A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah's Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel

By Thanassis Cambanis

While Hamas and Al Qaeda are certainly dangerous to Israel and the West, Hezbollah and its millions of foot soldiers are the premier force in the Middle East.

Veteran Middle East correspondent Thanassis Cambanis offers the first detailed look at the surprising cross section of people willing to die for Hezbollah and its uncompromising agenda to remake the map of the region and destroy Israel.

Part standing army, part political party, and part theological movement, Hezbollah is made up not just of unemployed young men but also middle-class engineers, merchants, even nurses. Hezbollah’s widespread popularity rests on its ability to offer its followers economic reform, affordable health care, dependable electricity, efficient courts, and safe streets, as well as victory over Israel. Also unique to the party is its powerful doctrine of self-improvement, which challenges its members to fight ignorance, make money, and engage in safe sex. Millions of demoralized Middle Easterners have gravitated toward these principles, swelling the ranks of what is at heart a radical, militant group. They span economic class, include both fanatics and casual believers, and are sworn to the apocalyptic beliefs of the "Party of God." With its promise of perpetual war, Hezbollah has ushered in a militant renaissance and inspired fighters in Gaza, the West Bank, Egypt, Iraq, and beyond. Whatever their differences, their hatred of Israel and the United States binds them together.

To understand Hezbollah is to understand the fighters and engineers, the women who raise the martyrs, the scouts who plant trees, and the nine-year-old girls who take the veil over the objections of their less militant fathers. Cambanis follows a few Hezbollah families through the ups and downs of the 2006 war with Israel and the continuing preparations for another conflict, letting us listen in to Hezbollah members’ intimate discussions at the kitchen table and on the battlefield. Cambanis’s reporting puts a human face on the Party of God, so we might understand the ideological and religious roots of today’s conflict. His riveting narrative provides an urgent and important exploration of militancy in the Middle East.

Praise for

A PRIVILEGE TO DIE

• Language: English
• Publisher: Free Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2010
• ISBN: 9781439150061

Thanassis Cambanis

Thanassis Cambanis is a journalist who has been writing about the Middle East for more than a decade. His first book, A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel, was published in 2010. He writes “The Internationalist” column for The Boston Globe and is a correspondent for The Atlantic. Thanassis regularly contributes to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and other publications. He is a fellow at The Century Foundation in New York City. Thanassis lives in Beirut, Lebanon, with his wife, Anne Barnard, a reporter for The New York Times, and their two children.

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PROLOGUE

In the waning days of Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon, I was reporting from the front lines trying to understand the motives of Hezbollah’s fighters and loyalists. At the beginning of August, Israel warned that it would consider any car south of the Litani River a military target. I abandoned the free-fire zone of South Lebanon for the relative safety of Beirut. At a slight remove from the rocket whistles and bomb thuds—Israeli bombardment still shook the Lebanese capital several times a day—the big questions raised by the conflagration came into focus. Israel and Hezbollah had fought many times before. But Hezbollah had now advanced a new idea whose destabilizing implications would persist long after this current conflict. Hezbollah had put back into popular currency a notion that had lain in tatters since 1967: that Arab forces could do more than terrorize or harass Israel—they could defeat and destroy it. In August 2006, even as much of Lebanon lay in ruins, no one could stop talking about Hezbollah’s ascendance: refugees and their hosts, politicians and their constituents, government officials, party activists, and Western diplomats.

Hezbollah’s conviction terrified some and galvanized others, but it had transformed the debate in the Middle East. Now, in 2006, the Party of God thought it could prove its position on the battlefield, provoking a war with Israel and promising to weather the storm. The war unleashed a torrent of street-level support for Hezbollah across the region that surprised Arab moderates and extremists alike. In Beirut in August 2006, even as the battle unfolded another struggle already was taking shape over the meaning of the war, a narrative with high stakes: who had won and why, who was a traitor and who honorable, and would the Arabs ever give up fighting Israel? Who knew the route to victory? The Axis of Accommodation, the compromise-seeking governments and movements that wished to avoid war? Or the Axis of Islamic Resistance, which believed the only principled stance was a fight for total victory? Much pivoted on the outcome of the 2006 war. The front of bellicose Islamism finally had a test for its confrontational approach. Its failure would strengthen forces of pragmatic realism across the Middle East; its success would embolden religious maximalists.

