'Hezbollah': The origins of the Iran-backed terror group and its involvement in Oct. 7 - review

Matthew Levitt is a counter-terrorism expert, and he is also an investigative journalist of the highest caliber. His in-depth study of Hezbollah’s origins, structure, criminal and terrorist activities, Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, first published in 2013, was widely acclaimed as a deeply researched and meticulously detailed examination of one of the most dangerous militant organizations on the planet. 

To the reprinted edition published in 2015, Levitt added a 14-page afterword to bring his research into Hezbollah’s activities up to date. He had a series of new major episodes to describe, including Hezbollah’s involvement in supporting President Bashar Assad in the civil war then raging in Syria; its backing of the Houthis in Yemen; revelations from the trial in Cyprus of a notorious Hezbollah undercover agent; newly emerging reports of a lost opportunity in 2008 to assassinate Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC Quds Force, who was in fact killed in 2020; and the mysterious death of Argentina’s special prosecutor, then investigating the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

A revised edition of a seminal text on Hezbollah

 Much water has flowed under the bridge since 2015, and now, in 2024, with outright war between Hezbollah and Israel a real possibility, a revised edition of Levitt’s seminal work is to be welcomed. In this edition of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, he provides a new 10-page epilogue in which he deals at length with major changes in Hezbollah’s status and role over the past few years, and its real – even if generally unknown – involvement in preparing the ground for the bloodthirsty Hamas attack on Israel of Oct. 7, 2023. 

“Looking back,” he writes, ”the road to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks appears to have started in earnest after the May 2021 rocket war between Hamas and Israel. At the time, the editor of a Lebanese newspaper affiliated with Hezbollah reported that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran coordinated the fighting from a ‘joint war room’ in Beirut.”

In the wake of that war, Levitt reports, Hezbollah and the Quds Force met with Hamas officials to put into effect a long-held notional Hamas plot to storm across the Gaza border and attack Israeli communities. Levitt quotes Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials claiming that tactical planning for the Hamas massacre began at least a year before the attack, “with key support from Iranian allies” – that is, Hezbollah.

Levitt has identified a major shift in Hezbollah’s behavior over the past few years. He has the evidence to show that Hezbollah has assumed a new role in recent times as the de facto managing partner for Iran’s network of proxies.

He maintains that Hezbollah has emerged as a powerful regional actor, still seeking to destroy Israel and undermine Western influence in the region, but now partnering with Iran’s IRGC Quds Force to reshape the region in Iran’s favor.

“Consider, for example,” he writes, “Hezbollah’s role in building up and supporting Iranian proxy groups in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.” He points in particular to how these groups each engaged Israel, US forces, or international maritime shipping in a loosely coordinated fashion that the late Qasem Soleimani envisioned as uniting the fronts. And he quotes Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, calling as early as 2015 for “uniting the fronts against the Israeli occupation.” 

Levitt’s message is that Hezbollah remains engaged in a wide range of militant, terrorist, and criminal activities within but also well beyond Lebanon’s borders. He seeks to spread a wider appreciation of the full range of Hezbollah’s worldwide activities.

Levitt has served as an FBI counter-terrorism analyst, including work on the 2000 millennium and September 11 plots. He then became deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the US Department of the Treasury. He is currently at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he directs a program on counter-terrorism and intelligence. 

Organized geographically and in loose chronological sequence, the book opens with Hezbollah’s birth and its first forays into violence targeting Western interests, first at home in Lebanon and then abroad. The book then follows the trajectory of Hezbollah’s operations abroad, first in Europe and the Middle East, then in South America and Southeast Asia. Hezbollah’s activities in North America pre-September 11 lead on to how the group became embedded in multiple global conflicts.

Levitt provides references for all the major aspects of what he tells us of Hezbollah’s activities, and his sources are fully set out in the pages of notes appended to each of the 12 chapters. They show that his work is grounded in recently declassified government documents, intelligence reports, court papers, and firsthand accounts. 

Levitt tackles head-on the dilemma concerning Hezbollah that inhibited many governments from taking action against the organization – namely, that over the years it has managed to infiltrate the administrative and political systems of Lebanon to such an extent that it is generally acknowledged to have become “a state within a state.”

Because the group is a duly elected political party in Lebanon, has members in the government, and is a key provider of social welfare services, some countries have sought to distinguish between its political and its military activities. For years, some governments proscribed Hezbollah’s military wing, but not what they claimed was its political wing. Most, including the UK, have now proscribed the organization as a whole. The European Union, however, persists in the fiction that Hezbollah has a “military wing” that it has designated a terrorist body, but it continues to allow Hezbollah to operate without restrictions across Europe.

The anomaly of the EU’s position is revealed by Levitt, who quotes the words of Hezbollah’s second-in-command, Naim Qassem: “Hezbollah has one single leadership, and its name is the decision-making Shura Council. It manages the political activity, the jihad activity, and the cultural and social activities. Hezbollah’s secretary general is the head of the Shura Council and also the head of the Jihad Council, and this means that we have one leadership, with one administration.”

Levitt judges that Hezbollah’s duality is central to its strength, “allowing it to operate in both the legal and illegal arenas with remarkable dexterity.”

Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God is a definitive, evidence-based examination of one of the world’s worst, most active, and most widespread criminal and terrorist organizations, tied in the most intimate way with the worst of all – Iran. The book is also a highly readable page-turner. 

In light of its violence and extremism, its criminal activities from narcotics trafficking to money laundering and more, and its continued use of international terrorism, Levitt feels that “it is high time the international community conducted a thorough and considered discussion of the full range of Hezbollah’s ‘resistance’ activities,” and what to do about them. 

“With this book,” he writes, “I hope to kick-start that discussion.” 

It is long overdue. He deserves to succeed. 

The writer’s latest book is Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020. Follow him at: a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com

• HEZBOLLAH: THE GLOBAL FOOTPRINT OF LEBANON’S PARTY OF GOD
• By Matthew Levitt
• Georgetown University Press
• 432 pages; $17.50