The terrorist group Hezbollah

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).

State Support to Hezbollah

Iran uses Hezbollah to set up terror cells among Israel's Arab citizens, with the goal of opening an additional terror front within Israel that will undermine Israeli society even more. If at first Iran directed Palestinian terror organizations to disrupt the peace process with Israel and make future reconciliation impossible, today its purpose is to undermine Israeli society from within by committing mass terrorist attacks that, it believes, will bring about despair and demoralization in Israel. Hezbollah did just this when Israeli forces were deployed in southern Lebanon. Its attacks caused serious losses of Israeli soldiers and led to public pressure to withdraw the army to the international border. Iran seeks to repeat that success in Israel itself (Ellingwood, 2006). Iran estimates that Israel's Arabs are potential recruits for this program.

Furthermore, this is the context in which Iran's attempt to deliver rockets and mortars to the Palestinian Authority on the arms ship the Karine -- A must be understood. It was Iran's attempt to use Arafat to menace the Israeli populace, especially that of its central and southern cities, with the threat of rocket and mortar attacks from within the West Bank and Gaza (Ellingwood, 2006).

A special arm of Iranian intelligence maintains, in cooperation with Hezbollah, an infrastructure for terror against Israeli and Jewish targets abroad (Kifner, 2006).

. The most deadly of these attacks were the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, and the bombing of that city's Jewish community center on July 18, 1994. This infrastructure exists in other parts of the world as well, and catastrophic attacks in some of those places have been frustrated (Ellingwood, 2006).

Iran achieved its greatest success against Israel through Hezbollah in Lebanon. For years, Iran cultivated its organization as its religious, political, and military representative in that country. It transferred hundreds of millions of dollars directly to Hezbollah, and channeled, through Hezbollah, about $100 million a year to Lebanon's Shi'ites for infrastructure, education, and welfare (Cooper & Erlanger, 2011). Thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition were transferred from Iran to Lebanon, principally by air to the international airport in Damascus, from where they made their way through the Syrian Army's checkpoints to Hezbollah's warehouses in the Lebanon Valley, Beirut, and the south of the country (Mazetti & Shanker, 2012). It was Iranian equipment and training that enabled Hezbollah to fight a guerrilla war against the IDF and to strike at Israel's northern towns. Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000 without an agreement, accompanied by the collapse of the Israeli-allied South Lebanon Army, was seen by the Arab world as a victory for Hezbollah against the omnipotent IDF. It is hardly surprising that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah brags that he is the only Arab commander to have defeated the IDF. Even if the IDF held the advantage in the field during the actual fighting, even if the decision to leave Lebanon was due to Ehud Barak's promise a year and a quarter before the withdrawal, the impression in the Arab world was of a Hezbollah-and, through it, an Iranian-victory. The IDF withdrawal strengthened the Iranians' assumption that by causing an incessant trickle of casualties they can break Israeli society's spirit. Thus, when the IDF left Lebanon, Hezbollah deployed its fighters along the border, as well as hundreds of Katyusha rockets. Iran's strategic measure was the deployment of hundreds of long-range rockets in southern Lebanon: Fajar-3 rockets with a range of 43 kilometers and Fajar-5 rockets with a range of 70 kilometers (Parton, 2007). According to a report by the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies, Iranian Revolutionary Guards stationed permanently in Lebanon operate the Iranian missiles. This is an unparalleled provocation and threat. One in five Israelis resides within these missiles' range (Mazetti & Shanker, 2012). Since the end of the Cold War, no state has placed missiles in the territory of another state and aimed them at the civilian population of a third state (Cohen, 2013). The United States almost went to war over a similar incident in 1962, when the Soviet Union placed its missiles in Cuba and aimed them at Florida. Ultimately it did not do so because the Soviets withdrew their missiles (Cooper & Erlanger, 2011).

More than anything, Iran's deployment of strategic weapons in Lebanon indicates that Israel and Iran are on a collision course. A force such as that which Iran has deployed 1,200 kilometers from its borders will ultimately be used. The temptation for Iran to strike a stinging blow at the hated Israel is too great to withstand (Mazetti & Shanker, 2012).

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).