Middle East & North Africa / Comment
Irregular Warfare and Non-State Combatants: Israel and Hezbollah
26/10/2007 By George Emile Irani
In July 2006, when the Lebanese militia Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed three more in a cross-border raid, it was widely predicted that the Islamist group would suffer a crushing defeat in the ensuing reprisal.
In the weeks that followed the organisation stunned its southern neighbour and the international community by withstanding the attacks of a vastly superior military force, however.
The Summer 2006 war was typical of many contemporary conflicts in that it saw two markedly unequal military powers lining out against each another. With Hezbollah receiving support from both Iran and Syria, the outcome of the conflict also had important ramifications for the rest of the Middle East.
It was not the first time that powerful regional interests had faced off against each other in Lebanon, but with the disastrous US occupation of Iraq continuing to unravel to the east, the international context of this latest round of hostilities was quite unprecedented.
Hezbollah’s victory served as an important boost for Islamist militias in other parts of the world and provided Iran, a country with which the US will have to negotiate over the future of Iraq, with further confirmation of its rising influence. The current situation may not be maintained for long, however, as many expect Israel to seek another confrontation, avoiding the strategic errors it made in 2006, in order to reaffirm its superiority.
In this Comment article the author examines the causes and consequences of the war between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah. It begins by briefly presenting Hezbollah’s Secretary General Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah’s rationale and justification for his group’s goal and vision during that war, before moving on to give a local, regional and global analysis of the contributory factors and ramifications of the conflict.
This is followed by scrutiny of a book by Sheikh Naim Qassem, one of Hezbollah’s founding members, in which he explains his perspective on the organisation’s ideology, social, political and economic roles; its views of Islam and how it informs Hezbollah’s overall actions both inside Lebanon and at the regional and global levels.
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Keywords
Conflict Ideology Iran Islam Israel Lebanon Middle East Post conflict SyriaRelated publications
- In no man's land. Internally displaced persons and refugees in Lebanon
- International humanitarian law and possible models of intervention in Lebanon
- The UN mission in Lebanon
Bio author: George Emile Irani
George Emile Irani is Director for the Africa and the Middle East Programme for the Toledo International for Peace (CITPAX) in Madrid, Spain. Until June 2005 he was a Professor in the Peace and Conflict Studies Division at Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada. Prior to that, he was senior policy analyst with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
