Hezbollah’s greatest victory is convincing people that every crisis it creates proves why it is needed.

The claim that Hezbollah is Lebanon’s defender is one of those remarkable Middle Eastern ideas that survives not because it makes sense, but because it has been repeated for so long that many people have stopped examining it. Like the claim that every dictatorship in the region is only one election away from becoming Denmark, it survives through repetition, not evidence.

The argument goes something like this: Hezbollah protects Lebanon from Israel. Hezbollah resists Israel. Hezbollah defends Lebanese sovereignty. Hezbollah alone stands between Lebanon and occupation.

There is only one small problem.

Hezbollah keeps opening fronts and then cites the existence of those fronts as proof that only it can defend the nation. In any other context this would be recognized as a contradiction. In Hezbollah’s case it is called resistance.

To understand how absurd the argument is, one must begin where many of Hezbollah’s defenders prefer not to begin.

The story did not start with Hezbollah. Nor did it start with Israeli tanks crossing into Lebanon in 1982.

The story began years earlier when the PLO transformed southern Lebanon into a launching pad for attacks against Israel. Northern Israeli communities were subjected to raids, shelling, and terrorism planned and coordinated from Lebanese territory. Yet many modern retellings of the conflict conveniently skip this chapter altogether. Israel simply appears one morning as though it woke up, looked north, and decided Lebanon would make a charming territorial acquisition.

In reality, Israel entered Lebanon because terrorist organizations were operating there with relative freedom.

One may debate whether every........

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