breeding. Under the impetus of Maronite merchants and investors from Lyon, the mountain was transformed into an open-air production hub.
This Maronite economic boom fueled tensions with the Druze aristocracy, whose land ownership was declining. France and England took advantage of these frictions for imperialist purposes: Paris positioned itself as the historical protector of the Maronites to establish its influence in the eastern Mediterranean, while London supported the Druze to counter French hegemony and secure trade routes to India. This power play, coupled with a strategy of division on the part of the Ottoman government in Constantinople (now Istanbul) to maintain control, began to transform local solidarity into identity divisions, culminating in the outbreak of violent conflicts—which degenerated into massacres—in 1860 between Maronites and Druze.
Faced with the passivity of the Ottoman troops and international outrage the conflict had caused, Napoleon III sent a French expeditionary force to secure the region. This major crisis forced the Ottomans to grant Mount Lebanon international autonomy, known as the Moutassarrifiya, establishing for the first time a governing council divided according to religious affiliation, thus cementing political confessionalism (“sectarianism”) as a crisis management tool for decades to come.
Zionist interests from the beginning and throughout
The Ottoman Empire’s entry into World War I alongside Germany marked a sharp acceleration in imperialist predation in the region. On the Mediterranean side of the Mashriq, the Ottomans established a regime of terror against the Druze and Maronites, regarded by the Ottoman government—having recently become dominated by Turkish nationalists—as a pro-French and pro-British “fifth column” within the Empire.
However, it was the naval blockade imposed by the Allied powers that ultimately destroyed the local economy: the resulting Great Famine (1915–1918) decimated a third of the population of Mount Lebanon, transforming the mountain into an open-air cemetery to crush any hint of revolt.
At the same time, the Zionist project asserted itself as a strategic ally of British imperialism; from the first aliyahs, waves of European Jews settling in Palestine, in the 1880s, the movement was part of a strategy of settler colonialism. Zionist leaders, such as Herzl and later Weizmann, explicitly presented their project to the colonial powers as an “outpost of civilization against barbarism” in the East, offering the British Empire a loyal outpost to secure the Suez Canal and the emerging oil routes. This convergence of interests culminated in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration, in which London promised a “national home for the Jewish people” on land that did not belong to it.
While the British exploited the Arab Revolt’s aspirations for independence with promises of sovereignty over a greater Arab Nation, they secretly negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France (1916). This arbitrary division of the Middle East into spheres of influence after the end of the First World War, transformed Lebanon and Syria into French mandates and Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq into British mandates, establishing a new colonial order based on geographical fragmentation and the exacerbation of communal antagonisms.
The interwar period was marked by a radicalization of the struggle against the mandates’ structures. In Lebanon, resistance was organized around interfaith trade union fronts, particularly during the major strikes at the Régie des Tabacs (“Tobacco Authority”) where workers challenged the French monopoly, which was perceived as an economic extension of the military occupation. In Palestine, colonial exploitation and the acceleration of land expropriations led to the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. This massive peasant uprising, directed against both the British administration and the Zionist militias, was bloodily suppressed, structurally weakening Palestinian society on the eve of the decisive confrontation.
We spoke with a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), who recounted the painful history of the Palestinian people:
Palestinians have been under occupation since the early 20th century, first by the UK and France, who set up “Mandatory Palestine,” before the Zionist entity was created based on a racial and religious identity. The people of Palestine were mostly peasants tilling the land, from which they were chased.
In 1948, the creation of the State of Israel and the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) led to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians. Lebanon participated in the 1948 war with a modest army, focusing on securing its southern border and liberating border villages such as Al-Malkiyya. The failure of the Arab armies and the 1949 armistice resulted in the arrival of more than 100,000 refugees in Lebanon, and the brutal severance of the vital Beirut-Haifa economic axis.
When we first met activist and former political prisoner Georges Abdallah, he explained that
Before European colonialism, the Arab world generally considered itself a single political and cultural entity, whatever the differences in language, religion, and local customs may have been. Inter-imperialist competition in the region is what fractured this unity. This process was accelerated with the birth of the Zionist project.
