The Arab world has had few heroes in the modern world that it can call its own. A dashing Gamal Abdel Nasser inspired a generation in the 1950s and 1960s with dreams of pan-Arab pride and dignity. But today the leading candidate for Arab hero is probably a plump religious scholar. This is not because of his religion, however. It is because he leads the only group in the Arab world that can claim a military victory against its historic enemy, Israel. Since the guerrillas of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s Hizbollah (”Party of God”) pushed Israel to withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon in May 2000, it has become an inspiration across the Middle East. Nasrallah’s picture appeared alongside that of Moqtada al-Sadr, the renegade Shia cleric who rebelled against US forces in Iraq last year. And Palestinian militants have adopted the suicide tactics that Hizbollah used against Israeli military targets (though the Palestinian suicide attacks have struck Israeli civilians, which Hizbollah’s did not).
The headquarters of Hizbollah in the Beirut suburb of Haret Hreik are in an inconspicuous building in a side street protected by two sets of gates. Past a metal detector at the entrance, I am escorted to a meeting room decorated with crystal chandeliers and patterned blue-and-yellow sofas. I sit down and wait as told, straightening the black scarf I have chosen to wear in deference to the man of religion. Only a few minutes later, he enters alone. With a heavy black beard, his eyes hidden behind thick glasses and his hair tucked behind a black turban, Nasrallah might look to some like the terrorist the Americans say he is. But he’s also charismatic in some respects, though he has a habit of fiddling with his turban as he talks. He speaks with a lisp and occasionally injects a touch of humour into his discourse, but he comes across more as politician than preacher.
Nasrallah embodies the two faces of Hizbollah: he terrifies and he fascinates. Despite his youth - he was only 32 when he took over the leadership of Hizbollah - he led the group through a war of attrition with Israel, at the same time deepening its political roots in Lebanon. And, along the way, he managed to carve out a measure of independence from his two main backers, Syria and Iran.
My visit took place before the most recent bout of the country’s interminable troubles began in February. I was there to talk about Nasrallah’s past, but above all about the party’s future. Tomorrow, the Lebanese will start voting in the first parliamentary elections free of meddling by Beirut’s bigger neighbour, Syria. This tiny Mediterranean country, associated with incomprehensible sectarian and religious divisions - almost the spiritual home of civil war, car bombings and hostage-taking - is being watched now by the rest of the world with more than a morbid curiosity. The massive protests for freedom from Syria’s grip that swept the streets of Beirut after the murder of the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February captured the interest of George W. Bush. His administration would like to hold up the elections (staggered over four Sundays) as an example of the success of its drive to democratise the Middle East.
The elections are supposed to be the start of a more hopeful future for Lebanon, one in which the US and Europe are looking for Hizbollah to put down its arms and promote itself as a political party, the other demand of a UN resolution sponsored by Washington and Paris that called first for Syria’s withdrawal. (Hizbollah has said it will remain armed until its conflict with Israel ends, and that includes resolving a dispute over a piece of land it claims Israel did not leave when it pulled out its troops in 2000. Its critics say this is a hollow pretext to hang on to its guns.)
Hizbollah is already the most organised party in the country. But Lebanon’s democracy has its limits: seats in parliament are divided among various sects, and Shia parties - Hizbollah is one of two main Shia groupings - are allocated only 27 seats in the 128-member parliament. Participating in the elections, on its own, can provide a measure of legitimacy to an organisation seen in Washington as terrorist. It shows that men who once carried guns and strapped explosives to their bodies can turn themselves into members of parliament. But these elections are also a new and more uncertain beginning because their sponsor and protector, Syria, has been sidelined. If indeed, after the election, the parties that have opposed Syria’s strangle-hold have a majority in parliament, Hizbollah will be forced to make the choice it has been avoiding: between peaceful political action and confrontation with a new, independent Lebanese government.
Could Hizbollah survive without its guerrillas? This is one of the main questions I put to Nasrallah. He looks at me and smiles. “We’re not people sitting around looking for a job. If you’re a doctor, you have to go to a hospital for a job, not to an architectural firm. But Hizbollah is not a job, it doesn’t lose its raison d’etre,” he says. “It’s a movement with a message and with objectives. So long as this requires sacrifices and giving from this group, then Hizbollah will continue.”
