## INTRODUCTION

Nicholas Blanford

At the end of the month-long Harb Tammuz (July War) in 2006 between Hezbollah and Israel, a woman contacted the party and begged to be given the abaya worn by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah during his wartime televised addresses to the nation. After the woman’s request was granted, she traveled around Lebanon displaying the simple brown woolen cloak to crowds of adoring Hezbollah supporters, treating the garment with a reverence usually afforded to an ancient holy relic.

The incident illustrates the veneration this 46-year-old cleric can evoke not just among his fellow Shiites but throughout the Islamic and Arab worlds. That Nasrallah is a Shiite—belonging to a minority in the Muslim world that is considered a heretical sect by some Sunnis—merely underlines the extent of his charisma and appeal to Muslims. Even at a time of heightened tensions between Sunnis and Shiites, a poll in Egypt conducted after the war asked respondents to name their two favorite political leaders. The first choice was Nasrallah, the second Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran.

Under Nasrallah’s 14-year leadership, Hezbollah has evolved from an uncompromising band of zealots into a political and military powerhouse. It is the most influential political player in Lebanon, and its military wing, the Islamic Resistance, is probably the most proficient guerrilla organization in the world, the only Arab army to have compelled Israel to unconditionally abandon occupied territory through force of arms.

And yet relatively little is known about the architect of Hezbollah’s accomplishments. Nasrallah remains something of an enigma, whose core motivations continue to perplex and confound. Is he the pragmatist who has learned to tailor his obedience to the wilayat al-faqih with the realities of Lebanon’s political and social milieu? Or is it the other way around, in which the “Lebanonization” process Nasrallah helmed from the early 1990s is little more than a disguise—a taqiyya—to protect the party as it pursues an open-ended pan-Islamic struggle against the West and Israel, according to the dictates of the wali al-faqih in Tehran? And what path will Hezbollah ultimately choose if, or when, its obligations to the wali al-faqih and the struggle against Israel can no longer be reconciled with its role as the political champion of Lebanon’s Shiite community? The answer to those questions will determine to a large extent the future of Lebanon, which once more has reprised its unenviable role as a battleground for competing local and regional powers in a struggle for control of the Middle East.

Hassan Nasrallah was born on August 31, 1960, the eldest of nine children to Abdel-Karim Nasrallah, an impoverished fruit and vegetable salesman. Although the family was originally from Bazouriyeh, a small Shiite village three miles east of the coastal town of Tyre in south Lebanon, the young Nasrallah was raised in the slum quarter of Karantina in East Beirut. He showed an early proclivity for studying and religion, preferring to walk to the city center to purchase second-hand books rather than playing with his contemporaries. Those books he was too young to understand he set aside for reading when he grew older. While his brothers helped their father with his fruit and vegetable stall, Nasrallah chose to read or pray at mosques in the nearby districts of Sin al-Fil, Nabaa and Bourj Hammoud. After his father secured enough money to open a small store, Nasrallah recalls spending much time in the shop gazing at a picture on the wall of Imam Musa Sadr, an activist Iranian cleric who had moved to Lebanon in the 1960s and began mobilizing the marginalized Shiites, and challenging the sect’s domination by a handful of feudal families.

The outbreak of the civil war in 1975 forced the Nasrallah family to relocate to Bazouriyeh in south Lebanon. While Nasrallah finished his education in a state school in Tyre, he found himself drawn into politics, becoming a member, along with his brother Hussein, of the Harakat al-Muhrumin (Movement of the Deprived) which had been established by Musa Sadr a year earlier, and later became better known as Amal, the name of its military wing.

Despite being only 15 years old, Nasrallah was appointed the head of Amal for Bazouriyeh in apparent recognition of his maturity. Amal had gained little traction in the village, with most politically active young men joining secular leftist groups, like the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and the Communist Party. But Nasrallah gathered together several friends who shared his religious ardor and helped organize meetings in the village’s Islamic center.

“There was a very decent, good and respected Sheikh in our town, by the name of Ali Shamseddin, who has died since,” Nasrallah recalled in a 1993 interview; “so we worked together to found a library at the town’s Islamic Center where the youth could come, read and receive lessons. It attracted a considerable number of young men and women, and I was the one who gave the lessons.”1

Although he was politically active, his ambition was to travel to Najaf in Iraq to begin his religious studies in earnest. He spent much of his spare time hanging around the main mosque in Tyre, and it was here that he was befriended by Sayyed Mohammed Gharawi, a religious teacher who was impressed by the young man’s obvious intelligence and enthusiasm. Agreeing to help, Gharawi wrote a letter of introduction to Sayyed Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr, one of the foremost Shiite scholars and theoreticians, asking him to accept Nasrallah into his hawza, or religious seminary.

