The world does not need more books on Hezbollah. The question of how and why an organization with little more than two million — largely impoverished Shia — among its support base has been able to sting the world’s only superpower and its closest ally has been pondered in literature by many. Undeterred by the panoply of former and current esteemed Hezbollah-watchers in whose footsteps he follows, Thanassis Cambanis, a New York Times and Boston Globe journalist, has thrown his hat into the ring with his new book “A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel.”
This work of narrative journalism focuses on personal testimonies from Hezbollah fighters, active members and supporters. The reader is introduced to such figures as Rani Bazzi, a Hezbollah fighter who cannot stop revealing the organization’s secrets; Cambanis’ translators and interlocutors, among them Issam Mousa and Dergham Dergham, the former an ex-footballer and the latter an ex-drug dealer; and Inaya Haidar, a 22-year-old nurse and “daughter of the South.” Added to this is your usual array of public Hezbollah figures.
Cambanis draws out the fascinating characters in his motley cast with great literary skill, although the majority of them are nowhere near the core of Hezbollah’s political and military machine. He defends this by writing: “I came to see that the grassroots individuals who gave their loyalty — and often their lives — to Hezbollah offered the most revealing insight into its nature as a dynamic sectarian group.”
But there are several problems. Cambanis has set himself the task of getting to “know” Hezbollah through the words of its “soft” supporters, but he himself does not speak Arabic. A decent translator of course could at least mitigate this problem. Cambanis’ honest confession, however, that one of his translators, Issam Mousa, “couldn’t always get the translation right” is a concern he does not appear to act upon. A Lebanese journalist who did not speak English interviewing American soldiers with a semi-articulate untrained translator would no doubt not be taken very seriously. Even more so if he claimed that his interviews with the soldiers would enable him to understand, through what they said, the United States military.
Cambanis tells us next to nothing about Hezbollah that we don’t already know. The summation that Hezbollah is built on two pillars — “ideology and services” — is hardly an exclusive. Rather than advancing our understanding of Hezbollah, Cambanis paradoxically allows the reader a better insight into how mainstream Americans view the region. Underlying the book is a keen sense of delicacy when dealing with the sensibilities of your average pro-Israeli/pro-United States-foreign policy readers.
The 18-year Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon is not given any real role in the history of Hezbollah; a startling omission given that Hezbollah was formed during, and in response to, the occupation and its most touted success was expelling the Israelis from the south.
On the other hand, efforts by the West, or more specifically the US, are portrayed as benevolent and well-meaning, while incompetent and corrupt Lebanese continually ruin the would-be plans. American foreign policy is rather generously summed up as “carefully laid plans for a friendly, secular, liberal Lebanon securely at peace with Israel.”
One needn’t judge this book by its cover when the title tells us a straight away that it plays into the old, tired, Islamo-crazy clichés so often bandied about in polite Western company.
While Cambanis offers some interesting portraits of the footmen of Hezbollah’s “legions,” a more accurate title for his endeavors might have been: “Inside the World View of US Elites and Their Perceptions of Lebanon.”
