The rhythm of any liberation struggle is set by two forces: how mature the liberation project becomes, and how swiftly the colonizer learns, adjusts, and mobilizes its power and alliances. When a movement first rises, it strikes at the weak points the colonizer has neglected in its arrogance. It invents methods the enemy neither knows nor expects that bypass its strengths and deliver targeted and powerful blows.
The colonizer soon adapts. It rewrites its political, strategic, and technical playbook. What follows is a relentless race for survival, won by the side that endures longer and gets more creative. If the liberation movement prevails at this stage, the confrontation moves to indirect wars, which are cultural, economic, and security wars, and above all, proxy wars.
These are designed to scatter and drain the foundations of liberation. The most dangerous of them is the proxy battlefield. Its purpose is to alter the resistance’s way of fighting, exhaust its accumulated experience, and expose the structure of its liberation project in preparation for a following direct assault.
The liberation project has entered a new cycle of adaptation, one that is political, strategic, and technical, to face an unprecedented revolution in military affairs driven by information and sensory technology.
The occupation tried this approach in 2006 and failed. It then spent the next 18 years building, through an international coalition, toward a single goal: to crush the Lebanese model of liberation. That model had survived and triumphed through every form of “alternative war”. The victories came at a steep price, shifts in methods, hard lessons, and heavy losses, but they also brought justified confidence. They reshaped the very core of the region’s liberation structure and stood firm against a massive international-regional bloc.
While the resistance fought on many fronts, the enemy waited and prepared. It exploited every structural change forced by deep adaptation. Yet, despite the coalition’s effort toward a “decisive war”, it failed spectacularly to end the conflict.
The liberation project has entered a new cycle of adaptation, one that is political, strategic, and technical, to face an unprecedented revolution in military affairs driven by information and sensory technology. Its opponent is a settler fortress built on ideology. Those who inhabit it believe they are the rightful owners of the land and fight with the conviction of permanence, not transience.
In Lebanon, the resistance endured one of the most intense tests in modern anti-colonial history. It faced a war that aimed to dismantle its entire structure, yet it adapted within days, rose from the ruins, and shattered the new imperial plan. It inscribed its own record against the international coalition that sustains the temporary Zionist entity: the first liberation since 1936; the repulsion of the 2006 war; the victories of 2006 and 2023 across every alternative battlefield; and the swift, flexible adaptation to the fiercest technological transformation in modern warfare, all under continuous fire.
This is a grievous, blood-marked achievement, yet it stands as the highest form of learning and structural evolution, beyond the tactical realm of “wars of minds”. It marks a hinge point between sporadic clashes with colonialism and a total confrontation pushed to its outermost limits.
Israel, the acting hand of the imperial coalition, now faces the aftermath of its failed attempt to uproot Lebanon’s liberation project. At this juncture, it requires a more radical and ambitious approach, one that convinces its public that the war’s costs will be paid “one last time”. Otherwise, it must accept that its reliance on the so-called AI revolution in military affairs has failed, and that its future holds only recurring wars and chronic insecurity.
In Lebanon, the resistance endured one of the most intense tests in modern anti-colonial history. It faced a war that aimed to dismantle its entire structure, yet it adapted within days, rose from the ruins, and shattered the new imperial plan.
The resistance, by contrast, has undergone a new birth. It has moved beyond the cycle of alternative wars and into a deeper structural adaptation. It responded simultaneously to its enemy and to the transformations of technology. It has drawn lessons from battle under maximum stress, distilled the logic of survival, and begun to build a new concept for a phase unlike any before in this long conflict.
The imperial coalition has now played all its cards in a single move. Liberation movements, on October 7, struck at the heart of the colonial fortress entrenched in occupied Palestine. Since then, the resistance has entered its most profound stage of adaptation, facing an imperial reaction steeped in technology and scale.
In this new phase, the resistance aims at the very existence of the settler fortress. It confronts the coalition of colonial powers on equal ground, at the height of the technological revolution. The coalition’s “smart war” continues to unfold but struggles daily against emerging threats across every front. The resistance stands firm, rooted in endurance and intellect, ready for a peer contest. As time passes and the glow of initial triumph fades, new security demands arise within the fortress. Boasts of victory give way to unease. Between these two poles lies a race: the resistance’s ongoing adaptation versus the colonizer’s attempt to block, preempt, and shape the next round.
The resistance, by contrast, has undergone a new birth. It has moved beyond the cycle of alternative wars and into a deeper structural adaptation.
Resistance adaptation includes repair, but it extends far beyond it. The shortfall lies not in raw capacity but in the ability to respond to a new operational pattern, one the resistance had not yet fully matched after years of alternative wars. It blunted the decisive outcomes the enemy expected, but the next stage demands a different form of transformation: an intelligence shift. This means moving beyond restoring structures, sites, and fortifications, toward a war of invention that depends on collective and individual intellect in the political, strategic, and technological arenas.
This adaptation draws its strength first from faith in God, who sustained the movement when it began with nothing in 1982. It also relies on the knowledge accumulated by generations of young fighters, the will that carried each victory through decades of struggle, and the force of history itself. Here, adaptation is not about improving the odds of liberation; it is about existence and survival.
In 2022, the RAND Corporation in the United States published a study on how to limit the adaptation of non-state actors. Six researchers examined fifteen cases, including Hezbollah. Their starting point was clear: “Defeating such organizations is difficult because they are flexible and structured to adapt to changes in their environment, and sometimes beyond.” The study advised the US military to anticipate and disrupt such adaptation by cutting access to the resources that enable it. It identified six domains of resilience: alliances, technology, geographic spread, financial capacity, tactics, and the ability to replace assassinated leaders.
Focusing on Hezbollah, Orna Mizrahi of Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies narrowed her analysis to the concept of “recovery”. In a lengthy article in May of this year, she wrote: “Hezbollah’s recovery includes expanding its dwindling financial reserves, continuing to move weapons to South Lebanon, smuggling arms by any means from abroad, recruiting new members, reorganizing its institutions, and making some efforts to address the needs of the Shiite population.”
Both the RAND study and Mizrahi’s article overlook the deeper forces behind adaptation, the motives and capacities that sustain learning. They focus on visible outcomes. In Lebanon, after four decades of continuous evolution under shifting pressures, the resistance’s adaptability now unfolds on three distinct fronts:
– Forced adaptation: born from the sweeping assassinations that targeted leaders at every level, and from the shifts that struck at the heart of the movement’s capabilities.
– Dynamic adaptation: shaped by relentless security, political, and economic pressure.
– Creative adaptation: driven by generations of inventive, disciplined youth determined to confront Zionist expansion.
Hadi Kobaissy
source: Al Akhbar