Jerusalem

YESTERDAY I TRAVELED TO Tel Aviv University and met with Martin Kramer, who’s been writing about Hezbollah since the ’80s. “Their motto back then,” he told me, “was, ‘the Islamic revolution in Lebanon. And now it’s ‘the Islamic resistance.'” Maybe that partly explains why so many academics, as Kramer says, “fell for this idea about the Lebanonization of Hezbollah. So, you have all these people who ignored the ties with Iran, ignored the theology, and imagined Hezbollah was a national resistance group.”

Clearly the experts were naive; Western intellectuals, for instance, who might be alarmed by the religious sentiment of the president of the United States had no problem contextualizing the medieval theological opinions of Hezbollah officials.