Hezbollah: A Short History (review)

Few scholars are as qualified to situate Hezbollah in local, regional, and socio-religious contexts as Augustus Richard Norton. A prescient observer of Lebanon for three decades, his Amal and the Shi`a (University of Texas Press, 1987), remains the best treatment of the rise of social and political activism within the long-neglected Shi`a community. While Amal still figures prominently, Hezbollah has in recent decades established itself as the dominant outlet for Shi`a power, galvanizing broad-based support for its militant resistance to Israeli occupation of the south, more recently its repulsion of Israel’s summer 2006 military onslaught.

The “Party of God” emerged out of a conjunction of the Lebanese civil war, which jolted the Shi`a community from ‘quiescence to activism’ (p. 14), the Iranian revolution, Israel’s long-term indirect and direct occupation, and the deployment of American troops, who were viewed by many Lebanese as a partisan force. Hezbollah, “less an organization than a cabal” (p. 34), arose out of shadowy relationship with Iran’s Islamic regime and retains credit for a series of deadly suicide onslaughts, culminating in the attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983. Labeled simply a “terrorist organization” in Washington, the picture on the ground has always been more complex. As Norton notes, Hezbollah may well have been merely accessory to some of these events. And while militant activism has been its primary calling card, like other movements that define themselves as liberation fronts, Hezbollah established deep roots in its community through social welfare networks and, ultimately, the ability of elected officials at the municipal and national level to successfully deliver goods and services, and retain an aura of incorruptibility. By the 1990s, Norton argues, “moral fervor began to give way to a more realistic sense of the possible” (p. 45).

This is a large topic that deserves more than the cursory “short” treatment that Norton has presented. A series of related essays, each concise and provocative, this is an excellent introduction for the novice. Norton presents a schema for re-considering the movement in the context of the broader rise of Shi`a political movements in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution through the debacle of the current Anglo-American war in Iraq. He provides a framework for understanding how both Shi`a and non-Shi`a Lebanese might at once applaud and look suspiciously upon Hezbollah’s broader social agenda. He clearly succeeds in taking us beyond “simplistic stereotypes” and “black and white world views” (p. 8), especially with regard to issues of militancy, terrorism, and the engagement with Israeli forces in South Lebanon. Yet Norton never really gets to core issues concerning the movement’s foundation, ideological formation, key figures, organizational structure, or political agenda. Clear on what Hezbollah is not, he never quite provides a clear sense of what it is and what it might yet become. The sections in which Norton situates himself on the ground as a keen observer of religious and political ritual cry out for thicker analysis. His accounts of the different ways in which the followers of Amal and Hezbollah enact public demonstrations of piety during Muharram, the month in which Shi`a mark the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, remind us that no sectarian community in Lebanon is monolithic; rather Lebanon remains a “stubbornly” pluralistic society with which Hezbollah, if it is to play a “constructive role” (pp. 157–59), will have to engage on behalf of a broader polity.