Israel’s terrorist attack with pagers and walkie-talkies, the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the ground invasion of Lebanon have reopened a debate on Hezbollah’s political and ideological identity. Let’s look at some aspects of the history of this organisation.
Mass base
A year of massacres in Gaza and the aggression of the Israeli state against Lebanon have caused enormous anger among the Arab populations in the region and worldwide. For the people of Lebanon and the Middle East as a whole, Hezbollah is a powerful military force that can put up resistance to Israel, inflict blows on it or even defeat it, as the past has shown. Before the latest attack, which is still ongoing, it had an estimated 60-100,000 fighters (depending on the source of the estimate – this figure includes reservists) and equipment far superior to that of the official Lebanese army.
At the same time, its army has real combat experience. When the Israeli army withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, after 15 years of occupation, Hezbollah took credit for driving it out. In the war that Israel started with Hezbollah in 2006, Hezbollah fought back fiercely, forcing Israel to agree to a ceasefire.
Hezbollah, apart from having a powerful military structure inside Lebanon, is also a political party with a massive base among the Shiite population. It has, over the past decades, set up a network of social services, with schools, hospitals, benefits for the families of war victims, etc., which is very important in a country that has been plagued by poverty, crisis and war for decades (in the past, until the civil war of the 1970s, Lebanon was one of the richest countries in the region, secular and with a high living standard).
But who is Hezbollah?
The word Hezbollah means “The Party of God” in Arabic.
It was founded in the 1980s and officially became a party in 1985. The period was marked by the bloody Lebanese civil war (1975-1991), the Israeli invasion in 1982 and the 1979 Iranian revolution that brought the Islamists to power.
Hezbollah is a Shiite Islamist movement trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and funded directly by the Iranian regime.
It fully embraces the theory that religious leaders should have absolute political power.
Leader authority and neoliberal policies
Hassan Nasrallah, who became Hezbollah’s secretary-general in 1992, declared that the leader’s authority was both spiritual and political and could not be questioned. Its political programme, although formally in favour of the oppressed, turned out in practice to be neo-liberal capitalist, once Hezbollah became part of ruling government alliances. It has been taking part in elections since 1992. It has been part of Lebanese governments since 2005 under the leadership of capitalist tycoons or generals like Aoun and Mikati.
None of these governments provided extra money for education, health or social services, none applied policies in favor of the working class and the poor . Hezbollah’s participation in government did not stop poverty, inequality and corruption. From July 2005 to November 2006, to cite just one example, Hezbollah’s Minister of Energy and Water, Muhammad Funayyish, carried through the privatisation of electricity in Lebanon (EdL).
Attitude towards movements
When protests broke out in Syria in 2011, followed by civil war -between the army and groups opposed to the regime of president Bashar al-Assad– Hezbollah sided with the Syrian government. It even sent in troops, a move for which it was widely criticised. In particular, former Hezbollah leader Sheikh Sobhi Tufaili stated: “Hezbollah should not be defending the criminal regime that kills its own people and that has never fired a shot in defense of the Palestinians.”
In the summer of 2015, when the popular movement You stink (over the garbage management crisis) erupted against Lebanon’s rotten system of governance, Nasrallah said that Hezbollah has a “neutral position towards the (“You Stink”) movement because we don’t know its leadership, its project and objectives.”
The mass revolt of 2019
On 17 October 2019, mass protests began in response to the increase in taxes on petrol, tobacco and telecommunications via the internet (especially the WhatsApp application, which is widely used in the country). In fact, it was the spark for a massive uprising against corruption, unemployment and the political system as a whole, that brought 2 million people (30% of the population) onto the streets and involved people from all religious groups in Lebanon.
How did Hezbollah -then part of the government- and Nasrallah react to the demonstrations?
In his first speech, Nasrallah accused the demonstrators of plunging the country into chaos and of acting like foreign agents. Then, although he spoke positively about some of the movement’s demands, he organised counter-rallies by Hezbollah supporters. Some of his supporters did not hesitate to violently attack the movement’s rallies.
