Last night, the IDF carried out a precision strike on an underground vault holding millions in paper money and gold belonging to Hezbollah. Israel is taking out nontraditional financial targets that Hezbollah has been relying on since many of its traditional ones have been sanctioned by the West.
Today, Daniel Hagari, a rear admiral in the IDF and spokesman for the Israeli military, delivered a message to the public: There is another vault, this one with as much as half a billion dollars in cash and gold in it, which Israel hasn’t struck. That’s because it’s underneath a hospital in Beirut—Al Sahel Hospital, to be exact. “This money could and still can be used to rebuild the state of Lebanon,” Hagari said.
Someone’s going to have to go get it, though. Perhaps a few Beirut-based volunteers saw Hagari’s announcement.
There are strategic reasons for such disclosures. Among them, the reminder to Hezbollah and to residents of south Lebanon that Israel often knows what’s underfoot better than Lebanon does And cutting a terrorist group off from its access to cash can be an organizational death sentence.
But there are intangibles at play here too, and they’re no less important. Terrorism thrives by causing chaos—the fear planted by successful acts of terrorism has very real social and economic consequences. There is the mutual suspicion in the street, in which people may wonder if they are at risk from their neighbors. Generalized uncertainty can be fatal to some businesses and economic institutions. An unseen menace can be irreversibly disrupting—just look at Covid and the fallout from society’s attempt to mitigate it.
The term “asymmetric warfare” generally refers to the power differential between combatants, but it’s also a good descriptor of the different tactics that state actors and nonstate actors have to use. A state actors generally doesn’t have to worry about a terrorist group marching on its capital, and terrorist groups in turn are not usually vulnerable to the kind of social breakdown caused by their own tactics.
And yet, Israel’s moves against Hezbollah suggest, there are exceptions. Such as when terrorists become sovereign governments.
Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—the main terrorist organizations at war with Israel—mimic states. They do so even though they govern on behalf of a foreign power: Iran. South Lebanon (many would argue the whole of Lebanon) isn’t a territory dealing with an insurgency; it is Hezbollahland. There is no insurgency. The government has too much control over the population to allow one to develop.
The Houthis control part of Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, in similar fashion. Before the current war, Hamas was the only game in Gaza. These aren’t resistance groups, they are the groups against whom a citizen would resist.
Terrorists sow terror through violence against innocents. But what if you could inject the same chaos by targeting the terrorists—a legal, ethical, and moral inversion of the evil and criminal methods of the terrorists themselves?
That’s what Israel appears to be doing. Iran has overextended itself, and Hezbollah has gotten too big for its britches. You can’t play at this level, Israel seems to be saying to the terrorist army occupying Lebanon. Hezbollah has made itself vulnerable to the weaknesses it has for so long exploited in others.
Suddenly, the citizenry is suspicious of the totalitarian thugs in charge. Don’t get too close to a Hezbollah soldier, his pager could explode at any moment. Stop believing that you’d starve without Hezbollah; those cash vaults underneath the hospital suggest they’ll starve without you. Remember that “generous” loan that you got from Al-Qard Al-Hassan, the “credit bank?” That place is where Hezbollah can use you to unknowingly wash its money for it—money that, if Hezbollah weren’t here siphoning Lebanese resources, might have been yours to begin with.
Meanwhile, that same suspicion can curtail Hezbollah’s recruitment. A lot of people may be having second thoughts about showing up to the job fair where they hand out the pagers. Or you might wonder: Am I talking to a Hezbollah commander or a Mossad agent dressed up like one for Purim?
Until now, Iran’s terror proxies have had all the advantages of actual nation-states with none of the limitations. They’ve essentially hacked the international system. Gaza’s borders are treated as Hamas’s sovereign territory, yet providing for the people within those borders is somehow Israel’s responsibility. Hezbollah gets a controlling stake in everything Lebanon does, but Israeli counterattacks on Hezbollah bases in Hezbollah territory are “collective punishment.”
Israel seems to have found a way to work within that biased system and use it against Hezbollah and Hamas. Hopefully we’ll see plenty more of this, and not just from Israel. Welcome to the NFL, martyrs.