Anti-Zionist resistance in Lebanon immediately took root in the wake of the Nakba, initially led by left-wing and Arab nationalist parties who saw the Zionist entity as a “base for imperialism” in the heart of the region. This opposition was not only military but also ideological; it denounced the Zionist project as a tool for dividing the Arab peoples in order to facilitate oil extraction and Western strategic control. These early nuclei of resistance, combining Lebanese militants and Palestinian refugees, laid the groundwork for future liberation movements that would challenge Israel’s regional hegemony from the 1960s onward.
Lebanon’s specific history and how it explains its current conditions
From the early 1950s onward, Lebanese activists, particularly those from the ranks of the Lebanese Communist Party and Nasserist movements, were inspired by the progressive regime established in Egypt after 1952, which nationalized the Suez Canal four years later. They began to take an interest in the plight of the refugees in the camps and to deepen their common struggle with the Palestinians, in the context of the prevailing Arab nationalist spirit of the time.
During this same period, the Lebanese Communist Party, founded in 1924 (initially forming a single party with its Syrian branch), became the leading Lebanese political force to organize concrete resistance in southern Lebanon. The LCP’s popularity was largely due to its rejection of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, in defiance of the official Comintern position, making it the only USSR- and former Comintern-affiliated party in the Arab world to do so. This enabled the party to gain support not only among Pan-Arabists, but also more broadly among the Arab masses.
Regarding the camps, Khaled Barakat, founder of the new Palestinian left-wing organization Masar Badil, give us an account of the historical conditions in the camps during those years:
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the literature shows a situation rather similar to today’s: poverty, passivity, integration into the host country’s society, etc. In the mid-1960s, youth movements began popping up everywhere in the camps and in the diaspora in general (“Youth of Revenge,” “Heroes of Return,” and others).
However, this initial resistance posed a dilemma for the central government in Beirut: The Lebanese state, dominated by a mercantile bourgeoisie with ties with the West, feared that this activism would provoke Israeli reprisals and radicalize the masses. The revolts in the camps in the wake of the proletarian movements and oppressed peoples around the world that arose beginning in 1967—combined with the traumatic Arab defeat in the Six-Day War that same year—provoked an explosion of militant activity in the region and proved the sectarian government’s fears correct.
When “Black September” took place in Jordan in 1970—during which the Jordanian left and the Palestinian resistance, allied in an effort to overthrow the reactionary Hashemite monarchy under the thumb of Western imperialism, were repressed by the army—the Palestinian resistance and the PLO fled from Amman to Lebanon. The arrival of the Palestinian Resistance leadership and the Lebanese left’s growing activism—including the Progressive Socialist Party and the Arab Socialist Action Party (Lebanon)—started to create cracks in the National Pact of 1943, an unwritten agreement that divided power between Christian and Muslim elites on the basis of an outdated census, and which was approved by the French colonial authorities as the foundational document allowing nominal independence.
On top of all that came the signing of the 1969 Cairo Agreements, which, along with the aforementioned 1970 PLO headquarters’ establishment in Beirut, marked the point of no return: Under pressure from the streets and from neighboring countries, the Lebanese state ceded sovereignty over its own camps to the PLO and allowed it to conduct military operations from southern Lebanon. This decision institutionalized a “state within a state” and exacerbated class contradictions, as the Lebanese right (mainly the Maronite oligarchy) saw the Palestinian Resistance as an existential threat to its domination.
The situation came to a head in 1975, marking the beginning of the Lebanese “Civil War” (1975–1990). This was not simply an inter-religious conflict, but a full-blown social and geopolitical war. It pitted the Lebanese National Movement, later renamed the Lebanese National Resistance Front or “Jammoul” (secular left, communists, Nasserists allied with the Palestinians), which demanded democratic and secular reform of the system, against the reactionary pro-imperialist camp of the Phalangists (named after Franco’s Spanish fascist militias) and supported by Israel and the West, mainly from the Maronite community.
The Left made considerable advances, and the Phalangists retreated to the heights of Mount Lebanon, where they were entrenched, and which they hoped to turn into an independent republic as a last desperate act in the face of their increasingly numerous opponents. However, they were saved from defeat in 1982 by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, known as “Peace in Galilee.” By besieging Beirut and forcing the PLO to flee to Tunis, Israel and its imperialist allies aimed to physically eliminate the Arab revolutionary center in Lebanon.
