The Hizbullah Phenomenon by Lina Khatib & Dina Matar & Atef Alshaer

Author:Lina Khatib & Dina Matar & Atef Alshaer [Khatib, Lina & Matar, Dina & Alshaer, Atef]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-11-14T18:30:00+00:00

The challenge of the Arab Spring

Hizbullah’s return to the victimisation framework was to prove useful with the onset of the Arab uprisings in December 2010. Hizbullah initially praised Arabs who had finally risen to claim their rights, with the Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan and Bahraini uprisings viewed as useful occasions to advance Hizbullah’s political position at a regional level. The first provided an opportunity to affirm Hizbullah’s mistrust of the West. On 16 January 2011, for instance, Nasrallah delivered a television speech reflecting on the refusal of European countries to host the recently ousted Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, in which the Hizbullah leader stated that he wanted to ‘congratulate the Tunisian people for their historic revolution as well as praise their bravery. But we must draw a lesson from that revolution. The lesson, above all, is this: the Ben Ali regime and its entourage have always served the interests of France, the United States, and the West in general, but now no Western power takes them in.’120 The Egyptian Revolution, on the other hand, was an occasion to delight in the fall of a political nemesis. After Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down from the Egyptian presidency in February 2011, Hizbullah issued a statement in which it said it ‘congratulates the great people of Egypt on this historic and honourable victory, which is a direct result of their pioneering revolution’.121 This quick embrace was in no small part due to Mubarak’s previous accusation that Hizbullah had masterminded a number of attacks that were planned to take place in Egypt to destabilise his regime, leading to the arrest of a Hizbullah member in Egypt in 2009.122 The third uprising, in Libya, was seen as a form of ‘revenge’ against the regime that had kidnapped the prominent Shiite leader Imam Musa al-Sadr in the 1970s. It took less than a week from the start of anti-Muammar Qaddafi protests in Libya for the Hizbullah MP Hussein Moussawi to speak out, calling on the international community to rid Libya of Qaddafi and condemning the Libyan regime for slaughtering its own people.123 In the al-Manar comedy show Tarabeesh, two comedians made fun of those Arab leaders whose pictures had been pelted by shoes during the uprisings, while another mimicked Qaddafi’s rambling speech on 22 February 2011, in which he had threatened the protesters and described them as rats in an effort to quell the uprising.

The Egyptian Revolution in particular was used by Hizbullah as an occasion to send different political messages. One message was an explicit criticism of its Lebanese and Arab opponents. An article in the 4 February 2011 issue of al-Intiqad with the headline ‘The Arab Spring brings Down March 14 and Mubarak’, for example, claimed that March 14 supported Mubarak because they were all American allies. A second message sought to paint the revolution as an extension of Hizbullah’s own legacy of resistance. The 11 February 2011 issue of al-Intiqad, for instance, carried a story about Egyptian activists praising Nasrallah’s speeches as having ‘encouraged’ them and ‘taught us how to resist our enemy’.

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