WeeklyWorker

04.03.2010

Whither Hezbollah?

Internationally Hezbollah allies itself with anti-imperialist movements for progressive change, but in Lebanon it defends the confessional status quo, argues Assaf Kfoury

Hezbollah is the guerrilla force that stymied the Israeli military in southern Lebanon in the 1990s. The Israeli occupiers and their proxies in the South Lebanon Army finally gave up and withdrew in May 2000. In a return confrontation in July-August 2006, Hezbollah again stood its ground, and the Israeli military was again stunned by a gritty enemy. This time round, it was the Bush administration’s open goading - recall Condoleezza Rice’s monstrous declarations (“the birth pangs of the new Middle East”) to justify the destruction and the killing - which pressed Israel to pursue an increasingly futile and elusive finish. In July-August 2006, just as in the 1990s, Hezbollah did not cave in, remained defiant, wore down its more powerful opponent, and fought it to a draw.

There is much to respect and reflect on here. The business with Hezbollah is not police action against murderous criminal gangs - though this is how it often sounds in the western media - which are moreover said to be armed and abetted by one of America’s current bogeymen (Iran). It is unfinished business with far-reaching consequences for the US, Israel and western interests in the Middle East. Autocratic Arab regimes have fallen in line with the dictates of the American overlord, one after the other, or else faced outright destruction, as in Iraq. By contrast, Hezbollah has repeatedly played spoiler and provided inspiration to others to resist. It is the only organised Arab force that the mighty Israeli army has been unable to subdue and the only one whose declarations of steadfastness have matched its performance on the battlefield. Largely thanks to Hezbollah, the plans for a “new Middle East”, at least as imagined by George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice, have collapsed.

Not without inflicting great pain, however. The cost for the Lebanese that have sheltered Hezbollah has been very steep. The wholesale devastation wrought on Lebanon by Israel over the years has been far in excess of what Israel has suffered in return. In July-August 2006, for example, the ratio of Lebanese civilian fatalities to Israeli civilian fatalities was more than 25 to one, while the ratio of combatant fatalities was about one to one.[1]

Hezbollah’s resilience has come at an even heavier price for the Palestinians to the south. Israel has undertaken with a vengeance to make the Palestinians under its control pay for its setbacks to the north. In recent years, commentators in the west have taken to chiding Israel’s ‘disproportionate’ response to Palestinian acts of resistance - as if there would be nothing to denounce about Israel’s relentless decades-long dispossession of the Palestinians, had its response been ‘proportionate’. Such was the liberal verdict, for example, on Israel’s destruction of Gaza in January 2009. By Israeli generals’ own admission, this ‘disproportionate’ response was deliberately designed to pre-empt any Palestinian urge to duplicate Hezbollah’s experience.[2]

But Hezbollah is not just an effective guerrilla force resolutely opposed to US-led western domination. It is also a political party, though one that is not neatly defined by traditional categories of the left (or the right). Since its shadowy beginnings shortly after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Hezbollah has transformed itself from a small underground militia into a large party deeply entrenched in Lebanese politics. Along the way, it has battled other parties to impose itself as the dominant powerbroker inside the Lebanese Shia community and then, without shedding its exclusive Shia identity, in Lebanon as a whole. It has shrewdly used the prestige and notoriety that have come its way to further its own communal agenda. It has often formed contradictory or unlikely alliances with political players to its right - out of expediency or Islamist affinity, sacrificing support from potential allies to its left - both inside Lebanon and in the region at large.

Trajectory

Hezbollah’s trajectory is punctuated by two documents - its so-called 1985 ‘Open letter’[3] and its 2009 Political manifesto.[4] After more than two years of secretive operations, Hezbollah issued its ‘Open letter’ in 1985, addressed to the “downtrodden in Lebanon and the world”. The opening paragraph sets the tone for the entire document:

“We are the sons of the umma [the worldwide Muslim community], the Party of God [Hezbollah], whose vanguard god made victorious in Iran, where it re-established the nucleus of the Islamic state in the world. We obey the orders of the sole, wise and just command of the faqih [Islamic jurisprudent], which are presently embodied by the imam and guide, ayatollah Khomeini. May his authority empower the Muslims and be the harbinger of their glorious renaissance!”

After proclaiming the advent of the Islamic state and pledging loyalty to the ‘rule of the jurisprudent’ (wilayat al faqih), the rest of the ‘Open letter’ is infused with enmity towards the US (“that arrogant superpower”), France, Israel and their “local agents” (foremost among whom are the Phalanges and their leader, Bashir Gemayel, “that butcher”), just as it never fails to invoke Islam as the only salvation for humanity (“we reject both capitalism and communism”; “only an Islamic government is capable of guaranteeing justice and liberty for all”; “we call upon you [the non-Muslims] to embrace Islam so that you can be happy in this world and the next”). Lebanon is peripheral in this agenda: if it is mentioned, it is as one of the battlefields where the umma confronts its enemies.

