Author: Helena

TWO MORE THINGS ABOUT SHI-ITE ORGANIZING: In yesterday’s post– right below here, I waxed fairly admiring of the political smarts that Hizbullah has shown over the year, in Lebanon, and suggested that much of what Hizbullah has learned through that experience there will inform the actions of their Shi-ite co-religionists inside Iraq.
I want to add two quick points. One, inevitably, has to do with the whole issue of “terrorism”, and the extent to which the discourse of “terrorism” is used and abused in order to vilify and exclude political opponents.
I have, of course, just been in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, even Desmond Tutu, were for many decades routinely described by the apartheid rulers as “terrorists”. And in Mozambique, where the Frelimo government for many long years refused to talk to their Renamo opponents on the grounds that the latter were merely “bandidos” (bandits). Now, they are valued members of the national parliament…
So people do generally know how these discursive strategies of exclusion work. And that they are, at the end of the day, strategies that are always manipulated for political purposes.
Lebanon’s Hizbullah occupies a position on the US State Department’s formal list of “foreign terrorist organizations”. That is due mainly, I believe, to actions that people associated with Hizbullah took against Americans and other westerners in the 1982-85 period– the period before Hizbullah’s actual establishment as a unified organization, and when Lebanon was still reeling from the brutal campaign Israel sustained during the summer of 1982, in the course of which an estimated 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinian people lost their lives. A majority of them, most likely, noncombatants.
Which is not to excuse any of the brutal acts that local Shi-ite-based grouplets carried out during the years that immediately followed. The murder of AUB President Malcolm Kerr stands out as one particularly horrifying and tragic incident.
But other actions taken by Shi-ite grouplets in those years that were also described as “terrorism” really were not terrorism at all. In particular, the spectacularly bloody attacks against the US Marines barracks and a large French caserne in Beirut, in October 1983 that killed 241 Marines and 57 of their French counterparts, and scores of others wounded was not terrorism by any recognizable definition of the word at all.
It was horrifying for the survivors of the attacks, for the family members of the 300 soldiers killed, and for the amour-propre of the US and French governments of the day. But it was not “terrorism”. Those who lost their lives were active members of the uniformed military who had taken the oath of military office whereby a person is, in essence, given a license to kill if ordered to do so and also to accept the fact he or she may be killed while in the line of duty.
Which perhaps goes to show that the discourse of “terrorism” is less useful and all-encomapssing than some of its practicioners take it to be. But certainly, it helps to indicate that accusations of “terrorism” always need to be given careful examination. In fact, the discourse of “terrorism” turns out to be far less useful, in practice, than the traditional distinctions that international humanitarian law has always sought to make, between what can be done to active-duty “combatants” and what can be done to “noncombatants”, a class that includes wounded soldiers and prisoners-of-war, along with all civilians.
Those distinctions have been spelled out in a score of international treaties and conventions since the late 1800s. The discourse of “terrorism”, by contrast, remains a slippery eel, subject always to political abuse and manipulation…
Which brings me back to Hizbullah. Once it had been established, Hizbullah’s leaders were generally very careful and disciplined in the approach they took to targeting. The vast majority of their military attacks were against Israel’s soldiers doing occupation duty inside Lebanon. This counts as allowable “resistance to occupation” under international law. certainly not “terrorism”– though of course the Israelis always tried to paint it as such.
On some occasions, however, Hizbullah did launch some fairly low-tech, low-yield rockets against civilian population centers in northern Israel. Hizbullah leaders always claimed they did this in response to Israeli attacks against population centers in Lebanon that lay outside the mutually-agreed “zone of operations” in the south of the country.
Of course, once people get into tit-for-tat retaliation mode, it becomes very hard to see “who started it” regarding any such move toward escalation. (That was why the question of getting a reliable and credible monitoring presence in on the ground became very important.) But it’s certainly true that Israeli commanders themselves sometimes admitted that it had been their side that started an escalation. And then, there were hige-scale Israeli escalations like the big punitive raids of 1993 and 1996 that were preceded by nothing like a “justifiable” trigger on the behalf of Hizbullah– and that did not provoke any Hizbullah “retaliation” against Israeli civilians on anything like the scale of the punishment that the IDF inflicted on Lebanese civilians during those raids.
