Cela dit, des citations antisémites de Nasrallah, on en trouve. Mais Nicholas Noe et Thanassis Cambanis, notamment, notent que « le parti a supprimé la haine des Juifs de sa doctrine officielle » depuis les années 2000.
The refrain that Hizballah desires “eternal war” with Israel sometimes takes the form of the charge that Nasrallah preaches “racist hatred of Jews.” Once again, this charge contradicts Cambanis’ own reporting. He accurately states that “the party has excised hatred of Jews from its official doctrine.” He likewise reports that at the November 2009 unveiling of Hizballah’s manifesto, its first since its original “open letter” in 1985, Nasrallah said, “Our problem with them is not that they are Jews…. Our problem with them is that they are occupiers who have usurped our land and sacred places.” Cambanis continues, “The Hezbollah leader went out of his way to call the Jewish state by its name, Israel, in addition to making the usual references to ‘the Zionist entity.’” Nonetheless, Cambanis repeatedly suggests that Nasrallah is an anti-Semite underneath it all.
The accusation is based on two quotations from the 1990s, one of which is questionably sourced. First, Cambanis references the secretary-general’s eulogy for his son Hadi, who was killed in a 1997 gunfight with Israeli occupation troops in southern Lebanon. Cambanis quotes Nasrallah as saying, “If we search the entire globe for a more cowardly, lowly, weak and frail individual in his spirit, mind, ideology and religion, we will never find anyone like the Jew — and I am not saying the Israeli. We have to know the enemy we are fighting.” This statement is not sourced in A Privilege to Die, and Cambanis seems to have taken it either from a book of collected English translations of Nasrallah’s speeches [3] or from another book about Hizballah, by the Lebanese scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, who attributes it in a footnote to then Hizballah MP Muhammad Fanayish. [4] The second quote Cambanis cites is a widely circulated excerpt from Nasrallah’s 1998 ‘Ashoura speech in which he mourned the “historic catastrophe and tragic event” of the founding of “the state of the Zionist Jews, the descendants of apes and pigs.” While no specific source is provided in A Privilege to Die, these lines do appear in the text of the speech printed in Hizballah’s weekly al-‘Ahd, as well as in the same English-language collection of Nasrallah’s speeches. [5] In the collection, the lines follow a translated speech that emphasizes that Hizballah’s fight is with Israel and not with Jews.
While anti-Semitism exists in Lebanon and emerged in the 1998 speech — though it could be argued that the reference is to the political group “Zionist Jews” rather than the Jewish people as a whole — Cambanis himself notes that this instance of anti-Semitic rhetoric was the last in any official party statements, including Nasrallah’s subsequent speeches. Anti-Semitic prejudice is not limited to Hizballah supporters or to Shi‘i Muslims in Lebanon. The Israeli state’s own conflation of Zionism, Judaism and Israeli identity (as with Israel’s granting of citizenship on the basis of religion) has contributed to the conflation between Zionists, Israelis and Jews in Lebanon and the Arab world. And there is certainly anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia in Israel and in the US among both political leaders and the population, where it is backed by government policies and military actions. Racism exists on all sides, yet it is not an age-old, inevitable animus, but one produced and perpetuated by ongoing political and territorial conflicts. Hence, since the 1990s Nasrallah has been customarily clear in distinguishing between the state of Israel and its Zionist supporters, including Zionist Jews, on one side, and the Jewish people in general on the other. The purging of anti-Semitic rhetoric from Hizballah’s discourse indicates a change not only in public presentation, but also in the ways that language about the enemy is being communicated to Hizballah’s supporters. And, indeed, among Hizballah supporters in Lebanon the more common pattern is to mimic Nasrallah and talk about “the Zionist entity” or “Israel.”
Hizballah, indeed, has undergone significant transformations from the time of its 1985 “open letter” to the 2009 manifesto. As Cambanis mentions, the social base of the party is diverse, including many educated, middle-class professionals and people who may not share Hizballah’s religious and moral conservatism but still staunchly support the resistance against Israel. Since a failed attempt in the 1980s, Hizballah no longer tries to enforce moral regulations on anyone outside its core partisan membership. The distinction between partymembers and less committed supporters, in fact, goes some distance toward explaining the party’s popularity.
