Hezbollah

Hezbollah (pronounced hez-buh-lah or khes-bah-lah (Arabic))

A Shiʿite Muslim political and military organization (though genuinely with cross-denomination support), based in Lebanon but involved also in various regional operations.

1985: From the Persian hezbollah and the Arabic حِزْبُ اللّٰه‎ (ḥizbu llāh) (literally "Party of God"), the alternative spellings being Hizbullah, Hizballah & Hizb Allah, the construct being hezb (hizb) (party) + Allah (God); an adherent is styled a Hezbollahi although in Western commentaries that term seems to be applied more loosely.  Hezbollah is a proper noun.  Hezbollahzation & Hezbollahization are non-standard nouns used only in political science although, like balkanize etc, if use spreads they may enter general use.

The Hezbollah

Flag of the Hezbollah (right), the public display of which is banned in some jurisdictions where both the organization's political & military wings are listed as "terrorist organizations".  The national flag of Mozambique (left) also includes a depiction of a Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle although the Africans fixed a bayonet to the barrel which was a nice touch.  Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975 although the flag wasn’t officially adopted until 1983 as a modified version of what was essentially the battle flag of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front, the Marxist (later styled “democratic socialist”) resistance movement which fought a war of liberation (1964-1974) against the Portuguese colonial forces).

Although the Hezbollah began to coalesce in 1982-1983 (in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon), it wasn’t until 1985 it assumed the familiar structural arrangement with both military and political wings.  Unlike many organizations with similar pasts, although the personnel structures don't (wholly) overlap, the Hezbollah has never made any attempt to suggest there is any functional or philosophical separation between their political & military wings.  Despite that, during periods when regional tensions are more subdued, they do receive invitations usually restricted to the respectable and a Hezbollah delegation attended the coronation of Pope Benedict XVI (1927–2022; pope 2005-2013, pope emeritus 2013-2022).

Like the Hezbollah, Hamas, a militant Palestinian resistance movement also operates as an apparatus with military, political and administrative divisions but the distinctions are less defined than those of the Lebanese operation and the name of Hamas comes from a similar linguistic tradition.  Formed in 1987 after the outbreak of the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation, its roots lie in Muslim Brotherhood so, unlike the Hezbollah, it’s thus a Sunni group although the historical and theological differences haven’t prevented the two cooperating when the circumstances have appeared compelling.  The word Hamas is an acronym of the Arabic phrase حركة المقاومة الإسلامية (Ḥarakah al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah) (Islamic Resistance Movement), used originally as the initializsm HMS.  In 1988, when the The ميثاق حركة المقاومة الإسلامية حماس (Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement and better known in the West as the “Hamas Covenant” or “Hamas Charter”) was published, this was glossed by the adoption of the Arabic word (حماس) (hamās) (strength, zeal, bravery).

The very existence of the Hezbollah disturbs some but certainly not the structural-functionalists who note that for an institution to continue to exist, the niche it inhabits must remain.  Those whose fastidiousness in this & that lead them to suggest some alternative to Hezbollah would be preferable seem never to go into details and the reluctance is understandable.  There are many countries in which the substitution of one political party for another can be modelled and the implications pondered but it's scarcely possible to imagine Lebanese politics without the Hezbollah.  As far as can be foreseen, it seems something permanent and Lebanon has for decades been a troubled place, badly served by its elite; it is not going to become a liberal democratic state in the Nordic mode.  Just as the yakuza (the Japan-based transnational organized crime syndicates and usually in katakana as ヤクザ) deploy rapidly in the aftermath of disasters like the Kobe earthquake (1995) and the Fukushima “incident” (2011) to provide affected populations with food, shelter and medical aid, it was the Hezbollah’s well-resourced (compared with the Lebanese state) social welfare infrastructure which was mobilized to provide the first response after the explosion in the Port of Beirut (2020).

The Beirut Port explosion, 20 August 2020, viewed from the sea, showing the mushroom cloud and effect of the blast wave.  It was one of the most powerful non-nuclear, man-made explosions ever recorded.

Such comparisons are intriguing because the yakuza are an integral part of the Japanese nuclear industry and much money was paid to them by TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company which ran the Fukushima plant) to keep secret the existence of cracks in vital parts of the machinery.  Although much of the world seems to think the meltdown (TEPCO and the Japanese government preferred “incident”, a word with a long cultural tradition until the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) called a spade a spade) was something which “happened in 2011”, it’s an ongoing event and will be for the next 40-50 years because unless TEPCO continues to pump water into the “hot” reactor core, the meltdown will resume.  That water has to go somewhere and for those 40-50 years the plan is to continue to pump it into the Pacific Ocean; there is no immediate alternative.  The pumping project will likely demand increasing yakuza involvement because they are willing lucratively to be involved in projects others prefer to avoid.  Some allege the invaluable role fulfilled by the Hezbollah in responding to the explosion at the Port of Beirut in August 2020 has a similar quality of circularity because the triggering of some 2¾ tonnes of ammonium nitrate (an explosive equivalent in excess of 1 kiloton of TNT (similar to some small, tactical nuclear weapons)) because a Hezbollah weapons cache was held in the same facility.  No evidence has been produced to support that and most analysts believe the blast was the result of an enormous quantity of explosive being stored in a low security environment, welding work on the day said to have “lit the fuse”.  However, whether all will ever be known about the matter is unclear because the Hezbollah (and others with their own reasons) have managed to ensure investigations have been curtailed.

Lindsay Lohan's Instagram post of photographs taken while on holiday in Lebanon, June 2022. 

Hezbollah has been the name of various Islamic groups in the twentieth century, the first known reference in English being from 1960, describing an Indonesian guerilla battalion of 1945 that appears to have been either an off-shoot of or successor to Laskar Hizbullah, formed by the Japanese to give military training to young Muslims they had recruited to their cause (an aspect of which was the training to become a kamikaze (ie suicide bomber)).  Laskar Hizbullah was ostensibly national-wide but, unlike the Lebanese namesake, had little effective central organization and, given the circumstances of 1945, didn’t enjoy the ongoing support from Tokyo the Hezbollah has had from the ayatollahs in Tehran.  It was militarily ineffective but its idea (if not the actual structures) carried over to post-war anti-colonial forces and (debatably) the communist movement which in the mid-1960s the Indonesian government suppressed, the death-toll of that claimed to be close to half-a-million.