By Jeremy Dewar
On 27 September Israel dropped 10 US made and supplied two-tonne ‘bunker buster’ bombs on Dahyeh, a suburb in southern Beirut and home to 700,000 civilians, killing 300, including Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and the group’s southern commander Ali Karki.
This follows Israel’s attack on Hezbollah’s communications systems by blowing up its pagers and walkie-talkies, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. A few days later they successfully targeted veteran military leader Ibrahim Aqil, taking out 11 leaders of the elite Radwan Force with him.
We condemn these attacks on two fronts. First, the Israel Defence Forces deliberately targeted and killed civilians. In a bitter twist of irony the IDF was carrying out its infamous ‘Dahyeh doctrine’, named after its devastating destruction of the Shi’a suburb in 2006 and carried out to the letter during its year long genocide in Gaza. It says:
‘We will wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases… Every one of the Shiite villages is a military site, with headquarters, an intelligence centre, and a communications centre.’
Secondly we stand foursquare behind Hezbollah and all forces resisting the Zionist state, which is carrying out its deadly strikes in order to complete its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza – and the West Bank – unimpeded.
How will these setbacks affect Hezbollah, and behind it Iran? How are they likely to react? To answer these questions it is necessary to examine the policy of Hezbollah. In doing so we shall also show why socialists have to balance an unconditional right of the oppressed to defend themselves, with a revolutionary critique of the dead end strategy of the Islamist resistance to Israel.
Ideology and structure
Hezbollah was formed between 1982 and 1985 in the midst of a civil war and at the beginning of an 18-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, backed by US marines and other forces. This period also marks Israel’s expulsion of the PLO from Beirut and its fatal blows against the left nationalist forces, the Lebanese National Movement (led by the Progressive Socialist Party) and the Lebanese National Resistance Front (Communist Party).
Like Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah sought to replace the secular forces with an Islamic resistance movement. Its ideology was based on three intertwining objectives: spreading Islamic faith, practice and ultimately rule among the people, initially the Lebanese Shi’a but beyond its borders too; the delivery of social services, food, housing, education and medicine to the poor; and resisting anti-Muslim forces, primarily the US and Israel, but also their local allies, like the Maronite Christian Phalange.
The Party of God, as Hezbollah translates, issued its founding manifesto in 1985, Open Letter to the Downtrodden of Lebanon and the World, in which it called the Iranian revolution an inspiration and Ayatollah Khomeini the ‘single wise and just leader’. This marked it out from Hamas, not just because its base was Shi’a, not Sunni Muslim, but also in its service to Iran. For example, Hezbollah enforces strict observance of ‘Islamic’ dress codes and social instruction far more than Hamas. No wonder it is often referred to as Iran’s ‘golden child’.
This subservience is reflected in its leadership structures. The Shura Council, which coordinates the party’s overall strategy, and the Jihad Council, which commands its military operations, both contained members of Iran’s political leadership and of its Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) from the beginning.
Nevertheless, despite its organisational and ideological ties to Iran, Hezbollah — like the Houthis in Yemen — is a political party rooted in a section of Lebanese society, with its own social base and command structures, not simply an Iranian proxy. This may well mean that Hezbollah’s local operatives will be able to fight on in a limited capacity and scope even after the force’s ‘decapitation’. Indeed, Nasrallah himself became the party’s leader following the 1992 assassination of then secretary-general Abbas al-Musawi.
Rise and fall
The Taif agreement of 1990, which ended the 15-year long civil war, allowed Hezbollah to develop in two ways. First, Hezbollah was the only militia that was not disbanded. As a result, its armed wing grew larger and far stronger than the Lebanese army, thanks to Iran. In effect Hezbollah became the defence force for Lebanon.
Secondly, it allowed Hezbollah to stand in elections in a system which institutionalised a sectarian ‘power sharing’, with seats allocated according to religious affiliation, Sunni, Shi’a or Christian, and the government containing ministers from all faiths. Whereas the Christians dominated parliament before, the Shi’a parties were guaranteed 27 seats out of 128. Hezbollah generally holds at least two ministerial posts and its parliamentary bloc of 41 posts holds the plurality.
This rotten and corrupt system, which entrenches sectarianism, nevertheless has allowed Hezbollah to augment its welfare services through contracts and investment projects that provide jobs for the Shi’a workers – and profits for the Shi’a bourgeoisie.
