Hezbollah history & background

Helena Cobben: (my tags in italics)

Hezbullah wear suits and have public relations officers

On my first visit to Hizbullah last fall, I was welcomed byMohamad Afif, the head of the party’s media-relations department and a member of its 11-man politburo, who set up a series of interviews for me. The functionaries I met were all men, though women work in other party offices. The ones I met—none of them clerics—all wore a simplified version of western-style dress but with, crucially (as in Iran), no necktie. They did not shake hands with me; they were helpful but wary. This was understandable, since tens of Hizbullah leaders and officials have been assassinated by Israel over the past 20 years and these men had never met me before.

“Z.H.,” who asked to be described simply as “a source close to Hizbullah,” talked to me about the party’s strategy for working within Lebanon’s problematically democratic political system. At the parliamentary level, the Hizbullah-led bloc now has 12 deputies out of 128, including, as Z.H. eagerly noted, “two Sunnis and one Christian.” Although Hizbullah has held a parliamentary bloc of around this size since 1992, it has thus far refused to seek any ministerial slots. Z.H. explained why:

We feel that a party that’s in the government should influence its whole program . . . But in Lebanon, you can’t pursue your own party’s program in government because governments are always formed through coalitions. Elsewhere, you can have one party in government, with one program. And then, it’s easier to hold the party accountable.

Then, there are the expectations of the people. We represent a great proportion of the people. But if you are in such an impotent government, then you sully your reputation with the people. In Lebanon, corruption is everywhere. The institutions need to be completely renewed. This is very difficult, and will take time.

Also, the political structure here is still sectarian. In this system people are led not by reason but by emotions and tribalism. We feel that most of the other politicians are leading people as tribe-members, by appealing to their sectional interests, rather than as citizens.

So altogether, it seems hard for us to go into government at the present time and just reap all the disadvantages from the way things are done there.

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Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah - a leader from youth

One of the key participants in Hizbullah’s founding was Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Then 24, and from a family of modest social standing, Nasrallah already had proven leadership abilities. At 15 he had been named Amal’s chief organizer in his home village, al-Bazouriyah, near Biblical Tyr. The following year he was tapped by a local Shiite mullah who sent him to Najaf, Iraq, to study at the prestigious “Hawza” seminary. The Hawza was then headed by Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr, a renowned Shiite jurisprudent who in the late 1950s had helped found the Islamic Da’awa Party, which had networks of supporters throughout the Shiite world. In 1978, when anti-Shiite tensions mounted inside Iraq, Nasrallah returned to Lebanon.

(Two years later, Saddam Hussein’s secret services assassinated Sadr and his sister, in Baghdad. Many waves of terrible, anti-Da’awa persecution followed in Iraq. But Da’awa survived and, being part of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance electoral list, is today more influential in Iraq than ever before. Nasrallah and the many other Hizbullah figures who have studied in Iraq or Iran retain good links with their ex-teachers and fellow students in those countries.)

After Nasrallah returned to Lebanon he resumed his studies at a Baalbek seminary headed by Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi. He also resumed working as an organizer for Amaland by 1979 had become (at 19) its chief political officer for the whole Beqaa’ region and a member of its politburo. Small wonder, then, that when he helped found Hizbullah five years later he immediately became a key member of its leadership.

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I watched portions of Nasrallah’s speech at that rally on Hizbullah’s controversial television channel, al-Manar. As at all his public appearances, Nasrallah’s distinctive, bushy-bearded form appeared behind a thick layer of security glass; a couple of tough-looking security men stood behind him scanning the crowd. Nasrallah is an articulate and effective public speaker. He was relaxed, turning easily to address people from all parts of the audience, and lacing his speech with asides in Lebanese vernacular that poked fun at Israel or the United States. He spoke almost without notes, looking down only once every five or six minutes at a small piece of paper in his hand.

Nasrullah is a hero to many Muslims (and some non-Muslims) in Lebanon and further afield. Many Lebanese speak with something near reverence about how, when his 18-year-old son Hadi was killed fighting the IDF in south Lebanon in 1997, the father turned aside any suggestion that he be treated any differently from any other bereaved parent. Two other Hizbullah fighters were also killed in that battle, along with six Lebanese Army soldiers, three of whom were Christians. It reportedly took some time for Hizbullah even to reveal that one of the three “martyrs” it lost that day was the son of the secretary-general.

Some Israelis speculated that they might be able to extract a high “price” for the return of Hadi Nasrallah’s body. But over the weeks that followed, Nasrullah pointedly praised the sacrifice that all the Lebanese, “including our Christian brothers,” were making for the defense of the homeland. When Hadi’s body was returned nine months later it was as part of a broader swap that involved the bodies of all the other Lebanese killed that day. Nearly all of Lebanon was impressed by the humility and grace Nasrallah showed over that affair.

