IFI Panel Discusses Hezbollah's Role After Israel's war on Lebanon in 2006

Left to right: Ibrahim Mousawi, Rami Khuri, and Patrick Haenni

Political experts Patrick Haenni and Ibrahim Mousawi said at a January 18 panel held at Auditorium B in West Hall that the current oppositional role of Hezbollah, Lebanon's leading Shiite party has been largely configured by former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri's assassination in February 2005 and the Israeli war on Lebanon in July 2006. Organized by the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI), the panel discussion was entitled "Hezbollah and Lebanon's New Challenges and Opportunities: Some Proposals on How to End the Crisis."

Haenni is a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group (ICG)- an independent, non-profit and non-governmental organization which works internationally to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts- and the principal researcher and author of the ICG report, "Hezbollah and the Lebanese Crisis," released in October 2007. Mousawi, on his part, is a lecturer at the AUB Department of Political Studies and Public Administration, the chief editor of the Arabic newspaper Al Intiqad, and a former spokesperson for Hezbollah. Mousawi, however, insisted that his views on the panel were his own and did not necessarily represent Hezbollah's position.

Haenni presented the ICG 2007 report on Hezbollah and the ongoing changes in Lebanese politics, as well as the recommendations proposed for resolving the crisis. Mousawi, in turn, commented on the report and the current situation in Lebanon. Haenni argued that the existence of a persistent threat from Israel and even from armed Palestinian groups in the south of Lebanon is the reason why people there turn to Hezbollah as protectors whom they subsequently vote for. For this reason, the ICG report recommended that "Lebanese parties and their external allies need to move away from maximalist [comprehensive] demands and agree on a package deal that accepts, for the time being, Hezbollah's armed status while constraining the ways in which its weapons can be used."

Haenni added that Hezbollah's main purpose of military resistance had changed after the Hariri assassination, the July 2006 War, and the subsequent deployment of the Lebanese Army and the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL). As a result, Hezbollah has turned inwards and more intricately involved in Lebanese politics.

Mousawi disagreed with Haenni's depiction, saying that Hezbollah had already switched from military resistance to symbolic resistance in 2000, following the Israeli troop withdrawal from southern Lebanon. He added that switching from military to symbolic resistance was a strategy that was meant to allow Lebanese expatriates to come back and participate in the reconstruction process of the South.