Greens have no answers to war in Lebanon

LEBANON: Hezbollah: its origins and aims

Michael Karadjis

The United States and Israel claim the horrific attack on Lebanese civilians is necessary to destroy the “terrorist” organisation Hezbollah, which is also routinely referred to as an “Islamic fundamentalist” movement.

Some such assertions are quite fantastic. An article in the July 24 Australian reported that “some US government officials now share Israel’s assessment that [Sheik Hassan] Nasrallah is a bigger danger than Osama bin Laden” — comparing Hezbollah’s leader and the head of the “Islamist” terrorist organisation al Qaeda.

The comparison of a group that allegedly “provoked” this Israeli massacre by abducting two soldiers and one that has killed thousands of people in actions like the destruction of the World Trade Center is self-evidently nonsense. Is there anything in Hezbollah’s history that justifies such comparisons?

Several pro-Iranian groups appeared in 1982 among the poverty-stricken Shiite masses of southern Lebanon to fight the Israeli invasion that year. In 1985 Hezbollah emerged as an umbrella organisation of these groups.

The great majority of military actions Hezbollah has undertaken since then were against the 22-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Fundamentally, therefore, Hezbollah is a national liberation movement, rather than an “Islamist” or “terrorist” organisation.

The largest “terrorist” attack attributed to Hezbollah is the killing of 241 US occupation troops in Lebanon in 1983. However, this was clearly a guerrilla attack on a military target, not the wanton killing of civilians. In any case, Hezbollah denies responsibility for these actions.

Hezbollah is sometimes accused of wanting to set up an “Islamic state” in Lebanon, where its Shiite Muslim base accounts for some 40% of the population, alongside roughly 30% each of Sunni Muslims and Christians. This accusation derives from the widespread identification of Hezbollah with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

However, while the groups that formed Hezbollah were influenced by Iran’s February 1979 revolution, and it has strong links to Iran and to Shiite groups in Iraq, Hezbollah’s evolution shows a strong relationship to the Lebanese reality in which it operates.

In its founding statement, “An open letter to all the oppressed in Lebanon and the world” (issued in Beirut on February 16, 1985), Hezbollah declared its aims were to drive the US, French and Israeli occupiers out of Lebanon, to defeat the right-wing Maronite Christian “Phalange” party, which dominated Lebanon and collaborated with the occupiers, and “to permit our people to choose in all the liberty the form of government they desire”.

While Hezbollah “calls upon all of them to pick the option of Islamic government”, nevertheless it said “we don’t want to impose Islam upon anybody. We don’t want Islam to reign in Lebanon by force as is the case with the Maronites today.” It tells Christians not to be “deceived and misled into believing that we anticipate vengeance against you. For those of you who are peaceful, continue to live in our midst without anybody even thinking to trouble you.”

The record would appear to bear out this rhetoric. There is little evidence that Hezbollah has ever attacked Christians for being Christians. The main “Christian” force it fought was the South Lebanon Army, which was a puppet force of the Israeli occupation.

In fact, some of Hezbollah’s earliest clashes were with Amal, the other main organisation representing Shiite Muslims, due to Hezbollah’s opposition to Amal’s brutal attacks on Palestinian refugee camps. Palestinians are mostly Sunni Muslims and Christians. Hezbollah’s actions cut across the sectarian divisions on which Lebanon’s “confessional” system of government is based.

While Hezbollah’s ideology fits into the category of “Islamist”, and appeals to Islam formed a core part of its strategy to mobilise against the Israeli occupation, the term “fundamentalism” usually refers to attempts to forcibly impose reactionary restrictions on the way people live, dress and so on. Yet the group’s founding statement states that whoever wants to defeat the “arrogant superpower” — the US — “cannot indulge in marginal acts”, such as “to dynamite bars and destroy slot machines”.

My own experience in areas of south Beirut during a visit in the late ’90s bears this out. There were far more women covered in veils in pro-Western Jordan than in Hezbollah-controlled south Beirut, where women were also more visible in the streets in general. This reflects the higher socio-economic level of Lebanon.

Hezbollah is far from being only a military organisation. It also runs a wide network of social services, schools and health centres, which service the poor generally, not only the Shiites. Since Lebanon’s undemocratic “confessional” system was reformed in 1991, Hezbollah has taken part in elections, and holds nearly a fifth of the seats in parliament.

Hezbollah’s accordance with Lebanese realities and avoidance of the sectarian and “fundamentalist” extremes of some forms of “political Islam” enabled it to become the leading force in the resistance to Israeli occupation. But for this it has been accused of being anti-Jewish and of wanting to “destroy Israel” once Lebanon is liberated.

