Hezbollah

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

A Shiʿite Muslim political and military organization 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 and Hezbollahzation & Hezbollahization are nouns (both non-standard and used only in political science although, like balkanize etc, if use spreads they may become part of the vocabulary.

The Hezbollah

Although the Hezbollah began to coalesce in 1982-1983, after 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 Pope Benedict XVI (1927–2022; pope 2005-2013, pope emeritus 2013-2022).  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 and 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.

         

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 (at least 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 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.