The Tory government plans to ban the political wing of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist political party with a well-armed paramilitary wing. This armed wing is already proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government, but Hezbollah’s political wing is not specifically banned. The proposed ban is motivated in part by a desire to exert diplomatic pressure on Iran, a key state ally of Hezbollah, in the context of its continuing imprisonment of British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
Despite their clerical-fascist political programme, support for Hezbollah as a progressive force against imperialism and Zionism has been common on the left. In 2006, marchers protesting Israel’s war with Lebanon marched under placards and banners proclaiming “we are all Hezbollah”, effectively supporting one of the two war parties, rather than opposing the war on both sides. Hezbollah flags are widespread on the annual anti-Israeli Al-Quds Day march, organised by various Islamist and Arab nationalist organisations. The potential for disarray and confusion on these issues within the “Corbyn surge” in the Labour Party is immense, with Jeremy Corbyn himself having previously hailed Hezbollah, and other Islamist groups like Hamas, as forces for peace and progress.
Nevertheless, applauding the Tories’ proposed ban is misguided. The left must support the struggles of socialists, feminists, and other radicals in Lebanon and across the Middle East organising in immensely adverse conditions against the sectarian Islamist terror and reaction that Hezbollah represent. Those are the forces, however currently embattled they may be, that can defeat a party like Hezbollah, and transform the social conditions that allows it to grow, not a British state engaged in a largely symbolic act of geopolitical and diplomatic jockeying. The powers the British state uses to ban Islamist “extremists” could just as easily be turned against left-wing “extremists” in a different context. Class-struggle socialists have traditionally opposed state bans on fascist political parties; that opposition should extend to cover bans on Islamist clerical-fascist parties too.
Opposition to the ban must, however, be accompanied by an ongoing work of political education to persuade socialist activists that Islamism and Iranian sub-imperialism are not forces for progress to be supported in their invective against “Zionism”.
