A Future Without Hezbollah

At the end of September, when Israel’s campaign to destroy Hezbollah was reaching its height, I met one of the group’s supporters in a seaside café in western Beirut. He was a middle-aged man with a thin white beard and the spent look of someone who had not slept for days. He was an academic of sorts, not a fighter, but his ties to Hezbollah were deep and long-standing.

“We’re in a big battle, like never before,” he said as soon as he sat down. “Hezbollah has not faced what Israel is now waging, not in 1982, not in 2006.