On Hizbullah - Zain Samir in LRB:

“The attacks and counterattacks were initially limited in scope. But as the war in Gaza intensified, Hizbullah started raising the tempo, expanding the range of targets to include barracks and other military positions, but still limiting its action to areas along the frontier – to the displeasure of some in the region. Israel stepped up its retaliation too, sending in its air force and armed drones to kill scores of Hizbullah fighters along with a few civilians, leading Hizbullah to use heavy calibre rockets and deploy kamikaze drones for the first time. After nearly two decades of relative calm along the Lebanese-Israeli border, the Israeli defence minister is threatening to do to Beirut what he is doing to Gaza. Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, has warned Israel that if it attacks Beirut again Hizbullah will start bombing Tel Aviv and beyond. It’s clear that a new war wouldn’t be limited to Lebanon, but could well involve the whole region, if the Iran-aligned ‘axis of resistance’ – Hizbullah, Hamas, the Syrian Arab Republic and other groups – invokes the doctrine of the ‘unity of the battlefields’. Yemen’s Houthis and pro-Iran factions in Iraq are already attacking US and Israeli bases.
The Israel-Lebanon frontier is called the Blue Line. Despite being one of the most heavily fortified inter-state boundaries in the world, it is not a border under international law but a demarcated ‘line of withdrawal’, established by UNIFIL – the UNInterim Force in Lebanon – to confirm the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 2000. (‘Without prejudice to future border agreements between the UNmember states concerned,’ as UNIFIL put it.) It stretches for nearly 120 kilometres, from the shores of the Mediterranean in the west, through the hills of Jabal Amil and then north-east to meet the Syrian border above the occupied Golan Heights, next to what is called the Galilee Finger of Israeli territory. Israel has constructed a high-tech security barrier along the Blue Line, connecting bases like the one at Hanita to others along the frontier. It stands at a height of nine metres, and consists of concrete slabs topped with a steel fence.”

(…)

“The Jabal Amil hills have been dominated by Shia Lebanese for centuries. Many settled there after being driven out of the coastal cities by the Mamluks in the 13th and 14thcenturies after the collapse of the Crusader kingdoms. The region’s rugged terrain and infertile soil ensured that it remained a forgotten part of the Damascus and Beirut provinces of the Ottoman Empire. And yet Jabal Amil was at one point a leading centre of Shia learning, rivalling Najaf and Karbala in modern-day Iraq. Its influence reached its height in the 16th century, when the Safavids invited Arab scholars, especially those of Jabal Amil, to help convert Iran to Shiism, which only increased the suspicions of the region’s Ottoman rulers.”

(…)

“Then a charismatic Iranian cleric of Lebanese origin, Musa al-Sadr, arrived in the southern city of Tyre after a stint in Najaf. He started mobilising the community and galvanising their sense of displacement, and in 1974 set up Lebanon’s first political Shia organisation, Harakat al-Mahrumin (the Movement of the Dispossessed).
For the majority of their history, Shia clergy took a quietist, apolitical approach, condemning any interference in state matters before the coming of the Twelfth Imam at the end of times. But as the 20th century went on, revivalist Islamic political movements grew in influence, partly as a reaction to the spread of secular, pan-Arab, nationalist and communist parties, and to the failure of those parties to respond to the challenges posed by the West and the conflict with Israel. The Islamic Dawa party, which had its roots in the Shia seminaries of Najaf, faced off against Iraq’s Ba’athists in the early 1970s and recruited widely, just as Ayatollah Khomeini was formulating his theories of Islamic governance. Another Iranian revolutionary, Mostafa Chamran, made his way to Lebanon to join forces with al-Sadr, helping to develop the movement’s military wing, Amal, which fought to defend Shia interests during the Lebanese Civil War, which broke out in 1975.”

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“Had the enemy not taken this step,’ Hassan Nasrallah said many years later, ‘I don’t know whether something called Hizbullah would have been born.’ It didn’t officially announce its existence until 1985, when it published an ‘Open Letter to the Oppressed in Lebanon and the World’. It adopted Khomeini’s doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih, in which the Supreme Leader is considered to be the representative of the hidden Twelfth Imam. It called for the unity of the Islamic ummah, an Islamic government in Lebanon, and jihad against Israel and its allies in the West.
Many believe that Hizbullah was behind a string of suicide attacks in Beirut in 1983, culminating in the simultaneous bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks and a contingent of French paratroopers, which killed 241 American and 58 French military personnel. The targets were members of the Multinational Force in Lebanon, which had been deployed to ensure the PLO left Lebanon under the terms of a US-brokered agreement. A little-known organisation called Islamic Jihad (not the later Palestinian organisation of the same name) claimed responsibility for the attacks. Hizbullah has consistently denied any connection to the group.”