Once again, the discourse of “terrorism” then dominant in western circles proved totally unhelpful in explaining what was going on, or in informing further actions on behalf of Western governments. The discourse of international humanitarian law (Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions) proved considerably more informative and helpful.
… Well, that’s one quick take on a matter that probably needs much more discussion. The other thing I wanted to note re the current emergence of Shi-ite political power in Iraq is the whole issue of women’s rights inside Iraq.
This, to me, is a much stronger reason to feel wary about the rise of organized Shi-ism than the whole badly-abused question of allegations of “terrorism”.
I know woefully little about the role of women, or women’s issues, throughout Hizbullah’s many years of experience in Lebanon. I don’t doubt but what the party has women members and women activists who must, presumably, play some kind of a role in planning and implementing the party’s many grassroots-level social and economic programs. But I sure haven’t seen any women referred to among the party’s leadership.
The party’s strong advocacy of veiling I do not, necessarily, take to mean that it favors total submission of women and their exclusion from public life. I know for a fact that in many Arab societies, many of the women who veil do so precisely so that they can go out into public life, jobs, academia, etc., without having their honorable-ness questioned at every turn…
But one thing I think we all have to take note of in Iraq is the terrible battering that women’s role in society seems to have taken in the aftermath of the US/UK invasion. This is NOT a case, like that in Afghanistan, where the authors of the invasion/occupation could claim that one of their “goals”, or at least one of the effects of their action, had been to strengthen the ability of women to take part in public life.
In Afghanistan that goal has been met only very partially, and very “modestly”. And in most parts of the country, not at all.
In Iraq, we have to recognize openly that systematic misogyny of the type practised in Afghanistan by the Taliban was not a problem at all under Saddam Hussein. Sure, women suffered under his rule. But they did not suffer any worse than the men in their same families. They weren’t denied an education or the means to make a living. Far from it! Iraq under the Baathists gave women a prominent and respected role in many fields of public endeavor.
I mean, how many other countries have women in charge of their biological-weapons programs??
But it was not just “Dr. Germ.” Under Saddam, women were prominently present in all sectors of public life.
And now, in many places, they dare not even leave their homes, or send their daughters to school.
Where is the outrage amongst western feminists about that?
Where is the questioning in the western press about the huge and much-celebrated soccer match (a recent, American-organized ‘showcase’ in Iraq of how good Iraqi-American relations were) , with a turnout of scores of thousands of fans– none of whom appear from the news pictures to be women?
Where is the questioning about the patheticly small number of women involved in all these much-heralded “consultations” the American gauleiters are holding regarding Iraq’s political future. A measly total of SIX women were all there were at the most recent “consultation” in Baghdad– along with TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR men.
Gimme a break! Where’s the outrage??
So anyway, what I wonder about, is what role the Iraqi Shi-ite organizations (as well as all the other emerging political groupings there) are going to play in Iraq in the future regarding the woman question. It could be a good role. For starters, anyone who can increase basic public security can transform the lives of women and girls completely, simply by allowing them to exit their houses and go to schools, job, and markets. But beyond that, there’s no reason we can’t hope that the Shi-ite organizations will also give active support to women taking leadership roles inside and outside their respective political parties…
Well, maybe I’m unrealistic. But I do like to look beyond the whole “veiling” issue that so many other western feminists seemto get so badly hung up on.
Actually, it was in Iraq, back in 1980, that I had my first experience of veil-wearing as possibly being a liberating experience. One of my Iraqi “minders”, a very good-hearted woman called Asea, agreed to take me to Najaf and Karbala. But being a Christian gringa, the only way I could possibly get into the shrines there was by donning the whole black abaya. So that’s how I spent my whole day there– going into the shrines, wandering with Asea around the markets, etc.
I wore the abaya. I spoke pretty good Lebanese Arabic at the time. People we met just assumed I was a visiting Lebanese Shi-ite. They were friendly. But we didn’t stick around any one place long enough for the flaws in my Arabic to become too evident.
I have to say that that point, having spent six years living in Beirut and traveling around the Arab countries as a western woman, that day was the first one in which I had not felt trapped in the gender complications of my public role.