Nasrallah openly supported the government and spoke out against the resignation of prime minister Hariri.
Divisive politics
The result of Hezbollah’s political choices has been the loss of part of the social support it previously enjoyed. This was reflected in opinion polls and in the 2022 elections, in which the Hezbollah alliance lost its parliamentary majority.
An Arab Barometer poll in early 2024 showed that only 30% of Lebanese people trust Hezbollah, while 55% say they do not trust it at all. The organisation is trusted by 85% of Shiites, but only 9% of Sunnis and Druze and 6% of Christians.
Lebanon is a multi-religious society. Muslims make up 67.8% (31.9% Sunni, 31.2% Shia, and smaller percentages of Alevities, etc.), Christians 32.4% (Maronite Catholics are the majority), Druze 4.5%, etc.
Hezbollah’s policy, as expressed in its two main programmatic documents (here and here), is to establish an Islamic regime under Sharia law, despite Lebanon being a multi-religious society.
It states that it does not want to impose the rule of Sharia law by force, but that other religious groups should accept it… voluntarily. Which, of course, will never happen. Ιf Hezbollah ever gains the power it needs, we should have no doubt that it will use violence to impose the Islamic rule for which it stands. In general, Hezbollah’s programme does not have progressive elements: it is in favour of alliances with all Arab regimes (however corrupt and oppressive they may be), in favour of “national unity” within Lebanon (i.e. between the country’s poor and the capitalists), and it wants Lebanon to have a strong army in order to play a “geopolitical role” – i.e. to be more powerful not only in the confrontation with Israel but also in the context of competition between the various Arab states in the region.
At the same time, its policy of “obliterating the state of Israel” and not recognising the right of Jews to have their own state in the region does play a role in pushing the entire Jewish population into the hands of the Israeli establishment.
How can there be a solution?
The latest developments with the Israeli terrorist attack and the assassination of Nasrallah obviously weaken Hezbollah’s position. And they show something that has been proven many times in previous history. Israel cannot be defeated by military means alone. Israel, with the support of the Western imperialists, has defeated the allied armies of the Arab states in several wars in the past decades.
Nevertheless, we will not find a trace of criticism of the character and political programme and practice of Hezbollah in most analyses of the Left (especially those coming from a Stalinist tradition but not only) today.
Of course, the resistance put up by Hezbollah, needs to be supported in the context of the confrontation with Israel. If Israel’s new campaign against Hezbollah fails as it did in 2006, this will be positive for the resistance movements in the region and for the international anti-imperialist movement. It is also necessary to support measures such as the social network of schools, hospitals etc. that Hezbollah has set up.
But this is quite different from unconditional support, from a complete lack of criticism of Hezbollah, as is so often the case with many left organisations. On the question of Hezbollah’s confrontation with Israel, it is necessary to know that the methods of struggle adopted by Hezbollah will not provide a solution to the Palestinian problem or to the other problems of the region (social, economic, national, cultural, etc.).
The heroic movements of the Middle East over all the past decades, in their struggle against oppression, poverty and imperialism need internationalist socialist ideas and mass revolutionary parties. Anything else, anything that tends to tail-end Islamists, ultimately leads to defeat, massacres and untold misery.
A simple reading of the history of the Iranian revolution, the hijacking of its working class, popular, anti-imperialist character by the Islamists and the massacre of worker leaders and activists as well as the Kurdish left guerrilla movement and members of the mass Communist Party of Iran, Tudeh, is very instructive.
The Left must learn from the mistakes of the past and not repeat them.
Support for the rights and struggles of a people does not necessarily mean support for the methods of struggle adopted by the leadership of such movements, especially when there is no internal democracy within them. The Left must offer its own class-internationalist analysis and perspective and not become the tail of conservative or socially reactionary forces in the name of anti-imperialism.
