What Is Hezbollah? Even After Three Tries, the New York Times Is Stumped

Ira Stoll

The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

How many tries, by how many reporters, will it take the New York Times to explain accurately what Hezbollah is?

The newspaper has been fumbling and bumbling its way toward an answer in a way that illuminates some of the challenges the Times has faced in covering the wars of Iranian aggression.

Our story begins in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. “What Is Hezbollah, the Group That Poses a Threat to Israel From the North?” a Times article published on Oct. 19 tried to explain. That article, by a Beirut-based British freelancer for the Times, Euan Ward, and a staff writer for the New York Times magazine, Nicholas Casey, did not use the word “terrorist” or describe the US government’s designation of Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organization. Instead the newspaper described the group as having “an expansive security apparatus and social services network.”

Then the Times Cairo bureau chief, Vivian Yee, took a fresh attempt at answering the question, for a piece published on Sept. 17, 2024. That article appeared under the headline, “A Look at Hezbollah and What a Wider War Would Mean for Lebanon.” What a wider war would mean “for Lebanon” seems a somewhat narrow framework for analysis in a war with wide international consequences on everything from oil prices to the US-Iran conflict and the American presidential election. For our purposes, though, the Yee piece was a modest improvement over the October 2023 Times effort. This time around, at least, the Times acknowledged that Hezbollah is “considered a terrorist group by the United States and other countries.” It also noted that “many Lebanese see the group as an obstacle to progress that keeps threatening to drag the country into an unwanted war” and that the group uses “authoritarian tactics” to “quell any dissent.”

Perhaps concern about those “authoritarian tactics” helps to explain why the Beirut-based Ward was reticent about using the term “terrorist.”

On Sept. 18, 2024, the Times tried yet again, with a piece by an Israeli-born reporter fluent in Hebrew, Ephrat Livni. That one appeared under the “Jeopardy”-game-show-style headline “What Is Hezbollah, the Militant Group Based in Lebanon?”

Livni’s article calls the group an “Iran-backed militia — which the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization decades ago.” The “decades ago” makes it sound like Hezbollah’s terrorism is a thing of the past rather than an ongoing problem. Later, the Times offers some more detail: “Hezbollah was involved in the suicide bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, drawing the enmity of the United States. The United States designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in 1997, and has long sanctioned people and companies with ties to the group to try to cut off its funding.”

Livni’s piece also credits Neil MacFarquhar and Ben Hubbard as having “contributed reporting,” bringing to a whopping six the grand total of Times journalists — Ward, Casey, Yee, Livni, MacFarquhar, Hubbard — mustered into action to attempt to answer the “What is Hezbollah?” puzzler.

Even on the third try, even after having rustled up a half dozen bodies to tackle the issue, the Times can’t quite seem to get a grip on the facts of the situation.

Neither Yee’s article nor Livni’s, for example, makes any mention of Hezbollah having killed a dozen Druze, mostly children, in July 2024 in an attack on a soccer field in Majdal Shams in northern Israel.

Livni’s article, after a subhead asking “Why are Hezbollah and Israel fighting now?” reports, “Hezbollah’s military wing has been targeting northern Israel for nearly a year in solidarity with Hamas and its war with Israel in Gaza.” Yet the Hamas war with Israel hasn’t been only “in Gaza” but included rocket attacks and deadly raids into Israel. The same article describes Hezbollah as having been “formed in the 1980s from the chaos of Lebanon’s long civil war to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000.” The Lebanon civil war began not to fight the Israeli occupation but rather Palestinian domination. The Council on Foreign Relations explains, “Hezbollah emerged during Lebanon’s civil war, which broke out in 1975 when long-simmering discontent over the large, armed Palestinian presence in the country reached a boiling point.” The Times, because of its anti-Israel tilt, can’t bring itself to talk about armed Palestinians in Lebanon. Instead it has to frame everything as a response to Israeli “occupation,” even if that’s inaccurate.

The idea that Hezbollah is mainly a response to “the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon” or to the Hamas “war with Israel in Gaza” is a misunderstanding. Like revolutionary Iran, Hezbollah has a goal of imposing its version of militant Islam worldwide and wiping Israel off the map. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has stated that if Jews “all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world-wide.”

Maybe by the fourth or fifth or sixth try, the Times might work its way up to including that Nasrallah quotation in its explanation to its readers of what Hezbollah is. Maybe the seventh or eighth or ninth Times reporter assigned to the job will figure it out. Until then, readers will be better off looking elsewhere, to more trustworthy sources than the Times, for an explanation of the terrorist organization and its goals.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.