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“For Hizbullah’s detractors in the wider Middle East, the rhetoric of resistance was a ploy, allowing an armed militia to keep its weapons, build a state within a state and serve the interests of its Iranian masters – this narrative is pursued by sectarian media outlets, mainly in the Gulf. And for many young Lebanese, by sitting in parliament next to former warlords, Hizbullah had capitulated to a corrupt political system, entrenching the vested interests and factionalism that had broken Lebanon’s economy and destroyed any chance of social progress.
It was a difficult line to tread. The person who made it possible was Hassan Nasrallah, architect of the dual strategy of armed militancy and political participation. He became Hizbullah secretary-general in 1992, after Israel assassinated his predecessor and mentor, Abbas al-Musawi. Nasrallah was born in 1960 in the seafront slums of Karantina in north-eastern Beirut, where his father was a vegetable seller, and grew up amid the urban poor. After the Christian Phalangist militias overran Karantina in the first massacre of the civil war, the family returned to their ancestral village in the south. Like many young people of his generation, he was drawn to politics and joined Amal when he was a teenager. He went to school in Tyre before leaving for the holy city of Najaf in Iraq. There, with no means to support himself, he was taken in hand by Musawi, a fellow Lebanese. In his seminary, Nasrallah was influenced by the developing theories of Islamic governance and found himself drawn to Khomeini’s teaching. When Saddam began his crackdown on Shia political activists in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, Nasrallah was among the thousand or so expelled from Iraq. He returned to Lebanon, and in 1982, the year of its formation, he became a member of Hizbullah.”

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“In four weeks of aerial and ground-level bombardment by the Israeli military, around a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed, a third of them children. Towns and villages were reduced to rubble; bridges, sewage treatment plants, port facilities and electric power plants were crippled or destroyed. This was an example of what the Israelis later called the Dahiya doctrine: the use of disproportionate force on civilian targets to cause such overwhelming damage that it serves as a lasting deterrent. The UN, EU, Russia, China and the countries of the Global South pressed for a ceasefire, but the Bush administration (and, of course, Tony Blair) vetoed it, giving Israel ample time to pursue its stated goal of destroying Hizbullah and killing its leaders.
But even full-scale bombardment failed to stop Hizbullah firing its rockets. The IDF had to send in troops, and they were shocked by the result. Small, mobile Hizbullah units – armed with anti-tank guided missiles, hiding in rocky ravines and taking cover under vegetation, using a network of underground tunnels and bunkers – destroyed a large number of Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles and killed scores of soldiers, members of elite units as well as reservists. Israel declared its operation a success, but it didn’t accomplish a fraction of its stated goals. It suffered heavy casualties, exposing severe vulnerabilities in its war machine, and enabling Hizbullah – which in order to win only had to survive – to boast that it had humiliated the mighty Israeli army.”

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“Hizbullah is now capable of fielding tens of thousands of fighters, and has an estimated arsenal of 100,000 missiles (about three times the number thought to be available to Hamas). Thanks to the military connections it has made abroad, the concept of the ‘unity of the battlefields’ envisaged by Shia religious leaders doesn’t seem as far off as it once did. If a regional war did break out, targets could extend from Israel to American bases to the oil fields in the Gulf. Everyone in the Middle East and beyond would pay the price. The reality is that not all the members of the ‘axis of resistance’ are equal. Members of Hizbullah often speak with disdain about the Iraqi factions they fought alongside, accusing them of profit-seeking and corruption. They feel that these new alliances have tarnished the reputation of Hizbullah itself.”

(…)

“One of the men started crying and buried his face in Khomeini’s chest. Khomeini patted him gently on the head and told him to rejoice for his friend, who was now a martyr. A few of the men buried here had been killed in Hizbullah’s foreign wars. But most of them, and most of those who will be buried over the months to come, grew up and fought in the hills around this town. They knew everyone, and everyone knew them. This is a tight community that keeps its people close, until the moment when the party calls on them to go and fight.”

Read the article here.

This is a very insightful article about the history of the Shia in South Lebanon.

Once again, if the regional war breaks out the whole region might go up in flames. This is the main reason why the US sent its warships to the Eastern Mediterranean. If the region goes up in flames the US cannot just be a bystander.

It’s clear that neither Iran nor Hizbollah have much interest in a regional war, but his calculation may change any moment.

Interestingly enough, the article seems to suggest that the 2006 was a powerful deterrence against Hizbullah. Reports that Hizbullah is more rational than Hamas have been spread before.

We will see what this rationality might mean.