Late one afternoon after a long day of political interviews during the war’s last weekend, I went to one of the few restaurants still open in Hamra, the normally hopping commercial drag in West Beirut. It was at the very end of the street, a fast-food joint that offered a decent narghileh, or water pipe. I sat facing the road, halfheartedly scribbling in a notebook, trying to make sense of everything I’d seen and heard. When my water pipe came, I put my writing tools away and pulled on the hose with long thirsty breaths, until my head was enveloped in sweet apple and honey scented smoke, and soothing nicotine surged into my blood. A chunky man at the next table started talking to me in American-accented English. He was Lebanese, a religious Shiite who had taken refuge in this secular Sunni neighborhood. He was twenty-eight, and his name was Ayman. He had two young daughters, and was a great admirer of Hezbollah. I’m sick of all these other assholes, he said. He ticked off the rest of the country’s political movements and dismissed them one by one; they had no respect for the common people, no courage to fight Israel, and no sense of responsibility toward the country’s finances. The current prime minister was an embarrassment, a weakling who wept in public. Other than Hezbollah, whose probity and competence Ayman admired, he bemoaned the remaining parties as corrupt or incompetent.

The government doesn’t give a shit about the people, he said with genuine amazement, as if Lebanon’s ruling class had it in for him personally. They’re crying because of the money they lost. They’re probably already planning how much they’re going to steal when the rebuilding starts after the war.

Ayman wanted to know what I’d seen in the South. Did you ever have the chance to talk to a Hezbollah fighter? he said. I told him about my encounters along the front, including a day in the frontier village of Bint Jbail with two fighters. You’re really lucky, he said. Most of us Lebanese never get to meet a real fighter, at least that we know of. He had grown up in the United States, he said, but was happy that fortune had allowed him to raise his children in an environment of Islamic Resistance. He spoke elliptically and withheld details like his family name or where in the South he lived. I assumed he was either wary since I was a foreigner or cautious because he had links to Hezbollah. We were both exhausted, and eventually lapsed into silence, drawing at our narghilehs and watching the evening light bounce through the thick smoke. Good luck, he said when I left. Make sure to tell the truth.

PART I

THE BATTLE

Crying brings sadness to a country, blood brings strength. God willing, our operation for Shebaa will continue. We will keep fighting to liberate our land. The day will come for the Israelis, you must have faith. Their day will come.

SAMIRA SHARAFEDEEN, after burying her three cousins who were Hezbollah fighters, in Taibe, Lebanon, August 21, 2006

As far as I’m concerned, the war ends when there’s nothing left of Israel. After we all die, that’s when Hezbollah is gone. When you kill the Shia, that is when Hezbollah is gone.

ALI SIRHAN, a volunteer fighter for the Islamic Resistance, standing a few hundred feet from Israel in the Lebanese border village of Kfar Kila, August 21, 2006

1

THE PARTY OF GOD

Hezbollah has captivated the Arab world with a radical new belief, decisively changing an entire region’s dynamics and paving the path to a long series of wars. Put simply, Hezbollah has convinced legions of common men and women that Israel can be defeated and destroyed—and not just in the distant future, but soon. With more success than any other Islamist group, Hezbollah has harnessed modern politics and warfare to mobilize millions of dedicated supporters and soft sympathizers under its banner of resistance against Israel. Theirs is not a quixotic quest for dignity, a symbolic but doomed fight for the sake of empowerment; Hezbollah’s militancy has had concrete consequences for Israel and has unleashed a new Islamist wave. Hezbollah has achieved military success in nearly three decades of guerilla war against Israel, first expelling the Israel Defense Forces from the security zone it occupied in South Lebanon for nearly two decades, and then frustrating Israel’s objectives in the war it fought against Hezbollah in 2006. Now Hezbollah, the Party of God, has the Islamic world’s ear, and is spreading a gospel of perpetual war. Hezbollah is persuading a growing swath of Arab society to follow its example: militarize fully and confront the enemy at every opportunity. An even greater number has added its moral approval. In 2006, Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and provoked a war that left Lebanon physically in shambles. But Hezbollah emerged elated. It had held out against Israel longer than any Arab army ever had. Its militia had thwarted Israel’s land advance, and the Jewish state failed to reach any of its declared war aims—the release of its captured soldiers, stopping Hezbollah from firing rockets, and dismantling Hezbollah’s militia along the border. Hezbollah moved from the backbenches to the center of power within the Lebanese government. And Hezbollah’s rise thwarted the United States’ carefully laid plans for a friendly, secular, liberal Lebanon securely at peace with Israel. Today Hezbollah preaches humility to its followers while acting anything but humble to expand its power and influence across the Islamic world.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general and charismatic supreme leader of Hezbollah, commands more popularity in the Middle East than any other leader.¹

Unusual among the region’s militants, he has frequently shown restraint and political savvy, but Nasrallah has encountered his greatest political success through confrontation. Speaking in November 2009 on the annual holiday that commemorates the martyrs of the Islamic Resistance, Nasrallah sounded like he was spoiling for another war with Israel:

I say we are ready. Here I vow again before the souls of the martyrs, which are alive and present, saying: O Barak, Ashkenazi, Netanyahu and Obama!²

Let the whole world listen. Send as many squads as you want: five, seven or the whole Israeli army. We will destroy them in our hills, valleys and mountains.