With some money given him by his father and friends, Nasrallah left Lebanon for Iraq in 1976 with the letter for Baqr al-Sadr in his pocket. By the time he arrived in Najaf, he was penniless and had nowhere to stay. While pondering what to do next, he was introduced to Sayyed Abbas Mussawi, a 25-year-old disciple of Baqr al-Sadr. Nasrallah recalls that on first meeting Mussawi he took him to be an Iraqi, because of the dark color of his skin, and spoke to him in Iraqi-accented Arabic. But Mussawi responded in colloquial Lebanese Arabic, telling Nasrallah that he was from the village of Nabi Sheet in the Bekaa Valley. Nasrallah later described his first encounter with Mussawi as the “sweet start” of a relationship with someone he would come to consider as a “friend, brother, mentor and companion.”2

Nasrallah was accepted into Baqr al-Sadr’s hawza and began his studies under the tutelage of Mussawi, who had already passed through the first phase of religious instruction. It was an ascetic existence for the teenage Nasrallah. He shared a room with other students, sleeping on a foam mattress and given a few dinars each month by Baqr al-Sadr to pay his way. But Nasrallah had little spare time, as Mussawi proved a diligent and strict teacher. His class of fellow Lebanese students worked through holidays and weekends, completing preliminary instruction in just two years, instead of the more usual five.

Through Mussawi, Nasrallah was introduced to the radical teachings of Baqr al-Sadr, and of influential Iranian cleric Ruhollah Khomeini. The latter had formulated the theory of wilayat al-faqih, or the Jurisdiction of the Jurist–Theologian, which advocated the creation of an Islamic state governed by sharia law and administered by an expert in Islamic jurisprudence—a faqih. Khomeini’s revolutionary theory stood in marked contrast to the more traditional “quietist” school of Shiite religious practice, in which jurists restricted their activities to settling disputes, implementing statutory penalties, and collecting religious donations. Although the opinions of senior marja—such as Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf or Lebanon’s Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah—can carry significant political influence, they eschew any direct role in day-to-day governance. Nasrallah was profoundly influenced by the teachings of Khomeini, whom he later described as “the greatest, most dignified, and undisputed personality of the [twentieth] century.”3

In 1977, Iraq’s Baathist regime launched a crackdown on Shiite Islamists, arresting and subsequently executing Baqr al-Sadr and expelling dozens of Lebanese students on the pretext that they were spies for Syria. Nasrallah avoided arrest and returned to Lebanon in 1978, where he enrolled in a new theological school established by Mussawi in Baalbek. Nasrallah’s return came at a pivotal moment for Lebanese Shiites. In March 1978, Israel invaded south Lebanon to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organization, which used the area as a launch-pad for attacks into the Jewish state. It marked the beginning of Israel’s 22-year occupation of south Lebanon.

Then in August, Imam Musa Sadr disappeared while on a trip to Libya. The Libyan authorities insisted that Sadr and his two companions had departed the country on a flight to Rome, but the cleric has never been seen since. Sadr’s mysterious disappearance was steeped in religious significance, echoing the Shiite dogma of the “hidden Imam,” who went into occultation in the eighth century and whose eventual return, Shiites believe, will herald the advent of Islamic rule on earth. The vanishing imam was a potent symbol for Shiites, and paradoxically helped to revive Amal’s then flagging fortunes.

The third critical factor was the Iranian Revolution of February 1979, in which the ousting of the Shah and the establishment of Khomeini’s Islamic Republic served as a powerful exemplar and inspiration for Lebanese Shiites.

In addition to his religious studies, Nasrallah had resumed his political activities with Amal, and by 1982 was in charge of the Bekaa region and a member of the movement’s politburo. Following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the leadership of Amal, which was headed by Nabih Berri, decided to cease resisting the Israeli advance and join a “national salvation” government grouping representatives of most political parties and sects. The decision aggravated a growing schism within Amal’s ranks between the secular-oriented leadership, under Berri, and those, such as co-founder Hussein Mussawi, who sought to Islamicize the movement. Nasrallah was among the latter, and he left Amal to join up with a new movement taking shape in the Bekaa that would become known as Hezbollah.

