If Americans want peace in the Middle East to be a reality and not a fairy tale, then they have to clamp down on the drug cartels used to finance Hezbollah.
By Rachel Avraham
More than anything else in the world, the average Israeli wants peace. We pray for it at every available opportunity, morning, noon and night. However, to our great sorrow, peace cannot be realized until Hezbollah and the other members of the Iranian axis are defeated. While Assad has been deposed, the toppling of Hamas in Gaza, the mullahs in Tehran and the Houthis in Yemen has as of yet to be accomplished. However, as of now, there is great potential to neutralize the Hezbollah threat at the very least, once and for all, without any further bloodshed being spilled.
Presently, there is a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon. Hussein Abdul Hussein, an analyst for the Foundation of Defense of Democracies, believes that there is great hope that the Hezbollah threat can be neutralized within Lebanon: “Just this week Lebanese President Joseph Aoun told Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi that Lebanon is tired of “the wars of others on its territory.” Beirut has aligned itself with Saudi Arabia’s peace initiative for a two-state solution between the Palestinians and Israel, in direct opposition to Iran’s policies.”
He continued: “While much of the discourse on Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral has centered around how many thousands attended, it’s clear that the crowd was much smaller than the Iran-backed militia could have mustered two years ago. Hezbollah is weaker and facing trouble maintaining its supporters’ loyalty after sacrificing their houses and livelihoods for war with Israel.”
Hussein was optimistic that the next elections could mark Hezbollah’s downfall from Lebanese politics: “From a political perspective, currently, Hezbollah and its junior ally the Amal Party occupy exactly the 27 seats allocated for Shiites in the 128-seat parliament. The speaker of the parliament too must be Shi’ite. Those who oppose Hezbollah and advocate peace must only win over one of these Shi’ite seats in order to oust Shi’ite Amal Party Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri. If they manage to pull off such a feat, parliament will be ripe to revive the May 1983 peace treaty with Israel, which parliament ratified but Syria’s then-President Hafez Assad killed.”
There can be no lasting peace in the region without the Hezbollah threat being neutralized. During the war, on a daily basis, rockets were fired at Israel, slaughtering and maiming people. The plight of the natural areas in Israel can make one cry. Between January and June 2024, Hezbollah destroyed over 12,800 acres of natural areas in the Golan Heights and Upper Galilee alone. According to the Israeli Agriculture Ministry, 5,435 acres of orchards, vines and avocado plantations within 1.25 miles of the Lebanese border are not being farmed consistently and 370 acres of fruits and vines have been damaged by rocket related fires.
Thanks to Hezbollah terrorism, the tourism and agriculture industries in Israel are in shatters, but they are not the only victims. Professor Sarah Cohen Shabat, the chair of the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Haifa, said that she lost many graduate students due to the intense rocket fire from Lebanon and she referred to all incoming students at the University of Haifa as “brave individuals,” during the beginning of the fall 2024 semester. This is because of the daily non-stop rocket fire that the city of Haifa was suffering from until relatively recently, causing students to often run to bomb shelters while in the middle of classes.
There is a huge psychological cost to this war. After a missile struck a soccer field in Majdal Al Shams on July 27, 2024, massacring 12 Druze children, the children of the village are all in desperate need of therapy. Rafiq, a manager of a school in Majdal Al Shams, stated that his school did an evaluation after the missile attack and found that 55 children in his school suffer from severe PTSD, while 80 suffer from moderate PTSD. What Rafiq highlighted in his school is an indicator of what is to come if this war continues. According to the Jerusalem Post, the State Comptroller’s Office reported two weeks ago that already a staggering three million people – almost a third of the population – are showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, or anxiety during this present war.
One of the reasons why this present war is so devastating for Israelis is because a sense of safety was shattered, from Eilat in the South to Nahariya in the North. Even in Eilat, which used to be a tourist town not used to terror attacks, they faced rocket fire from Yemen. In the South, they faced intense rocket fire from Hamas, destroying entire communities, both during the October 7 invasion and afterwards. In the Center, they suffered constant rocket fire from the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas. For the first time ever, the Global Summit on Counter-Terrorism this year was interrupted by a bomb siren on the IDC campus in Herzliya, an area that many used to feel was safe. Even in communities like Netanya and Even Yehuda, which many felt were not a target during the war, there were times when residents rushed a number of times to bomb shelters.
