"Still a loose movement, the group coalesced around clear tenets: Islam was a complete program for a better life. It provided the intellectual, religious, ideological, and practical foundations for their new movement. Resistance against Israel was the priority, its total obliteration the end goal. Crucially, the movement submitted to the wilayat al-faqih and the leadership of the faqih, Khomeini. In its official manifesto published in 1985 as a forty-eight-page Open Letter, Hezbollah made clear it desired an Islamic state in Lebanon, a Shia one just like in Iran, though the group was careful not to explicitly threaten to impose it. Society would embrace it, they believed, including Christians, because it was the righteous path. The story that would be most widely told in the decades to come about the birth of Hezbollah is that it was born from the ashes of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. After rose petals came bullets, and then car bombs. The story is not entirely wrong. Without the Israeli invasion and occupation, Hezbollah may not have been able to take root in the country. But this is not the whole story. Sheikh Tufayli’s eureka moment at the Damascus airport preceded the rage of occupation. Even before 1979, Khomeini’s disciples had identified Lebanon as fertile terrain for their revolutionary projects."