The former U.N. official Timur Goksel has described Nasrullah as “a smart leader who can find a useful symbolic role for the other mullahs in the party to play, even while he allows the party technocrats to make most of the decisions.” In Goksel’s extensive experience, Nasrallah was also a man of his word. “I’ve told the Israelis and Americans they would be crazy to try to kill him,” Goksel said in an interview. “If anything happens to Nasrullah, what comes after would surely be disastrous for them.”

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The growth of Hezbullah's political organisation

In 1985, the IDF withdrew from a large region stretching southward from Beirut and consolidated its positions within the so-called security zone, a broad strip of land inside Lebanon, running the length of its L-shaped border with Israel. Much of South Lebanon then became a free-fire zone for Israeli artillery, aerial bombardments, and periodic ground operations, all of which inflicted considerable casualties in the southern Shiite villages. But with the IDF’s permanent positions now removed far from Beirut, Hizbullah was able to establish a national headquarters in the Dahiyeh, and from there a group of talented political organizers set about building Hizbullah into a single, very effective nationwide party with its roots reaching deeply into the Shiite communities of the south, the Beqaa, and Greater Beirut.

All kinds of people, from hardscrabble farmers to well-educated members of the liberal professions, were brought into the constellation of mass organizations that the party established in every region, every profession, and every sector of the economy. Timur Goksel, who last year retired after 24 years as the chief political advisor to the UN’s (highly constrained) peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, told me how surprised he was to discover that the members of the first Hizbullah delegations sent to deal with him, in the mid-1980s, were not wild-eyed Islamist radicals but calm, serious men who were doctors, engineers, or businessmen: men of real substance in their local comunities. Over the years, the party built a robust organizational structure headed by a seven-member Shura Council. (Professor Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh, of the American University of Beirut, has written that from 1989 through 2001, three members of the Shura Council were laymen, and four were clerics. But before 1989, and again after 2001, the Council had six clerics on it.) The party also has a formal politburo, which is supposed merely to “advise” the secretary-general and the Shura Council, though its advice may well, on occasion, be taken very seriously indeed. The politburo has between 11 and 14 members, many of them laymen.

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Nasrullah’s leadership strategy—combining efforts at mass organizing and inter-group negotiating with a “militant” image and targeted violence—has many parallels with that pursued by the African National Congress leaders in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. And just as the ANC realized its longtime goal of establishing a one-person-one-vote system in South Africa, so too did Hizbullah succeed in May 2000 in winning an unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.

The contribution of mass organizing to Hizbullah’s early growth and to its success in winning Israel’s withdrawal has seldom been recognized in the west. It is true that Hizbullah built a smart, bold, and well-disciplined military wing that inflicted nontrivial harm on the IDF and its proxy forces from the so-called South Lebanon Army. That violence never came anywhere close to overwhelming the IDF militarily, but it did continue relentlessly, and the IDF was never able to suppress it. Meanwhile, over time, the IDF’s continuing losses in Lebanon spurred the emergence of a broad pro-withdrawal movement inside Israel that by 1999 had propelled the withdrawal issue to the top of the national agenda. The promise of withdrawal helped the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak win the 1999 election, and in late May 2000 he followed through.

That withdrawal was very popular inside Israel. But since 2000, a number of Israelis have expressed concern that Hizbullah’s success had “significantly dented Israel’s deterrent capability throughout the region.” Proponents of this view are largely right in judging that Hizbullah’s 2000 victory served as an inspiration to, among others, militant nationalists and Islamists inside the Palestinian territories. But they are wrong to attribute the victory solely to Hizbullah’s military capabilities. For what actually brought Barak to his very sensible decision to withdraw was his realization that winning the military battle in Lebanon (which Israel did many times between 1982 and 2000) could never be translated into winning lasting political gains there; Hizbullah always survived to fight another day. And the roots of Hizbullah’s remarkable resilience lay in the success of its mass organizing.

Ejecting Israel from South Lebanon

In 1996 the IDF had launched yet another of the many extremely punishing offensives it had mounted inside Lebanon since 1982. “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” as it was named, turned out to be decisive. Israeli armor, artillery, and bombers hammered the whole of south Lebanon north of the security zone. Labor Prime Minister (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Shimon Peres mounted an intense campaign to persuade the Lebanese that this punishment had come down upon them “because of Hizbullah’s continued presence and anti-IDF activities”—and that they had only to repudiate and dismantle Hizbullah for it to stop. But because of Hizbullah’s political activities over the preceding years, virtually the entire Lebanese body politic closed ranks around it. Reports from the time told of middle-class women in the staunchly Christian parts of East Beirut stripping off their jewelry and throwing it into the “emergency donation” bins that Hizbullah opened throughout the whole country.

