{"id":34791,"date":"2026-05-03T11:16:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T10:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/dominique-avon-hezbollah-history-armed-organisation\/"},"modified":"2026-05-03T11:16:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T10:16:07","slug":"dominique-avon-hezbollah-history-armed-organisation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/dominique-avon-hezbollah-history-armed-organisation\/","title":{"rendered":"Dominique Avon: “Hezbollah, the History of an Armed Organisation”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On 25 March 2026, historian Dominique Avon<\/strong><\/a> was a guest on Le Cours de l’histoire<\/em> on France Culture for an episode in the series Guerre au Moyen-Orient, l’histoire pour comprendre<\/em>, hosted by Xavier Mauduit. He was joined by Aur\u00e9lie Daher<\/strong>, senior lecturer at Universit\u00e9 Paris-Dauphine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dominique Avon presented his book Le Hezbollah. De la doctrine \u00e0 l’action, une histoire du parti de Dieu<\/em> (\u00c9ditions du Seuil), co-written with Ana\u00efs-Trissa Khatchadourian. The investigation traces back to the late 1970s: the first Israeli invasion of South Lebanon in 1978, the emergence of the preaching of two Shia clerics from the Bekaa Valley \u2014 Sobhi Tofeili and Abbas Moussaoui \u2014 and the coalescence of the movement in 1982 in a Lebanon torn by civil war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The programme highlights the complexity of the Iranian connection: Khomeini, consumed by the Iran-Iraq war, initially refused any aid and only agreed on the condition that the Pasdaran would not fight Israel directly. The role of Mohtashamipour, Iran’s ambassador in Damascus, is recalled. Dominique Avon underlines the doctrinal continuity between Khomeini and Khamenei, the centrality of wil\u0101yat al-faq\u012bh<\/em> in the founding open letter of February 1985, and the enduring register of jihad \u2014 from the founding text to the 2009 charter and Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches in 2024 \u2014 articulated throughout with a consistent political pragmatism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second half of the programme traces the party’s entry into the Lebanese arena (first parliamentary elections in 1992, entry into government in 2005), the Nasrallah turn, the Syrian engagement of 2012-2013 that fractured its support across the Arab world, and the ambiguity of its response to 7 October 2023. It also revisits episodes that have long remained opaque to French audiences: the September 1986 Rue de Rennes bombing, to be placed within the context of the Franco-Iranian standoff over the Eurodif dispute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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