by Prof. Hillel Frisch
There are several reasons why Hezbollah restrained its response. The most important is probably its demographic predicament.
Hezbollah posters around the streets of Baalbek,
Lebanon, photo by Will De Freitas via Flickr CC
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,281, September 8, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Hezbollah responded
with restraint to Israel’s three-pronged attacks over the past two weeks
in Syria, Iraq, and, above all, a neighborhood in Dahiya, the vast
Shiite area in Beirut where Hezbollah is headquartered. The
organization’s effort to avoid escalation reflects its demographic
problem in Lebanon.
Israel’s three-pronged attacks over the past two
weeks in Syria, Iraq, and, above all, in Dahiya, the vast Shiite
neighborhood in Beirut where Hezbollah is headquartered both above and
below ground, were met with a very limited Hezbollah response. An IDF
truck was struck by two missiles with the obvious objective of killing
Israeli soldiers in retaliation for the killing of two Hezbollah
soldiers in an Israeli attack on Syria. This limited response – against
Israeli military personnel only – sent a clear signal, acknowledged by
the Israeli side, that Hezbollah wants to avoid escalation that could
lead to all-out war.
The object of the Israeli attacks was to destroy
equipment that would have facilitated the local manufacture of
precision-guided missiles that could target Israel’s key strategic
infrastructure of power plants, airbases, seaports, and airports. Israel
has been taking this kind of action in Syria for nearly two years, and
felt compelled to do the same in Lebanon as well.
There are several reasons why Hezbollah restrained its response. The most important is probably its demographic predicament.
Despite the pretense of being an all-encompassing
Islamic resistance movement – Hezbollah rhetoric almost never directly
refers to Shiites or Shiism and instead conjures pan-Islamic enemies,
primarily Israel – the organization is perceived, both inside and
outside Lebanon, in strict sectarian terms as almost exclusively Shiite.
Its promotional material features photos of
Ayatollah Khomeini and present-day spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
It supplies links to their speeches and carries detailed coverage of
Sunni suppression of Shiites in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. It runs
articles that advocate the rule of Khomeini as supreme jurist, which
arouses antagonism not only among Sunnis but also among a considerable
segment of Shiites in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.
Hezbollah has also been at odds, often violently,
with the Sunni community in Lebanon – especially in Tripoli, where since
1984 Hezbollah has sided with the small, Syrian-backed Alawite minority
against the Sunni majority at the behest of the Syrian regime. The
Hezbollah-Sunni rift widened to include suppression of Sunni
fundamentalist organizations in the south, and later of mainstream Sunni
political organizations. This culminated in the assassination of Sunni
PM Rafik Hariri in 2005.
Relations are equally tense with most of the
Christian and Druze communities, though Hezbollah has succeeded in
allying with former Maronite general and president Michel Aoun and his
supporters.
What all this means is that Hezbollah’s
recruitment pool is strictly limited to the Shiite community in Lebanon –
and there’s the rub.
Not only is the Shiite community relatively small
(between 1 million and 1.5 million people), but it is suffering from a
rapidly declining birthrate very similar to that of Iran, the only large
country with a Shiite majority.
The Shiite birthrate has declined from five to six
children per woman of child-bearing age in the 1980s to fewer than the
2.05 needed to maintain the existing population twenty-five years later.
This has many implications.
By far the most important for Hezbollah is that
small families are reluctant to sacrifice the person who is all too
often their only son in a society where the two-child family is becoming
the norm.
We see something similar in Israeli data. Every
year, the IDF identifies the high schools with the highest percentages
of male graduates who volunteer for fighting units. Five to seven of
them are both religious and situated in the West Bank, and seven to nine
of the ten belong to the national religious stream. The common
denominator is that these recruits come from larger families than those
found at secular schools.
Hezbollah has been sacrificing Shiites for 37
years, with only a brief hiatus of five short years between the second
Lebanese war in 2006 and the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
Ardor for sacrifice is hard to maintain. Iran has
to work very hard to get non-Iranian Shiites to fight its battles after
the loss of hundreds of thousands in the prolonged war with Iraq over
thirty years ago. That is a magnification, many times over, of what 1973
was to many Israelis.
Hezbollah is up against a similar problem, and it
is not one the organization can easily counter. Declining birthrates are
the result of urbanization. Most Lebanese Shiites live in the
multi-storied apartment buildings of the Dahiya, not the small villages
and towns of the past from which they were bused in on election day to
vote for Hezbollah.
In the city, children are no longer helping on the
family farm. They are consumers, not producers. Their parents want them
educated and professional, and many would rather see them in Canada or
Australia than fighting Iran’s wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
Sheik Hassan Nasrallah also knows that the declining reservoir of recruits will be needed on the domestic front.
The balance between Sunnis and Shiites has grown
in favor of the former as hundreds of thousands of Syrian Sunnis have
found refuge in Lebanon. Essentially, the Alawite regime has exported
its problem to Lebanon, and more specifically to the Shiite areas on
Lebanon’s eastern border.
Hezbollah has not only paid in blood to prop up
the Syrian regime. It faces a more uncertain future in Lebanon itself as
a result of that support. Under such circumstances, restraint is a
reasonable response.
This is an edited version of an article published in The Jerusalem Post on September 4, 2019.
Prof. Hillel Frisch is a professor of political studies and Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University and a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/hezbollah-demographic-problem/
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