The Israelis continued their assault for two straight weeks. But as it became clear that they had no chance of attaining their goal, and as international diplomatic pressures mounted on Israel, Peres was finally forced to agree to a ceasefire on what were (for Israel) extremely humiliating terms. Not only was there no mention of “dismantling” Hizbullah, but the agreement—signed by Lebanon, Israel, the United States, France, and Syria—specifically allowed Hizbullah to continue its military activities against IDF forces inside Lebanon.

Hizbullah won its decisive victory over Israel that year, though it took Israel’s political elite a further four years to adjust the deployment of Israeli forces in line with that reality. The 1996 victory was a significant fruit of Hizbullah’s political strategy.

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In May 2000, as the IDF started to withdraw, its proxy force, the SLA, disintegrated rapidly; within hours the whole of the formerly IDF-held strip became a rolling victory carnival for Hizbullah. The SLA men who had guarded and run the notorious prison and torture center at Khiam slipped away from their posts, and the people of Khiam, a predominantly Shiite town, rushed in to free their loved ones. Hizbullah’s yellow flags flew exuberantly right up to Israel’s northern border. Villagers who had over the years been forced out of the security zone or the much-damaged areas to its north crowded home in cavalcades of cars and tractors. Some SLA members fled to Israel. But the bloodbath feared by many Israelis (and some Lebanese) never occurred. The Hizbullah leaders issued strict instructions prohibiting acts of vengeance in the liberated areas and any violations of the international border with Israel. Both orders were obeyed.

But while the Israelis were undertaking what they understood to be a complete withdrawal from Lebanon, Hizbullah and the Lebanese government suddenly claimed that a tiny wedge of land called the Shebaa Farms—where the “security zone” abutted the Syrian-owned but Israeli-occupied Golan—was also part of Lebanon; thus, it should also be evacuated. Israel considered the Shebaa Farms to be part of the Golan, and had no intention of leaving. Hizbullah, Lebanon, and Syria all claimed that Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon was not complete—and therefore, Hizbullah had the right to continue anti-Israeli operations within the tiny area of the Farms.

Syria, Hizbullah, and—arguably—Lebanon all had their own reasons for wanting to keep Hizbullah’s military confrontation with Israel simmering at a low level in the tightly confined space of the Shebaa Farms. For Hizbullah, the claimed “perpetuation” of the Israeli occupation of part of Lebanon buttressed its argument that it needed to keep its guerrilla formations in place in south Lebanon. In addition, maintaining a low level of confrontation against the IDF in that small, nearly unpopulated area has proven a relatively low-cost way for the party’s leaders to give their military planners a chance to test new tactics against Israel, while providing a tightly controlled focus of activity for militants in the party who might otherwise be bored by the dreary work of reconstruction and political organizing that has been the focus of the party’s work everywhere else in the south.

Keeping the Shebaa Farms front alive was not a risk-free strategy for Hizbullah, but its leaders generally calculated and managed those risks remarkably successfully. Indeed, since 2000, as from 1996 to 2000, the military situation along the border has been one of highly asymmetrical but mutual deterrence between the IDF and Hizbullah—but with these two crucial differences from the earlier period: since 2000, the communities on either side of the front line have enjoyed far fewer military alerts and disruptions, and many fewer people—Lebanese or Israeli—have been dying there. The stakes that citizens of both nations have had in the stability of the post-2000 situation have thus been high, and the political leaders of both Israel and Hizbullah have (thus far) been at pains not to jeopardize this stability.

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Daniel Sobelman, a strategic-affairs analyst at the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, has been one of the most careful observers of this situation. In August 2002 he wrote,

Why in fact have the fears of Aman [Israel’s Military Intelligence] of a total collapse in the north following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal not been realized? The answer lies in the indication that although Hizbollah has not ceased guerilla activity over the last two years, it has revealed itself, inter alia, to be a relatively disciplined and responsible organization, aware of its operational limitations and sensitive to the environment that sustains and shelters it. Recently, Nasrallah himself attested as much, and declared in a speech . . . “Once, in a discussion of resistance operations, I told certain officials that ‘we are concerned about the nation, the state, and the future more than you think.’ Why is this so? Because when, Heaven forbid, the country is menaced by security, military, and political dangers or economic collapse, then those people who have capital, bankrolls, companies, children, luxury homes, and houses abroad, flee. They have a second citizenship. It is very simple. They collect the rest of their family and leave the country. [However] our houses, graves, life, death, honor, and mortification—they are all here. Where else can we go?”

