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The 1982 Lebanon war began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded again for the purpose of attacking the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israeli army laid siege to Beirut. During the conflict, according to Lebanese sources, between 15,000 and 20,000 people were killed, mostly civilians.

On 16 February 1985, Shia Sheik Ibrahim al-Amin declared a manifesto in Lebanon, announcing a resistance movement called Hezbollah, whose goals included combating the Israeli occupation. During the South Lebanon conflict (1985–2000) the Hezbollah militia waged a guerrilla campaign against Israeli forces occupying Southern Lebanon and their South Lebanon Army proxies.

Throughout the painstaking process of confirming the Israeli withdrawal, Hizballah was at pains to declare its commitment to recovering the last millimeter of Lebanese territory, but it also acknowledged that it would not act hastily to reinitiate violence. In sum, Hizballah's behavior and deference to state authority have worked to its political advantage. It reaped recognition in an unprecedented meeting between Nasrallah and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who praised Hizballah's restraint and its promise of cooperation. The meeting with Annan offers a remarkable contrast with Hizballah's earlier days, when it was hostile to the UN and especially to the UN force in the south.

Without an agreement between Syria and Israel, there will be little pressure on Hizballah to disarm. Syria's calculated strategy is to allow Hizballah to serve as a constant reminder of the consequences of continuing to occupy the Golan Heights.This is a role that Hizballah is happy to play, given its enmity toward Israel. At the same time, it remains profoundly aware of the political costs of bringing destruction down on the heads of its supporters, and this further reduces the prospect that Hizballah will initiate attacks on Israel

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The doctrine is named after the Dahiya suburb of Beirut, where the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah has its headquarters, which the Israeli military leveled during its assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 that killed nearly 1,000 civilians, about a third of them children, and caused enormous damage to the country’s civilian infrastructure, including power plants, sewage treatment plants, bridges, and port facilities.

It was formulated by then-General Gadi Eisenkot when he was Chief of Northern Command. As he explained in 2008 referring to a future war on Lebanon: "What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.” Eisenkot went on to become chief of the general staff of the Israeli military before retiring in 2019.

While it became official Israeli military doctrine after Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, Israel’s military has used disproportionate force and targeted Palestinian, Lebanese, and other civilians since Israel was established in 1948 based on the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians, including dozens of massacres to force them to flee for their lives.

Hizbu’llah’s reluctance to grant Israel recognition is rooted in its rendition of the origins of the Israeli state, which it unequivocally portrays as a ‘rape’ or ‘usurpation’ of Palestinian land, there by rendering it a state which ‘is originally based on aggression’. By extension, the continued existence of the Israeli state constitutes ‘an act of aggression’, insofar as it represents a perpetuation of the original act of aggression. Therefore, Hizbu’llah ‘does not know of anything called Israel’. It only knows a land called ‘occupied Palestine’. In fact, the party never refers to the state of Israel as such, but to ‘occupied Palestine’ or ‘the Zionist entity’.

• pg 134

Based on the party’s delegitimisation of the Israeli state, its excoria-tion of Israeli state and society and its emphasis on the Zionist essence of both, certain existential elements of Hizbu’llah’s conflict with Israel can be readily discerned. Upon closer examination of these elements, the following three existential themes emerge: the party’s legitimisation of the use of violence against an essentially Zionist society; its rejection of the notion of a negotiated peace settlement with the Israeli state; and its pursuit of the liberation of Palestine.

• pg 142

According to the party, this aspiration to return ‘every grain of Palestinian soil’ to its rightful owners necessitates Israel’s ‘oblit-eration from existence’. Put simply, the reconstitution of one state is contingent upon the annihilation of another. The only way that the Palestinians can return to Jerusalem, and the ‘original Palestineof 1948’ generally, is for all Jews, with the exception of those native to Palestine, to ‘leave this region and return to the countries from whence they came’

• pg 162

Although Zionism and Judaism are synonymous in Hizbu’llah’s lexicon, the resulting confluence of the party’s anti-Zionism and anti-Judaism does not render the latter contingent upon the former. While there may be some truth in the contention propounded by some scholars that the conflict with Zionism has been the chief cause of Arab anti-Semitism, in the case of contemporary Islam, and Hizbu’llah in particular, it would be more appropriate to state that Zionism has greatly impacted on an existing, yet latent, anti-Judaism. Although this might be hard to determine, especially since Hizbu’llah owes its birth to Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, and hence to Zionism, the anti-Judaism of Hizbu’llah is detached from Zionism insofar as Islam is staunchly anti-Judaic.

If we are to employ Lewis’ criteria for anti-Semitism, we would be led to the ineluctable conclusion that Islamic anti-Judaism closely resembles anti-Semitism in that it both demonises the Jews and, according to at least to one Qur’anic verse, accuses them of conspiring against humanity. The following excursus will strive to illustrate Islam’s deep-rooted animosity towards the Jews by examining several Qur’anic verses which pertain to the Jews or the Children of Israel. The objective of this analysis is to show that, while Hizbu’llah’s anti-Judaism is to a considerable extent influenced by Zionism, it is not contingent upon it.

• pg 174