Hezbollah is not a state. Theyre a, you know, supposed political party — Hezbollah

"In the training camp set up by the Revolutionary Guards near Baalbek, the young men received religious instruction from clerics like Tufayli and Mussawi, now wearing military fatigues under their clerical robes. The men learned to handle AK-47 rifles and rocket propelled grenades, they were taught hand-to-hand combat and the art of camouflage. In the same Beqaa Valley where just a few years ago Palestinian guerrillas had trained Iranian revolutionaries, Iranians were now training Lebanese Shias, birthing a new movement that would forever change Lebanon’s Shia community and America’s relationship with the Middle East. Soon the Lebanese would run the training camps themselves. The still amorphous movement would remain unnamed for a couple more years. But this was the founding of Hezbollah, the Party of God, molded after Iran’s own Hezbollah, and it would be the revolution’s most successful export."

"Hizbollah is not and has never been a terrorist organisation. It is the legitimate national resistance movement of Lebanon. [...] I glorify the Hizbollah national resistance movement, and I glorify the leader of Hizbollah, Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah."

"In Greek legend there was a fighter named Antaeus who drew strength from the earth even when he was flung down. It took Hercules to work out his vulnerability as a wrestler. Hezbollah loves death, thrives on defeat and disaster, and is rapidly moving from being a state within a state to becoming the master of what was once the most cosmopolitan and democratic country in the Middle East. Meanwhile, a former superpower—no Hercules—is permitting itself to be made a hostage and laughing-stock by a squalid factional fight within the Israeli right wing involving the time and scale of petty land theft by zealots and fanatics. Only a few years from now, this, too, will seem hard to believe, as well as shameful and unpardonable."

"Still a loose movement, the group coalesced around clear tenets: Islam was a complete program for a better life. It provided the intellectual, religious, ideological, and practical foundations for their new movement. Resistance against Israel was the priority, its total obliteration the end goal. Crucially, the movement submitted to the wilayat al-faqih and the leadership of the faqih, Khomeini. In its official manifesto published in 1985 as a forty-eight-page Open Letter, Hezbollah made clear it desired an Islamic state in Lebanon, a Shia one just like in Iran, though the group was careful not to explicitly threaten to impose it. Society would embrace it, they believed, including Christians, because it was the righteous path. The story that would be most widely told in the decades to come about the birth of Hezbollah is that it was born from the ashes of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. After rose petals came bullets, and then car bombs. The story is not entirely wrong. Without the Israeli invasion and occupation, Hezbollah may not have been able to take root in the country. But this is not the whole story. Sheikh Tufayli’s eureka moment at the Damascus airport preceded the rage of occupation. Even before 1979, Khomeini’s disciples had identified Lebanon as fertile terrain for their revolutionary projects."

"A depressingly excellent book on the contours of that new reality is provided by Thanassis Cambanis. A Privilege To Die lays out the near-brilliant way in which Hezbollah manages to be both the party of the downtrodden and the puppet of two of the area’s most retrograde dictatorships. Visiting Beirut not long after Hezbollah had been exposed as an accomplice to Syria and as the party that had brought Israel’s devastating reprisals upon the innocent, I was impressed, despite myself, by the discipline and enthusiasm of one of Nasrallah’s rallies in the south of the city. Cambanis shows how the trick is pulled. With what you might call its “soft” power, the Party of God rebuilds the shattered slums, provides welfare and education, and recruits the children into its version of a Boy Scout movement, this time dedicated to martyrdom and revenge. With its “hard” power, it provides constant reminders of what can happen to anyone who looks askance at its achievements. Its savvy use of media provides a continual menu of thrilling racial and religious hatred against the Jews. And its front-line status on Israel’s northern frontier allows it to insult all “moderate” regimes as poltroons and castrati unwilling to sacrifice to restore Arab and Muslim honor. Many Sunni Arabs hate and detest Hezbollah, but none fail to fear and thus to respect it, which Nasrallah correctly regards as the main thing."