Nasrallah himself has made several anti-Jewish statements, which have been blown up by Zionist propagandists. These backward statements reflect the fact that decades of Zionist oppression of Palestinians and Lebanese does create prejudiced views among some of the oppressed. Many South African blacks would no doubt have blamed whites, rather than the system, for their oppression during the period of apartheid.

However, these occasional statements are at odds with more serious analyses by Hezbollah. Its website, Alghaliboun.net, contains articles that make explicit that its fight is against Zionism and not with Jews.

One such article, “Judaism is not Zionism”, after highlighting “a very important fact” that “Israel’s brutal policy is rejected by many Jews all over the world”, goes on to stress that “it is Zionism that Muslims criticize, not Judaism or the Jewish nation — Muslims respect all God’s religions, prophets and messengers”.

Hezbollah was accused of bombing a Jewish community centre in Argentina in 1994, but denies this. There is much scepticism about this charge, due to the incompetence of the official investigation, during which no proper autopsies or DNA tests were done. A number of factors point to the involvement of Argentina’s military in the attack.

For all the “terrorism” accusations, the only concrete fact is that Hezbollah has in the past fired Katyusha rockets into Israel, some of which have killed civilians. However, this was part of the war of liberation against Israeli occupation, during which Israel regularly responded to attacks on its military forces in Lebanon with massive attacks on Lebanese civilians. At such times, Hezbollah fired back. There was an enormous difference between the small numbers hit by Hezbollah and the huge numbers hit by Israel.

The same goes for the rockets Hezbollah has launched into Israel in response to the current attack. Less than 20 Israeli civilians have been killed, compared to estimates as high as 750 Lebanese. It is certainly debatable whether firing back into Israel achieves anything militarily that can make up for the boosting of support within Israel for the war when even a few civilians are killed. However, firing back when under massive attack is normal in war and can hardly be called “terrorism”.

There have been several clashes near the border since Israel withdrew from most of southern Lebanon in 2000, but overwhelmingly Hezbollah has stuck to its pledge not to make cross-border attacks. The only significant event was the death of five Israeli civilians in an incursion in March 2002, which Hezbollah claims it had nothing to do with. According to UN observer reports, Israel has violated the border between the two countries 10 times more frequently than Hezbollah has.

In December 2005, al Qaeda launched a cross-border attack into Israel from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is extremely hostile to al Qaeda and has vigorously denounced actions such as the attack on the World Trade Center and the beheading of Nick Berg, a US businessperson captured by followers of Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq. However, al Qaeda appears to have developed support among a few of the desperate Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.

Nasrallah responded to the cross-border attack by saying: “We believe that this operation was a mistake, because we believe that the Katyusha rocket should be used as a defensive strategy. If Israel attacks us, we respond with Katyushas. However, the Katyushua is not a weapon for a jihadist operation. Launching a Katyusha for no reason violates our strategy.”

Responding to the appearance of al Qaeda in Lebanon, Nasrallah blamed such extremism among some Palestinians on attempts by the Lebanese right-wing to forcibly disarm Palestinians, whom he defended as “our brothers”. However, al Qaeda would mean “calling for explosions, for blowing up Shiite religious centers, churches, mosques, and Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds ... is this how we will build the country?”

The association made by pro-Israeli media between Hezbollah's defensive use of Katyushas and some of the intemperate language about “obliterating” Israel suggests that Hezbollah’s primitive rockets might be a weapon to carry out the destruction of a first-rate military and economic power.

However, shorn of such rhetoric, Nasrallah’s actual view is that Israel “is a state based on occupation, that has usurped the rights of others”, but that “on this land, Muslims, Christians and Jews can coexist together, as they have for hundreds of years, in the framework of a democratic state”.

Hezbollah is led by sections of the small-scale Shiite bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, who have no interest in a “jihad” to “liberate Palestine”. The interests of this layer is in gaining a larger share of the pie in Lebanon, where the Christian and, to an extent, the Sunni big bourgeoisie have long been dominant. It is not in the interests of this layer’s prosperity to have constant conflict and destruction of its land by Israel.

At the same time, the oppression suffered by the Shiite masses at the hands of Israel, and the fact that they live in the same impoverished regions as half-a-million Palestinian refugees, has given rise to strong feelings of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, as well as the view that the Palestine “peace process” will not be complete without solving the problem of the refugees in Lebanese neighbourhoods.

Hezbollah is a nationalist, not a socialist, organisation, and socialists have many differences with Hezbollah’s ideology and many of its tactics. However, recognising that it is a national liberation movement rather than a “fundamentalist” or “terrorist” organisation is important in understanding the kinds of allies that are necessary in national struggle. Moreover, it is not necessary to romanticise Hezbollah in order to recognise that its actual political evolution and many of its tactical decisions make it a far better vehicle for the national struggle than many other organisations in the region with roots in “political Islam”, such as al Qaeda.

From Green Left Weekly, August 9, 2006.