Abstract
Aurélie Daher has written an informative and expansive account of the evolution of Hezbollah in Lebanon, focusing mainly on the relationship between the group and its popular base. The book’s primary goal is to highlight how Hezbollah has influenced and mobilized its base of support – the fundamental source of the group’s power – throughout its organizational development and at various military and political milestones.
The first three chapters of the book focus on Hezbollah’s origins and development. Appropriately, Daher begins her discussion in the early 1960s when the seeds of Shiite activism and empowerment were planted in Lebanon. Sometimes overlooked in contemporary analyses, an excellent discussion is provided of the close interpersonal ties between Hezbollah’s leadership forged in the religious seminaries of Najaf and Qom and the early divisions between Hezbollah networks in the Bekaa and southern Lebanon. Daher meticulously outlines Hezbollah’s coalescence from the plethora of different groups inside Lebanon during the civil war and highlights the extensive support from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). Chapters 2 and 3, meanwhile, examine Hezbollah’s development throughout the military conflict with Israel that commenced in 1982 and culminated with the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000. The group’s decision to enter politics in 1992 is noteworthy, as Daher asserts it was taken primarily to protect the interests of the party’s military force, the Islamic Resistance.
The true source of Hezbollah’s strength, however, is its popular base, and chapters 4–6 provide a stimulating account of Hezbollah’s vast social services network, the organizational structures of the group, and the charisma of current Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. Daher compellingly argues that Hezbollah uses its social welfare primarily to serve and promote the Islamic Resistance, which is ‘the true raison d’être for Hezbollah’s social action apparatus’ (p. 126), and not as a means to buy the support of the population. Its social services have allowed the group to cultivate a ‘rear support base’ and a ‘resistance society’ that the group nurtures.
The latter part of the book mostly discusses Hezbollah’s manoeuvring within the ‘perilous’ domestic environment between 2000 and 2015. Daher describes in painstaking detail how Hezbollah has fared within the dysfunctional Lebanese system, sporadically clashing violently with the rival ‘March 14’ coalition. She covers such events as the group’s response to the 2005 Cedar Revolution, which ousted Syria from Lebanon, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which accused Hezbollah of involvement in the killing of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri.
Daher also devotes an entire chapter to the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Here, she relies almost entirely on Lebanese newspaper articles and her firsthand experiences living in Baalbek at the time, barely utilizing any American, European, or Israeli academic studies in her account of the war. These might have provided a fuller and more impartial picture. She occasionally repeats Hezbollah’s party line, such as the dubious claim that Hezbollah’s surprise kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers on 12 July 2006 was merely used as a pretext by Israel to wage a preplanned war. It is clear from Israel’s publicly released post-war commission report, however, as well as dozens of academic studies on the war, that Israel was caught off guard by the Hezbollah ambush, was grossly underprepared for the 2006 war, had not adequately adopted or synthesized any coherent battle plans, and had not trained adequately for a war with Hezbollah.
The book as a whole, however, does rely on access to rare Lebanese sources, including some official Hezbollah publications, French-language materials, interviews with Hezbollah officials and party faithful. It is also peppered with the author’s personal reflections living in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley – a base of support for Hezbollah. As a whole, the book benefits from this rich array of sources.
The book does have sympathetic overtones towards Hezbollah, most apparent in the discussion of Lebanon’s domestic political scene and Daher’s attempt to downplay Hezbollah’s widely reported involvement in terrorism, such as the 1983 Marine Corps Barracks bombing, the 1994 AMIA Jewish centre bombing in Buenos Aries, and the suicide bombing of an Israeli tour bus in Burgas, Bulgaria in 2012 that resulted in the designation of Hezbollah’s militant wing as a terrorist organization by the European Union. That being said, one of the book’s goals is to convey how the group is perceived by its base, where these assertions are widely believed.
The book was originally published in French in 2014, and despite being newly translated in 2019, does not appear to have been updated since 2015, which means the discussion of Hezbollah’s military campaign in Syria is relatively limited. Further discussion of how Hezbollah’s popular base rationalizes its actions in Syria would have been a welcome addition in light of its strategic significance. Despite being overly sympathetic at times, this book offers a wealth of new information about Hezbollah and provides an extremely rich account of the group’s development organizationally, politically, and socially. The expansive, nearly encyclopaedic account of Hezbollah is an excellent addition for those who seek to understand the sources of Hezbollah’s popularity and its strength and endurance throughout its tumultuous history.