Counter-Terrorism: Hezbollah’s History of Violence
10th September 2024
Hezbollah, the powerful, Iran-backed Shia militia in southern Lebanon, is having problems. The most recent ones have to do with the Israeli retaliation for Hezbollah firing rockets into northern Israel and killing and wounding Israeli Druze children. The Druze are a quasi-Islamic group that is considered heretical by most Moslems. Druze live on both sides of the Israeli borders with Lebanon and Syria. It is not known if Hezbollah deliberately fired those rockets at Druze children or simply considered them Israeli kids because they were playing on a field in northern Israel. The response involved Israel launching massive airstrikes against the Hezbollah rocket storage sites in southern Lebanon. Numerous large secondary explosions were seen as Israeli missiles detonated rocket stockpiles.
Israel responds quickly and harshly against anyone who injures Israeli citizens. Many Europeans and Americans don’t realize that 24 percent of the Israeli population is not Jewish. Most of this minority is Arab, but some are Druze or Christian. Many of those Arab Christians are descendants of the first Christians who appeared two thousand years ago. The term Christian was first used about a hundred years after the Jewish rebellion that the Romans put down with massive killings and the enslavement and expulsion of most Jews to other parts of the Roman Empire. Substantial numbers of Jews didn’t start returning to what is now Israel until the 12th century. Even then the numbers were small and Moslems were still the majority. It wasn’t until the 1800s that Jews began to return to what eventually became Israel in the late 1940s. The movement became a flood after World War II when survivors of the Nazi effort to kill all Jews in Europe and Russia were only partially successful. Millions of Jews survived and most wanted to move somewhere else. Meanwhile most chose European countries or North America. But a substantial number chose the newly established state of Israel, which was born in battle and continues to be a dangerous region for unarmed Jews. The Arab states then expelled almost all their 600,000 Jewish people, who had been there for almost two thousand years after the Romans expelled them from ancient Israel. These all went to the newly independent Israel.