Hezbollah was established with the assistance of Iran, which dispatched a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards to the Bekaa to begin a process of recruitment, religious indoctrination and military training. Nasrallah played an important role in galvanizing young Shiites to join the new resistance group, and by 1985 was Hezbollah’s chief for the Bekaa. That same year he was sent to Beirut to serve as deputy to Sayyed Ibrahim al-Amine al-Sayyed, assuming the same organizational role that he had held in the Bekaa.

In February 1985, Hezbollah formally announced its existence in an “Open Letter”—a political manifesto that outlined the party’s aims and ideology. Among the party’s stated goals were to continue resisting the Israeli occupation, a rejection of Lebanon’s “rotten” sectarian political system, and support for the establishment of an Islamic state in Lebanon.

Nasrallah’s public profile began to grow from 1987, when he was appointed to Hezbollah’s leading Shura Council and began delivering speeches and giving his first interviews. A year later, he narrowly survived an assassination attempt when a car bomb exploded beside a vehicle carrying him, Mussawi, and Sheikh Subhi Tufeili, a senior Hezbollah figure who was elected the party’s first secretary-general in 1989. Hezbollah’s influence gradually spread further south, particularly after Israel withdrew its forces in 1985 to a border strip in south Lebanon. But the southward move brought it into conflict with Amal, which had been waging a resistance campaign in the villages east and south of Tyre since 1983, and resented the encroachment of this Iran-backed interloper.

Although it was born during the civil war, Hezbollah has publicly prided itself on not having participated in the sectarian clashes that marked the conflict in the 1980s, despite its deep antipathy to Christian groups that were at one time backed by Israel, such as the Phalange. Hezbollah did fight against non-Shiite Lebanese allied to the Israelis in south Lebanon, and was sucked into brief factional fighting with the Communists in early 1986, but otherwise it remained focused on resisting Israeli occupation. “We are still careful not to be dragged into the quagmire of civil war from which God Almighty has protected us in years past,” Nasrallah said in comments about the Hezbollah–Communist fighting; “we are always very careful to avoid fighting with anyone and, most of all, with those with whom we have ideological differences, like the communists … Our strategy is to build a future for ourselves through confrontation with the Zionist enemy.”4

Tensions between Hezbollah and Amal erupted in 1988, however, when the two groups fought the first of two brutal intra-Shiite wars in southern Beirut and in the south. Although Hezbollah crushed Amal’s forces in southern Beirut, its fighters were chased out of much of south Lebanon. Nasrallah, who never played an active military role, found himself inadvertently caught up in the conflict while on a visit to the mountainous Iqlim al-Touffah province east of Sidon at the end of 1988. Amal fighters surrounded Hezbollah’s stronghold in the villages of Jbaa and Ain Boussoir, trapping Nasrallah along with several hundred fighters for three weeks. The intra-Shiite war ended in January 1989 with the adoption of the Damascus Agreement, which allowed a gradual return of Hezbollah fighters to the south in exchange for the deployment of Syrian troops into the party’s bastion in southern Beirut. Renewed fighting between Hezbollah and Amal flared up again in 1990, and relations would remain frayed between the two groups in the years to come.

With the Arab League-brokered Taif Accord in 1989 signaling the end of the civil war, Hezbollah’s leaders engaged in a heated debate over whether to participate more fully within Lebanon’s political system. Toufeili opposed any participation within a confessional-based system, in accordance with the party’s Open Letter manifesto. But Mussawi and Nasrallah disagreed, believing that a parliamentary presence was not inimical to its ideology and would strengthen Hezbollah’s resistance priority in the post-war era. “Regardless of the resistance … there are internal issues that are important to the people in the political and economic spheres, and in their daily lives,” Nasrallah explained soon after the 1992 parliamentary elections. “In Islam, the act of serving the people and God’s families, rescuing the oppressed, saving the distressed and stretching one’s hand to the weak and the dispossessed, are major to the faith. These are mentioned in the Quran, and we care to encourage them anew.”5 The “pragmatist” line of Mussawi and Nasrallah prevailed over that of the hard-liners, although the debate caused a lasting division within the party. Tufeili was replaced by Mussawi in May 1991, and was gradually marginalized until he broke from the party in 1997.

The disagreement between Toufeili and Nasrallah over the future direction of the party was not only ideological but reflected a personal antipathy between the two clerics. In 1989, Nasrallah decided he could no longer work under Tufeili and left Lebanon to continue his religious studies in the Iranian city of Qom. Although he planned to spend five years in Qom to complete his religious education, Nasrallah was persuaded to return to Beirut after a few months and take up his responsibilities once more within the party.