Well into another millennium, Nasrallah and Hezbollah have woven a new reality for their followers, built on ideology, identity, faith, and practice. Hezbollah has delivered tangible social gains for its followers, like the $400 million reconstruction of southern Beirut to be completed in 2010, replacing refugee slums with gleaming glass residential towers that resemble luxury hotels. It has won tactical military victories against Israel, unlike the other Middle Eastern regimes that ineffectually rail against the Jewish state. As a growing movement with transnational appeal, Hezbollah has broken the crusty traditions of Arab politics to craft a big-tent party platform that speaks to people’s mundane aspirations: economic reform, affordable health care, round-the-clock electricity, efficient courts, and community policing. Most important of all, however, Hezbollah has shifted the norms of Middle Eastern politics with its fast-spreading ideology of perpetual war.

The Party of God’s new world is most vividly on display in the living rooms of its rank-and-file partisans, where Hezbollah’s bourgeoisie explain their devotion to a movement that organizes their daily lives and ideology, and which every decade or so leads them into a catastrophic war. The first time I visited the village of Aita Shaab, at the close of the war in 2006, virtually every structure bore the marks of Israeli mortars. It was from this heavily militarized border village that Hezbollah had launched its raid into Israel in July of that year, initiating the most recent war. It was here that Hezbollah guerillas had laid a second ambush, destroying the first Israeli tank that crossed the border into Lebanon. House-to-house fighting had reduced much of the village to rubble.

At the edge of the village closest to the frontier, I met a pair of local Hezbollah officials, surveying the wreckage of the war from a hilltop that looked like a rock quarry but which had recently been a crowded neighborhood. One of them, a man named Faris Jamil, told me how the local villagers had instantly mustered when war broke out and compared them to the National Guard. The doomsday destruction, he said, wouldn’t deter committed Hezbollah supporters; they felt they had won, and the loss of their homes would amount to no more than a temporary inconvenience. I found it hard to imagine that Aita Shaab would ever function like a normal town again; I thought of other war zones where even decades after the last clashes fallen buildings still marred the landscape and makeshift roads wound like goat paths around the detritus of uncleared bombing grounds.

In January 2009 I returned to Aita Shaab to find out how the villagers—still in the process of rebuilding—felt about future conflict. War was raging not far away in Gaza, between Hamas and Israel, and many Hezbollah activists were urging the Lebanese Party of God to attack in support of their Islamist allies in Gaza. To my surprise, the drive was an hour shorter than it had been before the war, because of a network of gently graded and freshly paved roads paid for by the government of Iran. The village was unrecognizable, bustling with construction crews, packed stores, and new villas. The ruined bluff where I first had met Faris Jamil was once again a crammed neighborhood, with two houses on lots meant for one.

Now 52, Faris was still living in the unfinished basement of his almost fully rebuilt family home. He was well off, and before the war had lived in a pleasant two story house on a hill. He had rebuilt it one notch better, as a mansion, three stories tall, with marble columns and hand-carved floral accents above the windows. This too he saw as a form of resistance. Israel wanted Hezbollah to leave the border villages, so it was the duty of patriots of the Islamic Resistance to stay—if possible, in style. Aita Shaab’s full-time population had expanded since 2006; Faris Jamil implied that Hezbollah had subsidized the boom with payments to families willing to relocate from Beirut. We want peace. We don’t want to suffer another war, he said. But we must have our plans in place. Last time there was a war, only a few hundred people stayed here. Next time, we want thousands to stay. We will send the children to Beirut, since they can do nothing. All the men must stay, along with some women to cook and support them.

Faris had lived in Manhattan for years and for a time had worked for a Jewish man who dealt wholesale in fabric. He remembered his boss fondly. He was unusual in that during his long complaints against Israel he didn’t slip into ranting about Jews. He wasn’t itching for war, but he was planning for it. As a businessman he had trained himself to anticipate the future, and in his opinion two things were guaranteed: Hezbollah would run his world, and Hezbollah and Israel would keep fighting wars. Neither eventuality upset him. Our life is hard, and that is mainly because Israel refuses to let us live like a normal country, Faris said. There are some people who want peace at any cost in their life, but we feel that in life you have to have respect. Without respect, it’s not a life.

