Why Is Hezbollah Popular?

Ethan Heitner

July 17, 2006

The barriers of language, distance and culture have always prevented the multiple audiences of conflicts in the Middle East from reaching a common understanding of violence there—a disconnect that has too frequently led to continued violence itself. On the other hand, we are blessed to live in an era where communication across those gaps is easier than ever. The voices of Iraqis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Afghanis—all are available to us, in their own words (even if they are forced to speak in our language) through the magic of the Internets. It is vital that the American public invest itself in the task of listening.

The G-8 clearly aren’t. The long-awaited, carefully-crafted and totally pointless statement today on the war between Israel and Lebanese civilians calls “the root cause “ of the conflict the “extremist forces” of Hezbollah and Hamas.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an incredible comment afterwards:

The notion that somehow policies that finally confront extremism are actually causing extremism, I find grotesque … For all of those who believe that we had somehow stability in the Middle East over the last 60 years and it's now been disturbed, where do we think Hezbollah and Hamas and these other extremist forces came from? They weren't born yesterday.

Right, they were born 20 years ago when Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the previous generation of “terrorists,” secular Palestinian nationalists. Rice still doesn't understand that confronting extremism with massive violence against civillians is exactly what causes extremism, and that lack of understanding is itself grotesque.

This is a precarious and complex situation. Hezbollah, which has significant support across the Lebanese population and in the Arab world—not just among Shiites—as the only Arab group to have decisively defeated the much-feared Israeli juggernaut militarily, is also the only faction to remain armed after the end of the Lebanese Civil War. It has a number of seats in the Lebanese Parliament and two ministers in government. The Lebanese government, on the other hand, although newly triumphant after the showdown with Syria last year, has almost no presence in South Lebanon and no control over Hezbollah.

Helena Cobban, on her blog Just World News, sums up the view of Hezbollah and the conflict from the perspective of international law and provides an excellent review of the facts of the situation.

Rather than pontificate one way or the other on what this means, however, I would like to use this space to give a window into the many different ways these events have been seen in the Middle East and the many questions they raise.

Judging from your responses every time I or other authors on this site criticize Israel, I get the sense that the readers of TomPaine.com are largely white, non-Muslim Americans who are more sympathetic to Israel than their Palestinian or Arab opponents. As a Jew of Israeli parents, who received a thoroughly Zionist education, I can sympathize. However, somewhere along the way I actually started reading Palestinian voices, studied Arabic, and lived and worked alongside Arabs in both Palestine and Egypt.

I realize many in our audience don't have those options. However, I encourage our readers to check out Arabist.net, the site of my former boss at Cairo Magazine, Issandr El Amrani, who also contributes to The Economist  and the Middle East Report . Issandr's response to "the situation" will hopefully be thought-provoking. From his site Arabist.net :

I find the current frustration incredibly frustrating, partly because of the never-ending despair of the situation in Palestine, but also because of a fundamental ambivalence I have about the policies pursued by Islamist groups in the region. Hizbullah, like Hamas, was born as a resistance organization. It successfully fought a war of attrition against the Israeli occupation, and caused them to eventually move out. For this, it has been cheered throughout the region because it appeared to have struck a blow for an Arab cause after a seemingly never-ending string of defeats. It helped restore some dignity to what, from an Arab perspective, is a humiliating situation. And it put a lot of people like me (nominally Sunni secularists) in a position of admiring a fundamentalist Shia group.

My first instinct after I saw this morning that Hizbullah had conducted a raid on Israel’s northern border was to think, shit, the Israelis are going to bomb Lebanon like they’re bombing Gaza. And, sure enough, the bombing started. My reaction was anger at Hizbullah for provoking Israel to do this — which clearly it has wanted to do for a while — and dragging the rest of Lebanon into a mess. I don’t really see the point of the raid beyond a symbolic gesture of support for the Palestinians — which, fair enough, considering the icy silence or hypocritical posturing of most Arab governments, is a welcome change. I don’t think this will either distract Israel from Gaza (it’s quite capable of waging war on two fronts) nor do I think it’s a clever form of asymmetric warfare. I doubt Israel will release any prisoners because of it.

Maybe I’m wrong. Israel doesn’t even need excuses anymore to do what it wants. Maybe signs of resistance will make it think twice about its policy. Yet, in the current situation of David vs. Goliath, I don’t think that symbolic operations accomplish much beyond allow Israel to kill more people. The lack of balance of power in the region and the refusal of Western states, especially the US, to moderate Israel’s winner-takes-all attitude makes me think that when I’m 80 (if I live that long!) this region will still be in the same mess. In the meantime, a steady trickle of people will die. It’s a depressing thought.

Click to read the whole thing , and be sure to also read the different views presented in the comments section by the readers of Arabist.net, who tend to be English-speaking journalists, academics and researchers both in Arab countries and the West.

Another view is presented by the other current main contributor to the site, Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian journalist who has written for the Los Angeles Times among other places:

As long as there is occupied Lebanese land, Hizbollah has the right to continue fighting Israel, but one’s support for the group can never be absolute. What is good about Hizbollah is that they have limited their attacks to Israeli military targets. And, they’ve been successful. The group, since its establishment following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, have fought a successful guerilla campaign against the Israeli occupation, which managed to bring finally a humiliating retreat by Israeli troops, with an even more disorganized flight of their proxy SLA agents.

Hizbollah, a Shiite based group and sure has its agenda in Lebanon’s sectarian matrix, has acted to its credit in a largely responsible way vis a vis other sects. The party worked hard to portray itself as a “national” party, and thus limited its military operations to the Israeli occupation troops, hoping, and at times indeed winning, the support outside their sect in Lebanon, mainly among Sunnis, but more importantly had a wider support in the Arab World—a Sunni dominated region, with a clear dislike for Shiites in general.

But again, “praising” Hizbollah can never be absolute, and it depends on the political context. If Hizbollah is fighting the Israeli army, demanding the release of the detainees, or fighting to liberate Sheb3a, then I’m on Hizbollah’s side. If Hizbollah members go around enforcing moral codes on population under their control, then I’m with that population against Hizbollah. And what’s even more important than taking sides, as a secular Arab I would like to focus my time on building an alternative secular movement to Hizbollah, that would organize Lebanese from all sects to build a truly democratic country in both the political and social spheres ...

Again, I encourage our readers, if they are interested, to also read the comments section in response to Hossam's posting.

The desire to point to these debates is partly a response to debates I've had in the U.S., where Palestinians (and by extension, Arabs) are presented as fanatical, suicidal, unreasoning in their devotion to militant groups—except for the “good Arabs” who denounce these groups, wear business suits, model themselves on Western liberals and generally have zero connection to the “Arab street."

There are actually rational people out there who have mixed feelings at best about these actions, these groups. There are reasons why Hezbollah is so popular, why Hamas is seen the way it is seen. It behooves us to try to understand that perspective and not pretend like we're speaking for others, like Danny Gillerman, Israeli's representative at the United Nations, who told his Lebanese counterpart:

Deep inside your heart you know that if you could, you would be sitting here next to me.

Yeah, right.