Hezbollah: Lebanon Has Just Shattered a European Fiction

*This article was originally published in French

For thirteen years, Europe explained that it maintained a distinction between Hezbollah’s political and military wings in order to protect Lebanon.

This week, Lebanese Foreign Minister Youssef Rajji gave Europe an unambiguous answer: the distinction does not exist. Interviewed on LCI, he said that Hezbollah is a single organization, with a single command, a single strategy and a single objective. He went further: Hezbollah, he explained, is nothing more than an instrument of the Islamic Republic, designed to destabilize the Middle East.

That statement should reverberate far beyond Beirut.

Because since 2013, European policy has rested on precisely the opposite premise.

At the time, following the Burgas bombing in Bulgaria and the accumulation of evidence concerning Hezbollah’s activities in Europe, the question was no longer whether the organization was involved in terrorism. The real debate concerned the scope of Europe’s response.

France was then one of the leading advocates of a compromise: designate only Hezbollah’s “military wing” as a terrorist organization while preserving its supposed “political wing.”

The rationale was familiar. A full designation, it was argued, risked destabilizing Lebanon, weakening its institutions and jeopardizing Western influence in Beirut.

This distinction did not reflect an organizational reality. It was a diplomatic arrangement that allowed the European Union to act without challenging a deeply entrenched French doctrine.

The problem is that Hezbollah itself has never accepted this separation.

For years, its leaders have repeated that its political, social, military and security activities all belong to a single organization and a single chain of command.

One man illustrates this better than any abstract argument. Mahmoud Qamati, deputy head of Hezbollah’s political council and a former minister, belongs to the supposedly “political” wing that Europe sought to spare. In recent months, he has repeatedly threatened to bring down Nawaf Salam’s government, warned that the militia would not be disarmed “without blood being spilled,” accused the cabinet of having “sold out the nation” and promised a reckoning for those he calls “traitors.” Turning history on its head, he compares the Lebanese state’s sovereign decision to reclaim the monopoly on armed force to collaboration with Vichy, and the militia armed by the Islamic Republic to the Resistance. Thus it is Hezbollah’s “political” wing that voices the most brutal threats against the country’s institutions and the Lebanese people themselves.

The European distinction has therefore never described Hezbollah as it is. It described Hezbollah as Europe needed to imagine it.

Behind this seemingly technical debate, another question was in fact hiding: the question of the Islamic Republic.

As long as Europe debated wings, it could avoid talking about Tehran.

Hezbollah is not simply a political party with a militia. It is the most powerful vehicle of the Islamic Republic’s regional strategy. Funded, armed, trained and supported by the Iranian regime, it has for decades been one of Tehran’s principal instruments of power projection in the Middle East.

This is precisely what Youssef Rajji has now stated publicly.

For more than a decade, however, France continued to defend this approach. Even after the 2020 Beirut port explosion, Emmanuel Macron maintained that it was necessary to engage with all Lebanese political actors, including Hezbollah, in the name of the country’s stability.

This position long shaped that of the European Union.

Some states ultimately broke with it. The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania and Slovenia gradually concluded that the distinction made no practical sense.

The German example is especially revealing. When Berlin banned Hezbollah in its entirety in 2020, the authorities explained that they had accumulated evidence of networks linked to the organization operating on German soil and involved in financing, recruitment, propaganda and logistical support. The Interior Ministry explicitly concluded that the distinction between political and military activities bore no relation to operational reality.

Thirteen years later, the record is difficult to dispute.

The European distinction did not weaken Hezbollah. Worse, by preserving a “political” facade shielded from designation, it left open the channels through which the organization finances its activities – associations, fundraising operations and networks of the very kind uncovered by German investigations.

It did not strengthen the Lebanese state.

It did not curb the Iranian regime’s grip.

It did not deliver the promised stability.

Many Lebanese have long reached this conclusion. Those committed to the sovereignty of their state have repeatedly warned – often at great personal risk – that no nation can be built by accommodating a militia that lies beyond its control, possesses its own arsenal and answers to a foreign power. What they said in the face of indifference, their own foreign minister is now saying before the cameras.

Today, as President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and Foreign Minister Youssef Rajji seek to restore the sovereignty of the Lebanese state and take considerable political risks to do so – even opening direct negotiations with Israel – Europe continues to defend a position whose very premises are now disputed by those most directly concerned.

For years, Europe justified its policy in Lebanon’s name.

Today, Lebanon itself is telling Europe that it is wrong.

The real question is therefore no longer whether the distinction exists. Hezbollah denies it, several European states have discarded it, and Lebanon’s foreign minister has now swept it aside. The question is how much longer the European Union will continue to pretend to believe in it.

Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is Senior Envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Maya Khadra is a French-Lebanese journalist and lecturer specializing in the Middle East. Roberta Bonazzi is the founder and president of the European Foundation for Democracy (EFD) in Brussels.