Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

HEZBOLLAH • 253northern Israel, which effectively displaced at least 300,000 Israelisand brought ordinary life in northern Israel to a complete standstill,something no previous Arab-Israeli war had ever accomplished.The end result of the Hezbollah-Israel war was that for the first timesince its creation, Israel was unable to completely incapacitate an Arabforce in military confrontation. Despite its high casualties, Hezbollahhad fought Israeli troops effectively, using a network of undergroundbunkers and mobile missile launchers to vitiate efforts by Israel to suppressits forces purely by air power. Hezbollah hurt Israel internallythrough its missile barrages and drew Israel into an invasion and counterinsurgencyat the time and terrain of Hezbollah’s own choosing, leadingto casualty rates that Israel had been seeking to avoid since its withdrawalfrom Lebanon in 2000. This victory of Hezbollah completelyovershadowed the military assaults and puny rocket attacks by Hamasfrom its Gaza enclave against Israel. However, Professor Eyal Zisser ofthe Moshe Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University provides a contrary interpretationof the results of the Hezbollah-Israel war, pointing out thatHezbollah refrained from further missile attacks on Israel after the warwhile the material costs of the war to the Shi’ite community of Lebanonled to more disaffection among Hezbollah’s base constituency. Othersources maintain that the Israeli air strikes successfully destroyed mostof Hezbollah’s missile arsenal, therefore crippling its ability to resumemissile attacks on Israel.In the period 2006–2008, Hezbollah appeared to be gaining groundwithin Lebanon and had proven itself to be a serious regional actorwith its July 2006 war with Israel and, following the June 2007 splitbetween Hamas and al Fatah, even an actor with influence over theIsraeli-Palestinian conflict. But these gains have been offset by thegrowing hostility of the Syrian regime, which began to view Hezbollahas a liability in seeking its own accommodation with the United Statesand Israel and also in challenging Syria’s own control over Lebanon,which it views as falling within its own sphere of influence.On 12 February 2008 the top Hezbollah covert operations commander,Imad Mughniyah, was assassinated by a car bomb in Damascus.Although suspicions first focused on Israel’s Mossad as being themost likely perpetrator, within a few weeks Hezbollah began to suspectthat Syria was either directly behind the assassination or allowed it tohappen, and relations between Hezbollah and Syria soured. Hezbollahalways had to play a balancing act between pleasing its primary