This invasion was marked by the massacres of thousands of Palestinian civilians refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps, which were supervised if not instigated by the Zionist armed forces, and broke the Lebanese left. Over 3,000 Palestinians were slaughtered in the Sabra and Shatila camp alone. In Saida’s Ain al-Hilweh camp, over 1,000 were killed, as were more than 1,000 in Burj al-Shamali camp in Tyros. The decline of Marxist movements and Arab nationalism accelerated under the impact of repression and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Taif Agreement (1989), imposed under the aegis of Saudi Arabia and Syria, put an end to the fighting but buried any hope of secular reform. Instead of abolishing sectarianism, it redefined it in favor of a new power-sharing arrangement between the same Sunni, Shi’a, and Christian elites already in place. Our host, one of the leaders of the People’s Democratic Party—a communist party based mainly in Saida—explained:
Jammoul was dissolved only one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union…. As a result, major internal party conflicts emerged, especially within the LCP. After the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, the Taif Agreement consolidated the postwar order. The Taif Agreement led to the disarmament of all non-state armed actors in the country, with the exception of Hezbollah. In addition, it institutionalized the country’s sectarian division and laid the groundwork for the neoliberal shock strategies that would follow in the 1990s.
The LCP leadership participated in the agreement with the aim of securing a share of posts and functions within the Lebanese state apparatus and its institutions, which were being divided among the former wartime factions. The Communist Party was indeed granted a limited share, but only at the price of far-reaching political concessions.
Its consent to incorporation into the sectarian system already represented a fundamental class compromise. This led to a growing alienation between the party leadership and its base, a gap that has continued to widen. Between the Taif Agreement of 1990 and the 2006 war, the LCP lost considerable influence and significance.
Regarding the communist forces’ historically difficult organization in Lebanon, as well as their rapid decline beginning in the 1990s after several decades of relative success, our host said:
Blindly following the often wrong policies of the USSR concerning the Arab world, the LCP explicitly disapproved of the United Arab Republic’s foundation in 1958 [the first concrete step towards the creation of a united Arab nation], for which it ended up paying a heavy price in terms of credibility among the masses. In the same vein, the LCP, aligned with the Soviet Union, made similar policy mistakes and further detached itself from the masses. Despite all of this, in their heyday, the LCP organized hundreds of thousands of Lebanese youth and workers. It had a strong armed wing and was widely respected in society and abroad. But at the beginning of the “civil war,” the party deviated and adopted a militaristic line, leaving aside politics and mass work. Later, they joined the newly formed Jammoul front, which improved their political line and reputation among the people. Yet, after the Taif Agreement was signed in 1990, marking the end of the bloody conflict, the party tried to enter government, which led them to compromise on many issues. This, again, stained its reputation.
This happened not only in Lebanon but also in other parts of the Arab world. Objectively, the collapse of the USSR meant the loss of material support. In Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere, this led to widespread corruption among nationalist and left-wing groups. It was in the ideological and political vacuum of this period that a shift towards religious-based resistance took place. Within the Shi’a community, historically the most disadvantaged, new grassroots social and political movements, galvanized by the Iranian Revolution of 1979, proposed a synthesis between national liberation struggle and Islamic revolutionism, proving itself to be more effective militarily than the traditional left.
The most known among them is Hezbollah, or “Party of God.” Hezbollah originally split from the “Movement of the Dispossessed,” from which the Amal Movement later developed. Amal had been founded by Musa al-Sadr. In its early years, Hezbollah was an Islamic revolutionary movement that occasionally advocated establishing a Shi’a Islamic state in Lebanon. However, it was also able to adapt and develop from a Shi’a resistance movement into a national force capable of incorporating different social groups, although it remains, in the end, a sectarian Shi’a party.
Hezbollah emerged in direct response to the Israeli invasion of 1982. During the occupation of Beirut, Jammoul drove the Zionist troops out of the city within a few weeks. In the south, the newly formed Hezbollah led the armed struggle to fight for the liberation of the entire country. This process was the result of a long and costly struggle, which eventually culminated in the liberation of southern Lebanon on May 25, 2000.