He was not yet 30 years old, but it was clear that Nasrallah’s star was in the ascendant. His charisma and organizational skills had won him many admirers within the party. One veteran Hezbollah official recalls that, even after the popular Mussawi had been elected secretary-general, it was his protégé who drew the eyes of the party’s rank and file.

The end of the war and the advent of Syrian dominion over Lebanese affairs allowed Hezbollah to concentrate its resources on battling Israel in south Lebanon. After Nasrallah was elected secretary-general in February 1992, following Mussawi’s death in an Israeli helicopter attack on his car, the Islamic resistance underwent a tactical revolution. Gone were the suicidal “human wave” assaults against well-defended Israeli positions that marked many resistance operations during the 1980s. Under Nasrallah’s leadership, the resistance became more compartmentalized, with units specializing in different weapons and tactics. Intelligence-gathering measures were improved, and greater autonomy given to field commanders.

The improvements to the Islamic resistance were evident in the escalating rate of attacks in the early 1990s, from 19 in 1990 to 187 in 1994. In the final months of the occupation, in 1999–2000, the resistance was recording as many as 300 attacks a month. More significantly, the fatality ratio shifted in Hezbollah’s favor, dropping from an average of five-to-one in 1990 to an average of three-to-two in the late 1990s.6

Other than air-tight secrecy, intense planning and the ability to learn from mistakes, Nasrallah explained that a central factor was the determination and morale of the individual combatant.

This group of fighters does not go to war in order to flex their military muscles, score a publicity coup or to achieve material advantages; they fight and do jihad with serious intent and a deep conviction that the only way to regain their usurped territory is by waging war on the enemy.7

Israel launched air and artillery blitzes against Lebanon in July 1993, April 1996, June 1999 and February 2000, targeting infrastructure such as bridges and power stations, and, in the first two campaigns, forcing hundreds of thousands of southern Lebanese to flee their homes. The offensives were miserable failures—they only strengthened domestic support for Hezbollah, and highlighted the inability of the Israeli military to curb the Islamic Resistance.

Nasrallah’s reputation soared immeasurably in September 1997, when his 18-year-old son Hadi was killed in a clash with Israeli commandos inside the occupation zone. In May 2000, Israel’s occupation collapsed almost overnight, and the last few hundred soldiers dashed for the border as Hezbollah’s fighters streamed into the newly liberated area. It was the crowning moment of the 18-year resistance campaign, and confirmed Nasrallah as one of the most respected, effective and popular leaders in the Arab world.

By then, Hezbollah was also an important actor on the domestic political stage, having secured 12 parliamentary seats in the 1992 elections and nine in the 1996 elections. Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc served as a counter-weight to the economic and social policies of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri during the reconstruction boom of the mid-1990s, which emphasized Beirut and Mount Lebanon over the poorer Shiite areas of the south and Bekaa. The parliamentary presence helped entrench Hezbollah within Lebanon’s political framework, giving it a relevance beyond the finite role of the resistance against Israeli occupation and bolstering its position as an alternative Shiite voice to Amal, which had steadily ossified under Berri’s autocratic leadership. Nonetheless, with its resistance priority guaranteed and protected by Damascus, the party’s leadership shunned a deeper political engagement—such as pressing for a share of the cabinet—to avoid the “bazaar” of compromises and quid pro quos that are an unavoidable element of Lebanese politics.

Following the Israeli troop withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah deployed into the former occupation zone and began installing a comprehensive and largely secret military infrastructure consisting of weapons stores, bunkers, tunnels, and firing positions. In October 2000, Hezbollah launched a campaign to liberate the Shebaa Farms, a 25-square-kilometer pocket of Israeli-occupied mountainside running along Lebanon’s south-east border with the Golan Heights. The campaign developed into a sporadic but finely calibrated series of harassing attacks in the Shebaa Farms and elsewhere along the Blue Line—the UN’s name for the Lebanon–Israel border. Hezbollah’s intention was to needle the Israelis without goading them into a massive response which could backfire on the party’s domestic popularity. Israel had to take into account that if it reacted disproportionately to Hezbollah’s attacks, the party could unleash its arsenal of thousands of rockets—some of them long-range—into northern Israel. The “balance of terror” along the Blue Line helped ensure a period of tense stability for nearly six years.