In “liberated” Beirut and the other Arab countries I visited, I always dressed modestly. I learned to keep my eyes on the ground– simple eye-contact from a gringa could frequently be seen as a come-on. I walked the streets the same way I see my daughter walk New York now: fast, purposeful, alert.
But despite practising all those defensive precautions, I would still– just by virtue of my mid-brown hair, or whatever; I really don’t know– have young boys running after me in the street shouting “prostitute!” In some places– Damascus comes to mind, but there were portions of all other Arab cities I worked in where it would also happen– the crowds of young men on the street would seem to compete in trying to do painful jostling right into my chest as I walked by. I could never NOT be aware of the fact that I was a woman walking on an Arab street–
Until I went to Najaf and donned the abaya.
What can I say?
I can say Damascus has gotten a lot better over the past 25 years, and maybe the other cities have, too.
I can say that the right to walk on a public street without suffering constant sexual harrassment is one that all people, women and men, should be able to enjoy, and that should be enshrined in the Universal declaration of Human Rights.
I can say that the terrible harrassment that women are reportedly suffering on the public streets of many Iraqi cities these days is simply unconscionable.
I can note that when I was in South Africa, I learned that when South African blacks and whites were negotiating their final transition to democratization, all sides agreed that each party would field a negotiating team of five members– AT LEAST TWO OF WHOM WOULD HAVE TO BE FEMALE. That in the “front bench” of two members of that team, AT LEAST ONE MEMBER WOULD HAVE TO BE FEMALE. And that as the role of chairing those proceedings rotated amongst the parties, EVERY OTHER CHAIR WOULD HAVE TO BE A WOMAN.
That was in “deepest Africa”, back in the 20th century.
But how about “the new Iraq”, today??

SHI-ITE ORGANIZING: Ways, ways back in 1985, I published a book about Lebanon. (It won an award from Choice magazine, actually.) The “new” phenom in Lebanon then– new, I mean, in terms of, gee-whiz, it suddenly gets “discovered” by otherwise uninterested Westerners– was the rising influence of the country’s rapidly modernizing and rapidly organizing Shia community.
I wrote a bit about that along the way. A little monograph called “The Shia Community and the Future of Lebanon” (January 1985). A chapter in a book co-edited by Juan Cole and Nikkie Keddie: “Shi’ism and Social Protest” (Yale, 1986).
More recently, I’ve been going back to look at some of the more recent scholarship being done on the Shi-ites of Lebanon, and in particular on the notable successes won over the years by Hizbullah.
What is clear to me, from my own earlier work, from my close knowledge of developments in Lebanon throughout the past 30 years, and from this more recent work that’s now starting to come out, is that Hizbullah is an incredibly sophisticated, disciplined, and focused organization.
Some Westerners may look askance, or with a strong but unexamined sense of cultural/intellectual superiority, at a political movement run by men in turbans. They do so, I suggest, at the risk of considerably underestimating a religio-political culture that– in the case of Hizbullah, above all– has shown itself to be extremely adept at the core political chore of winning and keeping a strong and multifaceted political base.
And no-one looking at the political dynamics of the Middle East today can fail to see that Hizbullah is renowned throughout the entire region for being the only grouping anywhere that was able to liberate large chunks of Arab land from Israel’s military occupation. Considering that Hizbullah is a non-state actor and has none of the immense advantages that the stature of statehood confers, that’s no mean feat.
Hizbullah is important, currently, I believe, for two main reasons:
(1) because of the power throughout the Muslim world of “the Hizbullah mystique” — that is, the narrative that argues that Hizbullah won (all or nearly all) of its goal of liberating Lebanon from Israeli occupation primarily through the force of arms. One clear contrast that is often posed, in this argumentation, is with hapless old Abu Ammar and Abu Mazen, who have pursued peace negotiations with Israel for so many long years but have gotten nothing but repeated grindings of Israel’s military jackboot in their face for all their pains. And–
(2) because we can fairly confidently expect that much of the same political/organizing smarts that Hizbollah has displayed in Lebanon will be increasingly displayed by the Lebanese Shit’ites’ co-religionists in Iraq.
I’d love to write about both aspects of this topic. Not sure that I have time to, tonight. But here goes.