The “Islamic Resistance” became the spearhead of the struggle against occupation, leading to Israel’s withdrawal from the South in 2000, without the signing of a peace treaty. The 2006 war was the culmination of this new configuration: Hezbollah stood up to the Israeli army for 33 days. While this military victory reinforced its prestige as a “bulwark” against Zionist expansionism, it also sharpened internal divisions.
III. Current Context
2006–2023
The period between the 2006 July War and October 7, 2023, represents a complex trajectory defined by the military strengthening of the Resistance alongside a catastrophic internal collapse of the Lebanese state. Following the 33-day Israeli invasion in 2006, the Hezbollah-led resistance emerged with immense regional prestige, viewed as a formidable force capable of imposing a stalemate on the Zionist entity. According to different comrades from the Lebanese Left we met, at that particular point Hezbollah could have taken state power proper if it wanted.[1]
However, this external military capacity was a sharp contrast to a domestic scene increasingly paralyzed by the sectarian power-sharing system solidified by the 1989 Taif Agreement (above). This deadlock created a permanent battleground between the “March 8 Alliance,” which favored the Resistance, and the pro-Western “March 14 Alliance,” a situation that effectively neutralized the state’s ability to implement structural reforms.
The 2008 global financial crisis was largely mitigated in Lebanon by a surge in diaspora remittances and high-interest rates that kept the banking sector buoyant. But this temporary resilience masked the structural corruption of what would later be identified as a state-sponsored Ponzi scheme. For decades, the Banque du Liban (the Lebanese Central Bank) maintained a fixed exchange rate by borrowing from commercial banks at exorbitant interest rates, using new depositors’ dollars to pay off old debts and finance a bloated, corrupt state.
The 2011 “Arab Spring” briefly manifested in Lebanon through protests demanding the end of the sectarian regime, but it was quickly overshadowed by the war in Syria. Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria to protect the Axis of Resistance—of which Syria’s Assad government was a part—consolidated its military regional standing but also deepened domestic fractures, straining its historical ties with some traditional left-wing forces. It also damaged Hezbollah’s popularity throughout Lebanon, not so much because of the Syrian civil war, but because of the intensifying sectarian tensions that resulted. The intervention was therefore particularly unpopular among the Sunni population.
By 2016, a compromise that brought Michel Aoun to the presidency marked a new phase where Hezbollah and its allies became primary stakeholders in the government. To maintain stability and protect the Resistance from domestic vulnerability, Hezbollah constructed a web of complex alliances with traditional sectarian actors, including those deeply embedded in the corrupt financial order. This pragmatic positioning meant that when the economic bubble finally burst, Hezbollah was perceived by many as an indirect guarantor of the failing political system they had sought to shield. The party also became inextricably linked to the administrative negligence that led to the August 2020 Beirut Port explosion, killing 200.
The spontaneous “October 17 Revolution” of 2019—called the “Thawra,” or “Revolution” in Arabic—was a mass uprising against the state-sponsored financial system that had collapsed by October of that year, devastating the working and middle classes. While the protests targeted the entire ruling class, the movement was fragmented; traditional left forces, such as the Lebanese Communist Party, sought radical secular and social reforms, but were often sidelined by sectarian repression or “NGO-ized” groups backed by Western interests. Reactionary forces, particularly the Lebanese Armed Forces, increasingly weaponized this economic misery to demand the disarmament of the Resistance, aligning themselves with Western and Saudi interests.
For Hezbollah, the party occupied a contradictory position; while its base identified with the economic grievances, the leadership viewed the Thawra as a potential geopolitical tool for Western-backed regime change. Hezbollah is not only an organization focused on armed resistance, but is also a “party-state” and an economic apparatus that binds its social base through welfare, credit, services, jobs, loyalty networks, and sectarian mobilization. As Hezbollah became more deeply integrated into the Lebanese state, it increasingly represented the interests of Shi’a capitalists and made compromises with other members of Lebanon’s ruling class. This is one reason Hezbollah did not support the 2019 protests. It is an anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist organization and also a representative of the Shi’a bourgeoisie and a part of Lebanon’s sectarian-capitalist order.
