Hezbollah, Arabic for “The Party of God”, also named “The Islamic Resistance of Lebanon,” has been increasingly making headlines in recent months, as Israel continues its war on Lebanon. Earlier this week, Israel’s new war minister Yizrael Katz announced the “defeat” of Hezbollah. The group responded with unprecedented rocket barrages and more drone attacks on Haifa and Tel Aviv, showcasing its fighting capacity.
In early October, Israel started its offensive on Lebanon with the pager explosion attacks that killed dozens of Lebanese, mostly civilians. The attacks were followed by a series of assassinations of Hezbollah’s top military leaders, culminating with the assassination of Hezbollah’s secretary general Hasan Nasrallah, and then of the strongest candidate to succeed him, Hezbollah’s executive council chief, Hashem Safiyyudin. Israel then began a massive bombing campaign on the south of Lebanon, which expanded to the Beqaa Valley and Mount Lebanon, allegedly targeting Hezbollah’s rocket arsenals.
But Hezbollah didn’t collapse. On the contrary, it has been increasing its military action on a daily basis, introducing farther-reaching and heavier rockets to the fight, and offering a stiff resistance to Israeli incursion attempts in the south.
As during the ten-year-long Syrian war, in which Hezbollah played a major role, and as in 2006, when Hezbollah fought off another Israeli offensive on Lebanon, the group has become the object of speculations, curiosity and contradictory narratives about it. So, who is Hezbollah? What does it want? How does it work? And how much of what is said about it in the West and the media is true?
Lebanese, Shia, or pro-Palestinian?
In a way, Hezbollah is the product of the crossing of political, sectarian, class, and regional conflicts in Lebanon in the 1980s. The group was born as a response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982, but its roots go back to the Shia movement that started as a social protest movement. Most of the founders of Hezbollah had made their first steps as activists in the ranks of the ‘Movement of the deprived’, started by the Iranian-Lebanese cleric and social leader Mousa Sadr in the mid 1970s, when the Shia were among the most marginalized and impoverished communities in Lebanon.
As Israel repeatedly attacked Lebanon to counter Palestinian resistance fighters based in the south of the country, Mousa Sadr was among the first to call for organized Lebanese resistance, and founded the ‘Legions of Lebanese Resistance’, which acronym in Arabic reads ‘Amal’, that also means ‘Hope’. The group soon became the Shia militia engaged in the civil war, especially after Sadr’s disappearance in 1978.
After Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and occupation of Beirut in 1982, the Lebanese communist party launched the ‘Lebanese National Resistance Front’ that was joined by other leftist and nationalist parties, and became the main resistance force to Israel. It is then that several Islamic activists from Amal, other Shia groups, charities, mosques, and neighborhood associations met in Al-Muntazar Islamic religious school in the city of Baalbek, and decided that they needed an Islamic force dedicated only to resist Israeli occupation. They named it ‘Hezbollah’, in reference to verse 56 of the surat 5 of the Quran, which says that “The partisans of [or those loyal to] God will be victorious.”
The founding group had two things in common: the priority of resistance to Israel, putting aside all other political differences, and their agreement on who their religious reference should be. The ‘religious reference’ is a centuries-old Shia tradition, where every community chooses a religious scholar that meets certain qualifications, and they accept their religious judgment in major issues in which the community can’t reach agreement. The founding members of Hezbollah who met in Baalbek agreed that they accepted, as religious reference, the Iranian cleric and leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.
“Iranian proxy”?
Hezbollah’s relationship to Iran has always been a contentious topic, as the group has been accused of being Iran’s proxy in Lebanon and in the region. However, the relationship between Hezbollah’s roots and Iran is older than the establishment of the current Iranian regime and more complex than it is often presented. In fact, it was Lebanese religious scholars, mystics, and preachers from Mount Amel, known today as the south of Lebanon, who introduced Shiism to Iran in the 17th century. The bond between Shiites in both countries continued, exchanging religious leaders, scholars and students, and forming family links. But in 1982, that relationship took on a new level.
As Israeli forces besieged Beirut, the recently-established Islamic republic of Iran sent members of its revolutionary guard to nearby Syria and offered the Syrian government to help fight the Israeli invasion. That Iranian force later changed its mission, after it became clear that Israel was not planning to invade Syria, and began to offer training to any Lebanese who wanted to resist the occupation. The newborn organization, Hezbollah, became the main recruiter of volunteers, and the main organizer of the newly trained fighters, and thus was able to grow its militant body in a short time. That relationship between the Lebanese group and the Iranian revolutionary guard grew, and continued to this day.
