On Monday 26 June 2023, in a soulless corporate boardroom in Kensington, I listened to Israeli commentator Ehud Yaari deliver a lecture on shifting alliances and threats in the Middle East. As a twenty-year-old student activist, it was the first time I had heard of the Axis of Resistance, a network of Iran-aligned groups that included Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) in Iraq. “Iran’s Quds Force, led by Qasem Soleimani, recognised that Arab attempts to destroy Israel since 1948 failed due to a total lack of ideological and strategic coordination,” said Yaari. “Soleimani’s solution was simple. Build a network of allies around Israel’s borders and, when the time is right, squeeze.” I remember a pit forming in my stomach at the prospect of the engineered destruction of Israel, its citizens helpless against an unrelenting onslaught from all directions.

Few people in the pre-7 October world—Yaari included—could have imagined the attempted realisation of that dream by Hamas. Fewer still could have predicted that two years later, Lebanon would ban the IRGC and expel Iranian diplomats from its soil, while civil servants in London celebrated the legacy of the Islamic Revolution. Lebanese foreign minister Youssef Raggi has announced that the Iranian ambassador, Mohammad Reza Shibani, is now persona non grata in Lebanon. Hezbollah described the decision as a “grave strategic mistake” and a capitulation to foreign influence. Hours later, an Iranian ballistic missile struck Lebanon’s coastal region, making it the thirteenth country in the region to be targeted by Iran.

The Lebanese decision was a reaction to the humanitarian cost of Israel–Hezbollah fighting, which has displaced a million people as Israel attempts to take control of all Lebanese territory south of the Litani River. This follows previous attempts to curtail Shi’ite militancy: in early March, the Lebanese prime minister and former ICJ president Nawaf Salam vowed to ban Hezbollah’s military activities. This emerging campaign against Hezbollah from within the Lebanese political establishment is extraordinarily brave. Until early February, Lebanon’s security directorate was effectively controlled by Wafiq Safa, a notorious Hezbollah official linked to the arbitrary detention of anti-Hezbollah activists. It has also been reported that Lebanese parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri receives US$500,000 a month from the Islamic Republic to maintain Hezbollah’s stranglehold on national politics. The fight against Hezbollah is—and always has been—a very dangerous uphill battle.