Hezbollah : a short history

245 Pages·2014·2.24 MB·English

by  Augustus Richard Norton

PrincetonStudiesinMuslimPolitics
DaleF.EickelmanandAugustusRichardNorton,Editors
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HEZBOLLAH
A Short History
With a new afterword by the author
Augustus Richard Norton
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
All Rights Reserved
First printing, 2007
Fifth printing, and first paperback printing,
with a new afterword by the author, 2009
New paperback edition,
with a new prologue and afterword by the author, 2014
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-16081-8
Library of Congress Control Number 2013957455
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Goudy and Avant Garde
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Prologue to the New Paperback Edition vii
Prologue 1
Chapter 1
Origins and Prehistory of Hezbollah 9
The Rise of Shiʿi Politics from the Mid-twentieth
Century to the Lebanese Civil War 14
The Role of Musa al-Sadr 18
The Resurgence of Amal 21
Chapter 2
The Founding of Hezbollah 27
The Iraq Connection 30
The 1982 Israeli Invasion 32
Hezbollah Emerges 34
The Hezbollah Worldview 35
Implementing the Design 41
Chapter 3
Being a Shi`i Muslim in the Twenty-first Century 47
Ritual and Identity 51
The Intersection of Ritual and Politics 58
Chapter 4
Resistance, Terrorism, and Violence in Lebanon 69
Hezbollah and Terrorism 75
Contents
Occupation in Southern Lebanon 79
The “Rules of the Game” 83
The 2000 Israeli Withdrawal 88
Chapter 5
Playing Politics 95
Hezbollah’s Decision to Participate 98
Municipal Elections 103
The Revolt of the Hungry 105
The Rich Texture of Shi”i Institutions 107
Chapter 6
From Celebration to War 113
The Changing Social Tapestry in Post–Civil War
Lebanon 120
Lebanon’s Love-Hate Relationship with Rafiq al-Hariri,
and His Assassination 124
Setting the Stage for War 132
The Start of Hostilities, July 2006 135
Prosecuting the War 137
Conclusion 145
Hezbollah in a Fractured Postwar Lebanon 152
What Next? 157
Afterword to the Paperback Edition 161
Glossary 173
Additional Reading 175
Sources Cited 181
Index 185
Acknowledgments 197
vi
Prologue to the New Paperback Edition
My work on the Shiʿi community began in
tumultuous times many years ago. The Shah of
Iran had been toppled, Iraq was about to invade Iran
(launching a savage eight-year war), and Lebanon,
ever permeable to external influence, was divided into
militia fiefdoms supported by regional and global rivals.
Next door in Syria, the legitimacy of the al-Asad regime
was being challenged by Islamist opponents who would
soon be pitilessly obliterated along with much of the
city of Hama in 1981. The most significant non-state
actor in the Arab world was the PLO, then dismissed by
Israel as “terrorist.” Shiʿi Hezbollah did not yet exist (its
establishment is discussed in chapter 2).
In the 35 years that have passed, the country has
enjoyed some peaceful, prosperous interludes, and some
Lebanese have managed to insulate themselves from
disorder and violence or lose themselves in the rampant
consumerism of Beirut. Others have made new lives
as expatriates. For all too many Lebanese, however, it
is sobering to consider how often invasion, warfare,
dislocation, or the threat of impending disaster have
impinged on daily life. Too many of the Lebanese whom
I first encountered in the early 1980s or later have died
violently: three were assassinated; others fell in battle
or were otherwise victims of violence. As this updated
version of Hezbollah goes to press, civil war rages in Syria
and ominous storm clouds hang over Lebanon, where
bad weather hardly stops at the border.
Inspired by the initial successes of the “Arab Spring,”
Syrians mounted peaceful demonstrations beginning in
Prologue to the New Paperback Edition
March 2011. The Damascus regime responded ruthlessly.
Of course, the iron fist response failed to squash the
protests, and as the opposition turned to bullets and bombs,
floods of refugees began to cross borders into neighboring
countries, including in Lebanon, where more than one
million refugees from Syria sought safety by the end of
2013. Considering that Lebanon’s population is just four
million, the refugee crisis alone has been calamitous for the
small country’s stability and treasury.
In contrast to Syria, only a handful of Lebanese were
inspired by the initial success of massive protests in Tunisia
and Egypt to take to the streets shouting “irhal” (leave/
scram). Changing the government in Lebanon would
accomplish very little, because political and economic power
rests largely in patronage networks, political movements,
and political parties, as exemplified by Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s initial response to the “Arab Spring”
demonstrations was calm and self-assured. When Egyptian
president Husni Mubarak was toppled in February 2011,
many Hezbollah supporters were gleeful that an arch foe,
who had lent strong support to the Shiʿi group’s Lebanese
rivals, had fallen from power. There was little concern that
the group’s close ally in Damascus would be threatened
at all. It turned out that Hezbollah shared in the Syrian
government’s self-delusions. Al-Asad’s armed forces not
only failed to suppress its internal opposition but also
precipitated a civil war that imposed destitution, death,
and destruction on its own citizens.
As for Iran, whose government has close ties with
Hezbollah, leading regime figures incredulously claimed
that the “Islamic Revolution” had inspired the “Arab
Spring.” Even before the Arab Spring, Saudi-Iranian
jousting was already the main event in Lebanon; with
the developing civil war in neighboring Syria, it has
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Prologue to the New Paperback Edition
become a blood sport. Although Hezbollah extolled
its Iranian ally’s virtues, the squashing of the reformist
Green Movement protests in Iran during 2009 received
wide play in the Arab media, and the Iranian regime was
widely viewed in Arab countries as both repressive and
alien.
Many Lebanese would naturally prefer to keep these
regional catastrophes at arm’s length, praying that what
happens in Syria, in particular, stays in Syria. This is
not happening. Notwithstanding the efforts of leading
Lebanese political figures to avoid entanglement in
Syria and maintain a neutral stance of “disassociation,”
the creeping encroachment of the Syrian civil war has
proven unstoppable. The two countries are intertwined
economically, culturally, and politically. Well before
Hezbollah’s high profile intervention in Syria bolstered
the regime in the spring of 2013, cross border shoot-outs,
ambushes, kidnappings, floods of Syrian refugees entering
Lebanon, and the counter flow of Lebanese to join the fight
in Syria dashed hopes for neutrality.
Although precise survey data is unavailable, my
impression, which is shared by a number of other close
observers, is that the Lebanese are more or less split half-
and-half in terms of which side they support in Syria. Three
decades of Syrian domination of Lebanon ended only in
2005, and many who suffered would celebrate the fall of
the al-Asad regime. It must be said, however, that large
numbers of Lebanese, including many Christians as well
as Muslims, continue to see the Syrian regime in a more
favorable light. They note that it has protected minorities
and fear the prospect of a new regime in which extreme
jihadist groups can gain significant power and potentially
pose a lethal threat to those who do not embrace a Salafist
interpretation of Islam.
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