ABSTRACT
Before the outbreak of war in 2006 between Israel and Hizbullah, which captured the world’s attention, Hizbullah was mainly known to specialists in the terrorism field because of its hostage taking and kidnappings of Westerners during the chaos of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1989). Several large-scale terrorist attacks against Western targets throughout the 1980s and 1990s solidified Hizbullah’s image as a global terrorist organization. Most notably, the October 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps Barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French soldiers in a simultaneous attack, was attributed to members of Hizbullah and carried out under Iranian direction (Geraghty 2009). Despite its bloody militant and terrorist history, Hizbullah’s organizational identity is increasingly complex and multifaceted, as the group concurrently developed its guerilla warfare capabilities while engaged in protracted conflict with Israel, bolstered its involvement in the Lebanese political system (and governing cabinet), and expanded its vast social services program. This has made scholarship on Hizbullah increasingly contentious, as debates rage over which one of Hizbullah’s competing militant, political, social, and terrorist identities is primary.
