In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r t h r e e The Lebanese Hezbollah Armed Struggle and Political integration Hezbollah (the Party of God) is a Shia Lebanese organization composed of a military branch, sociocultural institutions, and a political party. this group was chosen as a case study because of its critical dimension, its high-profile nature, and its cultural uniqueness. Hezbollah, a highly institutionalized organization with a powerful and sophisticated political wing, also represents a “least likely” case to test the validity of the cyclical development model and the hypotheses on political wing formation. the group was also selected because of its relevance: Assessing Hezbollah ’s political development process has real-world policy implications, because the international community has been split over whether the group should be classified as a terrorist organization or a political party. At the one end of the spectrum, some have labeled the Lebanese group a terrorist organization because of its involvement in both domestic and international attacks, including two deadly operations against the israeli embassy and the Asociación Mutual israelita Argentina, the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in 1992 and 1994, respectively.1 Canada, israel, the netherlands, and the United States are the only Western nations currently labeling Hezbollah as a terrorist group.2 in the United States, Hezbollah has been classified as a terrorist organization since 1995. it was designated by the US State department as a Foreign terrorist Organization in 1997;3 with the additional designation Specially designated Global terrorist, given in October 2001, further underscoring the American government’s belief that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization with a global network and reach.4 in the aftermath of September 11, deputy Secretary of State richard Armitage captured this perspective by declaring that “Hezbollah may be the A team of terrorists,” while “Al Qaeda is actually the B team.”5 At the other end of the spectrum, other countries, like Australia, have considered Hezbollah’s “external security apparatus” to be entities separate from the political wing of the organization, a position that enables them to relate to the group as a The Lebanese Hezbollah  legitimate political party. the european Union has, to date, also not classified the organization as a terrorist entity, although several individual members of the group have been placed on the european terrorist list.6 Several individual european countries have been reluctant to designate Hezbollah. For example, the United Kingdom has proscribed Hezbollah’s armed militia since 2003 but views its political wing as a legitimate political interlocutor.7 A fundamental problem with both of these approaches is their reliance on a binary classification system—“political organization” or “terrorist group.” As the next sections extensively illustrate, no definition of the organization that relies on these dichotomous terms can grasp Hezbollah’s more complex organizational reality and accurately account for its development process. Background Origins and Early History According to the received history of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia movement was founded around 1982 to respond to the israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. However , the birth of this organization must be understood in the broader context of the rise and politicization of the Lebanese Shia community and in its ongoing postindependence struggle to achieve greater political participation and power. the Shia community has been a religious minority within Lebanon since Shiism first was established in the area in the tenth and eleventh centuries as a result of the expansion of the egypt-based Fatimid empire. the history of the Lebanese Shia, like the history of Shia islam in general, is one of persecution and marginalization: As early as the thirteenth century, during the Mamluk conquest, this community found itself persecuted and driven into the south of the country, and the later Ottoman occupation led to no dramatic improvements.8 during the centuries of Ottoman rule (sixteenth to twentieth centuries), the Shia community saw the rise of a small number of political bosses (the zaims); building on their extensive ownership of land and on their Ottoman-based concessions to collect taxes, they became the de facto rulers of their community.9 As a result, the Lebanese Shia lived for centuries in a quasi-feudal and clientelist system, kept largely dependent on the zaims, deprived of individual power, and alienated from the other sectarian communities. it is not surprising that, when the Ottoman empire collapsed in the aftermath of World War i and France took over the administration of the area corresponding to modern Lebanon and Syria, the Shia community was...

Share