Before I can begin to talk about Hezbollah I should put things in to historical context. Drawing the circumstances that led to the birth of such an entity and the events surrounding it and the Lebanese civil war. Its inevitable relationship to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
But before I begin that I feel compelled to explain my stance on the subject of the entity called Hezbollah. To all western readers; understand that this is a rather complicated subject and that I will not delve in to deeply, because if I do, I will end up writing a multi volume book about the subject. Suffice to say that this is the view and opinion of someone who has lived the civil war and born witness to many of the atrocities of that time and the subsequent distortion of time that followed the politics of these events. For us, the Lebanese, Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization. Rather, Hezbollah is a dangerous relic of the civil war and the greater Arab-Israeli conflict.
It is a historical fact that when we, the Lebanese, declared our independence from the French, they were lead, back then, by a coalition of prominent Lebanese leaders of all walks of life and society that included Maronites, Sunnis, Druze, Orthodox, Shia and others. They banded together and formed the first true pan-Lebanese national group that demanded independence, and the will for self-governance, from an arrogant power that thought us its third class subjects, the French. This happened shortly after the second world war, where the allies where indulging themselves in the spoils of this great and atrocious war that they had fought and won. The French however, being as arrogant and stuck up as they were, granted us this independence, but not without making sure that we would fail as a nation. They, the French, insisted on dividing the country based on the feudal system that existed before they had arrived and favored placing the greatest portion of power in the hands of the Maronite Christians, who were even back then not the majority, but simply because they were Christians and thus, by default, sympathetic towards Christian France. The French exploited old fears that had existed in the region for hundreds of years and insured that the old feudal divisions that existed in this small patch of land that geographically was the meeting way between Europe, Africa, Arabia and Asia, continued to exist as it was so that they may say "look at those barbarians, they are nothing without us". Maybe not using those same words but that was the intention.
Any way! the French dictated that the President, who had the greatest share of power, was to be a Maronite Christian, in spite of the fact that even back then the Maroinites did not represent a majority, and that the prime minister, with less power than the president, should be a Sunni Muslim, and that the speaker of parliament should be a Shia Muslim, and basically powerless.
Obviously power corrupts and the subsequent Maronite presidents drowned themselves in the power allotted to them. Undoubtedly this created resentment from the other Lebanese parties, the Sunnis, the Shia, the Druze etc. The Shia, who lived mostly in the south of Lebanon, close to the Israeli border, where the most deprived, economically and politically, though many will point out individuals who made it big, proportionally they were the most deprived after the Palestinians. For that reason, a Shia movement sprung up, in the form of the Movement of the Disinherited, to lend voice to the Shia people of the south whom have been neglected by the Maronite Christian dominated state. Headed by Musa al-Sader, who later on vanished mysteriously after a visit to Libya, of all places, to meet with one Muamar Qadafi back in 1978. The very same Libyan tyrant that the Libyans are now fighting to get rid of. But that’s a totally different story.
In 1975, the Lebanese civil war erupted for reasons that the Lebanese still cannot agree on… a sad truth but it is so… Some say that it was because of Palestinian armed presence, some say it was because of Maronite sectarian fears (they feared losing their minority powers to the majority Muslims) some say because of external interference. For whatever reasons, the Lebanese civil war started, all the warring Lebanese sectarian factions where, and still are, to blame for it, without exception. But that too is a different story.
In 1975, as a response to the civil war, the Movement of the Disinherited was forced to arm itself to protect, as where all the other Lebanese sects and feudal lords, the interests of the Shia population, in the form of the armed militia group called Amal, the word for “hope” in Arabic.
Skipping in time and details a little bit, in 1982, the Israeli military, invaded Lebanon for the second time, under the guise of riding Lebanon of the Palestinian problem. the Shia of the south welcomed the Israelis with cheers, flowers and rice (a tradition of jubilance) they saw the Israeli forces as one of liberation and welcomed it as such, if it were to rid them of the “pesky” Palestinian resistance which was trying hard to reclaim a homeland from which they were unjustly expelled from by a group of people how had themselves been expelled from that very land two thousand years ago, and who have endured unimaginable atrocities and who by reclaiming the land they claimed was promised to them in some obscure religious text, repeated the atrocities that where committed against them, against the population that had moved in when they were moved out two thousand years ago. Semites warring against Semites with a different belief system. essentially, brother (Israeli) against brother (Palestinian).
It may surprise people who do not know the complicated history of Lebanon, that it was not the Shia movement, represented by Amal, that rose up in defiance against the Israeli occupation. It was not even Hezbollah, who at the time of the invasion, did not even exist. No. it was the communist party that rose up in defense of the nation against the occupation force. Only after this point did the group called Hezbollah, the “party of god”, a splinter group of Amal, come to play with the big boys. Hezbollah was not the initiator of the resistance movement against the 1982 Israeli invasion, Hezbollah did not exists as an entity until 1985, though a pseudo form of it did exist in the shape of minor extremist splinter groups from the Amal movement.
The point I am trying to make is that the resistance against the Israeli occupation of 1982, was not the Islamic resistance of the Shia group called Hezbollah, but rather it was a nationalist movement, initiated first and foremost by the atheists, not religious zealots, in the form of the communist party of Lebanon.
With the subsequent advent of Hezbollah after 1985, the face of the resistance slowly began to change and take on the form of the Lebanese Islamic resistance.
The Syrians, who were, ironically, invited by the Lebanese before the 1982 Israeli invasion, by the Maronite Christians, to rid them of the Palestinian problem. The Syrians fought against Hezbollah on many occasions… realy bloody and grousom fights…. But Lebanon is a strange country where allegiances keep shifting, and shifting like the sands of time. The Maronite Christians grew weary of the Syrians and their hegemony and turned against them, the very power that they had invited, and sided with the Israelis, covertly, and the Shia turned against the Israelis, the very power that they had welcomed as liberators, and sided with the Syrians, openly. And thus Lebanon became intricacy involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which we had previously attempted our best to avoid. Lebanon became the crux of the power struggle, as the external forces of east and west fought out their war, by proxy, at the expense of the Lebanese people.
The civil war finally ended in 1990 and we were all made to believe that that was the end of it all. All the militias gave up their weapons and militancy… all except for Hezbollah, who was allowed to continue its resistance against the Israeli occupation that continued, empowered by the Syrians, who also still occupied most of Lebanon after the civil war, and acted as the puppet master of Lebanese politics.
Hezbollah grew in power and created an un-official state within a state which no one dared to contradict or oppose. If Hezbollah still exists today, with all its power and militancy, it is not because the Lebanese wish it so, but because the Syrian regime of al-Assad Baathists, who no longer wished a direct confrontation with Israel, continued to empower the Iranian baked Lebanese Shia faction in the name Arabs to resist the western backed Israel hegemony.
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