Shia political movements in Lebanon from the 1960s onward

Political chiefs (zucama) from a few powerful families dominated Shici politics into the 1960s and continued their control through extensive support networks. The authority of the zucama varied on their clients' support, but by the 1960s hundreds of young Shici men and women became estranged from old-style politics and were attracted by new political forces. The vision of radical change could only have been appealing to a community whose culture emphasized its exploitation and dispossession by the ruling elites. In Lebanon, as in Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, Shica in great numbers were recruited in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to secular opposition parties. In Lebanon the resistance took the shape of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), (Cooper & Erlanger, 2011) the Organization for Communist Labor Action, and pro-Syrian and pro-Iraqi factions of the Arab Socialist Bacth (or "Resurrection") Party. Predominantly in the case of the Communist organizations and the SSNP, there was an intrinsic ideological pull towards parties that damned the tribal, religious, or cultural bases of discrimination (Mazetti & Shanker, 2012). Without a doubt, it is notable that the leadership of these secular parties was mainly Christian. Even though support for secular parties has faded, significant numbers of politicized Shica keep on expressing a preference for them, more often than not in particular families, villages, or regions. For example, the Communists stay strong in the large village of Bra'sheet in the South, in an area now otherwise dominated by Hezbollah, plainly, the Party of God, and the Amal movement, an acronym for Lebanese Resistance Detachments, often rendered as "Hope." Amal, and especially Hezbollah, were practically late bloomers on the political scene and held sway on the Shica in clearly sectarian terms, in spite of their declarations of welcoming all comers (Parton, 2007).

Four main (and sometimes entwined) political trends distinguished the political enlistment of the Shica after the 1960s: secularism, freedom -- especially the view that the fortune of the deprived Shica was connected to the expelled Palestinians, Islamism, and reformism, often implied in demands for more access to supporting privilege and for rooting out corruption (Cohen, 2013). Even though Arab nationalism without doubt enjoyed Shici adherents, given that Sunni Muslims numerically control the Arab world, many of the Shica would not see a combined Arab nation as a very model solution. In 1997 a fifth, embryonic trend started from within Hezbollah, when Shaikh Subhi al-Tufayli, (Cooper & Erlanger, 2011) the organization's previous secretary general, started a populist nonconformist movement in the Beqaa valley among estranged farmers and tribesmen. Even though the fortunes of secular movements and parties have gone down, the devotion and understanding of the Shica remain extensively distributed, and no single association -- together with Hezbollah (Ellingwood, 2006) may claim a crushing majority following from among the Shica. By the 1990s, on the other hand, Hezbollah was without doubt the best-organized political trend and enjoyed the largest base of admired support (Parton, 2007).

Foundation and Rise of Hezbollah

Of the three characteristic trends prior to the emergence of Hezbollah in 1982, a number of secular parties, in addition to the reformist Amal movement, preserved a significant following. As the Lebanese civil war came up to in the early 1970s and the armed Palestinian existence grew stronger, several young Shica found their place in one or more of the fidaii, or guerrilla fighter groups. Support for the Palestinian cause has now shrunken but not vanished. Political loyalties within tribes are often shared between two or more groups or are not "loaned" (Cooper & Erlanger, 2011) to any political group in any way. Hussein Nasrallah, a brother of Hasan Nasrallah, a pioneering member of Hezbollah and its famous secretary-general, is a long-standing member of Amal. When the two groups were against each other in the late 1980s, Hussein was on the facade (Cohen, 2013)

Fida (pl., fidaiyun, rendered often as fedayeen) is a common Arabic term for A person who surrenders himself, that is, a revolutionary fighter lines confronting his brother. In spite of the long-term promises of the Nasrallah brothers, one usually meets individuals whose biography includes association in three or four dissimilar political organizations, more often than not in sequence. In Lebanon political support is provisional and political loyalty from time to time has a short shelf life. Be that as it may, ideological currents have changed noticeably in the last two decades in favor of Hezbollah, which gives an ideological vision that many Shica now find influential (Ellingwood, 2006).

