In the summer of 1982, Israeli forces pushed all the way to Beirut with a coherent logic. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was using Lebanese territory in order to wage a war against Israel. Militarily, the war was successful – the PLO was removed, and Yasser Arafat fled to Tunis.
Unfortunately, the 40 years that have followed have been far worse because of the Iranian Regime’s sponsoring of Hezbollah; as former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak said in 2006, “It was our presence there that created Hezbollah.”
The occupation of southern Lebanon by Israel helped to radicalize Lebanon’s Shia population, the community that Hezbollah is rooted in and recruits from today. A far more serious threat than the PLO was created on Israel’s border.
Hezbollah is not merely a Lebanese militia, but part of an Iranian regional architecture that puts Tehran a stone’s throw from Israeli civilians. With Lebanon’s May 2026 parliamentary elections coming up, Israel faces a race against time to ensure that Hezbollah’s disarmament remains politically viable.
This is not to argue that Israel should have adopted a passive response to Hezbollah, but that military success in Lebanon has, historically, yielded strategic failures.
Israel fails to win politically
The problem has not been Israel’s ability to degrade Hezbollah militarily, but its inability to shape the subsequent political order. In Lebanon, failure to shape what followed Israel’s 1982 success was a fatal error. Israel cannot afford to make the same mistake again.
The situation in Lebanon today is, in some ways, more favorable for Israel than it has ever been in Hezbollah’s time. The group has lost much of its power after Israel’s military campaign against it.
Domestically, their situation is not much better; Lebanon’s newly formed government has made disarmament of the group a key priority. For the first time in 40 years, the Lebanese Armed Forces have gained operational control south of the Litani River, with deployments of more than 9,000 soldiers.
In January, the Lebanese army stated it had established a state monopoly on arms in an “effective and tangible way,” stating that no group would be able to launch attacks from southern Lebanon.
However, after the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hezbollah launched missiles and drones towards the north of Israel. These strikes have reinforced US, Israeli, and Lebanese fears that it is the IRGC, rather than Hezbollah’s so-called political arm, that exercises control over the group’s military actions. Israel has launched its own counter-offensive as a result, killing hundreds and displacing hundreds of thousands.
There exists a structural issue that a ceasefire cannot resolve, which is that Hezbollah’s relationship with Iran is a precondition of the group’s continued existence. Despite losing many of its senior commanders and facing a disarmament campaign from the Lebanese government, Hezbollah has, to some degree, regrouped, with IRGC-Quds Force commanders present in Lebanon, advising and perhaps even operating some of Hezbollah’s weapons systems.
While the fall of Assad’s regime in Syria removed the most convenient land corridor for weapons supply, Iranian arms smuggling thrives in weak state environments, and alternate routes through Iraq and maritime corridors still exist.
It is therefore crucial that the Lebanese state is strong enough to enforce its own sovereignty. It is the only durable answer to the question of Iran continually rebuilding Hezbollah. The Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) cannot be given a disarmament mission, but then starved of the financial and military support it needs to execute it. US Special Envoy Tom Barrack highlighted this, saying that the LAF is “not well equipped,” and that Hezbollah fighters make far more money than LAF soldiers.
Ultimately, a disincentivised, under-funded, underequipped army is fighting an army with an eschatological cause, against a backdrop of near-daily Israeli strikes. This is a contradiction that cannot hold.
There is also a crucial internal Lebanese dimension that must be explored. Forced disarmament could trigger civil war with Lebanon’s Shia community, who generally support Hezbollah, or even fracture the LAF itself.
The political legitimacy of disarmament is dependent on the Lebanese government being viewed as a sovereign actor in pursuit of its own interests, rather than an enforcer of Israeli or American interests.
This is key in how Shia communities hedge over the next decade. A Lebanese government that is seen as a foreign instrument will fail. If it is seen as asserting national sovereignty, it could hold.
The May 2026 parliamentary elections serve as a deadline. If Hezbollah and its allies perform well, disarmament may stop. There is not a long window, therefore, and continued Israeli strikes further undermine the authority and legitimacy of the Lebanese government, that is supposed to be on equal footing to Israel and the US in this disarmament project.
Somewhat ironically, Israeli military outcomes in Lebanon over the last two years have been hugely successful, destroying much of Hezbollah’s capabilities with few Israeli casualties.
However, with no credible political end state, there is a risk of recreating the failures of 1982 – that instead of eliminating the threat of terrorism on its northern border, Israel’s invasion helped to create a far deeper, entrenched security threat. It is clear how this happened; occupation created resistance, and resistance generated an organization, funded by Iran and trained by the IRGC, in Hezbollah.
The question then, for Israel, is not military success. It is clear that in the northern arena, this can be achieved. It is whether the end state produced by current operations is one where the Lebanese state has the legitimacy and political space to replace Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. If not, a repeat of 1982, where a shattered society and humiliated Shia community create a successor even more difficult to dislodge.
The failure of 1982 was not that Israel lost, but that it did not have an answer for what came next. This question, albeit in a new context, remains unanswered. Hezbollah must be disarmed now, whilst it remains weak.
The writer is a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Leeds, studying International History and Politics. He is a policy fellow at the Pinsker Centre, a UK- based foreign policy think tank focusing on the geopolitics of the Middle East.