As a result, its supporters at times physically intervened to break up protest camps, effectively preventing the movement from toppling the sectarian presidency of Michel Aoun—a Maronite reactionary and opportunist, former Commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF, backing the phalangists against the Resistance) during the civil war. Michel Aoun’s presidency (2016–2022) epitomized the “Marouch” (Maronite-Shi’a) alliance, a cornerstone of Hezbollah’s domestic strategy to secure a Christian cover for its armed resistance. This web of alliances extended beyond Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement to include complex, often transactional relationships with Sunni figures like Najib Mikati and traditional Christian leaders. These ties were designed to integrate Hezbollah into the Lebanese “patchwork,” ensuring that no state decision could be made without its consent.
By the eve of October 7, 2023, the balance of power within the Resistance had shifted decisively toward the “Islamic Resistance,” while the traditional left was weakened both in terms of organization and also theory.
In terms of imperialist maneuvering in the country, during 2006 to October 7, 2023, the US pursued a policy of “controlled instability,” funding the LAF as a counterweight to Hezbollah while using aggressive sanctions to strangle the Resistance’s social base and accelerate the banking collapse. The US’s policies in the Middle East have always been implemented in order to “divide and conquer.” And as our Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) host said during one of our meetings:
The “New Middle East” conceived by Henry Kissinger started, so to speak, in Lebanon: different, politically segregated ethnic and religious “communities” living one next to the other—Maronites, Sunnis, Armenian Orthodox, Shi’as, etc.
France also intensified its neo-colonial diplomacy in the country, particularly after the 2020 port blast; President Macron issued ultimatums to preserve the sectarian elite under the guise of Western-led “reforms.” Meanwhile, China offered condition-free infrastructure projects through its “Belt and Road Initiative”—offering the Chinese imperialist trade-road another access to the Mediterranean Sea through the port of Beirut. However, these efforts were consistently blocked by a Lebanese political class fearful of US retaliation.
Since October 7, 2023: The war, the genocide, the loss of the war, the South in Lebanon, the “ceasefire,” preparations for restart of the war
Since the launch of the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, Lebanon has been forcibly re-centered as a primary theater of the regional anti-imperialist struggle, even as it faces this moment from a position of profound internal exhaustion. The war in Lebanon, initially framed by Hezbollah as a “support front” to alleviate the genocide in Palestine, rapidly escalated into a full-scale Israeli invasion in late 2024 that systematically decimated the border regions of the South—as mentioned before, a historically important center of mass Resistance against Zionism. Israel utilized a “scorched earth” strategy, employing white phosphorus and targeted demolitions to render entire villages uninhabitable, effectively erasing the social and agricultural fabric that sustained the Resistance for decades. While the forces of the Lebanese Resistance (Hezbollah, Amal, different Palestinian parties and Leftist groups) maintained a formidable tactical presence, the sheer scale of the Zionist technological and aerial onslaught—culminating in the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and much of the senior leadership—led to a strategic impasse that many analysts characterize as an indirect loss of the previous deterrent balance.
The resulting “ceasefire” established in late 2024 has proven to be a fragile and one-sided instrument of containment rather than a precursor to peace. In practice, the agreement has functioned as a mechanism for the intensified surveillance and disarmament of the South, with the Lebanese Armed Forces being pushed by the US and France to act as a buffer against any regrouping of the Resistance.
A comrade close to the Saida-based People’s Democratic Party, told us that
Since the “end” of the last war in November 2024, Israel has never ceased to bomb the South, and as of today missiles continue to hit Nabatiye. Whenever construction materials arrive on site to rebuild what has been destroyed, the Zionists target them, preventing the region from crawling out of the rubble caused by the war.
On the road to Nabatiye, the same comrade told us that when she hears Westerners discuss the question of “demilitarizing Hezbollah in the South,” she always wonder if those people know what that concretely means. “Because the armed men of Hezbollah are nothing more than villagers and city dwellers who have decided to defend their homeland.” Where should they go if “‘Hezbollah’ has to go?” “They live here; they’ve always been here.” She added, “we owe everything to those fighters of October 7.” Facing the Nabatiye mountains bordering Israel, her son, a 16-year-old activist, explained what the stakes were for the Resistance in the region, and what the ceasefire really was about from Hezbollah’s perspective:
During the “66-day war” [the war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2023–2024], in its attempt to conquer the South, Israel was not able to capture the strategically important village of Al-Khiyam in its entirety, because of the mountainous terrain but mainly because of the strong presence of the Resistance. Al-Khiyam’s importance lies in the fact that it represents the access point to the road leading all the way to Saida. If Israel had been able to secure the area, it could have been able to advance all the way to the coast and enclose the entire South.