Hezbollah also provided assistance to the Palestinian intifada raging in the West Bank and Gaza from September 2000. Hezbollah’s Al-Manar satellite channel beamed a steady stream of anti-Israeli propaganda into Palestinian homes, making it one of the most widely watched television stations. Clandestine assistance included training specialist fighters, providing funds to Palestinian cells, attempting to smuggle weapons into the West Bank and Gaza, and passing on bomb-making skills. Hezbollah strengthened its political ties with the Hamas movement and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as several smaller pro-Damascus secular Palestinian groups, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command.

The support for the Palestinian intifada was rooted in Hezbollah’s anti-Israel credo, as well as a desire to offer its successful resistance to Israeli occupation in Lebanon as a model for other oppressed people to emulate and adapt to their own circumstances. “We offer this lofty Lebanese example to our people in Palestine,” Nasrallah said in his victory speech in May 2000.

You do not need tanks, strategic balance, rockets or cannons to liberate your land, all you need are the martyrs who shook and scared this angry Zionist entity. You can regain your land, you oppressed, helpless and besieged people of Palestine; you can force the invading Zionists to return from whence they came … the choice is yours and the example is clear before your eyes.8

By late 2004, Damascus was under stiff international pressure to withdraw its troops from Lebanon, and Hezbollah was facing growing demands to dismantle the Islamic Resistance. Hariri’s assassination in February 2005, and the subsequent “independence intifada” protests in Beirut, compelled the Syrian regime to disengage from Lebanon in April, ending a military presence of nearly three decades.

The collapse of the Pax Syriana had profound implications for Hezbollah. With Syria’s protective umbrella gone, Hezbollah was required to play a more assertive political role to defend its interests. It struck a strategic alliance with Amal, effectively subsuming its long-standing rival, and in July 2005 joined the Western-friendly government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, giving it tacit control of the five Shiite ministerial seats. In January 2006, Hezbollah forged an unlikely alliance with General Michel Aoun, a prominent Christian leader who, as an exile in France before 2005, had been a fierce critic of Syria’s involvement in Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s deft political juggling was in marked contrast to its more aloof attitude towards parochial politics during the 1990s, illustrating the party’s declining options and narrowing margins of maneuver as it struggles to reconcile its often conflicting domestic and regional obligations.

The Islamic Resistance is Hezbollah’s beating heart, giving it regional prominence and ideological fulfillment. But the cruel paradox for Hezbollah is that, as the Islamic Resistance has steadily evolved over the years into one of the most formidable guerrilla movements in the world, its raison d’être as a resistance force has been gradually eroded. When it began to coalesce in the summer of 1982, Israeli troops were in Beirut and occupying the entire southern half of the country, and no one questioned the efficacy of a resistance force. The same held true during the 1990s when the Pax Syriana and continued Israeli occupation allowed Hezbollah to pursue its resistance campaign unhindered and with at least the tacit support of all Lebanon’s communities. Hezbollah’s quandary began inevitably with the Israeli troop withdrawal in May 2000, which highlighted the stark fact that, for a party determined to retain its arms, victory over Israel was always going to possess a certain Pyrrhic quality. How can Hezbollah continue to justify resistance where there is nothing left to justifiably resist?

The collapse of Syrian–Israeli peace talks in March 2000, and the Shebaa Farms pretext, bought Hezbollah an extra five years. But Syria’s disengagement from Lebanon, international pressure, and rising unhappiness from non-Shiite Lebanese at Hezbollah’s continued armed status presented new challenges. Then came the month-long war between Hezbollah and Israel in the summer of 2006. The conflict demonstrated just how remarkable a military force the Islamic Resistance had become. Israel suffered a serious military and political reversal in the hills and wadis of south Lebanon, its vaunted deterrence capabilities publicly smashed by a few hundred devoted resistance fighters.

Yet even though Hezbollah’s reputation in the Arab and Islamic worlds had never been higher, this was a war that the party would have preferred to avoid. The argument that Hezbollah deliberately triggered the conflict by kidnapping two IDF soldiers on July 12 does not hold. There were no guarantees at the onset of the conflict that Hezbollah would emerge militarily triumphant—particularly as Israel had the full backing of the US. Indeed, part of Hezbollah’s ultimate battlefield success must be attributed to Israel’s poor planning, woeful intelligence failings, unrealistic political expectations, and hubris on the part of the IDF general staff.