In March 2002, Hizbullah’s people were apparently not alone in wanting to heat things up along the Lebanese-Israeli border: Palestinian militants living in the refugee camps that still dotted Lebanon were also, apparently, eager to do so. But once Hizbullah and its backers in the Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian governments had agreed to return to a more restrained policy in the south, the Palestinians did not stand a chance. Sobelman wrote,

Published reports from Lebanon reveal that Hizbollah fighters deployed in the south assisted Lebanon in blocking a number of independent acts by Palestinian groups. This is an event of no small consequence: it implies that when necessary, alongside its maximalist rhetoric, Hizbollah knows how and is willing to put its radical ideology on the back burner for the sake of Lebanon’s national interest and for the sake of guaranteeing its own limited operations.

Nasrallah himself explained Hizbullah’s restraint in April 2002 a little differently. In a meeting with party activists on April 8, he reminded people sympathetic to the Palestinians,

As you remember I gave a promise more than a year ago . . . I said if “Sharon” [sic] was thinking about committing genocide against the Palestinians in order to expel them in groups, then the Palestinians must consider that they are not alone, and that Hizbullah will be on their side . . . Therefore some people may ask, is there anything worse than [what is] happening now in Palestine? We say yes there is something worse. This would be the following stage which lies inside “Sharon’s” mind and for which we must preserve weapons and put accounts into consideration. It means that each time a stage begins; we should not use all of what we have . . . Moreover if we used all of our weapons, after that “Sharon” would be encouraged to expel the Palestinians.

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Ethical resistance - human achievement

The military parade that preceded Nasrullah’s Jerusalem Day speech was reportedly as impressive, and meticulously organized, as the party’s parades always are. A couple of days before, I watched some al-Manar footage of an earlier Hizbullah spectacle in which ultra-fit party activists performed breathtaking stunts on high wires strung between some of the buildings in the Dahiyeh.

The Hizbullah leadership, as it works to motivate and organize its base, seems just about as good at bread as it is at circuses. The AUB professor Judith Palmer Harik has studied the party for many years now. She notes that in the chaotic, civil-war-ridden circumstances in which Hizbullah was born, its provision of basic social services won it considerable loyalty and respect. After Hizbullah took over effective control of the conflict-pounded Dahiyeh in 1988, it almost immediately started providing a reliable trash-removal service there, five years before the central government sent any garbage trucks into the area at all. Regarding safe drinking water, Harik wrote,

During General Aoun’s administration [1988–1990], water and electricity services in the dahiyeh were almost completely cut off due to fighting . . . Several wells dug by UNICEF in the area reportedly failed. With help from the Iranian government RC [the Hizbullah-affiliated “reconstruction campaign,” or jihad al-binaa] resolved this emergency by building 4,000-litre water reservoirs in each district . . . and filling each of them five times a day from continuously circulating tanker trucks. Generators mounted on trucks also made regular rounds from building to building to provide electricity to pump water from private cisterns . . . [In August 2001] Hezbollah still provides the major source of drinking water for dahiyeh residents.

Across the gamut of human services—schools, hospitals, public-health services, rural-development aids, low-income housing, revolving loan funds for small businesses, and income-support projects for the poor—Harik’s story was the same: at a time when the Lebanese government was unable or unwilling to provide these services, Hizbullah and its affiliated organizations stepped in to do so; and even when the government did finally return to the scene, the relevant ministries still relied on Hizbullah’s affiliates to pick up the slack.

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Harik, Hamzeh, and other close observers of Hizbullah all agree that Hizbullah’s social-service affiliates, law courts, and schools provide their services on a low-cost basis to those Lebanese who need them, whether Muslim or Christian, and that subsidies are available for very-low-income users. Many Christian parents send their children to Hizbullah-run schools, especially in south Lebanon, where they are often judged to provide the best education available. The budgets for the schools and Hizbullah’s other social-service organizations come from a combination of sources: user fees, government subsidies (where available), donations from Iran, donations from international development bodies, and allocations from the khums, the one-fifth share of one’s income that a Shiite believer is obligated to pay to Islamic charitable organizations. One researcher told me that Hizbullah-related organizations now control the significant income stream constituted by khums donations sent from the numerous Lebanese Shiite emigrés in West Africa.

Harik notes rightly that Hizbullah’s commitment to, and success in, providing these services on a continuing basis is unique among the political parties in Lebanon. The roots of this commitment are complex. Several of Hizbullah’s founders had previously been secular leftists. When I was in Lebanon in the late 1970s, several Lebanese leftists I knew—including a number of Christians—underwent a noticeable conversion to Islamism after the success of the Iranian revolution. Hizbullah’s social-service activities have as much in common with some (secular) leftist rhetoric as with the Khomeinist concept of concern for the Mustaz’afeen (the deprived). But Lebanon’s secular leftist movements never succeeded in organizing anything that even approximates Hizbullah’s efforts in this sphere. The chronically weak Lebanese government has never provided even minimally adequately basic services, either. As Harik notes, Hizbullah’s effectiveness in this sphere certainly helped build and buttress its political support in many parts of the country.

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