The existence of Hizbollah, which emerged with Iranian backing from radical Shia ranks to resist Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, is not based on the conflict with the enemy, he says. “Hizbollah is also a political party, which has its programme and its responsibility in the country. So it represents a popular movement. Outside the conflict with Israel, we have a big following and a presence in syndicates, media and student unions. And we’re concerned with everything that happens in the country.”
You would not know this if you relied only on what you saw. But this is Lebanon. The Beirut suburb of Haret Hreik, for instance, looks like any other lively Muslim neighbourhood, an odd mix of traditionalist culture and western influence. Its heaving streets are lined with toy stores, boutiques and electronic goods shops. Women hide behind long dresses, some shrouded from head to toe in black robes, but a few girls wear tight jeans, their hair flowing down their backs. It is in the side streets, such as the one I was visiting, that things look different. They are blocked off and manned by armed guards in military uniform. Beyond them, the noises fade and the bustle disappears.
This was once a mostly Christian neighbourhood. You can still find the old church a few blocks away from a new mosque. But over the past decade, it has metamorphosed into Hizbollah-land. Hizbollah militants - the only group permitted to carry weapons since the end of the civil war, on the grounds that they are fighting Israel, not the Lebanese - protect the political hierarchy and a vast empire that includes charities, a television station, hospitals and schools. Construction Jihad, a Hizbollah company, was created to rebuild houses destroyed by Israeli bombardments. There is also a Hizbollah-funded marriage service that helps newlyweds pay for weddings and buy furniture for their first apartments.
For nearly two decades, Hizbollah has thrived in this state within a state, controlling its own security and that of perhaps half a million people living in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Further south, near the border with Israel, it has an arsenal of missiles that can reach deep into Israeli territory. Its infrastructure and its policies have been protected by successive Lebanese governments, which have answered to their masters in Syria. It has received a steady flow of arms and money from Iran (they pass through Syria), seeking to export its radical Shia revolution.
The early days of Hizbollah are at the core of the party’s conflict with the US, which still holds it responsible for blowing up the US marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and later the US embassy, as well as the spate of brutal kidnappings of foreigners. More than 300 Americans died in those attacks, the first suicide bombings against US targets. This is why, long before September 11, Hizbollah topped the American terrorism list. Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, famously declared three years ago that Hizbollah may well be the A-team of international terrorism while al-Qaeda was actually the B-team.
Nasrallah says that, since the party had not been officially formed until 1985, it could not carry the blame for earlier violence. “That doesn’t mean that some Islamic groups or jihadi groups or young men who are religious did not do these acts - I don’t deny it. But it wasn’t part of Hizbollah’s group. They were independents. In fact, Hizbollah later knew some of these groups and played a very positive role with Iran and Syria to release the hostages and close this file. If there is any link to Hizbollah it is this. The US should have rewarded it.” The Americans believe the mastermind of the Lebanon attacks at the time - Imad Mughniyah - has remained a top Hizbollah operative, later put in charge of the so-called external terrorist arm of the movement. No one knows his whereabouts and no reliable photograph of him exists. But US intelligence suspects he was involved in the 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the bombing of a Jewish community centre there two years later (European diplomats are less certain).
To Nasrallah, this is all a figment of America’s imagination. While his speeches are peppered with excessive anti-American rhetoric - before the Iraq war, he warned that the US would be greeted with “rifles, blood, arms, martyrdom and martyrdom operations” - Hizbollah has not been involved in an attack against Americans since the early 1980s. “Not everyone whose policies we object to we must fight. But if someone attacks militarily or occupies us, of course we will fight and we will defend ourselves and our country, whether they’re Americans or others.”
That Nasrallah was willing to sacrifice his eldest son, Hadi, to military operations against Israeli troops lifted him to a near-sacred status within the party and encouraged young Shias to join Hizbollah’s ranks. Hadi died in September 1997 under Israeli mortar fire after his group ambushed a patrol in the occupied zone. The next day, Nasrallah surprised his own aides by going ahead with a planned speech, and said he considered the death of his son a worthy martyrdom. I ask him if he cried on that day. “We were in battle at the time, part of it is military, part of it is psychological, part of it is mediative. So you had to be strong. I did not want to shed a tear in front of my enemy. But when you’re alone with yourself or with your family, where the enemy does not see you, then you can give your emotions freedom. Otherwise you wouldn’t be human. This is what happened with me.”