First, the possibility of Iraqi emulation of Hizbullah. Well yes, it’s evidently going to happen. Has already been underway for quite a time, indeed. While I do not pretend to know all the ins and outs of the relations among the different Iraqi Shi-ite groups, or the details of their relations with different factions in Iran, it’s evident that the Iraqi Shi-ite groups which have had a strong presence in Iran in recent years must have had close links and the opportunity for close consultation with Hizbullah people there.
Plus, the links between all three of these Shi-ite communities go back a long way. Lebanese ulema have received their religious training in Najaf for many centuries, and have socialized and inter-married there with many members of the big Iraqi (and some Iranian) religious lineages. So of course continued cross-border learning has been taking place– on matters of how to liberate a country from foreign military occupation, as well as on interpretations of arcane religious texts.
So what kind of lessons might the Iraqi Shi-ite organizers have been getting from their Lebanese counterparts? One key one, I think, would be the need to adopt a careful, longterm strategy of guerrilla warfare, and to pay attention to the classic guerrilla doctrine that rock-solid socio-political organizing is every bit as important (and sometimes, much more important) than organizing for direct military confrontations.
In Lebanon, in the years after Israel’s large-scale invasion of 1982 (which had been preceded by its smaller-scale invasion of 1978), it was Israel’s continued presence on Lebanese soil and the clumsiness of the interventions it made in Lebanese politics that themselves stimulated the birth and rapid growth of Hizbullah.
Hizbullah won early acclaim for the daring of its front-line fighters and the ingenuity of the tactics they used against the Israeli occupiers. (Israel in Lebanon, like the US in Iraq today, always swore its troops were not there to stay… But the Israelis never showed any signs of voluntarily leaving the country completely to its rightful owners.)
The Israel “Defense” Forces with their state-of-the-art military technology, funded and largely provided by an ever-generous Uncle Sam, always had the ability to “beat” Hizbullah on the battlefield. There was never any question about that. But the darned thing was– the thing that frustrated the heck out of two or three generations of Israeli military leaders– that they could never figure out how to translate a battlefield victory into a lasting political victory. The one big attempt to do so– in 1982, when they occupied about 35% of the whole country right up to and including the capital, Beirut– rapidly proved to have led to an order that was ways too costly, at every level, to sustain.
I’ve written about this before. In 1984, the inflation rate in Israel went up to 373%.
So they re-jiggered their footprint in Lebanon, and tried to keep a smaller force in “just” the south of the country, and to use it to project a “deterrent” threat that would deter the unruly Lebanese from messing with the IDF any further.
Israel’s “deterrent” in Lebanon was meant to work like this: Israel (of course!) would set the ground rules for any encounter. If something happened that Israeli gauleiter Uri Lubrani didn’t like, then the IDF would launch a “punitive” raid to force Hizbullah or other opponents to shape up.
But it didn’t work out like that. Hizbullah was never cowed into submission by those Israeli raids.
So starting in the early 1990s, the Israeli brain-boxes came up with a new idea. Instead of punishing Hizbullah, they would punish the Lebanese population instead, and try to force large parts of the Lebanese body politic to repudiate Hizbullah. (Sort of what they’ve been trying to do in the Palestinian occupied territories for the past 30 months. Also, without much notable success.)
So in 1991, and in 1993, and again in 1996, Israel launched raids of increasing ferocity against Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. Each time, they unilaterally declared that most of the (majority Shi-ite-peopled) area of South Lebanon was a “free-fire zone”, and that Lebanese civilians stayed there– in their own homes– at their own peril. (And then they accuse others of “terrorizing” civilians??) The idea there was to send waves of Shi-ite refugees flooding northward for their lives; and that once these waves hit Beirut, they would put irresistible pressures on the Lebanese government to repudiate and finally take action against Hizbullah. To step up the pressure, Israel bombed bridges, power-plants, roads… The pressure inflicted on the lives of most Lebanese was terrible indeed.
But the support for Hizbullah didn’t waver. In fact, it got stronger each time. Finally, the 1996 invasion– launched by Shimon Peres and titled “Operation Grapes of Wrath”– resulted in a humiliating debacle for the Israelis, when they were forced to accept significant changes in the rules of engagement inside Lebanon that went in Hizbullah’s favor.
