Content area
Full text
Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance. BY HALA JABER. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Hala Jaber's lasting contribution is her ability to treat Hizbullah's formidable Islamic movement not as an Iranian import but rather as an indigenous locally-nurtured and internally-justified development in Lebanese Shs ite society. In the biographies and social makeup of Hizbullah's fighters and "human bombs," emerges the image of a frustrated social group pushed into militancy at the hands of governmental neglect, class tensions, aggressive Western policies and Israeli expansionism. Amidst that, we witness the growing formulation of an 'authentic' 'Islamic' order as a solution to problems of state and society. Perhaps the sections that carry the greatest import in this work are those that deal with the socioeconomic history of southern Lebanon, the forced migration of Shiites from the rural south to the impoverished urban quarters of Beirut, and the consequential radicalization of Shiism under circumstances of economic instability, marginal governmental support, and systematic Israeli aggression in the South. What had been clinically termed by the Israeli political apparatus as the `security zone' of Lebanon, was but...