His main preoccupations were his house and the businesses he had established for his sons, including a restaurant and an internet café. His quotidian struggles were material, and yet to Faris they did not contradict his complete submission to the higher aim of the Islamic Resistance. He was not a violent man, nor was he an impulsive hothead. But he willingly and calmly served a movement whose commitment to armed struggle guaranteed that his world and livelihood would be blasted apart every few years. Like Ayman, the young man I had met smoking the water pipe in Beirut, Faris Jamil had voluntarily relocated from a prosperous merchant’s life in America to the borderlands of South Lebanon, choosing near-certain war over prosperity. New York, in his view, was a dangerous place to raise kids, riddled with gangs, drugs, and other temptations. Better to relocate his young family to the cradle of Islamic Resistance, a place where their spirits could thrive, and any violence they encountered would be part of a meaningful, epochal battle. He was not rare in choosing the battleground of south Lebanon over a career in the United States; I met a half-dozen families that followed the same trajectory. They always explained their decision to return as a result of contemplating what would become of their children in America’s public schools. In Aita Shaab, Faris pursued daily dreams quite similar to those that animated him when he worked at 37th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Yet he was happy to let his commercial livelihood go up in smoke, literally, when Hezbollah deemed it time for another war with Israel. Life is for more than to make money, Faris said. We will continue, and if we make peace, it will be through power.

Hezbollah has inculcated millions—including many beyond Lebanon’s borders—into its ideology of Islamic Resistance, which is coupled to an unusually effective operational program. That recipe has put Hezbollah in the pilot’s seat in the Middle East, steering the region into a thicket of wars to come. And it has made Hezbollah dangerous not only in the short term, as a military threat to Israel and to the pragmatic, compromise-seeking Arabs in its neighborhood, but over the long term as the progenitor of an infectious ideology of violent confrontation against Israel and the United States, vilified in the region as the ultimate backer of the Jewish State.

During six years of reporting in the Middle East I encountered no popular movement that rivaled Hezbollah as a militia or an ideological force. In Lebanon I met men and women prepared to die, or sacrifice their children, for Hezbollah’s program, but they defied the mold of dreary desperation that characterized other would-be martyrs. Educated middle-class types populated Hezbollah’s legions, professionals with alternatives and aspirations, who lived multidimensional lives not much different from those of my friends in America. They were engineers, teachers, merchants, landlords, drivers, construction workers; they had jobs and children. They weren’t broken, miserable people, turning to Hezbollah out of hopelessness; they were willing actors who had come to embrace Hezbollah’s view of the world, a heady mix of religion, self-improvement, and self-defense that translated into a sustained surge of toxic and powerful militancy. I met mothers who grieved their dead children but encouraged their surviving brood to join Hezbollah’s militia; they projected the confidence of patriots, rather than the fanaticism of a death-cult. They radiated a victor’s confidence I rarely encountered among Palestinian militants. These Hezbollah mothers sounded proud and sad, but never unhinged or cornered. Hezbollah’s followers were as notable for their discipline and restraint as for their willingness to die.

Hezbollah coalesced in the crucible of Israeli occupation. Israel occupied about one-tenth of Lebanon’s territory from 1982 to 2000, a strip of south Lebanon that Israel euphemistically termed the security zone. The first generation of Hezbollah fighters came of age during two decades of guerilla war against Israel. When Israel quit the occupied area under fire from Hezbollah in May 2000, it left behind thousands of collaborators, including men who had beaten and tortured Hezbollah fighters on behalf of the Israelis. Hezbollah’s rivals expected a raft of vigilante executions, but Nasrallah ordered his followers to keep their hands off all collaborators, leaving their judgment to Lebanese courts. This decision shocked everyone. I met Hezbollah fighters who recalled years later how they had wanted to take revenge, but instead had cordoned off the collaborator villages and protected their erstwhile tormentors from harm—an act less of mercy than of political calculation, which eased the fears of some opponents and ultimately gained Hezbollah more power than it ever before had possessed.

Nasrallah’s personal charisma has played a major role in Hezbollah’s rise. He has run the party since 1992, steadily consolidating the fidelity of its inner ranks while expanding Hezbollah’s reach among soft supporters. A pudgy man with a handsome mouth, a mellifluous voice, and the black turban that signals direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed, Nasrallah has matured along with the Islamist Party that he took over almost two decades ago when he was only thirty-one years old. His speeches alternate between humor and invective; between steady exposition of Arab politics and appeals to gut anger; between systematic analyses of Israeli policy, and racist hatred of Jews.

