Hezbollah goes left

 

In the 1980s, Hezbollah – then known as “Islamic Amal” – attempted to eliminate secular and national resistance movements, killing many leftist leaders, field fighters and intellectuals like Mahdi Amel and Hussein Mroueh. This was part of a Syrian strategy to keep military resistance under their control.

 

In fact, following a major prisoner swap with Israel in early 2004, in which more than 400 prisoners were released to Hezbollah in exchange for a reservist colonel and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers, the communist party was not even allowed to attend the reception held at the airport, despite the fact that most of the Lebanese prisoners were communists.

 

History aside, many leftist groups today now support the Party of God.  Hezbollah’s hatred of the US, Israel and their exploitative globalization, in addition to its defense of the Palestinian cause, has driven many in the Left to support it as a new form of international anti-imperialism.  The Democratic Left, now with March 14, is the only major exception.

 

Scattered ideology

 

An ex-communist, who is still call himself a leftist, said that he finds it impossible to reflect on his experience in the Left because of the inevitable association with Hezbollah that the Left carries today.  “I’m trying to understand why the Left has become today an ally to Islamist groups, and I wonder why my political space has vanished,” he said.  “I don’t think the communist party has ever been an ideological party in Lebanon. It has always been a political party.”

 

Speaking to NOW Lebanon, Ziad Majed, former Vice President of the Democratic Left Movement, said that the Left is, in that sense, more of a cultural position than a political one, adding that its influence is mainly in intellectual circles and among students. “The real challenge for me is how to reconcile it with real politics, without abandoning ethical and cultural guidelines, to increase its influence and presence… One of our achievements until now is that we brought part of the Left to the Independence Intifada, and this was important symbolically and had an impact on students and some secular circles,” he added.

 

Hazem Saghieh, a writer and columnist at Al-Hayat daily, told NOW Lebanon, that the majority of Lebanese Communist party members are Shia, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had to reconcile themselves with their roots in the Shia community. “The relation between the Left and Hezbollah is masochistic in nature,” he said. “Hezbollah killed their leaders and annulled them politically, but the Left is still looking up to Hezbollah. They are like orphans who needed a strong father or guide, because they are afraid of their independence,” he added.

 

Saghieh is an ex-communist himself who fell for a very brief moment in the trap of the Islamic revolution, which raised the banner of fighting American-Israeli hegemony in the region. “That was before the initiation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and I quickly realized that we cannot allocate resistance to Islam, because we will turn into a tool in their hands,” he added.

 

Looking for a father

 

For many leftists in Lebanon, as long as Islam can continue the fight, everyone should support it. In an October 16, 2006 interview with As-Safir, Secretary General of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) Khaled Hdede said that his party had not changed and did not follow Hezbollah. Instead, he said, Hezbollah had changed and developed into a group more open-minded than other political factions.  “I supported Hezbollah during the 2006 summer war, because, if it was defeated, the resistance would be defeated,” he said.

 

However, MP Elias Atallah told NOW Lebanon that the main reason behind the split in the LCP, a split which ultimately produced the Democratic Left Movement, was the Syrian issue. “The Communist Party’s alliance with Hezbollah is related to its alliance with the Syrian regime, and this precedes the resistance question,” he explained.

 

The Left, in this sense, is divided over the Syrian issue and Lebanon’s relation to the Syrian regime. According to the leftists affiliated with Hezbollah, however, the question is more about the resistance and its weapons. In this respect, Hezbollah seems to be carrying an international notion of resistance, which has been picked up and championed by leftist leaders, intellectuals and politicians all over the world.

 

On January 20, 2008, Future TV interviewed the leftist American political scientist Norman Finkelstein, a controversial academic highly regarded by the Lebanese Left.  Even though his position might appear, to those who have seen Lebanon held hostage by Hezbollah, simplistic and naive, Finkelstein said that he has no problem saying that he expresses solidarity with Hezbollah.  “I don’t care about Hezbollah as a political organization. I don’t know much about their politics, and anyhow, it’s irrelevant… but there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers… That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question,” he said.

 

Today, the absence of a strong leftist party is dangerous, because it means that the many scattered leftists – many of whom fought with the LCP in the war – now feel they have no place to go but to Hezbollah.  By doing so, their principles of secularism, equality and human rights are put on hold.  The Left at present is doomed to find no common political space.  Instead, the temporary and sometimes hypocritical political alignments will continue to push men and women of common ideology further and further apart.