Furthermore, Hezbollah may have emerged from the war with its resistance credentials freshly burnished, but it came at a steep price: it lost its military autonomy over the south Lebanon border district, and was forced to yield to an expanded UN peacekeeping force of some 10,000 troops, the bulk of them drawn from NATO countries, as well as 15,000 Lebanese soldiers.

Lebanese critics of Hezbollah bit their lips during the war, to present a unified front against the Israeli onslaught; but a post-conflict day of reckoning was inevitable. Crucially, the people who suffered most from the war were Hezbollah’s Shiite constituents who, for all their public praise for the resistance, were not pleased to have their homes and livelihoods destroyed. That perhaps explains Nasrallah’s mea culpa in a televised interview two weeks after the August 14 ceasefire, in which he stated that if the party’s leadership had predicted by “1 per cent” the Israeli response to the kidnapping of the IDF soldiers, the operation would not have proceeded.9 The party’s sense of post-war vulnerability also partly explains why Hezbollah subsequently launched its bold political gambit of cabinet resignations and street action to topple the Western-backed Siniora government—offense being the best form of defense. Hezbollah sought to increase the opposition’s share in the government, allowing it to block any potential legislation that threatened the party’s interests or those of its allies in Damascus and Tehran.

Regional dynamics have a deep influence on the unfolding political struggle in Lebanon, and thus shape Hezbollah’s courses of action. Hezbollah is a vital component in a strengthening anti-Western alliance uniting Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and some smaller pro-Damascus factions. This alliance challenges the US, Israel, and Washington’s Arab allies for control of the Middle East. The alliance is attempting to draw Lebanon firmly back into its orbit, thus denying the US its Levantine toehold, and reversing the Bush administration’s self-declared policy “success” in having helped Lebanon gain independence from Syria in 2005.

But Hezbollah’s regional commitments can conflict with its domestic interests. The timing of Hezbollah’s campaign to unseat the Siniora government coincided with a key moment in the process of forming an international tribunal to try those eventually indicted by a UN commission investigating Hariri’s murder. Syria is widely blamed for the Hariri assassination, and Hezbollah’s critics in Lebanon accused the party of deliberately attempting to block the formation of the international tribunal to protect its allies in Damascus. Hezbollah denied the charge; but if the Syrian regime is seriously weakened, or even falls, as a result of the Hariri judicial process, it would have significant ramifications for the durability of the anti-Western alliance.

The perception that Shiite Hezbollah is protecting the killers of the Sunni Hariri has fostered a growing intra-Muslim schism in Lebanon, itself a reflection of the broader Sunni–Shiite tensions generated by the regional confrontation between an expansionist Shiite Iran and a nervous Sunni Arab Middle East.

Nasrallah has long championed intra-Muslim unity, believing that disagreements between Sunnis and Shiites only benefit the enemies of Islam, and detract from the goal of confronting Israel. So it can have been of little comfort to note, at the beginning of 2007, that some of those Sunni Islamists around the region who had been cheering on Hezbollah’s resistance fighters during the war with Israel six months earlier, were now criticizing the party for being a duplicitous agent of the Persian “Magian” state.

Hezbollah is scheduled to hold internal elections in the summer of 2007, although Nasrallah’s mandate as secretary-general is likely to be extended, granting him a sixth three-year term in office. To an extent, Nasrallah long ago transcended the prosaic role of party functionary to become, for many members of Hezbollah, the very embodiment of the organization. Hezbollah is often regarded as a rigid, tightly controlled monolithic entity, but in fact it is more a coalition of shifting views and constantly evolving debate. Arguably, Nasrallah’s greatest feat as Hezbollah’s leader is to have prevented the party from fracturing or becoming fatally mired in internecine squabbles. In a moment of candor, a party official admitted that if Nasrallah were to retire or become incapacitated, it would represent a “catastrophe” for Hezbollah. Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, the head of Hezbollah’s executive council, has been tipped as a replacement secretary-general in the event of a calamity, but it is unlikely that he or anyone else can replace Nasrallah in substance.

Nasrallah’s leadership is the glue that binds the party together even as Hezbollah’s often contrary regional and domestic agendas threaten to pull it apart. Hezbollah’s Achilles heel is that one day it will have to make an existential choice: Is it to be a Lebanese party serving Lebanese interests, or Iran’s spearhead in the pan-Islamic struggle against Israel? Nasrallah has so far deftly sidestepped that critical decision, but for how much longer?

Nicholas Blanford
Beirut, January 2007