Hezbollah's Goals

When it comes to terrorism, Hezbollah is a different kind of animal. Unlike most terrorist organizations, Hezbollah is considered a success. Hezbollah combines physical acts of violence, propaganda, and social services to gain political agency in Lebanon. Ultimately, it wants to achieve two major goals: resist American foreign policy influence and eliminate the threat posed by Israel’s existence. This paper looks to explore Hezbollah’s strategy, Israel and the United States’ response to Hezbollah’s strategy, the parts of Hezbollah’s strategy that have seen success, and the net effectiveness of Israel and the United States’ campaigns to end Hezbollah. To understand Hezbollah’s overarching strategy, a few aspects of its existence need to be

For one, it symbolically expresses the lengths to which the group is willing to go to achieve its objectives. If a group is willing to commit murders for a cause, then those causes must be important to it. If a terrorist group has supporters, and it carries out violent acts in the name of a cause, then it means that the group is willing to fight for those who support it. However, violence as a means of achieving political gains is a risky endeavor. If a group opts for violence before being recognized as a state, it risks being ostracized and losing the audience it depends on to achieve political legitimacy. This is especially true if the organization targets individuals whom their audience does not view as a threat. The reason why terrorist groups are able to gain a following is because their audiences have similar goals and frustrations as the groups themselves. Hezbollah is no different. Another goal that violence achieves is that it acts as a legitimizing force in the eyes of a group’s supporters. Terrorist groups lose support if violence is not carried out in the name of their objectives. Violence can only be carried out for so long by a group before its members lose motivation and the audience sees no real political gains being made. Therefore, a terrorist organization has to have a plan in mind when it opts for violence against governments and their respective populations. Hezbollah’s acts of violence are a source of legitimation

It reiterates its resistance toward the oppressive and imperialist United States government (section 1.2), that Israel continues to pose a threat to Lebanon and that armed resistance is needed to protect Lebanese sovereignty (section 2.2), and goes to describe the relationships that Lebanon seeks with other religious, geographical, and international actors (sections 2.4 through 2.7). What is important to recognize between these documents is that the 2009 Manifesto is mostly consistent in its message with that of the 1985 Open Letter. In addition, both invoke the concept that if Islamic governance is to be realized as Hezbollah desires, supporters of Hezbollah and Islam must resist oppressive (i.e. Western and Israeli) governments and accept no alternative political ends (even if those ends have practices and ideologies that are similar to many Western governments and institutions, because that is what Hezbollah has described as their ideal government’s