Hezbollah: From Wilayat al-Faqih to the Raouché Rock

The Iranian party, Hezbollah, has never been a territorial resistance. It has been a militia of spatial expansion, using territory as an argument for legitimacy. It is time to acknowledge this, once and for all.

Since its inception, Hezbollah has lived with a fundamental division: it is simultaneously the armed wing of an imperial project—that of the Iranian Wilayat al-Faqih as defined by Imam Khomeini—and an actor that claims to embody the “resistance” to liberate a national territory. “Space” first: that of the Shiite ummah, from Qom to Beirut, structured around a Supreme Leader whose decisions, in matters of war and peace, are binding. Then there is the “territory”: that of South Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and the disputed borders, where the party presents itself as a bulwark against Israel and the guardian of a national cause. This dichotomy is not new. Upon its establishment in 1984, under the guise of “resistance to the Israeli occupation,” Hezbollah began by eliminating a significant portion of the national resistance movement stemming from the Lebanese left—Mahdi Amel and his associates. It established itself on the margins: the Bekaa Valley, South Lebanon, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. There, it built a sprawling social infrastructure financed by Iran, and later supported by Assad’s Syria within the framework of the “alliance of minorities.”

Even then, the logic of space prevailed: the party saw itself as the vanguard of an axis, far more than as a mere territorial actor. Between 1990 and 2000, this dynamic became partially territorialized. Hezbollah is leading the armed resistance in a South abandoned by the state, while gradually inserting itself into the heart of the system: participating in the 1992 municipal elections, the 1996 parliamentary elections, and then in the government from the 2000s onward. The Israeli withdrawal of May 2000 provided it with a territorial baptism: it could claim the liberation of a portion of the national territory, to widespread applause, while retaining its weapons outside the state's monopoly on legitimate violence. "Resistance" then became the key to remaining a militia in a state whose mechanisms it was beginning to systematically infiltrate. After the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005 and the Syrian withdrawal, the party crossed a threshold. It took over from Damascus's tutelage, aligned itself with the Mar Mikhaël alliance and the Aounist movement—a meeting of the two suburbs, south and north—and embarked on a veritable campaign to absorb the state. The July 2006 war provided it with a "divine victory" for domestic consumption: it reactivated its territorial legitimacy at the very moment when Resolution 1701 began to limit its military maneuvering. Two years later, in May 2008, it besieged the Siniora government and launched a punitive expedition to Beirut and the Mountain, before wresting from Doha the blocking minority of the government: the quintessential instrument of a supranational veto power legitimized… in the name of "resistance." From 2008 to 2015, prevented from openly conducting operations in the South by Resolution 1701, Hezbollah definitively shifted its center of gravity to space. It becomes the backbone of the Tehran–Damascus–Baghdad–Sanaa–Gaza axis. It intervenes in Syria to save Assad, in Iraq alongside Shiite militias, and in Yemen with the Houthis, all while supporting Hamas. Lebanon is reduced to a mere link, a logistical platform, a corridor for a regional project. The da'wah of resistance, in the sense highlighted by Michel Seurat, is now directed solely toward the investment of the mulk, the center of power. Imperial space absorbs national territory.

It is this imbalance that October 7, 2023, shatters. By launching an operation that draws the entire Iranian axis into a high-intensity confrontation with Israel, Hamas precipitates the hubris of the system. Driven by territorial logic—not wanting to "abandon" Gaza, preserving the myth of the "unified resistance"—Nasrallah is forced to open a northern front. But the disproportionate Israeli response, military attrition, the gradual destruction of the party's leadership and infrastructure, and the internal Iranian crisis revealed the fragility of the structure. The fall of Assad in Syria and the closure of supply routes changed everything: the axis itself began to crack. The alliance of minorities collapsed, technically if not symbolically. Where it had reigned supreme over a disintegrated state, Hezbollah found itself brought to its knees. Its totemic figures—Nasrallah, Safieddine, and other mythical military leaders—were eliminated. The space collapsed, the territory reappeared. A new American tutelage locked down Beirut airport, a governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon (BDL) close to Washington was appointed, and a president from the military was elected with explicit international support.

The barely veiled prospect of leading the country toward some form of arrangement with Israel. Too weakened for a direct confrontation, the party is retreating to its only remaining resource: its territorial rhetoric. It has suddenly recast itself as the guardian of sovereignty, the defender of borders, accusing the state—which it has methodically emptied of its substance over two decades—of passivity in the face of the enemy. Hence the current paradox: after fragmenting Lebanon's territorial continuity by multiplying "security perimeters," gray zones, and controlled routes, Hezbollah now invokes the state's "failure" to mask its own impotence. It is covertly sabotaging attempts to restore public authority—from the airport to the seafront and including urban symbols—while publicly demanding that this same state assume the responsibility for confronting Israel. Having been the primary factor in the country's territorial and political disintegration, it is now attempting to hide behind the fiction of the state to survive the collapse of its imperial space.

The quintessential caricature of this decline is the Raouche Rock affair, the Tarpeian Rock, the ultimate stage of Hezbollah's "sound and light" demise. This is not merely tactical duplicity; it is an ontological fracture. Hezbollah does not know how to lose because it does not know how to be a purely national actor. As long as it is the local embodiment of a spatial project—metaphysical, ideological, imperial—it can justify its difference, its arsenal, its exceptional status. The day it reverts to being a purely territorial force, subject to the rules of mulk, to sovereignty, to accountability, it ceases to be itself. For Hezbollah, recognizing the primacy of the state means admitting that "Resistance" is nothing more than a slogan. And that it is now just one party among many, responsible for its record of death, ruin, and chaos. In this sense, Hezbollah can never be transformed into a simple political party. It must disappear, however ruthless that word, that idea, may be.

The future of Lebanon is at stake here today. Solutions imposed from the outside have always failed because they stumbled against a local elite obsessed with the art of compromise, of "at the same time," of mutual nibbling away: appeasing the militia without acknowledging its logic, praising the state without giving it the means to exercise its sovereignty. But experience since 1967 is unequivocal: there is no state without a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, nor any territory without continuity. Sovereignty cannot be perpetually treated as a variable to be adjusted. The real fault line today no longer opposes "Resistance" and "foreign agents." It divides those who accept Lebanon as a political territory, with a state that alone decides on war and peace, and those who want to maintain it as a mere foothold in a sectarian, regional, or imperial power structure. As long as this ambiguity persists, Hezbollah will continue to play both sides, hoping that time, or a change of power in Washington or Tehran, will one day restore the illusion of its former grandeur. But the country's time is not that of the militia. Lebanon can no longer afford to waver between space and territory. It must, once and for all, choose to exist as a state—or accept being nothing more than the exhausted stage set for a decaying empire.