Under Nasrallah’s leadership, Hezbollah steadily has expanded its number of followers and its share of political power, in large part because the Party of God is just as happy to use the tools of coercion as of persuasion. Within its primary target constituency of Lebanese Shia, Hezbollah ruthlessly quashes any serious threat to its monopoly on force and power. Hezbollah has thwarted any attempt to organize alternative Shia parties, either religious or secular. It has crushed individuals who publicly question Hezbollah’s militant approach. The party tolerates free speech and political dissent only from weak actors, to forge the impression of openness. Hezbollah accepts only one other Shia political party, the Amal Movement, which has long been subsumed into Hezbollah’s ambit as a junior partner. Those who dare challenge Hezbollah’s policies or bona fides face the withering power of the party to ostracize and economically marginalize them. Those suspected of plotting against Hezbollah might disappear or end up imprisoned and charged with treason or espionage on behalf of the Israelis. Hezbollah’s constituency and its skeptical neighbors know that the hand extended in invitation easily turns into a fist. But Hezbollah has convinced many audiences to overlook its brutal side as an unavoidable consequence of war, highlighting instead the party’s humanitarian wing and ideas-based agenda. So long as Hezbollah is perceived to be defending the Arab world against Israel, it can put its Arab critics on the defensive.

Hezbollah’s ideology might seem incoherent were it not so successful; but the Party of God has been able to market its ideas effectively because success sells. Perpetual war has perpetuated the movement; Islamic Resistance has brought power to its adherents; and Hezbollah’s web of embedded institutions, including courts, schools, militias, and hospitals, has dramatically raised its community’s standard of living. Faris Jamil truly believes in the war against Israel, but Hezbollah buttresses that abiding belief with the formidable material resources it spends to rebuild its communities after each war. So long as it continues to deliver, Hezbollah’s number of followers continues to grow.

Roughly put, Hezbollah teaches a sort of Islamist prosperity agenda, a doctrine of militant empowerment. People must live with dignity, and that means taking the offensive on every level: against Israel, the regional military bugbear; against poverty; against immorality; and against ignorance. Power is the antidote to powerlessness, Hezbollah counsels. It’s a compelling gospel of self-improvement, and it easily translates into specific prescriptions for demoralized Middle Easterners, especially members of the long-downtrodden Shia sect of Islam. Hezbollah lectures about everything from safe sex and hygiene to family responsibilities and financial planning. Individual power, in the party’s ideology, stems from the ummah, or community. The more powerful the ummah, the stronger its members. Hundreds of thousands have joined Hezbollah’s community, freely volunteering their time or donating their money to the Party of God, adopting its militia and bureaucracy as an extension of their own families. Millions more extend their sympathy and political support to the Islamic Resistance.

The holy struggle against Israel weaves together these manifold ideological strands. Anger toward Israel unifies Hezbollah’s followers in the face of internal contradictions that might otherwise unravel the movement. An almost primal and simple dictum informs and at times dwarfs all else for Hezbollah’s community: Resistance. It is difficult to contain a militant movement that includes not only fully indoctrinated Shia Islamists but soft sympathizers lured by identity politics and held in place by Hezbollah’s impressive network of social services. When it proves too daunting to hold this coalition together with Islamist teachings, Hezbollah can always invoke its trump card—the War Against Israel. Many people across the region dislike Hezbollah but loathe Israel’s policies even more. And for many of Hezbollah’s followers, Israel’s very existence amounts to a casus belli.

Nasrallah regularly reminds his millions of listeners across the Arab world that Hezbollah and its allies—the Axis of Resistance—have wrung more concessions from Israel by force than the pro-Western Axis of Accommodation has won through decades of negotiation. As Nasrallah said in his November 2009 Martyrs Day speech:

Eighteen years of [Palestinian] negotiations resulted in failure, frustration, forfeiture, humiliation and the persistence of occupation. On the other hand, eighteen years of resistance in Lebanon [from 1982 to 2000] led to the liberation of Beirut, the Southern Suburbs, Mount Lebanon, Beqaa and the South from the Zionist occupation and the restoration of our dignity and esteem without anyone in the world begrudging us that…. God willing with our resistance, unity, cooperation and firmness and the moral blessings of the blood of martyrs, we will turn any threat into an opportunity.

