In 1982, as Israel’s invasion of Lebanon reshaped the region, Subhi al-Tufayli — who would later become Hezbollah’s first secretary general — traveled to Tehran with the Shiite cleric Ragheb Harb to seek Iranian support for a new resistance movement.
Iran was then deeply entrenched in its war with Iraq. But its leadership viewed Lebanon as an opportunity: a new front from which the Islamic Revolution could expand into the Arab-Israeli conflict.
According to Nicholas Blanford’s history of Hezbollah, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini quickly embraced the proposal. Soon afterward, Tehran dispatched Revolutionary Guard personnel to Lebanon and framed the fight against Israel as inseparable from Iran’s own war effort.
“For us,” Khomeini declared at the time, “there is no difference between the fronts in southern Iran and southern Lebanon.”
From the beginning, Hezbollah was conceived not simply as a Lebanese militia, but as an extension of Iran’s revolutionary project.
More than four decades later, the movement appears to be returning to those origins.
The shift became more apparent after a Hezbollah military official recently spoke of reviving tactics associated with the group’s early years, including suicide operations against Israeli forces. Analysts largely dismissed the comments as psychological warfare. But the rhetoric reflected a broader trend already underway inside Hezbollah: a retreat from the pragmatism that once helped the organization embed itself within the Lebanese political system.
In his landmark study of Hezbollah, Augustus Richard Norton described the group’s 1985 founding manifesto as unmistakably shaped by Tehran. The document divided the world between the “oppressed” and the “oppressors,” denounced both the United States and the Soviet Union and openly justified violence as a means of driving Western influence from Lebanon.
The manifesto emerged during one of the bloodiest phases of Lebanon’s civil war — shortly after the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut and amid a wave of kidnappings targeting foreigners. Those years formed the ideological core of Hezbollah, even as the organization later tried to soften its image.
Following the civil war, Hezbollah gradually recalibrated its public identity. It toned down revolutionary slogans, broadened its political alliances and increasingly portrayed itself as a Lebanese national movement rather than a purely Iranian-backed faction.
After Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, the group deepened that strategy. Its alliance with Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement in 2006 provided Hezbollah with crucial Christian political legitimacy and strengthened its influence across the Lebanese state.
For years, that balancing act allowed Hezbollah to maintain both its armed status and a degree of domestic acceptance.
But the balance began to collapse after the group opened a front against Israel in October 2023 in support of Hamas after the war in Gaza erupted. Once again, many Lebanese questioned whether Hezbollah’s decisions reflected national priorities or Iran’s regional calculations.
The devastating Israeli strikes that followed in 2024 accelerated the transformation. Much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership was killed, and large parts of the military infrastructure it had spent decades building were destroyed.
What emerged afterward looked increasingly like the Hezbollah of the 1980s: more dependent on Iran, more ideologically rigid and more isolated inside Lebanon.
Iranian influence also became more visible. Reports of Revolutionary Guard officers operating alongside Hezbollah fighters resurfaced, while the group’s media rhetoric revived the language of revolutionary confrontation that had largely faded over the past two decades.
At home, Hezbollah found itself politically cornered. After the group launched rockets in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last March, the Lebanese government moved to ban its military activity — an extraordinary step that further weakened the group’s domestic legitimacy.
In some respects, Hezbollah had come full circle: once again a heavily armed movement tied openly to Tehran, but lacking broad national consensus inside Lebanon.
Kobi Michael, a researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, said he doubted Hezbollah could realistically revive the suicide operations that once defined its confrontation with Israel.
Hezbollah fighters no longer operate in direct proximity to Israeli troops, he said, and areas under Israeli control no longer contain Shiite communities that previously provided operational access.
“The fact that they are carefully monitored by the IDF they are not able to reach physically to the soldier,” Michael said.
Any such operations, he argued, would more likely target Israelis or Jews abroad — though carrying them out today would be significantly more difficult.
For Michael, Hezbollah’s return to its Iranian identity underscores a larger strategic reality: Lebanon’s Hezbollah problem cannot be separated from Iran itself.
“Ultimately,” he said, “weakening Hezbollah means weakening Iran.”
The article is a translation of the original Arabic.
Rami Al Amine
Rami Al-Amin is a Lebanese writer and correspondent for MBN covering political, social and cultural developments across the Middle East. He produces and presents the satirical critique segment Bitter Sweet, which examines current events through a critical lens. He holds a master’s degree in Islamic-Christian Relations from Saint Joseph University in Beirut. He is the author of Ya Ali, We Are No Longer the People of the South, a political booklet on Hezbollah, and The Two Mourners, a book on the history of Beirut’s Martyrs’ Statue.
