Back in 1997, at the height of Hezbollah’s relentless campaign to drive the IDF out of Israel’s security zone in southern Lebanon, I made an out-of-the-box suggestion.
Along with attacking the terrorists head-on, I gave an opinion in The Jerusalem Post that Israel should strike at one of their principal sources of funding – drugs.
Back then, Hezbollah and its Syrian allies were regional leaders in the production of heroin. The poppy fields from which the opiates were extracted blanketed the Bekaa Valley and other fertile areas. Defoliate them, I argued, and deprive the terrorists of their oxygen.
My proposal went unremarked by Israel’s security establishment, and, in May 2000, the last Israeli soldier exited Lebanon.
Over the course of the next twenty-five years, Hezbollah swelled from a relatively small terrorist force into an immense terrorist army, one of the Middle East’s most formidable military forces.
The 15,000 rockets and missiles Israel confronted in the 2006 Second Lebanon War ballooned into more than 150,000.
Since invading southern Lebanon in September, the IDF has uncovered a vast network of attack tunnels, each lavishly equipped with weapons, designed to facilitate Hezbollah’s planned conquest of the Galilee.
All of those armaments, the infrastructure, and training cost billions of dollars. Much of this sum was remitted from Iran, but a no less lucrative moneymaker is – still – the drug trade.
Hezbollah's new focus: Captagon
However, the nature of the business has changed. While the Bekaa region still produces prodigious amounts of opium and cannabis, Hezbollah’s focus is now on fenethylline, a synthetic amphetamine and psychostimulant best known by its brand name, Captagon.
Illegal in most countries, Captagon is produced in Syria, which is responsible for 80% of the global market, and is distributed by Hezbollah.
Controlling Captagon’s supply routes across the Middle East into Jordan and Iraq and its exports abroad via the Port of Beirut has enriched Hezbollah.
The drug’s annual sales of $5.7 billion – representing a quarter of Syria’s GDP—account for 40% of Hezbollah’s budget.
Joseph Braude, founder of the Center for Peace Communications, has documented Hezbollah’s exploitation of Lebanon for narcotics and human trafficking and its virtual enslavement of innocent Lebanese as mules. “Together with Iranian support,” he told Bari Weiss’s podcast Honestly. “The sex and the drugs are a big part of how they [Hezbollah] fund their operations and their war machine.”
Hezbollah’s drug enterprise encompasses much more than the Middle East, though. In cooperation with South and Central American cartels, it plays a prominent role in smuggling drugs into the United States.
Nevertheless, Washington has reacted sluggishly, if at all.
Project Cassandra, launched by the DEA in 2008, investigated Hezbollah’s cooperation with the cartels only to be quashed by an Obama administration determined to achieve a nuclear deal with Hezbollah’s patron, Iran.
More recently, in December 2022, President Biden signed into law the Captagon Act, mandating efforts to disrupt the Captagon trade.
Congress passed a bipartisan bill requiring new sanctions against the drug’s manufacturers and traffickers. Whether these measures have impacted the Captagon market or in any way diminished Hezbollah’s profits remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Israel is at war with Hezbollah and eager to destroy not only the terrorists’ military and command centers but also its financial centers.
On October 21, Israeli warplanes bombed the Hezbollah-linked Al-Qard Al-Hassan financial association in Beirut along with several of its Bekaa Valley branches.
While highly critical of Israel’s airstrikes in the Lebanese capital, the US was hard-pressed to denounce the destruction of a sanctioned bank that, according to the Treasury Department, “illicitly moves funds through shell accounts and facilitators, exposing Lebanese financial institutions to possible sanctions.”
From Israel’s perspective, the objective was clear, as a senior Israeli military source told the Wall Street Journal. “The purpose of the strike is to target the ability of Hezbollah to function both during the war but also afterward, to rebuild and rearm.”
Achieving goals through bombing narcotics industry
That same goal can be achieved, perhaps with even greater efficacy, by bombing Hezbollah’s narcotics industry. Former Mossad terrorism division head Oded Ailam agreed, saying, “Targeting the organization’s drug labs in the Bekaa Valley could hurt its operations.”
My 1997 Post op-ed concluded by quoting, of all sources, the Wicked Witch of the West who, in The Wizard of Oz, cackled, “Poppies. Poppies will make them sleep.” The time had come to put Lebanon’s poppies to sleep, I urged. Thirty-seven years later, Israel’s destruction of Hezbollah’s drug empire could not be timelier or less controversial.
The United States – and much of the world – will thank us.
The writer, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and past MK and deputy minister for diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office, is the founder of the Israel Advocacy Group and the author of the Substack, Clarity.