The ceasefire is de facto only one-sided, as only the Resistance has stopped attacking Israel. Why does it accept such unfavorable conditions? There was, back then, immense pressure from all sides to sign a ceasefire with the Zionists. Even if the Resistance were to launch a new offensive, it will only do so once there is again a majority in the country who would support it. This means today propaganda work is important, as well as going to the masses and winning their hearts.
Throughout this period, the mobilization of the Lebanese masses has been starkly uneven. While the families of the South and the Beqaa valley (another Shi’a majority bastion, where Hezbollah is strong) have borne the brunt of the displacement and death, a significant portion of the urban middle class and the political elite has exhibited a chilling indifference, often prioritizing the preservation of a hollowed-out “normalcy” over the existential demands of the liberation struggle.
Our translator told us more about the “territorial dissociation” between the capital and the Southern “governorates” (Lebanese provinces), adding that
it had reached such extreme levels that at the peak of the war, during which the South was attacked and bombed by Israel which attempted an invasion, Beirut’s inhabitants were mostly living their lives as if nothing was going on in the country. People were partying at night, having breakfast in the morning, not affected at all in their daily lives.
Perhaps most revealing has been the internal political realignment. As the pressure intensified, Hezbollah’s “allies”—Sunni and Christian blocs that previously benefited from the party’s protection—have largely retracted their support, revealing their primary interest: the preservation of their own sectarian privileges rather than any genuine commitment to fighting Zionism or imperialism. This abandonment has forced a (for now limited) reach-out by the Resistance to more traditional left-wing and secular forces like the PDP and the LCP.
As of early 2026, the situation in the South remains a powder keg; the ongoing Israeli violations of the ceasefire and the state’s failure to rebuild the destroyed regions are widely seen as the precursors for a restart of hostilities. The Resistance is currently in a phase of deep internal reassessment, if not crisis. This is not merely the result of territorial or human losses, but is the consequences of structural and symbolic shocks that have fundamentally altered the regional landscape. The most immediate was the assassination of Nasrallah in late 2024, a leader whose strategic charisma and authority acted as a rare unifying force in Lebanese anti-imperialist politics (and beyond), commanding a popular legitimacy that transcended the Shi’a community. This decapitation of the leadership coincided with the sudden and total collapse of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024—a key member of the Axis of Resistance.
This isolation is further exacerbated by the situation in Iran, which, since the beginning of 2026, has been grappling with its most severe internal economic and social crisis in decades. Plagued by record inflation and widespread domestic unrest even before the US/Israeli military attacks beginning in February 2026, Tehran has been prevented from exerting its usual influence or providing the level of financial and political sponsorship that historically anchored the Lebanese front.
In the meantime, neither the Leftist forces nor Lebanese “civil society” are developing the capacity to fill this vacuum. On the Left, some small groups (such as the “Free Palestine Front”) and some LCP party chapters are only slowly getting out of the Soviet-nostalgia morass in which the entire region’s communist movement is still generally frozen (we will go into more depth in a later chapter of this series). On the other side, the Lebanese masses outside of the Beqaa valley and the Southern territories are, according to our observations and the testimonies of our local contacts, rather depoliticized as the fatigue accumulated over the span of multiple successive wars makes people “think of armed struggle as ‘outdated,’” leading to activists waging armed struggle “to be mocked.”
In regards the evolution of the local communist movement, we asked: How does one become a communist in Lebanese society? The reply was brief but informative of some of the difficulties faced by the movement:
Beyond the banal anti-communism present in most societies, in Lebanon it hasn’t recently become “cool” to be a “commie” as is the case in many Western countries today. Either you come from a family with a Leftist tradition, or a mix between hard living conditions, the experience of being marginalized in society and a high level of curiosity present can lead someone to become interested in communism. This happens only rarely.
Nonetheless, one person added that the communist movement has a potentially much larger pool of recruitment and a stronger pull factor compared to other forces.
Because its secularism and class-based politics transcend sectarian divisions which blocks, for instance, Hezbollah to grow in Christian and Sunni communities, and vice versa for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
References
source: Red Spark