Understanding Hezbollah

Ahmed Quraishi, 14 August 2006

BEIRUT, Lebanon—The Arab world’s most erotic pop singer, Haifa Wehbi, shares something personal with Hezbollah’s charismatic leader Hassan Nasrallah: the same roots. The two come from the same town in southern Lebanon. One more thing the two have in common: an equal level of fame across the Arab world.

Just walk into any Arab coffee shop or restaurant in Beirut, Amman or Abu Dhabi. You’ll find the Hezbollah chief and the erotic singer topping the list of favorites in politics and music.

This is just one in a series of ironies that mar the war between Israel and Hezbollah. It also reflects the dynamism and diversity of Lebanon’s Shiite community, the support base of Hezbollah’s war machine.

As a proud Pakistani, I must say here that I’m impressed at the level of harmony between Lebanese Muslims of Shiite and Sunni orientation. The 1975-1990 civil war has taught all the Lebanese that you can have differences, but you can also respect them and live with them. After the civil war, all Lebanese have developed a thick skin. You can’t say anything that would shock anyone anymore. People respect each other. The Maronite Christians of Lebanon, and the rich influential Sunnis of Beirut, may or may not disagree with Hezbollah’s action of kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and provoking a war that no one in Lebanon was prepared for. But, when they talk about this, they do it in a manner that is respectful of the Shiite militia. And they do it at their free will.

Here’s another irony: Not all Lebanese Shiites support Hezbollah. And yet Lebanon’s Shiites, the poorest segment of the four million Lebanese, have born the brunt of Israel’s war on Lebanon: Almost 900,000 of them are displaced, close to 900 dead, and thousands more are injured. Almost the entire Shiite population of Lebanon is displaced. The southern part of Lebanon is empty of its people. So is the southern part of Beirut, Hezbollah’s headquarters before the war. Israel’s message has been clear: even the moral support for Hezbollah has a price.

And despite all of that, not all Lebanese Shiites are anti-Israel or anti-Jew. Contrary to popular belief, there are scores of people in Hezbollah’s southern Lebanon stronghold who have no problem dealing with an Israeli state next door. When Israel withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah discovered that most, but not all, of the Lebanese collaborators with the Israeli occupation were local Shiite Lebanese. In other words, Israel found plenty of people from Hezbollah’s constituency to co-opt and work with.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this story is Bint Jbeil, the largest city of south Lebanon and a Hezbollah stronghold before the Israeli takeover. Out of 60,000 people living in this city before the war, almost half were American nationals moving between Lebanon and the United States.

This Shiite American constituency of Bint Jbeil was evacuated by the U.S. navy and air force in the early days of the war.

Another irony: the Shiites of Hezbollah and south Lebanon are generally not happy with the Shiites of Iraq. Iraq’s ruling elite, predominantly Shiite, is allied with the United States, Saudi Arabia and others. The Shiites of south Lebanon are allied with Iran and Syria.

Lebanon’s Shiites have been at the forefront of this tiny nation’s cultural revolution. They have been communists, leftists, liberals, Maoists, anarchists, nationalists, Islamic fundamentalists, and, now, Hezbollah activists and fighters.

Yussef Bazzi, a prominent Lebanese journalist working for Rafic Hariri’s newspaper, al-Mostaqbal, has stopped writing for his paper since the first week of the war. Why? Because he writes against Hezbollah. He is a Shiite coming from Bint Jbeil. This was enough for the militia’s media handlers to warn him to stop. And he did. My PTV team here has been trying to get him to come on camera and tell his story, to no avail.

In his last article on the war, Bazzi wrote, “Against our will, they have taken us to a war we never agreed to or authorized. No sooner had we freed ourselves from Syrian domination, that cycle of theft, depredation and the belief that Lebanon is a stage on which to play out regional conflicts – a P.O. Box for violent opportunists – than we are brutally yanked back into the ditch of Middle Eastern misery.”

At another place, Bazzi writes, “As long as an armed Lebanese group is following Syrian and Iranian orders, crossing the southern border and snatching Israeli soldiers, we have no protection under the international law.”

Another Shiite Lebanese intellectual, Ali Jaafar, who writes for the only English-language daily in Lebanon, the Daily Star, questions why Lebanon is alone fighting the wars of the Arabs and Muslims.

“What do many Arabs and Muslims want from tiny Lebanon?” writes Jaafar in the 5 August edition of Daily Star. Sarcastically, he adds, “Surely the Syrians, too, wish to taste the blood of martyrdom for the glory of Arab struggle. Surely our Arab brethren cannot be happy […] while they remain unscathed by as much as a flyby or a stray Israeli bullet.”

Jaafar is at his most cynical when he wonders why the hotel industry of Damascus is making money while Beirut’s nightlife and tourism industry stand destroyed.

Jihad El Zein is another prominent Lebanese journalist, writing a famous weekly column in Lebanon’s largest Arabic-language newspaper, Al-Nahar. He is also a Shiite.

Two weeks after the war, Zein wrote an open letter to Iran’s supreme commander Ali Khamenai. In the letter, the Lebanese Shiite journalist asked the Iranian leader why Iran was using – with devastating effect – Lebanon’s Shiite community as a fodder in Iran’s conflict with Israel and the West.

Such bold writings are becoming increasingly common in the Lebanese and the larger Arab media. But Lebanon’s unique experiment in peaceful religious coexistence is definitely worth looking at, since it provides a glimmer of hope for the larger Arab and Muslim worlds.

The writer was a PTV World correspondent in Beirut during the conflict. This report was first published by Pakistan’s The Nation daily newspaper.