By Afro-Middle East Centre Beginnings Hizbullah was established in 1982, at the height of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war, to protect Lebanon’s Shi'a community which, at the time, was one of the country’s most disadvantaged communities. Its main objective was opposition to Israeli aggression against Palestinians and Lebanon, and it hoped to engender a more favourable view of Iran. The party’s most concrete advances occurred after the 1990 Saudi-brokered Taif Accord which ended the civil war. Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon allowed Hizbullah to retain its weapons, unlike other militia groupings which were largely disarmed and incorporated into the country’s formal…

By Lamis Andoni  The 2005 assassination of Lebanon's Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was followed by the launching of an international investigation into the assassination, and the subsequent setting up of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in 2007. Both were problematic from the outset. First, it was unprecedented for a special foreign tribunal - albeit nominally under United Nations sponsorship - to be established to investigate the assassination of a state official. This unprecedented step raised suspicions as to the real political motivations of the west. Second, the process instantly became a further catalyst for the polarisation that had been…

By Lamis Andoni Four years after the end of the Lebanon war, the role of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which had been entrusted with keeping the peace between Israel and Lebanon, has been thrown into doubt amid intensifying threats of another war. Both Israel and Hizbullah, the latter having been the main target of Israel's 2006 war, have stepped up their accusations against UNIFIL. Israel is again accusing the peacekeeping forces of failure in preventing, if not of collaborating with, Hizbullah in its replenishment of its military power in South Lebanon. Hizbullah, meanwhile, believes that "certain…

Reviewed by Na'eem Jeenah Sandra Mackey sets herself a few tasks for this book. Firstly, she expects to give the reader an overview of the contemporary situation in Lebanon and to analyse the issues besetting Lebanese society by examining its history and sociology. Secondly, she hopes to use Lebanon to show that the rest of the Arab world has similar issues that it needs to confront and that Lebanon is 'mirrored' in the Arab world. Finally, she expects to do all this in a readable, easy manner. She succeeds in some of these tasks and fails (sometimes miserably) in others.