However, Hezbollah’s late leader Hasan Nasrallah explained multiple times in media interviews the distinction between the group’s relationship to the Iranian state and to its supreme leader. According to Nasrallah, Hezbollah considers Iran as a country a ”friend and ally”, while it considers the supreme leader, Khomeini and his successor Khamenei, its “religious reference” to whom it goes back only in matters that require a religious ruling to decide. This distinction remains blurry to many, as the supreme leader is also the head of the state in Iran, and because on the ideological level, he is also the “religious reference” of the Iranian state. However, other Lebanese parties have more unbalanced, dependent, and explicit relations to foreign countries. One example is the relation between Saudi Arabia and the ‘Future’ party of the assassinated Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, which competes to represent the Sunni community. Another is the far-right anti-Palestinian Lebanese Phalanges party, who monopolized the representation of Maronite Christians during the civil war, and its relations with the US, France, and even Israel itself during the 1982 invasion. A complex context which makes Hezbollah’s relationship to Iran far from strange in the Lebanese political culture.
Hezbollah in politics
In its forty-two years of existence so far, Hezbollah has evolved as a major political force in Lebanon. It remained only a resistance movement until 1995, when it ran for parliamentary elections for the first time. At the time, the Lebanese civil war had just ended, and the new generation of Lebanese youth were looking for something new to believe in and to be united around, and the battle for the occupied south provided them that, increasing Hezbollah’s popularity. The group had also begun to develop social programs to assist the families of its fallen fighters, like health care institutions and schools, which also provided help for poor Lebanese.
This popularity increased even more after Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in the year 2000, which marked the first unconditional liberation of an occupied Arab territory. Hezbollah continued to score successes in elections, maintaining a growing presence in the Lebanese parliament and in many municipalities, especially in Shia areas like the south and the Beqaa, forging alliances with other Lebanese parties.
In 2008, Hezbollah struck an alliance agreement with the emergent new Christian force, the ‘Free Patriotic Movement’, led by the veteran former army general Michael Aoun, who ironically had built his heroic image in the 1980s for standing up against Syrian military presence in Lebanon. The unusual Shia-Christian alliance gave Hezbollah unprecedented leverage in Lebanese politics when Aoun became president of Lebanon in 2016. The president in Lebanon’s constitution must be a Maronite Christian, and Hezbollah suddenly had a powerful ally who made it to the presidential Baabda palace, with Hezbollah’s support. This, among other things, like the military capacity of Hezbollah to start or prevent war with Israel, earned it the accusation of controlling the Lebanese state.
However, Hezbollah has never been the only party with such an influence in Lebanese politics, and the overall position of the Lebanese state is unmovable on several issues, against the position of Hezbollah. For instance, Lebanon never accepted Hezbollah’s proposals to seek Iranian assistance to modernize and strengthen the Lebanese army, or to buy fuel from Iran to solve the fuel crisis in the country in 2021. Most importantly, Hezbollah only accessed state offices that can be reached through elections, in the parliament or municipalities, but it was never given any key administrative position in the government agencies, or in the judicial system. This is due, according to Hezbollah and its allies, to external pressure on Lebanon, mostly from western countries, who consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
More than a militant group
A designation of “terrorism” that has put Hezbollah in the crosshairs of successive US administrations, who have systematically given unconditional support to every Israeli war aimed at destroying Hezbollah, even if it caused destruction to the rest of Lebanon. In the latest ongoing attempt, Israel has tried its best by targeting the head of Hezbollah’s pyramid, Nasrallah, and several key leaders surrounding him. However, the Lebanese party’s capacity to sustain the blows and continue the fight, without wavering, has demonstrated that contrary to popular belief about Arab and Middle Eastern organizations, Hezbollah is not an ideological cult led by one or a few charismatic men. In fact, Nasrallah himself said multiple times that Hezbollah did not have a leader, but a “leadership system”, run by institutions, with a continuous process of forming new leaders, ready to step in whenever there is a vacancy.
But the most important aspect of Hezbollah, and the most overlooked too, is that it is far more than a militant group with a cause and guns. Hezbollah represents the tradition and the decades-long struggle of a key component of Lebanese society. It is also the strongest representative, today, of the political choice of resistance to the US and Israel in Lebanon, which is much older and much more diverse than Hezbollah itself. It is also a social force with a strong presence in all fields of Lebanese public life, from politics, to education, to charity, to art and culture. And in times of war, it represents the feelings of large parts of the Lebanese society, that extend beyond the limits of religious communities or political sectarianism.
Source: Mondoweiss