Hezbollah’s followers have embraced the notion that it’s better to fight and die with dignity than live comfortably without it. They scorn the pacific Arab governments that support coexistence with Israel.

In taking the leadership of the region’s militant renaissance, Hezbollah has capitalized on diffuse anger about Israel’s policies toward Gaza and in the West Bank, including the growth of settlements. The failure of the Palestinian Authority to reach a settlement with Israel nearly twenty years after signing the Oslo Accords has weakened advocates of compromise while strengthening Hezbollah’s resistance camp. But Hezbollah also draws on a deep well of hatred of Jews, knowingly and cleverly intertwining it with the bubbling vein of anger at Israeli policy. Still sensitive to international opinion, Hezbollah leaders speak pointedly about Israeli, rather than Jewish, policies in their speeches. Ever since an infamous speech in May 1998, Nasrallah has avoided anti-Semitic invective. On that occasion, he mourned the historic catastrophe and tragic event of the founding of the state of the Zionist Jews, the descendants of apes and pigs. Since then, Nasrallah’s rhetoric has been more measured; he has carefully observed that Hezbollah’s complaint is against Zionist policy, and not Jews in general or the Jewish religion. Whether sincerely or not, the party has excised hatred of Jews from its official doctrine. In November 2009, Nasrallah unveiled Hezbollah’s new official manifesto, its first update since the Open Letter released in 1985. Our problem with them is not that they are Jews, Nasrallah said, reading from a document that had been debated for months by the party’s leaders. Our problem with them is that they are occupiers who have usurped our land and sacred places. The Hezbollah leader went out of his way to call the Jewish State by its name, Israel, in addition to making the usual references to the Zionist entity.

Throughout the Arab world, many people use the words Israeli and Jew interchangeably when discussing the Middle East conflict. In the modern Middle East, racist attitudes thrive even among populations that coexist peacefully, including Arabs and Jews living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders and between the region’s sometimes violently opposed sects and ethnicities (Kurds, Turkomen, Armenians, and Arabs; Shia and Sunni; Christians and Muslims). Many Hezbollah supporters I met professed to harbor no malice toward Jews, only toward the specific Israelis who had wronged them. But when they grew comfortable, some of them would lapse into racist generalities or even virulent anti-Semitism, a disturbing ambiguity that tainted Hezbollah.

Although Hezbollah’s undercurrent of anti-Semitism prompts much distrust in Israel and the West, the Party of God if anything is less vitriolic in its expressions of anti-Semitism than other Middle Eastern movements. In fact, many of the most stalwart advocates of peace with Israel, like some Lebanese Christians, paradoxically hold the most racist attitudes. Hassan Nasrallah’s party has attracted supporters and swelled into an unmistakable strategic threat because of its uncompromising and violent opposition to any peaceful negotiating process. Anti-Semitism doesn’t distinguish Hezbollah. Hezbollah is committed in deed, not just in word, to destroying the Jewish state of Israel—a position that is far more cause for alarm than the racist beliefs held by some party loyalists. Hezbollah’s updated manifesto declares Israel an unnatural creation that is not viable and cannot continue to survive. Hezbollah deems it every Muslim’s duty to fight to liberate the entire usurped land however long it takes and however great the sacrifices. Well into the twenty-first century, more than six decades after Israel joined the fold of nation-states, Hezbollah remains determined to deny the legitimacy of [Israel’s] existence and oppose any negotiated settlement. This stand is firm, permanent, and final, and it does not tolerate any retreat or compromise even if the entire world recognizes Israel, Nasrallah said. Hezbollah seems determined to disestablish Israel, and after nearly three decades of trying to do so believes its goal is in reach. It’s the Party of God’s ability to do something tangible about this notion that makes it unique among militant movements in the Middle East.

If parts of its ideology have remained rigid, Hezbollah has taken a far more flexible approach to matters of commerce and lifestyle. I would come to learn that Ayman, the young father I met at the café during the 2006 war, made good money as an international merchant, buying diamonds wholesale in Africa and selling them in Antwerp or New York, and financing the mining ventures of other Lebanese. His life seemed profoundly modern and international: a bilingual dual national who had lived in the United States and enjoyed driving his new Mercedes sedan. None of that stopped him from fully embracing Hezbollah. Like many Lebanese, Ayman was convinced there would be violence along the Israeli border whether Hezbollah fought or not, because of scarce water resources, renegade Palestinian factions sheltering in Lebanon, disputed border territory, and Israel’s ambitious strategic designs. In his view, Hezbollah merely improved the odds against Israel, the regional power. He found meaning in Hezbollah’s frontal war, which gave the Arab world the initiative and, Ayman believed, had a significant chance of success. Israel had dominated and demoralized Arabs for decades without effective opposition. Hezbollah now was holding Israel to account for its worst excesses of expansionism and occupation. Hezbollah’s ideological teachings also shaped Ayman’s personal life, guiding him as a new father and enabling him to find equanimity when his own father died and the family faced financial strain.

