Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Lebanon-based Green Without Borders and its leader. Green Without Borders is a Lebanon-based organization that has provided support to and cover for Hizballah’s operations in southern Lebanon along the “Blue Line” between Lebanon and Israel over the last decade while publicly operating under the guise of environmental activism.“The United States rejects Hizballah’s cynical efforts to cloak its destabilizing terrorist activities with false environmentalism,” said Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson. “We will continue to support the many Lebanese civil society groups protecting Lebanon’s unique and sensitive natural environment while also relentlessly pursuing Hizballah and their support networks.”OFAC is designating Green Without Borders and its leader, Zuhair Subhi Nahla, pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, as amended, which targets terrorists, terrorist organizations, leaders and officials of terrorist groups, and those providing support to terrorists or acts of terrorism.
Israel and others have been complaining about Green Without Borders for years. The Washington Institute issued a paper on the group, where they noted that GWB has bragged about being part of the "resistance:"
Green Without Borders registered as a Lebanese environmental nonprofit on June 30, 2013. According to its blog, the group’s mission includes planting trees, cleaning forested areas, establishing public parks, running nurseries, and locating and fighting forest fires, especially in Shia-dominated areas in southern Lebanon and the Beqa Valley. However, through cooperation with the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of the Environment, municipal organizations, and other Hezbollah entities— especially Jihad al-Binaa—the organization also seeks to aid the “southern Green resistance.” In 2017, Hajj Zuhair Nahle, president of GWB, told Lebanon’s Daily Star that “we do not hide this [affiliation with Hezbollah]. All our brochures include this and in all our media campaigns...we write, ‘The trees are the shade of the resistance.’” Nahle emphasized that despite the group’s environmental intentions, tree planting also has a strategic national security dimension, serving as “a veil on the eyes of the enemy in addition to a wall behind which the resistance fighters protect themselves.” The article described Nahle as gleeful that the organization is a “thorn in Israel’s side.”
In addition, GWB has built lookout stations on the border - 27 in the past year alone - and has interfered with UNIFIL forces in Lebanon.
Yet even though GWB brags to Arab media that it is part of the "resistance," it tells Western media the opposite. My favorite comes from this AP article earlier this year:
“We are not an arm for anyone,” the head of Green Without Borders, Zouher Nahli, told The Associated Press. “We as an environmental association work for all the people and we are not politicized.” He spoke at the Bassam Tabaja Nature Reserve, named for a Hezbollah fighter killed in Syria in 2014, where the NGO has planted hundreds of trees.
The US got this one right, if a bit belatedly.
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