The Palestine struggle group did more than openly challenge the supremacy of Lebanon's well-established elites; the resistance fighters were also compensated reasonably well. It is extensively known that many young men, and a small number of women, took up arms not only out of an ideological obligation but also merely to feed their families in a world offering few other economic prospects. On one occasion full-fledged civil war started in 1975, the Shica became the cannon fodder for the fedayeen. Without a doubt, more Shica died in the fighting than associates of any other sect (Ellingwood, 2006).

When juvenile Lebanese Shici men were chosen for a religious schooling, their conventional destinations had been the revered Shici seminaries of al-Najaf or Karbala in Iraq. By the end of the 1970s, on the other hand, as the revolution in Iran gathered force, Iraq had become unwelcoming for foreign Shica. In 1978 Ayatollah Khomeini was himself barred from Iraq at the assertion of the Shah, thus bringing about international notoriety in a village of Paris with much of the global media just a small number of steps away as the Iranian revolution picked up force (Cohen, 2013). Young Lebanese Shici clerics for instance Abbas al-Musawi and Subhi al-Tufayli, who later carried out important leadership roles in Hezbollah's early days, went back into Lebanon from Iraq. Al-Musawi established a hawza, or religious university, in Baalbak, where the potential Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah (Cooper & Erlanger, 2011) turned out to be his student and protege'. The returnees from Iraq did bring with them revolutionary dedication and the promise to alter their societies. They shared aversion toward Israel and faithfulness to Iran. The majority of the returnees were associates of the Hizb al-Da'wa party ("Party of the [Islamic] Call"), started in Iraq in 1958 as an Islamic substitute to the Communist Party (Mazetti & Shanker, 2012).

Iran has founded a consortium comprising four terror organizations: Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front-General Command (Ahmad Jibril's organization). Until 2000, Iran supported each such organization separately, with increasing levels of support: finance, arms, instruction, and guidance. It founded Hezbollah as a military arm to take over Lebanon and to make war directly against Israel (Mazetti & Shanker, 2012). It gradually took over the Palestinian terror organizations, and the more it gave them, the harder it pressed them to carry out attacks that would suit its own needs. Since 2000, Iran has begun tightening operational coordination and cooperation among these organizations. This cooperation is expressed in joint instruction, and in operational and logistic assistance. For example, members of Jibril's Popular Front have carried out for other organizations major arms-smuggling operations to Gaza by sea, such as the case of the ship Santorini, which was captured by the Israeli Navy. Iran encourages these organizations to carry out terror attacks and rewards them financially for successful attacks (Cohen, 2013).

Countermeasures

Even if Israel is on a collision course with Iran, this does not mean that the collision will necessarily take place. It can be avoided by political action and by military deterrence. In the political arena, Israel must make clear the significance of such a collision for regional stability, for the global energy market, and for the states that will directly bear the consequences of such a collision: Syria and Lebanon (Cooper & Erlanger, 2011). If these countries only understood what price they will pay for being a base, providing transit, and assisting aggression against Israel's citizens, they would certainly act immediately to remove the rockets and the Katyushas, and put pressure on Hezbollah not to act. In our contacts with Europe and Russia, Israel is must continue to highlight Iran's instigation of terror, its plans for large-scale attacks on northern Israel, and its potential deployment of long-range nuclear missiles. These actions will turn Europe and Russia into targets of blackmail by Iran's obscurantist theocracy (Cohen, 2013).

It is of particular importance to bring this home to the United States. Only that country has the means of pressuring and influencing Russia to stop providing Iran with technological assistance for its military nuclear program. The cessation of this Russian assistance would bring about a significant delay in Iran's schedule for producing a nuclear bomb. To date, the U.S. government has not succeeded in persuading the Russians to cut off their nuclear assistance to Iran (Mazetti & Shanker, 2012). The concern is that Russia's closer relationship with the United States after the September 2001 attacks will remove this issue, so vital to us, from the two states' common agenda. Realistically speaking, Israel must make every effort with Washington on this subject (Myre, July 2006).

The IDF's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000 reduced Syria's ability to employ terror and pro-Iranian guerrillas to wear Israel down. But by the same token, it left Hezbollah free to operate in the "Shaba'a Farms" on the slopes of Har Dov, a spur of Mount Hermon that lies on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Syria also allows Hezbollah to deploy long-range artillery, rockets, and guerrilla units in all of southern Lebanon, along Israel's northern border, ready to be activated (Cohen, 2013).

