When asking commentators, including former senior military officials, what needs to be done to return Israel’s displaced northern residents to their homes, the answer is often that Israel will eventually need to exact a price from Lebanon by destroying Beirut. Occasionally, the answer is more precise: Israel will need to target Dahiya, the large Shiite suburb in southern Beirut where Hezbollah’s headquarters is located and where its late leader, Hassan Nasrallah, would hide before Israel indeed began implementing such a policy, including the massive September 27 strike that destroyed Hezbollah’s HQ and eliminated Nasrallah. Massive attacks on Dahiya occurred during the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
The problem with this response, which has become a formula, if not a mantra, is that it ignores a very important fact: the vast majority of Hezbollah recruits likely come from the sparsely populated Shiite periphery in the Nabatieh district in the south and from the Bekaa-Baalbek-Hermel area to the north – distinct Shiite regions. Only a small percentage of recruits likely come from the Beirut area, mainly from Dahiya, where most Shiites live.
This is evident from the distribution of Hezbollah’s 407 casualties in the “Swords of Iron” war (as of August 12, prior to the launch of Operation Northern Arrows on September 23) according to their place of origin, published by the Alma Research and Education Center, which specializes in analyzing the war on the northern front. Sixty-seven percent of the casualties hail from the Nabatieh district in the south, and an additional 15 percent come from the districts north of Nabatieh – such as Bekaa (including the sub-districts of Baalbek and Hermel) – all highly mountainous and therefore sparsely populated regions (about half a million people in total, of which around 250,000 are Shiites). In contrast, only three percent of the casualties come from the Beirut and Dahiya areas, where at least 800,000 people live, about half of Lebanon’s Shiite population. This means that the level of sacrifice in the Bekaa-Baalbek-Hermel region, which is also far from the combat zones, is at least 15 times greater than in Dahiya, taking into account the size of the Shiite population in both areas.
These data are further corroborated by an analysis of searches for the term “Hezbollah” in Arabic on Google Trends. This site provides the distribution of searches for the term across Lebanon’s six districts. It is important to note that people search for terms not only out of interest but also to express identification. For instance, if someone searches for the word “France,” most of the searchers, relative to population size, will likely be from France and former colonies, rather than from English-speaking countries, even though the word is the same in English. The highest number of searches for the term “Free Palestine” in Arabic will be from the region of Palestine – many times more, relative to its population size, than the same phrase search in Egypt.
The highest number of searches (relative to population size) for “Hezbollah” is from Nabatieh and the south – precisely the regions where most of Hezbollah’s casualties were born. In contrast, searchers for the term “Hezbollah” in Dahiya, located in the Mount Lebanon area, are less than one-fifth of the number of searchers in Nabatieh. Considering that the Shiite population in Dahiya is significantly larger than in Nabatieh, the gap is even more pronounced. For every search in Mount Lebanon, there are ten times more searches in Nabatieh. The lowest number of searches, as expected, is in the north – a predominantly Sunni area (with a small Alawite minority) and geographically distant from Hezbollah’s areas of operation, hence the lesser interest in the organization.
From this, we can understand how critical the periphery is to Hezbollah’s war effort. The migration process from the rural areas to the city, which began intensively among the Shiites in the 1960s, has clearly been accompanied by a weakening of political affiliation with Hezbollah compared to that in the periphery. We can assume that economic dependence on Hezbollah in the periphery is much stronger than in the Beirut area and that the intensity of the organization’s propaganda is lower in Greater Beirut, with its many temptations.
For Israel, this data holds strategic significance. Israel must consistently work to weaken the periphery, where Hezbollah is strongest, and encourage continued Shiite migration to Greater Beirut by destroying civilian infrastructure.
Such a policy has an additional advantage. The smaller the Shiite population north of the border, the easier it will be for the IDF to maneuver in southern Lebanon and employ greater firepower against the enemy. We saw how Gaza’s dense civilian population prompted the international community to pressure Israel into halting the IDF’s operations. It is possible that this heightened sensitivity to civilian casualties may have increased the risk to the lives of IDF soldiers.
Of course, the importance of the Dahiya should not be overlooked, despite the apparent difficulty in recruiting fighters from there. Dahiya is home to Hezbollah’s leadership – much of which has been eliminated since September 23 – and the command center controlling the organization across the entire region. Beirut is also home to the Iranian ambassador – injured in the September 17 pager attacks on Hezbollah – and his staff, who form an important liaison to the organization, which is subordinate to Iran’s Supreme Leader. In this context, it is important to note that Dahiya is close to Lebanon’s only international airport and its main seaport – two crucial means of transferring weapons from Iran and maintaining the connection between Hezbollah’s leadership and its Iranian patrons. At the same time, the importance of crushing the periphery in the south and east of the country and the long-term weakening of the organization through this process should not be underestimated.
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Photo: IMAGO / Sipa USA
