Hizballah: Enemy of the State

Tony Badran writes what is perhaps the most lucid interpretation and analysis of Hizballah's operational philosophy, in Lebanon and as an extension of Iran's regional policy. This piece should be read in full, below are some excerpts:

The recent tension in South Lebanon, choreographed by Hezbollah against UNIFIL under the guise of spontaneous protests by villagers, has been used by the party to reassert its equation of “the Resistance, the people, and the army”— the three mutually-reinforcing pillars which, Hezbollah maintains, are alone responsible for safeguarding the country’s security. The core premise of this mantra, however, has its origins in Iran’s Islamic revolutionary doctrine.

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The absence of any reference to the “state” in this formula, and its substitution with the category of “people” is not accidental. ...

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Dissociating the peoples from their governments in the Arab world was and remains a vital aim of the Iranian revolutionary regime. ...

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That is the essence of Hezbollah’s formula. Much like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hezbollah operates in a parallel universe; it forms a parallel military and presides over a parallel society, which “coordinate” with the armed forces and interact with the state only in order to neutralize the state’s ability to challenge the party’s autonomous, parallel existence. All of which of course makes a mockery of those in the West advocating dialogue with Hezbollah to encourage its further “integration” into the “political mainstream.”

As party official Mahmoud Qomati explained in 2009, Hezbollah seeks to integrate the state into “the axis of the army, the people, and the Resistance.” This of course merely echoed a central theme in the thinking of Hezbollah, articulated by the party’s deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, in a June 2007 article in An-Nahar revealingly titled “How Does the Rest of Society Integrate into the Resistance?”

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