The History of the ACTUAL war in Israel-Palestine and Lebanon

So I've discussed ideal warriors and wars of ideas, now let's examine some real warriors again and real fighting wars central to why the West can't be excluded from being involved.

Let’s attempt to get to grips in more depth with the history of the radical groups in Israel/Palestine and Lebanon, in particular, as apparent Western interference in this area seems to be what seems to most irk most Muslims most often (and may be the cause of most trouble for the West, as a result). Nationalist resistance in both areas has morphed recently into religious projects.

Hamas, of course, has its origins in the Brethren movement. It rightly opposed the Oslo ‘peace process’ which depended on capitulation by Palestinians and in any case hasn’t proved successful. Following the failure of the process, Ariel Sharon deliberately provoked Muslims in 2000 by his visit to the Muslim 'holy sites' of Jerusalem setting off the second or al-Aqsa intifada that is effectively ongoing.

Hamas has, of course, been elected the government of the Palestinian Authority in protest at the corruption and accommodationism of Arafat’s PLO and in recognition of the work it has done in Palestinian society. Most governments in the West have effectively refused to recognize this result. They are also not fully ready to rule, in part because the divide and rule repression tactics of Israel have succeeded in creating a splintered Palestinian people. Hamas is now effectively the weak government of virtually-occupied Gaza having expelled many PLO elements while the PLO/Fatah has clung to a tenuous grip on power in the West Bank with some Western support.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah (Party of God) is a corresponding essentially Shi’a resistance movement; the resistance is mainly to an outdated sectarian constitution which formally gives more power to various Christian and Sunni minorities than to what is a virtual Shi’a majority or will probably soon be. Resistance has also been necessary over the years to Israeli occupation (which was in turn thought by Israeli politicians to be necessitated by Palestinian radicalism in Lebanon).

The 1921 founding constitution for an independent Lebanon set up by the French as they ceded control has become the source of injustice because of demographic changes. A properly conducted census has not occurred in Lebanon since the 1930s arguably because of the constitutional crises each census would potentially provoke. Thus neither of the two most powerful government positions is ever allocated to Shi’a politicians. The most powerful (President) usually goes to a Maronite Christian and the second (Prime Minister) to a Sunni Muslim. The Shi’a population lives mainly south of the Litani River or in southern Beirut and are allocated the third most powerful role (that of Speaker of the Parliament).

The recent history of Shi'a disadvantage in Lebanon is well revealed in a novel by T.Y. Awwad known in English translation as Death in Beirut (the strict translation of the Arabic title is Mills of Beirut). The clear rightness of the Shi’a position in the nevertheless polarised debate on constitutional reform has led to reductions in the powers of at least the Christian President (although powers have effectively been transferred to the Sunni Prime Minister rather than any Shi’a political position) and the parliamentary ratio of Christians to others has been reduced from 6:5 to 50:50. The system of patronage of elite sectarian families which suggested the French constitutional idea behind all this dates back to the Ottoman ‘representative’ constitution of 1908.

The first hint of Shi’a oppositionism dates to the mid 1920s with the setting up of Harakat AMAL (Movement of Hope but AMAL is itself also an acronym for something like Movement for the Dispossessed) by a charismatic scholar, Musa as-Sadr. He had been educated in both Iraq (Najaf) and Iran and set up this Lebanese party on his return. He later disappeared in mysterious circumstances possibly somewhere between Libya and Italy. The initially social movement under repression splintered into at least two armed parts and thus developed militia arms which finally split from the peaceful AMAL party to become Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad (no direct relation to the Palestinian group); the peaceful AMAL party still exists.

Hezbollah was earlier formed in Iran in the early days of 1979 (just before that year’s Islamic Revolution there). Iran is still influential in Hezbollah. Its political leaders are Hassan Nasrullah, Abbas Musawi and Subhi al-Tufayli and its alleged spiritual Shaykh, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, has generally preached tolerance and self-defence only. This has also generally been the practice of the party.

Hezbollah has recently been involved in government but Hezbollah ministers resigned from a weak government following the recent Israel incursions. The incursions led to further splintering in the Lebanese polity as repressions have elsewhere but fortunately the splintering has at least not been split on purely confessional lines.

The other factor causing this splintering process was the long term Syrian occupation that has recently ended under pressure following the assassinations of Rafiq al-Hariri and several other politicians and others. While there is as yet no final proof of the motives of the perpetrators, the targets of assassination generally opposed the Syrian occupation and influence generally in Lebanon leading to suspicion falling on Syria.

The two broad factions initially provoked by the later stages of the Syrian occupation have come to be called ‘the Forces of the 14th of March’ (opposed to Syria's occupation and in favour of the so-called “Cedar Revolution”) and the pro-Syrian ‘Forces of the 8th of March’. The dates are the date of the 2005 Cedar Revolution (14 March) and the date of a pro-Syrian call for protest in 2005 (8 March).

The Siniora government continued to resist Syrian influence following Syria's formal withdrawal before Siniora was replaced by Saad Hariri, the son of the slain ex-PM. Hezbollah recently boycotted Presidential elections before Michel Suleiman was finally elected in 2008 after crisis talks in Qatar confirmed his general acceptability to both sides of the divided polity.

So those are the warriors from Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. In the next two posts, I'll return to wars of ideas (though never completely divorced from the potential for violence), this time within Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Following that, I'll discuss one of the 'spill-over' effects in the West of all of these wars and that is the Arab and Islamic diaspora in the West (Eastern Christian, Jewish and other groups are also significant Middle Eastern diasporas, of course). While I'm discussing Muslims in non-majority Muslim Western states, I'll also dip my toe into discussing the situation of the 150 odd million Muslims in majority Hindu modern India.