Lebanon’s opposition has always treated Hizbollah with a mixture of apprehension and respect. Although many opposition leaders, particularly among the Christian community, can hardly wait to strip Hizbollah of its weapons, everyone’s emphasis today is on preventing a rekindling of sectarian conflict. So, at least in public, most of the opposition has been holding a rather friendly, reassuring discourse with Hizbollah. First, it called on Nasrallah to join them in their “intifada for independence”, telling his supporters that the fight against Syria was a new phase of the war of liberation that Hizbollah had started. More recently, it has been reassuring Nasrallah that the fate of his group was an internal affair, whatever the UN resolution might say.
Ghattas Khouri, a medical doctor and an MP in the Hariri bloc, says that once the land dispute with Israel is resolved, “the rest of the Lebanese population won’t accept a continuation of the resistance. Hizbollah had a successful resistance because all the Lebanese population supported them, including the Maronite [Christian] patriarch. If they deviate from the national consensus, they’ll be on their own.”
Hizbollah has remained ideologically tied to Tehran and its followers pay religious allegiance to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. But the movement has not blindly followed orders from Iran and Syria. It no longer has to. The vast majority of its estimated $1bn budget is said to be generated in Lebanon, partly through Hizbollah’s own business but, through an agreement with leading politicians, it has also been receiving a regular portion of the state telephone company’s revenues, possibly between $150m and $250m a year. An Islamic state remains, in theory, a Hizbollah goal (Nasrallah studied for three years in the Shia holy city of Najaf, in Iraq). But the ambition is rarely raised by Hizbollah officials in a country with large liberal and westernised sections of society and a sizeable Christian minority. MPs do not advocate that Lebanese women wear the veil, for example, knowing that it would be a lost cause. One Hizbollah official once suggested to me that its military actions tended to drop in the summer season so as not to disrupt the tourism from which other communities benefit.
Some politicians in Lebanon doubt that Hizbollah would be satisfied with only a political role in a country where parliamentary seats and government posts are divvied up according to a sectarian quota. One of the nagging questions that politicians have is whether an eventual Hizbollah disarmament would also mean the end of its support for Palestinian militants. No Hizbollah official would confirm that the Lebanese organisation is a vital backer to Palestinian groups such as Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Brigades. Nasrallah is adamant that Hizbollah’s fight does not extend beyond Lebanon. “We offered a model, a good model of resistance that respects its people and works with the government of its country... It’s possible Palestinians are using this model and so Americans come and say Hizbollah should take responsibility. But those fighting in Palestine are Palestinians and if there’s resistance in Iraq, it’s Iraqis.” Yet, when explosives ripped through a car carrying Hizbollah official Ghaleb Awali on a street in Haret Hreik more than a year ago, Nasrallah acknowledged, curiously, that Awali’s job was to assist the Palestinians. And, when I mention to Sheikh Naim Qassim, Hizbollah’s deputy head, that Israel says 74 per cent of operations are organised by Hizbollah, he tells me that Palestinians have enormous will and all they need is a bit of training and logistical support.
Nizar Hamza is a professor of political science who has has just published In the Path of Hizbollah. In his cluttered office at the American University of Beirut, he tells me the assumption that Hizbollah could not survive only as a political party with a purely Lebanese agenda is nonsense. “This party is so big with an institutional infrastructure, investments in the country. It has become self-sufficient and it wouldn’t collapse even if Iran collapsed.”
The more pertinent question, he says, is whether Hizbollah, as a party, would be acceptable to others, given the demographic trends in the country. It can only expand its constituency among Shia in Lebanon but they are already the largest minority, making up more than 30 per cent of the population. An average Shia household has eight to nine children, compared with four to five in Sunni Muslim families, and two to three in Christian families. What Hizbollah wants in return for disarmament is a guarantee that it can campaign peacefully for what will remain radical ideas, including opposition to normalisation with Israel.
The transformation of Hizbollah, in Hamza’s view, is a complex affair that drags in Iran, which would have to agree to an end to the resistance, and the US, which would have to turn the page on the past. But it is not only the Lebanese who have an incentive in a successful Hizbollah transition, Hamza says. It is also America. “The US is in need of co-opting the Shia in Lebanon as they did with the Shia in Iraq.” The more potent threat, after all, comes from the Sunni jihadis of al-Qaeda.
Roula Khalaf is the FT’s Middle East editor.