Whereas the 1985 ‘Open letter’ is an angry call to arms, the 2009 Political manifesto by comparison is deliberately studious and more than three times as long. The first is interspersed with paragraph-long jeremiads against accumulated grievances at the hands of the confessional system and its foreign backers; the second tries to frame these grievances in the context of conflicting socio-economic interests. The Political manifesto is still short on analysis - running into ambiguities of its own, and unable or unwilling to discard the pointless (for a political manifesto) Islamic frills - but nevertheless confirming the extensive changes Hezbollah has experienced since the early 1980s.

The most significant perhaps - seen from a western perspective that tends to stress Hezbollah’s narrow Islamist focus - is the shift away from the call to bring to Lebanon the unifying Islamic state (already established in Iran). This call, as well as allegiance to the ‘rule of the jurisprudent’, are absent from the Political manifesto. Though still referring to Islam as the inspiration for the party’s ideology and action, the 2009 document makes no mention of the umma and insists instead on Hezbollah’s identity as a patriotic Lebanese organisation.

Just as significant for those among whom Hezbollah has to operate is the 2009 document’s acceptance of ethnic, cultural and religious diversity - not only emphatically in Lebanese society, but also in the Middle East at large. It considers this diversity “a source of wealth and social vitality.” This is a far cry from the appeal in the 1985 ‘Open letter’ to non-Muslims to “embrace Islam where you will find salvation and happiness upon Earth and in the hereafter”.

Hezbollah’s beginnings did not bode well for communists and their supporters.[5] In the 1980s it participated in a wider campaign of intimidation and assassination by an array of Islamic fundamentalist groups against communist intellectuals and activists. In that, it emulated (on a much smaller scale) its Iranian sponsor in Tehran, which was summarily executing hundreds of communists during the same years. After 1985, Hezbollah “was soon to become the sole resistance movement, strongly backed by the Syrian authorities, which deployed all available efforts to block the participation of the communists in the resistance.”[6]

Has Hezbollah shifted left?

In a welcome change in the 1990s and later, Hezbollah has refrained from turning its ideological and political differences with communist and other left parties into murderous armed confrontations. On occasion, especially in periods of parliamentary elections, Hezbollah has even courted - or taken for granted the support of - left parties. Nonetheless, it retains to this day an ingrained antipathy to all things Marxist and communist, especially if home-grown. Hezbollah can proclaim its solidarity with revolutionary socialist movements in Latin America - as it does indeed in its Political manifesto - but it will not extend this solidarity to kindred parties and movements in the Middle East and, least of all, in Lebanon itself.

Hezbollah has imbued its members and supporters with a deep culture of resistance and communal solidarity, which perhaps explains best its resilience against overwhelming odds in battle. With a sense of entitlement, sometimes overweening, it has acted as the party that knows best about resistance. But with much less justice, it has assiduously ignored or belittled others’ contributions to the same struggle. The fact that armed resistance to the Israeli military in 1982 was initiated and carried out by a coalition of communist parties, not by Islamists, is never acknowledged by Hezbollah. One can search in vain for a frank recognition of the role played by communists before and after 1982 in their statements and writings, only to find passing references to acts of resistance by groups of nameless (or unworthy of being named) political identity.

Sympathetic journalists in the west have often remarked on Hezbollah’s wide network of social services - evidence that it is not only a resistance movement, but also a party with a social agenda. Yes, Hezbollah is also a party with a social agenda and its services have greatly benefited the Shia community, not least the poor among them. However, in Lebanon’s confessional system, these networks of social services are not by themselves a measure of progressive or socialist orientation. They are part of the benefits of the patronage extended by all confessional (sectarian-based) parties to their respective constituencies, which are often superior to the chronically depleted (if not absent) social safety nets provided by the Lebanese state. Some parties are better at doing the patronage than others, but none can afford to dispense with it, as it is their means to maintain an effective hold on their respective constituencies. Their fear, of course, is that, without this patronage, class allegiances may eventually trump confessional allegiances.

Patriotic

Hezbollah insists that it is a “Lebanese project” in rebuttal to its opponents’ frequent charge that it is an Iranian proxy. Although this insistence is reassuring to many, Hezbollah in practice seems to equate its embrace of Lebanese identity with support for the confessional system. It is now deeply enmeshed in the chronic horse-trading that is internal Lebanese politics. In preference to alliances with secular extra-parliamentary forces, it has built a special relationship with one of the mainstays of the confessional system - the Free Patriotic Movement, led by former general Michel Aoun.[7] Beyond hollow calls for fiscal responsibility and shunning capitalist excesses,[8] Hezbollah does not have a plan to counter successive Lebanese governments’ close adherence to International Monetary Fund-dictated neoliberal economics.

