In July of 1982, as Israel's invasion of Lebanon was getting underway, Iran, with the blessings of its ally Syria, dispatched one thousand Shiite revolutionary guards, or Pasdaran, to the town of Zebdani in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. There they joined forces with Hussein Musawi, a breakaway commander from Nabih Berri's Shiite Amal forces. Within a few months, Musawi's group along with others, including the amorphous Islamic Jihad group based in the Baalbek region of Lebanon, formed a loose merger beneath an umbrella party with pro-Iranian leanings called Hizbullah ("Party of God"). The group took its name from s.5: 56 of the Qur'an: fa-inna hizba Allahi hummu al-ghalibuna - "Then surely the Party of God, they are the triumphant." Hizbullah was formally constituted in February of 1985.
A pro-Iranian Lebanese Shiite cleric, poet, and writer, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah (born in 1934 and educated in Najaf) emerged as the spiritual leader of the group. In 1976, he published a book, al-Islam wa Mantaq al-Quwa ("Islam and the Logic of Force") which became one of the most influential texts in radical Shiite thought. Fadlallah, as spiritual leader, kept himself out of the day-to-day organizational structure of Hizbullah. The General Secretary of the group was Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.
Lebanon's Shiites had initially welcomed Israel's invasion of Lebanon as a way of getting rid of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). However, they soon turned against the invaders as Israel blocked the Shiites' access to northern markets and began dumping Israeli goods into their local economy causing indigenous economic interests to suffer. (Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Third Edition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 284)
Then, on October 16, 1983 during the Shiite Ashura festival in Nabitiyeh, Lebanon (marking the martyrdom of the Imam Hussein at Karbala thirteen centuries earlier), an Israeli military convoy provoked a violent reaction by insisting on traveling through the middle of a crowd of 50,000 Shiite worshippers. Two Shiites were killed and fifteen were wounded in the ensuing fracas.
One week later on October 23, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon was blown up by a suicide bomber driving a truck loaded with explosives. 241 Marines died. Twenty seconds after the Marine barracks bombing and four miles away another bomb exploded in a building housing French Multi National Force paratroopers. 58 soldiers were killed. Ten days later, another truck bomb blew up the headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) killing 29 Israeli troops and more than thirty Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners. Many observers believed these bombings to be in retaliation for the Ashura incident in Nabitiyeh.
In February of 1985, Israel, stung by hostile world reaction to its policies in Lebanon, pulled most of its troops out of southern Lebanon and set up a 15 km (nine mile) wide occupation zone in an effort to stop Shiite attacks across its border. However, the continuing Israeli presence created the opposite effect: attacks increased, carried out now, not by PLO guerillas but, by Hizbullah. Israeli raids on Shiite villages failed to stem these counter-attacks.
On March 8,1985, a Lebanese intelligence unit trained and supported by the CIA exploded a car bomb in West Beirut in front of the apartment building where Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was living killing 80 and wounding 200. Hundreds more died in Shiite Palestinian fighting in Beirut camps and in shelling and car bomb attacks in the spring and summer of that same year.
Hizbullah kept up its war of attrition against Israel claiming it was not a "terrorist" group, but a freedom-fighting militia. When, in the spring of 2000, Israel abruptly pulled out of its security zone in southern Lebanon, Hizbullah troops rushed in to occupy the area and declared victory over Israel. This event inspired Palestinians to stage the al-Aqsa Intifada the following autumn. Hizbullah continued to keep up military pressure on Israel around the disputed area called Shebaa Farms, which had been occupied by Israel, and at the same time began working to establish itself as a legitimate, mainstream political party in Lebanon.
By 2006, with Syria gone from Lebanon, with plenty of funding and arms flowing from Iran through Syria to Hizbullah, and with Hizbullah's other external sources of support, it was clear that Hizbullah had become virtually self-sufficient (perhaps even a a government within a government in some parts of the country, a state within a state, or, as some had it, a state within a non-state) and capable of having its way with and forcing its will upon the Lebanese central government. By this time, Hizbullah controlled two ministry portfolios in the Lebanese government and felt powerful enough to ignore United Nations demands to disarm (see UN Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1680).
This is why, after Hizbullah provoked Israel with rocket attacks in July of 2006 and the capture of two Israeli soldiers, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah sounded very much like a head of state when on July 12 he stood before TV cameras and lectured the Lebanese government (pumping up Lebanon's roughly half million Palestinian refugees as well as his own Shiite constituents): "Today is a time for solidarity and cooperation, and we can have discussions later. I warn you against committing any error. This is a national responsibility." (Megan K. Stack and Rana Abouzeid, "Hezbollah Forces Lebanon Closer to War," Chicago Tribune, July 13, 2006).
One of the most difficult challenges Israel faced in trying to defeat Hizbullah stemmed from the fact that Hizbullah was less of a monolithic organization and more of a generalized umbrella movement under which a wider assortment of religious (not just Shiite) and political groups had joined forces. In this sense, it was more like the American civil rights movement, for example, than the American Black Panthers. The core principle of the Hizbullah movement was not a religious cause, therefore, so much as resistance to foreign occupation. This, after all, had been the basis for Hizbullah's foundation in the first place back during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (see Robert Pape, "Ground to a Halt," New York Times, Op-Ed, Aug. 3, 2006).
February 7, 2000 Israeli attacks on Hizbullah positions.
May 18, 2000 Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
Civil war in Lebanon (1975-1989).
Prisoner exchange with Israel, 2004.
Hizbullah provokes war with Israel, July, 2006.