In the east and south of Lebanon, Israel continues its bombing campaign. After the latest attacks, in which several Hezbollah members were killed, the group has raised its rhetorical pitch. It has again vowed to fight back, despite being severely weakened after the 2024 war.
For the last four decades, Hezbollah had held an effective monopoly on Lebanese resistance against Israel. But it was neither the first to pick up arms nor to support the Palestinian cause from Lebanese soil. So Hanna Gharib, general secretary of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) tells me, at the party’s headquarters in Beirut. “We started the resistance,” he points out.
Even before the foundation of Israel in 1948, the Lebanese Communists fought side by side with Palestinian left-wingers against Zionist right-wing militias. When the civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975, the Communists again joined the fight. “We liberated three-quarters of the territory when Israel invaded in 1982. We began in Beirut and then continued south,” he tells me.
But the Communists were fighting an uphill battle. “Before the fall of the USSR, we received our weapons from the Soviets,” Gharib continues.
But when the Soviet Union fell, arms deliveries stopped.
At the same time, Iran had advanced its positions in Lebanon. A loosely organized group called “Islamic Amal” carried out several massacres of LCP members. In 1985, Hezbollah was officially founded. In 1987, over forty Communists were killed within ten days.
“First, they killed our leaders and then the intellectuals in the party. They attacked us because we were a national resistance. We had members from all religions. They wanted a monopoly on the resistance and to impose their ideas and values on everyone,” says Gharib.
When the genocide in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, Hezbollah was more powerful than ever. Since 2006, when a short but intense war with Israel raged, it had grown stronger. With confidence and heavy arms, Hezbollah…
Auteur: Hanna Strid