The height of Hezbollah’s popularity came in 2006, when it pushed back Israel’s army after it again invaded southern Lebanon. Although not strictly a victory for Hezbollah, it was certainly a defeat for the IDF, which had hitherto been portrayed as invincible. Hezbollah’s prestige as the only force in the region that could kick back against Zionist expansion shone beyond the Lebanese borders. But soon the party found itself on the wrong side of popular protests.
However, its ascent was not to last, for several reasons. Its tutelage to Iran meant it had to do its bidding during the Syrian civil war, militarily backing the dictator Bashir al-Assad against the democratic revolution from 2012 onwards. This was deeply unpopular across the Middle East – remember, Hamas refused to back Assad and were expelled from Damascus as a result.
Then in October 2019 a mass movement erupted, initially over tax rises during an economic crisis (which lasts to this day), but very quickly turning into a political revolt against the clientelist political system and its inherent corruption. Hezbollah, a recipient of such ill-gotten gains, called on its supporters to withdraw from the streets and on the prime minister not to resign. It stands accused of killing several protesters. This ended the non-sectarian character of the 2019 revolution and was a major factor in its demise.
The people’s anger was further fuelled when a gas storage facility blew up in Beirut in 2020. Rumours spread that it was caused by a Hezbollah weapons dump. Whatever the truth, the party threw its weight against a public inquiry. By this stage Hezbollah had been embroiled in neoliberal attacks on public services and working conditions for many years.
The trajectory of Hezbollah, from defender of the ‘downtrodden and poor’ to promoter of a nascent Shi’a bourgeoisie, proves that radical Islamism is not as radical as it first appears.
Where next?
Hezbollah has undoubtedly been severely weakened in the past few weeks, on top of its already declining popularity. However, the ostensible cause of Israel’s attacks — the rocket fire which has forced tens of thousands of Israelis to be evacuated from the north — has been carried out with light anti-tank weapons and drones, with the advanced guided rockets largely held in reserve and beyond the range of a military incursion into the south of Lebanon.
As with Hamas, Israel will not be able to defeat or disarm Hezbollah without a massive military incursion and destruction of the civilian communities from which it draws its popular support.
But most of all its strategic ally Iran, which will now even more call the shots in Lebanon, is already sounding a note of caution. Hezbollah’s principal utility to Iran is twofold: firstly, holding a balance of power in Lebanon, maintaining the sectarian settlement is a transmission belt for Iranian influence. This will be lost if Hezbollah is seen to have acted against the country’s interests by drawing down an apocalyptic Israeli assault.
Secondly, its large arsenal of advanced rocketry serves primarily as a deterrent force to Israel, maintaining the possibility of a second front against Israel, tying up its forces, and providing Iran with an element of deniable response to Israeli aggression. Iran will have to carefully weigh in the balance its attitude towards Hezbollah’s actions in the days and weeks to come, even as it contends with the attitude of the new leadership that the theocracy will have to construct.
On the very day the pagers exploded, Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian put out a statement calling the Americans ‘our brothers’ three times and for an end to hostilities. Iran’s primary interest in deploying its proxies is to balance the power with its regional US backed rivals and to secure the end of US sanctions — not the ‘destruction of Israel’.
The political and economic problems Iran confronts at home, along with the military preponderance of Israel and the West, all explain why its military response to the Gaza war, whether directly or through its allies, has been calibrated to maintain the status quo.
Israel may not intend a wider war but if Hezbollah’s resistance persists it may need to invade up to the Litani river or beyond. As Benjamin Netanyahu warned a half empty UN, ‘There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach. And that’s true of the entire Middle East.’
The working classes of the Middle East, especially in Lebanon, must take these words seriously. While undoubtedly none of them want war with Israel, the continued existence of the Zionist state will be used time and again to police the whole region in defence of the imperialist order. Neither Iran nor the Arab states are prepared to confront Israel and the US; they are too afraid of their own working classes.
But it is precisely this class across the Middle East — the ‘downtrodden of Lebanon and the world’ — that can overthrow their bourgeois governments and parties, including Hezbollah, rally to the cause of Palestine and the destruction of the Zionist state, and establish a socialist federation of the Middle East.
Only the strategy of permanent revolution, linking the democratic struggle to the fight for socialism, can break up the Zionist bloc, opening up the road to a free Palestine from the river to the sea.
