Hizballah in Lebanon: The Muqawamah as a Contra- Hegemonic Project

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1 Tel-Aviv University The Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities The School of History The Department of the History of the Middle East and Africa Hizballah in Lebanon: The Muqawamah as a Contra- Hegemonic Project The Dissertation is submitted for a PhD. Degree in the University of Tel-Aviv By Abed (El Qadir) Kanaaneh The Dissertation was supervised By Prof. Eyal Zisser Prof. Dani Filc December 2016

2 Abstract Hizballah in Lebanon: The Muqawamah as a Contra-Hegemonic Project Abed (El Qadir) Kanaaneh This research is concerned with the activism of the Lebanese Hizballah towards strengthening its status in the Lebanese arena and its contribution to the development of the Muqawamah (resistance) concept into a culture and a counter-hegemonic project in the Lebanese arena. The Muqawamah of Hizballah's school has become a weltanschauung (world-view), a culture and a political tool that efficiently serve Hizballah's interests and the Lebanese interests, as perceived by the former. Following Gramsci and the Neo-Gramscian thinkers, hegemony could be defined as a situation or a process in which a certain historical bloc (social groups organized around a certain project) tries to stabilize the social structure around the main interests of the dominant social group within the bloc. However, one cannot achieve complete stability of the social structure around a hegemonic project, and the hegemonic project is always likely to face resistance. Therefore, this resistance would internally develop different social forces into a new historical-bloc which is organized around its own counter-hegemonic project. 1 1 Dani Filc, Populism and Hegemony in Israel, Tel-Aviv: Resling, 2006, p.32. (in Hebrew) 1

3 A certain project becomes hegemonic when, as Gwyn Williams had defined, its perceptions and its way of organizing and understanding reality delve into all layers of society: institutions, individual lives, ethics, customs, religion and all cultural aspects.ˮ 2 The Lebanese Hizballah is a relatively young organization, compared to other players in the Lebanese arena. The organization started operating shortly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in This was preceded by a conceptual land reclamation carried out for several years by different revolutionary political streams and modernist clerics like Musa al-sadr, Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, Mohammad Shams El Din and others. Despite the organization's young age and the complexity of the Lebanese arena, Hizballah has succeeded within two decades in realizing considerable achievements in the social and military arenas in Lebanon. Hizballah's ability to credit itself with the Israeli Withdrawal from Southern Lebanon has enhanced its prestige and increased academic research interest in this organization. By means of Gramscian and Neo-Gramscian tools, the proposed research will attempt to follow up on Hizballah's development and on its openness process, or the "Lebanonization" of the organization as defined in scholarly literature, during the nineties of the 20 th century. The research will provide a new explanation for Hizballah's developmental process, from a purely military-religious organization into the main representative of a social group standing in the center of a unique counter-hegemonic project which I will name "the Muqawamah project". 2 Williams G., "Concept of 'Egemonia' in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some Notes on Interpretation", in Journal of the History of Ideas 21(4)(1960): pp

4 The term "Muqawamah" in the proposed research is a signifier allowing the establishment of a historical bloc composed of various forces. It is worth indicating that this historical bloc did not only comprise political parties and forces; it also included different social organizations and forces, like civil society organizations that serve large sectors, beyond their "natural" target groups (educational institutions, health institutions, Jihad Al-Binaa' Development Association, the martyrs fund, the injured fund and so forth). These organizations had remarkably substituted the failed state services, as indicated by different researchers. This has enabled Hizballah to step into the "Vacuum" which the Lebanese state had created through its withdrawal and incapacity to provide appropriate services to its citizens, mainly to the poor population. Hizballah has achieved that explicitly as an act of establishing a "Muqawamah society", depending mainly on the poor or Oppressedˮ populations, which are the backbone of the counter-hegemonic project called Muqawamah. It is evident that Hizballah provides support manly in Shiite regions; however, one cannot underestimate the willingness of Hizballah and the different organizations affiliated with it and with the Muqawamah project to provide services to the whole poor population residing in these regions, regardless of their ethnic, religious and even national background. For example, Charity organizations are listed among the main supporters of the Palestinian refugees in the refugee camps in Lebanon 3. The research will devote particular attention to the media, which includes several TV channels and other communications media. Within this context, it's worth mentioning Al- 3 Shawn T Flanigan and Mounah Abdel-Samad. Hizballah's Social Jihad: Nonprofits as Resistance Organizationsˮ In Middle East Policy, Vol. XVI, No.2, Summer