During the 2006 war I set forth on a three-year quest to understand Hezbollah’s juggernaut, through the individual men and women who had joined the Party of God’s movement. They ran the gamut from fully committed ideologues and activists to occasional volunteers, sympathizers, and, on the fringe, fellow travelers who made few sacrifices for it but wouldn’t stand in the party’s way. Through them, I learned that three things distinguish Hezbollah from other Islamist movements in the region: its clearly articulated ideology; the fervor of its followers; and its success at expanding membership and inflicting military harm on its enemies. I met supporters who liked it that Hezbollah picks up the garbage, and activists who wanted to expel every last Jew from the Middle East. Only a few people, perhaps tens of thousands, actually join Hezbollah as fighters or paid party members. To a degree unparalleled among other Islamist movements in the region, Hezbollah has leveraged that driven inner core to appeal to hundreds of thousands more, sympathizers who never rise to the level of official membership, but provide Hezbollah much of its political, cultural, social, and military clout.

Islamism has been on the rise for a century, spreading the idea that political life is a subsidiary of one particular interpretation of Islamic faith. Islamist groups have experimented with approaches ranging from peaceful incrementalism to maximalist violence. If any group today can claim the mantle of revolutionary Islam in the Middle East, it is Hezbollah. Iran’s Islamic Revolution has calcified into a rigid and orthodox theocracy. Hamas wages a quixotic war against Israel from its isolated, crumbling enclave of Gaza. Al Qaeda recruits from the limited ranks of Salafi fanatics. By contrast, Hezbollah, in an unlikely journey, has emerged as a quasi-state of its own in the ruins of the failed state of Lebanon. The Party of God has eased itself into comfortably wielding power, governing its own constituents without losing its revolutionary pedigree.

In the 1980s, Hezbollah literally exploded into the world’s consciousness with a series of shocking acts of violence: the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, which killed 241 Americans; kidnappings of prominent Americans in Lebanon; and a sustained frontal assault in southern Lebanon against the occupying Israeli army, waged first by suicide bombers and then by increasingly effective guerillas.³

At almost every turn, then and since, the movement has defied expectations with its military as well as its political success. At its founding in 1982, the group was so secret its members claimed Hezbollah didn’t even exist. Gradually the Party of God emerged from the shadows, winning the loyalty of Lebanon’s Shia community and claiming the lead role in the anti-Israeli resistance in occupied Lebanon. In the two decades that followed Hezbollah’s founding, the Party of God methodically refined a messianic theology and political philosophy that appealed to frustrated people all across a roiled and confused Middle East. Diplomatically, Hezbollah forged deep and enduring relationships with the governments of Iran and Syria that were responsible for its creation. In turn, Hezbollah exported its own revolution, sharing knowledge and materiel with radical movements of every sectarian and political stripe, including secular Palestinians, Hamas, the Shia Mahdi Army in Iraq, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, and even, allegedly, with Latin American communist guerillas. Militarily, Hezbollah has evolved into a classic guerilla warfare organization, discarding the early tactics that branded it a terrorist organization in the eyes of America and Israel. Even though it cultivates a vibrant culture of martyrdom among its supporters, the party hasn’t launched a suicide bomber since December 30, 1999, when a Hezbollah fighter drove a car bomb into an Israeli military convoy. In the 1990s, its suicide bombers attacked only military targets. American intelligence warns that Hezbollah sleeper cells could strike in the West, but Hezbollah hasn’t been compellingly linked to an international attack since 1994. Hezbollah disputes the West’s definition of terrorism and yet has tried to keep its military tactics within the West’s norms.

At each stage of Hezbollah’s growth, rival politicians in Lebanon and intelligence experts in the United States and Israel have predicted its imminent demise. Instead the group has consolidated its strength with shrewd political maneuvering and military flair. Radical and patient at the same time, Hezbollah has brick by brick laid the foundation of a limited Islamic state within its Lebanese constituency, perhaps the first experiment in Islamist governance that is both militant and pragmatic. The Party of God accommodates both fanatics and moderates, and it has historically refused to coerce followers or non-Shia who live under Hezbollah control into following religious rules (though it does demand piety from its inner core of supporters). Impressively, it has appealed across sectarian and cultural divides. Its most significant ally in Lebanon is the largest Christian party, the Free Patriotic Movement. Under the banner of Hezbollah’s Islamic Resistance, normally fractious groups set aside their differences: Persians and Arabs, Sunnis and Shia, religious and secular, Islamist and Communist.

