Elmaleh’s case and Iran tell us much about Hezbollah

What do the recent protests in Iran have in common with the decision of the French actor and comedian Gad Elmaleh not to attend the Beiteddine Festival next week? Simply that both events exposed once again the extent to which illiberal tendencies are an inherent part of Hezbollah’s identity.

Party leaders were relatively quiet in the early days of the Iranian demonstrations, although they defended the alleged election victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Hezbollah sided with the hardliners in Tehran who had likely swindled millions of Iranians out of a vote. This was natural, since the party is an emanation of generally the most intransigent and undemocratic bastions of Iranian power. But the reaction also showed how Hezbollah, because of its instincts of self-preservation, has a natural interest in seeing Iran’s reformers and democrats fail, even those who have no desire to overthrow the regime.

How odd this is for a party that, both inside Lebanon and throughout the Middle East, has laid claim to moral righteousness, through its efforts to combat an unjust Israel and an overbearing United States. By the same token, Hezbollah has often argued that it is the preeminent defender of Shia rights in Lebanon, and that if the country’s political system were more just, the Shia would be afforded greater political power. In electoral terms, for instance, party leaders routinely call for a voting system that favors what they believe is the community’s numerical majority.

That’s why it’s so instructive to see a party that supposedly embodies social justice, majority voting, and moral rectitude, supporting the ruthless crushing in Iran of a legitimate challenge to a falsified election that ignored the views of a majority of voters. And if you doubt that there was cheating, then explain the incomprehensible behavior of the very people and institutions in Iran that Hezbollah most strongly supports, who rejected a more consensual solution to the election dispute.

Then there is the case of Gad Elmaleh. The comedian is of Moroccan origin, but it was his Judaism that Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television and website chose to focus on recently, when it accused Elmaleh of having served in the Israeli army. There is no evidence this is true, and the actor’s manager bluntly stated that it was untrue. However, Elmaleh was frightened enough to cancel his performances at Beiteddine.

We can speculate about why Hezbollah prevented a stand-up comedy act. Then again the party has always been immune to the temptations of humor. Partly, it was to commandeer the right of being gatekeeper to prominent visiting Jews; partly, it appears to have been a message to Walid Jumblatt, whose wife, Nora, heads the Beiteddine Festival, that his reconciliation with Hezbollah will come on the party’s terms. However, what the incident really showed was that Hezbollah is most comfortable when inhibiting a pluralistic political and cultural Lebanese order.

When will the party’s anti-democratic impulses get more coverage than they do? Hezbollah is difficult to ignore, but does that have to mean that those engaging the party need never raise objections about its behavior? For example, whether Hezbollah’s leaders are meeting with useful idiots like the former US president, Jimmy Carter, or with representatives of the United Kingdom, never do we get a sense that it pays any price for being a near totalistic organization, wedded to violence, that will flaunt its indifference to the Lebanese state and United Nations decisions. Carter has never seen an Islamist he doesn’t like, while the Gordon Brown government resumed its dialogue with Hezbollah despite ample evidence that the party had violated UN resolutions the UK voted for.

The same holds for quite a few Arab and foreign journalists and observers who have cut the party considerable slack over the years. It is a common subtext in the international media to hear how Lebanon’s traditional political leaders are autocratic, but almost never is that demerit applied to Hezbollah. One reason is that access to the party is difficult, so journalists will usually avoid jeopardizing that access. Another is that there is an instinctive fascination with Hezbollah for being so different than what is otherwise found in Lebanon, so that its social networks and communal popularity are seen as compensating for its absolutist tendencies.

Not enough has been written or said about this aspect of Hezbollah. The party has many facets, but what it fears most is uncontrolled pluralism and shifts in the status quo that might threaten its power. Hezbollah is by nature a Leninist party that only allows dissent in the shadow of centralized discipline, which cannot make it particularly tolerant of Lebanon’s open ways. That’s why it has sided with the bullies in Iran, and has again chosen to act like a bully in Lebanon at the start of a cultural season which we naively thought might pass without a hitch.