5 Akhbar a daily newspaper bringing together journalists, authors, artists and thinkers from different communities and streams, but who share the belief in the Muqawamah culture and project. Al-Akhbar is deemed important since it serves as a bridge, a laboratory and an arena of struggle: it bridges between the different streams that are considered part of the Muqawamah project in Lebanon; it's a laboratory where the possibilities of co-existence and cooperation between these streams are examined and it is an arena where each stream struggles to impose its "own Muqawamah" on the project as a whole. Hizballah's unique Muqawamah project could not have developed without the cultivation of the ideological ground by thinkers like Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Shari ati. Fadlallah's perception of the Muqawamah was integrated in his sermons in a mosque in South-West Beirut, during the Civil War and particularly during the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon in During these sermons, collected and published under the heading "Al-Muqawamah al-islamiyyah", Fadlallah provided the Shiites in Lebanon, especially the young militants who have experienced the radicalization process of their community, with the religious authorization of their Muqawamah against the Israeli occupation. Fadlallah provided a prolonged analysis of the Muqawamah's activism and the Shahadah of the Muqawimon (resisters), considering it as a rational action and not a product of "brainwashing", since they aimed to advance their nation and homeland towards achieving the ultimate goal- defeating the occupier 4. The significant contribution of Fadlallah was his definition of al-muqawamah as a large-scale project that is not limited to resistance operations against the Israeli occupation in Southern 4 Mohammad Huseein Fadlallah, Iradat al-quwa ( ed. Naguib Nour Eddin), Beirut: Dar al-malak, 2000, pp (in Arabic) 4

6 Lebanon. He presented the Muqawamah as an Islamic and universal project within which all Muslim and non-muslim disempowered populations can act as one actor 5. Fadlallah's perception integrate into the contemplations of Ruhollah Khomeini and the thinker Ali Shari ati who maintained that Islam is the real comprehensive and revolutionary ideology, through which one can liberate the disempowered populations wherever they are. This perception allowed Hizballah at a later stage to shape the Muqawamah project which has addressed many actors within the Lebanese communal mosaic, and not only the Shiite, although it has grown up under the influence of the revolutionary stream of the Shi a Islam. In this research, I will argue that comprehending Hizballah and its development will remain deficient unless we perceive the inter-lebanese politics (and to a certain extent, the regional politics in general) as politics of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects that compete with each other. This perception will solve some mysteries and will provide a new and different explanation for the alliances and the coalitions that Hizballah established during its second and third decades. Further to my thesis, I will attempt to read Hizballah's history and development through reflecting on the organization's adoption of Muqawamah over the years and on the development of the term from a purely military tactic into a worldview, a culture and eventually a broad counter-hegemonic project. The Muqawamah project of Hizballah's school is counter-hegemonic at multiple levels: firstly, it is directed against the Shiite elites that dominated the community before. Secondly, and more importantly, it is directed on behalf of all marginalized groups against the 5 Ibid, p.18. 5

7 Maronite- Sunni hegemony that deprived most Lebanese citizens, especially the Shiites who are perceived as a "proletariat" in Lebanon and are marginalized at the political and economic levels, of the opportunity to enjoy the available political and economic resources. Thirdly, it is directed against the Israeli and U.S hegemony in the region and in the whole world. Through a special reading of the organization's history, I will attempt to provide answers to the relevant questions that researchers are concerned with. For example, how could Hizballah enter into negotiations and dialogues with Lebanese, regional and international groups and authorities with whom it doesn t apparently have a common ground for dialogue? What was the impact of this dialogue on the organization itself? What is the essence of the Muqawamah project established by Hizballah? What mechanism does the organization use to establish it? and so forth. The research will somewhat try to continue the work conducted by Hamid Dabashi on the boundaries of the "liberation theology" discourse worldwide and in the Middle East. It will also examine the challenges, the barriers and the opportunities which affected the development of Hizballah as a potential embodiment of the Muqawamah which pushes the East-West duality and the Islam-West duality towards a resistive discourse that crosses ideological and geographical borders inside and outside Lebanon and the Middle East. The "liberation theology" is a concept borrowed from the Christian theology and developed by clerics in South America. The concept interprets the New Testament in favor the poor and the oppressed, versus the rich and the oppressors. Dabashi brought this concept into 6

8 Islam and into the Middle Eastern reality. In my research, I will continue from the point reached by Dabashi in his book Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire and will shed light on Hizballah's potential and attempt to establish a different type of a counterhegemonic project based on the interpretation of Islam as a resisting religion, "Muqawamah religion", whose real heroes are the poor populations who have finally decided to take action. This interpretation allows Islam to open up to different actors and other political and social forces in the Lebanese society and in the whole region. Over the years, extensive literature has addressed Hizballah, but very few studies have attempted to analyze the organization as a generator of a new culture in the Lebanese and the regional arenas, and there is almost no scholarly reference to the organization as a main partner in the development of the counter-hegemonic project inside Lebanon. 6 This dissertation aims to fill this void and open new horizons regarding the Lebanese history in general and Hizbullah s in particular. 6 Such reference appears in the article of Butko, the only article I found which attempts to explain Political Islam from a Gramscian perspective: Butko T. Revelation or Revolution: A Gramscian Approach to the Rise of Political Islam. In British Jourmal of Middle Easern Studies, May 2004, 31(1), pp