And in the North, there was non-stop constant rocket fire from Lebanon, transforming entire communities into ghost towns, forcing many residents of Northern Israel to relocate to hotels or even leave Israel entirely, thanks to the heavy barrage of Hezbollah rocket fire. Approximately 143,000 Israelis in total were evacuated from their homes, 76,600 from the South and 68,500 from the North. Losing one’s home has a major psychological and economic cost for Israeli society. One in five Israelis who were displaced from their homes after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, have lost their jobs, the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) reported. According to the report, some 44% of the evacuated Israelis from the war-torn northern and southern communities reported that their current incomes are lower than before the Oct. 7 attack. This pushes Israeli society downwards economically, which adversely affects the population’s mental health.
The constant barrage of rocket fire was accompanied by the October 7 massacre, which resulted in the slaughter of 1,400 people, a hostage crisis that continues to date after 251 people were abducted to Gaza on October 7 with 59 still remaining in the coastal strip and a series of terror attacks in the streets across the country, including a terror attack in Pardes Hana that injured 14 in recent days. Nobody is spared from this reign of terror, thus creating a grave mental health crisis across all of Israel.
The question remains, what is the best way to defeat Hezbollah in order to restore peace to the Middle East region? The answer is to go after those who are financing Hezbollah. When Lebanon seized 2.5 million dollars in cash from a man who arrived in their country planning to transfer the funds to Hezbollah, they had the right idea. Without money, the terror group will collapse very quickly. Various reports indicate that up to 80 percent of Hezbollah’s funding comes from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. However, the rest comes from donations and illegal businesses, like drug cartels. Therefore, the best way to defeat Hezbollah and bring peace to the region short of regime change in Tehran is to clamp down on the drug cartels.
According to the US Department of Justice, “There is a clear connection between the drug trade and the financing of terrorist organizations and rogue state actors, including the Iranian regime. Members and affiliates of Hezbollah’s money laundering network have been known to collaborate with South American drug cartels, particularly in the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, to facilitate the smuggling of drugs into Europe and the Middle East.” Hezbollah is especially involved in the trade of Captagon (Fenethylline) – the ‘cocaine of the poor’.
These drugs are also very detrimental to the average American. The US Justice Department proclaimed: “Americans today are experiencing the most devastating drug crisis in our nation’s history. This is because one drug—fentanyl—has transformed the criminal landscape. Fentanyl is exceptionally cheap to make, exceptionally easy to disguise, and exceptionally deadly to those who take it. It is the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 to 45, and it kills Americans from all walks of life, in every state and community in this country.”
Hezbollah has definitely contributed towards America’s drug crisis. Last year, during the height of the war, David Asher, a former U.S. Defense and State Department official, told VOA: “I have talked to several Europe-based traffickers who were arrested in the past and recruited as sources for law enforcement and are now back on the streets. They told me they are being contacted to arrange illicit drug deliveries on behalf of Hezbollah-affiliated actors as fast as possible. It does not mean there already is an uptick in narcotics on the street, but I would expect it because Hezbollah’s money is in peril in Lebanon, and they need to raise more through illicit means.”
The Institute for National Security Studies in 2023 confirmed the connection between drug cartels and Hezbollah, stressing that the drug trade particularly of Captagon is a central source of income for the terror group: “The drug trade has been a source of income for Hezbollah since the 1990s. The organization has sent activists to join the drug cartels in Central and South America, which have developed networks to smuggle and distribute cocaine in the United States (through Mexico) and Europe (through Africa).” According to the report, Hezbollah also produced Captagon pills in the town of Tfail close to the Syrian border overseen by the Lebanese drug lord Hassan Mahmoud Dako, known as the Captagon King: “Dako tool control of agricultural areas cultivated by locals, operating under the protection of Hezbollah.”
While Israel has tried to disrupt the Captagon trade during the current war with Hezbollah up until the declaration of a cease-fire and definitely the Captagon King faced a major loss when the Assad regime fell in Syria, it is obvious that Hezbollah will try to use the cease-fire to regroup, including of its financial power that is propped up by the drug trade and Israel must not allow for this to happen.
For this reason, US President Donald Trump made a correct decision when he decided to wage a war on the drug cartels. If President Trump is successful in clamping down on drugs in the United States, it will greatly assist the State of Israel in efforts to block funding to the Hezbollah terror group, thus making it easier to sideline the terror group into oblivion within the domestic Lebanese political framework.
