Lebanese Hezbollah’s Framing of the ‘Two-front Resistance’

A Quantitative Analysis of al-Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah’s Speeches

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011, Lebanon’s Hezbollah has militarily confronted both Israel and the Syrian rebels, which has led it to articulate its discourse of resistance that targets both the ‘enemies’ simultaneously. When and how did Hezbollah change its framing of the resistance between these two ‘enemies’? What factors motivated these changes? This study investigated these questions through a quantitative text analysis of the Arabic speeches delivered by the organisation’s charismatic leader, Secretary-General Hasan Nasrallah.
First, this paper configured the critical phases of the Syrian conflict to provide an overview of the political environment surrounding Hezbollah. Second, it employed a quantitative text analysis method, namely Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS). Third, it verified the results through statistical analysis.
The study found that Nasrallah’s speeches emphasised the ‘takfiri frame’ rather than the ‘Israeli frame’ since 2011. This was particularly evident after the declaration of the formation of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria. However, Nasrallah’s emphasis on the ‘Israeli frame’ gained prominence when Israel’s military intervention began and escalated. The overall result shows and statistically confirms that Hezbollah’s framing of the ‘two-front resistance’ was influenced by the dynamics of the Syrian conflict.