Who is Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah against whom Israel directed its attack in Beirut?

No one is a prophet in his country. And in the native district of Hassan Nasrallah there is no particular devotion to the head of Hezbollah. Bourj Hammoudeast of Beirut, Today it is home to an Armenian majority who live with Lebanese Christians, Syrian refugees and workers from Africa and the south of Asia. But it was there that the man was born 64 years ago who, in the name of Shiite Islam, twice ended the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and now uses the armistice line as his front of war in solidarity with Palestine.

Nasrallah grew up as a minority Bourj Hammoud. This small district of Beirut, on the other side of the Dahie where the Hezbollah stronghold resides today, keeps a secret. In its streets, rumor has it that it was an Armenian woman who breastfed him when he was a child. “That’s what the old people in the neighborhood say,” Krikor, a neighbor of the same age as the Hezbollah leader, tells EL ESPAÑOL. “But that didn’t matter before. At that time, we didn’t ask ourselves if anyone belonged to this or that religion,” he remembers.

The period to which it refers Krikor It ended abruptly in 1975 with the outbreak of the civil war which shook Lebanon for fifteen years. Nasralá’s family, like other members of the neighborhood’s small Shiite community, decided to seek refuge in the city. In his mid-teens, Hasán changed his school to Wireless -a predominantly Christian neighborhood- by ​​Bazuriye, a small southern town with a Shiite majority and hit several times during the escalation between Israel and Hezbollah last year.

Although his family was not particularly religious, the young man quickly developed his interest in theology in his parents’ town. Not even a year had passed since his transfer from Beirut when he joined Amal – “Hope” – the “movement of the dispossessed” which would become the main Shiite militia in the new war. At the age of 15 he was already the party’s spokesperson in the city, and after finishing secondary school he entered the clerical seminary in Baalbek, the capital of the Becá Valley.

From this poor region on the border with Syria, Nasrallah went to the Ayatollah’s seminary. al-Sadr In Iraq. He remained there until 1978, when Saddam Hussein’s government dismantled the Dawa ulama school in which the student was initiated. In 1979, he returned to Lebanon and resumed his activism in Amal. With such success that, a few months after his repatriation, he became a member of the party’s political council and delegate of the movement for the Becá region. At the turn of the decade, he strengthened his friendship with Abbas al-Musawialso a student of Al-Sadr in Iraq.

In 1982, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon prompted al-Musawi found a new movement: the Party of God, or Hezbollah. At this point in the civil war, a large portion of Lebanese Shiites – particularly those living in the south of the country – felt that a more militant and radical group than Amal was needed to respond to the specific threat posed. Israel. Moreover, unlike the existing party, the new movement had all the support of an Iran where the Islamic revolution had just triumphed and eager to launch its foreign policy.

Just as the Israeli invasion marked a change in mentality in his generation, Nasrallah quickly abandoned Amal and joined the new political-military project. Hezbollah declared in its Open letter —its founding manifesto— 1985 that the pillars of the movement were two. First, the armed struggle against enemy occupation in occupied Palestine. Second, loyalty to Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, as faqih – hermeneut – or highest religious authority.

Nasrallah’s involvement in Hezbollah’s early years came from abroad. The cleric spent long periods in Iran to strengthen the Lebanese party’s relations with the Islamic republic. But he quickly took the reins of the movement: in 1991Israel assassinated al-Musawi and Nasrallah returned to Beirut become secretary general of Hezbollah.

The party man

Since al-Musawi’s death in 1992, Nasrallah has been the sole leader of Hezbollah. At 32, the cleric inherited the leadership of a young movement which tried to wrest from Israel control of a strip of southern Lebanon equivalent to 10% of the territory. Over the next decade, he made two achievements that legitimized Hezbollah’s role as a political and military actor in Lebanon. First, he expelled Israeli troops from the south in 2000, after 18 years of occupation. Second, in 2004 it reached a difficult agreement with Israel on the exchange of prisoners. Lebanese and Palestiniansas well as the remains of deceased Hezbollah fighters, including those of his son Hadi, assassinated in 1997.

The successes of Feast of God the first five years of this century they won Nasrallah the admiration and recognition not only of Shiite Muslims, but also of a large part of the Lebanese population and many Arabs in the region. Perhaps the first setback in his leadership came in 2005, when Rafic Hariria Sunni prime minister critical of the Syrian government, was assassinated. Hezbollah was already a strong ally of Bashar al-Assad, and many Lebanese suspected their prime minister’s death was the work of Nasrallah’s men. At the time, the Hezbollah leader denied any involvement, calling the accusations a political attempt by the United States and Israel to defame his party.

But this crisis was an effective springboard to a new role. After Hariri’s death, it was confirmed that the Lebanese state was seriously injured. In the absence of Lebanese social security, public schools or public hospitals, Nasrallah’s Hezbollah has intensified aid programs for members of the Shiite community that it had already launched years ago.

The rest of Lebanon’s population was conquered after the 2006 war with Israel. In July of the same year, Hezbollah kidnapped two soldiers from the enemy army. Israel responded with a military campaign against southern Lebanon. In one month, the Government’s Defense Forces Ehud Olmert they killed more than 1,200 Lebanesedisplaced a million people and left entire regions destroyed. But after 34 days of operation, Nasrallah’s great feat arrived: Israel withdrew.

The entire Arab world celebrated Hezbollah for a moment. THE the feat of expelling Israel was the best fuel for the popularity of the Party of God in a society demoralized since the 1967 war. Nasrallah also insisted on the fact that this victory was the work of an entire nation: “It is not the victory of a party , of a sect, nor of a nation. category. “This is the victory of true Lebanon, of the people and of all the faithful of this country.”

After the collective euphoria, Nasrallah felt his party needed more than military might and deserved to have a permanent voice in the Lebanese government. After negotiations, confrontations and disagreements with the government of Fouad Siniora, the Prime Minister and the Party of God reached an agreement on Qatar: Hezbollah would have a veto over all decisions of the Lebanese cabinet of ministers.

But if, in the 2000s, Nasrallah consolidated himself as a legitimate political and military force in the eyes of the Lebanese and Arabs of all political denominations and all religions, the role played by Hezbollah in the war in Syria This tarnished the movement’s public image. Collaboration with the government of Bashar al-Assad This cost Nasrallah the dislike of rebels and his supporters as the so-called “Arab Spring” spread from Tunisia to Yemen. In Lebanon too, the arrival of a million and a half Syrian refugees has turned part of the population against the Party of God.

In recent years, the weight of Hezbollah in Lebanon has scared away investments from Gulf countries that are enemies of Iran. The economic crisis, the popular uprisings of 2019, the explosion of The port of Beirut in 2020 and the failure of the Lebanese Parliament to appoint a president have transformed Lebanon into a failed state. And in the face of this institutional power vacuum, Hezbollah is only growing and becoming one of the most important members of the movement. “Axis of Resistance” who is captain Tehran and which aims to combat Zionism and Western imperialism in the Middle East.

Following the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7 Nasrallah congratulated the armed group in Gaza. A day later, his men began attacking Israel from the northern border. In the name of Islam, but also of Lebanon, anti-imperialism and Palestine, Nasrallah showed himself ready to challenge Israel and devoted all the efforts of his 100,000 fighters to attack the other side of the border. Today, on the brink of war, the leader of Hezbollah presents himself as a man of great achievements. The first, expel Israel twice from Lebanon. Second, give credit to your party, but do it on behalf of an entire country. In doing so, Nasrallah has led the Lebanese – supporters or not – to increasingly believe that Hezbollah is the only force in Lebanon capable of fighting Israel.