Hezbollah's Survival: Resources and Relationships

The transformation undergone by Hezbollah between the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 and the July 2006 War with Israel was a profound one. In the late 1980s, Hezbollah was a radical militant group prone to flamboyant tactics and viewed with distrust even by many Shiites. It had been unable to hold territory in South Lebanon even against its main Lebanese rival, much less the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). But in July 2006, Hezbollah proved that it could withstand an assault by the strongest conventional military in the Middle East, denying the IDF its stated objective of driving the organization from South Lebanon. It even forced an Israeli withdrawal from territory the IDF had already captured. And perhaps more important, whereas Hezbollah's military activity in the 1980s cost it dearly in terms of public support, the July War itself, despite high casualties, had a very different effect. While this transformation is sometimes attributed to an increase in financial assets or military hardware, this explanation is ultimately unconvincing. I argue instead that, as with militant movements in other contexts, it was the strategies that Hezbollah used to acquire resources in the first place, rather than those resources themselves, that changed between 1990 and 2006. Adapted from the source document.