Not an Iranian proxy, but still unable to distance itself from its erstwhile sponsor, Hezbollah does not brook any criticism of the Islamic Republic of Iran, at least publicly, nor does it venture any of its own. On reading Hezbollah-affiliated media reports, one cannot fail to notice the glossing over or ignoring of the internal convulsions that shook the Islamic Republic to its core during the second half of 2009, conferring it, as it were, attributes immutably frozen in time since 1979. Ironically, by contrast, Hezbollah has been prone to openly admit that it has adapted to changing circumstances.[9] But judging it by its practices rather than only its pronouncements, Hezbollah is now far more progressive than the Iranian theocracy it routinely paints in rosy terms.

In his last will and testament in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini included a scathing attack on communism: “Islam differs sharply from communism. Whereas we respect private property, communism advocates the sharing of all things - including wives and homosexuals.”[10] In Tehran, communists and other political dissidents are summarily executed, and outed homosexuals publicly hanged. In Beirut, they walk freely and Hezbollah does not hunt them down. Will Hezbollah ever criticise or break with the Islamic Republic and its founder?

Hezbollah is not a revolutionary party of the labour movement in Lebanon, nor does it pretend to be, regardless of ethnic origin or religious affiliation. Nor should there be any expectation that it will change in the future into a socialist or social-democratic party, let alone a proletarian, Marxist or other more radical left formation. If it has empowered the oppressed and the poor, it has done so strictly within the Shia community.

But Hezbollah is anti-imperialist, for reasons all of its own, which have become more local-oriented and less pan-Islamist with passing time. It contributes to a global effort against imperialism, and thus is objectively in alliance with movements for progressive change elsewhere in the world. By contrast, in Lebanon’s internal politics and in regional Arab politics, Hezbollah has allied itself with forces defending the status quo. Despite its professed support for changing Lebanon’s confessional system, Hezbollah is now a major player in that system and effectively works for its preservation.

As an anti-imperialist force, standing up to the Israeli military and the US behind it, Hezbollah needs all the support it can get. As a political party, participating in Lebanon’s confessional system and defending it, Hezbollah should not be miscast as a revolutionary progressive force.

Notes

  1. These ratios are inferred from estimates by Human Rights Watch Why they died September 5 2007: www.hrw.org/en/reports/2007/09/05/why-they-died. There were 1,200-1,500 Lebanese civilian fatalities and less than 50 Israeli civilian fatalities.
  2. See Donald Macintyre, ‘Israeli commander: “We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza”’ The Independent February 3 2010.
  3. Published in Arabic in the Beirut daily as-Safir on February 16 1985. There are very few complete English translations, none entirely faithful to the original Arabic. It is not available from any of Hezbollah’s websites.
  4. Released on November 30 at the conclusion of a general congress that had met intermittently over several months, the Political manifesto is available from Hezbollah’s website: english.moqawama.org/essaydetails.php?eid=9632&cid=214
  5. In addition to the Lebanese Communist Party, there were other smaller Marxist parties: the Organisation of Communist Action, the Socialist Arab Action Party and other groups. The LCP was founded in 1924, part of a wider network of communist parties that emerged in major cities of the Levant (Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria) in the 1920s and 1930s. Its strength has ebbed and flowed over the decades and is now perhaps at its lowest ever, but it remains the main extra-parliamentary force in Lebanon today. The other communist parties and groups have mostly dispersed over the last two decades.
  6. F Traboulsi A history of modern Lebanon London 2007, p230.
  7. The Memorandum of understanding is a pact between Hezbollah and the FPM, one of the few documents that get home-page billing on Hezbollah’s website (english.moqawama.org/index.php).
  8. The Political manifesto deplores the effects of “savage capitalism”, which, in its view, is promoted in the world by the US and its “industrial-military complex”. Though it recognises deep economic inequities in Lebanese society, it does not spell out a link between these domestic inequities and “savage capitalism”. As for countering them, it does not invoke anything other than the goodwill of people.
  9. In the press conference in which he presented the Political manifesto on November 30 2009, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, said, in answer to a journalist’s expressing surprise at the changes: “We do not have any problems in dubbing [them] a development and transformation, because people as well as the whole world transformed in the last 24 years. The international and regional systems have changed, the situation within Lebanon has also changed and this is a normal process” (english.moqawama.org/essaydetails.php?eid=9632&cid=214).
  10. Quoted in E Abrahamian A history of modern Iran Cambridge 2008, p179.