The impact of Israeli and Saudi Arabian geopolitical risks on the Lebanese financial market

Hezbollah is best defined in geopolitics as the Iranian ideology proxy that aims to grow the Persian footprint and to gain geopolitical strategic depth in the region. Its role continuously requires geopolitical conflicts, mainly against Saudi Arabia and Israel - for resistance, ideological, and geopolitical purposes. Being a state within a state, Hezbollah militia makes sovereign geopolitical decisions and forces Lebanon to pay for the consequences. This is the first economic study that empirically investigates under vector autoregression (VAR) models the dynamic causal relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel's geopolitical risks and Lebanon's financial stability and economic activity. The results show that Saudi Arabia and Israel's geopolitical risks affect Lebanon's economy differently. Economic and financial stability cannot be promoted independently of regional geopolitical conflict.