It is important to remember that it is clearly in Syria's interest to instigate terror from Lebanese territory. Syria will use this terror extensively and at its own convenience when the balance of deterrence created after the IDF's withdrawal from Lebanon is eroded (Parton, 2007). During the IDF's stay in the southern Lebanon security zone, Israeli governments refrained from directly pressuring Syria, so that Syria would stop allowing Hezbollah to operate there (Ellingwood, 2006). As a minister in Rabin's government, I demanded (in discussions following attacks in Lebanon that cost the lives of many Israeli soldiers) that Israel is use the means of pressure available to us not on Lebanese villagers, and not on the Lebanese puppet government, but rather on Syria, the real power in Lebanon (Ben-David, 2006). I did not demand a direct and immediate attack on Syria's military forces in Lebanon, but rather an attack on its economic interests in that country. My reasoning was that if Syria saw fit to damage the vital Israeli interest of quiet on its northern border, then Israel should pressure Syria by striking at one of Syria's own vital interests (Cohen, 2013).

Every year, Syria earns about $4 billion as a result of its rule over Lebanon and its economy. A strike at these revenues would directly hit the pockets of the Syrian elite. Israel began to strike at targets such as these only toward the end of the Netanyahu government's rule, and thus achieved a lull in attacks for a not inconsiderable time. The second option is to reach a state of direct conflict, or at least a balance of fear of conflict, with Syria (Ben-David, 2006). This would happen if Israel's response to Syria's continued use of Hezbollah as a proxy in its fight against Israel were a direct and severe Israeli strike against the Syrians themselves. By withdrawing the IDF from Lebanon, Israel in effect chose this second option (Cooper & Erlanger, 2011).

As of this writing, Israel has already twice struck Syrian military targets in Lebanon in response to Hezbollah attacks on the IDF. These Hezbollah attacks have been infrequent and limited to the "Shaba'a Farms," (Parton, 2007) because Syria partly reined in the militia. The "Shaba'a Farms" is a small piece of territory that Lebanon (under orders from Damascus) continues to claim, even though the United Nations has certified that Israel has completed its withdrawal from Lebanese territory. Israeli deterrence has been effective in neutralizing the factors that goad Hezbollah to act (Myre, July 2006).

How should Israel act toward Syria? Israel is should preserve its deterrent capability (Cohen, 2013). Their precise and devastating operations against Syrian targets in Lebanon have given the Syrians a preview of what they would suffer in an all-out war.

Conclusion

Since the 1980s and until now, Iran has disbursed over half a billion dollars in training and support to the Guerilla fighters -- Hezbollah (Ben-David, 2006) in Lebanon. In the past decade Hezbollah has caused more Israeli army deaths than had some of the Arab-Israeli wars. Hezbollah and their Iranian funded and delivered katyusha rockets and guerilla strategy finally succeed in making the price of engaging Lebanon so heavy that Israel unilaterally vacated from the areas it had captured in Lebanon. In the course of Hezbollah Iran has, for almost two decades, waged a war on its own conditions and has been successful in a tiny way (Ben-David, 2006) it has as a minimum regained a few of Muslim areas occupied by Israel, a task which Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq together could not accomplish. Iran has completed similar military and monetary support to Islamic jihad, which in addition has grossed a low intensity guerilla war aligned with Israel (Myre, July 2006). In 1982, a Shiite fighter from Iran devised and excuted a car bomb to blow up the garrison that housed American marines resulting an American pull out from Lebanon. Iran sees this moreover as an achievement in forcing the majestic powers to take out their forces. In the course of the Iran-Iraq war, Iran saw itself combating for Islam against the West and their two-faced puppet Muslims in Iraq and other Arab nations. A number of these activities of Iran have been called international terrorism and the United States has put Iran on its list of terrorists (Ben-David, 2006).

The next plan that Iran executed contained the support of Islamic movements and activists within Israel and Palestine. Islamic groups within Palestine, significantly Hamas, have not accepted the terms of peace and they are alone with Iran on this score. Iran still provides material and spiritual support to Islamic groups inside Palestine, while at the same time rejecting the peace, which in their view plunders Israel for fifty years of occupation and infringement of the rights of millions of Palestinians.