Summary
The Lebanese Shia resistance movement that ended Israel’s two-decade military occupation of southern Lebanon by forcing the Israeli army out in 2000, which Makdisi’s Coda distinguishes sharply from Hamas against David Remnick’s description of the two as “ideological allies” (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.333-335).
Details
- Hizballah is a Shia organization that emerged among the impoverished agricultural villages of southern Lebanon; Hamas is a Sunni organization based in the urban slums of Gaza and the West Bank (PDF p.333).
- It has the strong support of a major segment of Lebanon’s Christian population, shown in backing for former army commander Michel Aoun — demonstrated most recently in a parliamentary by-election in August 2007 — and Aoun supported Hizballah during the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon on the basis of nationalism rather than religion, an alliance that makes it “hopelessly simplistic” to consider Hizballah simply in Muslim terms or as the actualization of an extremist “ideology” (PDF p.334).
- People across Lebanon’s spectrum supported its resistance operations against the Israeli army up to the 2000 withdrawal not because they believed in its Islamism but because they wanted an end to the occupation; in neither Hizballah’s nor Hamas’s case does this justify indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets (PDF p.334).
- Insofar as there is any connection between Hizballah and Hamas, Makdisi argues, it lies in both having emerged in response to Israel’s military occupations of other people’s land (PDF p.334-335).
- The Epilogue names the Dahiyeh Doctrine for Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut razed by Israel in its 2006 war on Lebanon (PDF p.373).
Related pages
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Hamas, Dahiyeh Doctrine