I guess from that time on, the writing was on the wall for the IDF’s strategy of “active, forward-based deterrence” in Lebanon. In 1999, Ehud Barak ran on a platform calling for speedy, unilateral withdrawal. After he won the election, that was one campaign promise that that he managed to keep. (Unlike the one about real and rapid progress in the negotiations with the Palestinians.)
So the interesting question is why did the political part of Israel’s “deterrent” strategy backfire so badly in Lebanon? And the answer to this has to be the political and organizing genius of Hizbullah. Which stands in stark contrast, I might add, to the shoddy and makeshift organizing capabilities of Yasser Arafat and his colleagues, with their tangled lines of command, their total lack of focus and discipline, and their general over-all reluctance to speak honestly and directly to “the people” whenever they can avoid doing so– which they generally do.
In contrast to Arafat’s Fateh, as it has become over the years, Hizbullah’s leaders always tried to keep close to the people. It was always assiduous about offering them the very best levels of social and economic support that it could. For many years–and perhaps until today– Hizbullah organized all the trash collection in Beirut’s southern suburbs; it regularly trucked in drinking water to all the subrubs’ neighborhoods; it provided cheap schoolbooks for hard-pressed parents and students; it sent its young men to refurbish school buildings. In the agricultural areas of the Bekaa, meanwhile, it provided agricultural extension services, marketing expertise, and cheap loans to farmers.
Most of these services were provided irrespective of the religion of the recipient, though their provision was always centered in areas of high Shi-ite population. But at the political level, Hizbullah’s leaders and sheikhs and ulema associated with it were always very careful to reach out across confessional lines and engage in interfaith dialogues with counterparts in other religions. Though everyone knew Hizbullah had good relations with Iran– which helped to fund the many social programs– Hizbullah’s leaders were always at pains to position themselves as a specifically Lebanese party. They played the political game in Lebanon with aplomb, building alliances across all kinds of confessional and political boundaries in order to maximize the number of their winning candidates in parliamentary and local elections.
Israel’s attempts to get the Lebanese body politic to repudiate them failed in the mid-1990s because by then Hizbullah had become an important and generally valued part of the body politic itself. When Israel launched the punishment raid of 1996, even leaders of the Maronite Christians– traditionally Israel’s closest allies inside Lebanon– declared, “we are all Hizbullah now”.
Without the massive attention to grassroots organizing, and the smart but careful political strategy that stemmed from that organizing, Hizbullah could never have attained those results. On a purely military battlefield, it would always have been smashed by Israel. ut lebanon is not just a “battlefield”. It is also a country, with politics, and even more importantly, people.
My current argument with those friends in the Arab and Muslim worlds who seem to have been dangerously swayed by the attraction of the “Hizbullah mystique” is that Hizbullah’s substantial victories never grew mainly out of the barrels of its guns. They came instead overwhelmingly from the strength and intelligence of Hizbullah’s political strategies.
So if the Palestinians, or the Iraqis, or anyone else who wants to free their country from foreign military occupation wants to take a leaf from Hizbullah’s playbook, maybe they should concentrate on Hizbullah’s superb political-organizing skills much more than on its military achievements.
Indeed–and I have argued this a number of times– they could maybe try to replicate what Hizbullah achieved but with even less loss of life, and less pain and suffering, by doing Hizbullah’s style of meticulous and focused political organizing, and its active mass resistance actions– but on the basis of a determined adherence to using nonviolent means??
So far, this seems to be the focus of what the mullahs in “the new Iraq” are doing. So far, I have a lot of respect for them. It is, after all, their country that the US and UK forces are now quite extra-legally parked in…
As far back as April 12, I wrote here that Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld bore a lot of responsibility for the terrible power vacuum and mayhem that was then starting to emerge inside Iraq. And I wrote there that in the center and south of the country, the Shi-ite mullahs looked like the network best prepared to provide the kind of very basic services that in such circumstances everybody needs. (Oh, things like basic personal security. Bombs-Away Don seemed to have forgotten about that completely.)
And of course, Iran is right over the border. Handy for them. A long and very porous border, too.
So of course it’s not going to all be an exact replay of Lebanon. But there are already scores of similarities. And one of them is definitely the existence of a common, shared body of knowledge about what works in building a popular movement to resist foreign military occupation, and what doesn’t…
But hey, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody’s armies just returned to their own national soil??? Why should that suddenly seem such a revolutionary notion?