MEPEI
December 09
Manuela Paraipan: Why is the Lebanonization of Hezbollah a chimera?
Tony Badran: This is a rather timely question with the recent unveiling of Hezbollah's so-called new political manifesto.
The conventional wisdom and the dominant interpretation of this document, in the media, is that it signals the "Lebanonization" of the Islamist group and its "evolution" away from Islamist rhetoric and other maximalist positions. In many ways, this is merely a recycling of the old argument put forth by Augustus Richard Norton and others starting in the late 1990s. Both the old theory and its current reincarnation miss the mark, and in fact have been thoroughly discredited and disproved by events.
Manuela Paraipan: How so?
Tony Badran: The Lebanonization theory is an amalgam of various misreadings of Hezbollah.
It was stipulated in the late '90s that Hezbollah was merely concerned with purely Lebanese goals, namely the liberation of southern Lebanon, and that once Israel withdrew, Hezbollah would close shop. Indeed, Norton wrote in 1998 that Hezbollah was "preparing for life after resistance."
Very clearly, this has been shown to be wrong.
Hezbollah today has dissociated its armed status from an Israeli withdrawal from the disputed Shebaa Farms, and has linked it to Israel's very existence: so long as Israel exists, Hezbollah's reasoning goes, it will constitute a threat to Lebanon, a threat that can only be countered by its continued armed status. At the same time, Hezbollah’s manifesto includes the “liberation” of Jerusalem, which the organization describes as a “religious duty.” This duty carries great peril for Lebanon.
In order to support this argument of a purely Lebanese outlook for Hezbollah, its proponents went to great lengths to dissociate the group from any acts of global terrorism. One argument was that since the group had Shiite support and maintained "social networks," that somehow meant that it can no longer be dubbed a terrorist group.
Tony Badran: This is a rather timely question with the recent unveiling of Hezbollah's so-called new political manifesto.
The conventional wisdom and the dominant interpretation of this document, in the media, is that it signals the "Lebanonization" of the Islamist group and its "evolution" away from Islamist rhetoric and other maximalist positions. In many ways, this is merely a recycling of the old argument put forth by Augustus Richard Norton and others starting in the late 1990s. Both the old theory and its current reincarnation miss the mark, and in fact have been thoroughly discredited and disproved by events.
Manuela Paraipan: How so?
Tony Badran: The Lebanonization theory is an amalgam of various misreadings of Hezbollah.
It was stipulated in the late '90s that Hezbollah was merely concerned with purely Lebanese goals, namely the liberation of southern Lebanon, and that once Israel withdrew, Hezbollah would close shop. Indeed, Norton wrote in 1998 that Hezbollah was "preparing for life after resistance."
Very clearly, this has been shown to be wrong.
Hezbollah today has dissociated its armed status from an Israeli withdrawal from the disputed Shebaa Farms, and has linked it to Israel's very existence: so long as Israel exists, Hezbollah's reasoning goes, it will constitute a threat to Lebanon, a threat that can only be countered by its continued armed status. At the same time, Hezbollah’s manifesto includes the “liberation” of Jerusalem, which the organization describes as a “religious duty.” This duty carries great peril for Lebanon.
In order to support this argument of a purely Lebanese outlook for Hezbollah, its proponents went to great lengths to dissociate the group from any acts of global terrorism. One argument was that since the group had Shiite support and maintained "social networks," that somehow meant that it can no longer be dubbed a terrorist group.
Tony Badran is a research fellow with the Center for Terrorism Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He has the blog Across the Bay.
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