Unlike the Salafi extremists who feed groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah’s leaders quite comfortably navigate modernity. They espouse a form of Islamic living in conjunction with contemporary mores; Hezbollah’s leaders tend to lead Spartan lifestyles but they’re happy to see the party’s supporters engage in commerce, grow rich, and live well. A thriving and prosperous constituency makes for a healthy Islamist militant party, Hezbollah’s leadership believes. Lebanese rivals, including Christian militias and the Shia Amal Party, have in the past built impressive but unsustainable networks to provide social services, jobs, and graft without approaching Hezbollah’s level of success.⁴

Hezbollah has had the luxury of unabated funding from Iran since its inception, by some estimates receiving a minimum of $200 million a year from Tehran and much more than that in times of crisis. But that funding alone cannot account for Hezbollah’s continuous growth over the decades; Hezbollah’s primal appeal and sustained popularity stem from the group’s deliberate, patient cultivation of ideological loyalty. Party activists are God’s shock troops; they can choose to wage war not only by wiring bombs but also by designing buildings, teaching school, babysitting children, and clearing roads. The majority of Hezbollah’s loyalists are engaged in social projects, to which they apply the same militant fervor as a guerilla fighter. Hezbollah does much more than simply fight, but without fighting it loses its holy identity.

This is Hezbollah’s secret: its followers believe. Ideas matter to them. Hezbollah has steeped them in a consuming way of thinking about God, their neighborhoods, their habits, and the omnipresent enemy. The party’s followers have redefined their personal goals and habits in line with the party’s ideology—a melding of the political idea of resistance with the religious idea of fully committing oneself to God. The most religiously devoted members of Hezbollah’s community are passionately devoted to a messianic Shia mission of bringing the Mahdi, the last Shia imam, or spiritual leader, out from hiding to rule the earth with perfect justice. A far greater number have embraced the ideology of Islamic Resistance, which resonates with notions of restoring pride, dignity, and self-determination to the dispossessed. And the greatest number of all of the party’s supporters, the million or more in the outer ring, have found in Hezbollah an avenue to a restored sense of communal strength or a stricter Islamic faith, without wholly subscribing to Hezbollah’s political project. Faith and ideas lure people into Hezbollah’s fold; prosperity and services keep them there. The material benefits of Hezbollah’s community grease the engine, but they don’t make it run. At Hezbollah’s heart lie constructive elements, like a view of Islamism as self-empowerment, requiring volunteerism and discipline from every member of Hezbollah’s community. Alarmingly, they are balanced by destructive elements, like perpetual war, authoritarianism, a conviction that strength comes only from military superiority, and a brisk current of political rage.

After Operation Truthful Promise, Hezbollah’s July 2006 raid into Israeli territory and the thirty-four days of war that ensued, Hezbollah perfected a strategy that has spread to other militants in the region: the notion of winning by simply surviving. Israel, with American backing, made its war aim nothing less ambitious than the destruction of Hezbollah. Nasrallah’s war aims were equally grandiose: he vowed to end the American dream of a New Middle East, to keep Israel out of Lebanon, and force the release of prisoners in Israeli jails, top among them Samir Quntar. A Lebanese Druze, Quntar was convicted of murdering an Israeli man and his four-year-old daughter in a bungled 1979 raid that left a two-year-old smothered to death as well. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail. In Israel, Quntar symbolized the worst brutality of the Jewish state’s enemies; in Lebanon, Quntar became a national hero. Israel vowed never to release him from prison, and Hezbollah made his freedom a central demand. In 2006, Israel defeated Hezbollah by conventional military measures; but in the estimation of the Arab world, and of many Israelis, Hezbollah prevailed by fighting longer than any previous Arab army, withstanding the most fearsome punishment the Israel Defense Forces could rain on its guerillas, and emerging strong enough to rearm and fight again.

Its influence is growing. Hamas has remodeled itself on Hezbollah’s example. In the 1990s, Hezbollah taught Hamas how

Reviews for A Privilege to Die

[samtekoa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Helpful in understanding Hezbola, however, he presents the differences between Hezbola and Israel with so much moral equalivancy one wonders what he would have said about Hitler.