Hezbollah originated within the Shiite block of Lebanese society. According to the CIA World Factbook estimate in 2022, Shiites comprise 31.2 percent of Lebanon's population, predominating in three areas of Lebanon: Southern Lebanon, Beirut and its environs (Dahieh), and the northern Beqaa valley region.

Origins Lebanon gained its independence on November 22, 1943, with the French army withdrawing its soldiers from Lebanon in 1946. The Lebanese National Pact became the framework for governance, leading to the allocation of political privileges, such as membership in parliament as well as senior bureaucratic and political appointments, to each of the 17 recognized sectarian communities based roughly on the proportionate size of each community. The two most important positions of the presidency and premiership were given to the Maronites and Sunnis respectively, with the Shia receiving the speakership of the parliament in recognition of their status as the third largest demographic group in the country. Despite the appointment they remained politically, socially and financially marginalized.Hezbollah and the Political Ecology of Postwar Lebanon

Shia political movement before Hezbollah Between 1943 and 1990, Shiites areas in Southern Lebanon and Beqaa Valley were long neglected by the Lebanese state which diverted its resources to other areas, and Shias were sorely underrepresented with very little say in the government. Early on, Lebanese society was traditionally dominated by the za'im, a political boss from a leading feudal family. The za'im system was strongly criticized from early on, most notably by the Najaf-educated cleric Muhammad Jawad Mughniyya who wrote newspaper editorials against capitalism, feudalism, and the pro-Western Baghdad Pact in 1956, and demanded justice for peasants from the "wicked politicians and ruling clique". Mughniyya's efforts were eventually succeeded by Musa Sadr.

Opposition to feudalism grew stronger, and by the late 1960s, za'ims had little power left. Instead, Shiites lent their increasing numbers to a wide variety of Leftist organizations, particularly ones which demanded the reformation of the Lebanese system and the abolishment of sectarianism. During the early 1960s–70s, Shiites formed significant numbers in the Arab Nationalist Movement, the Ba'ath Party (1947–1966), the Lebanese Communist Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the Progressive Socialist Party (where they formed 20% of the membership in 1958), and Palestinian factions which were based in Lebanon, namely Fatah, the PFLP, and Arab Liberation Front. Shiite circles of former Arab Nationalist Movement members went on to establish other parties, including Socialist Lebanon, Organization of Lebanese Socialists, the Communist Action Organization in Lebanon and Arab Socialist Action Party, which advocated violence as the best means to end class conflict. Multiple Shias rose into prominence within leftist circles, most notably Marxist–Leninist intellectuals Husayn Mroue and Mahdi Amel, CAOL leader Mohsen Ibrahim, and Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party leader Assem Qanso.

In 1960, Imam Musa Sadr came to Lebanon to become the leading Shi'ite figure in the city of Tyre. He quickly became one of the most prominent advocates for the Shia population of Lebanon, a group that was both economically and politically disadvantaged. In 1969 he was appointed as the first head of the Supreme Islamic Shia Council, an entity meant to give the Shias more say in government. In 1974 he founded the "Movement of the Deprived" to press for better economic and social conditions for the Shi'ites. He established a number of schools and medical clinics throughout southern Lebanon, many of which are still in operation today. During the Lebanese Civil War he at first aligned himself with the Lebanese National Movement, and the Movement of the Disinherited developed an armed wing known as Afwaj al-Mouqawma Al-Lubnaniyya (Lebanese Resistance Regiments), better known as Amal.

Although Amal had its genesis in the Movement of the Disinherited (Harakat al-Mahrumin), founded by the charismatic Musa as-Sadr, when Sadr was abducted it turned briefly to the secular leadership of Husayn Husayni in 1979, and since 1980, Nabih Berri.Hizballah Rising: The Political Battle for the Loyalty of the Shi'a of Lebanon Under Berri's leadership, Amal alienated many religious Shias by supporting the Syrian-backed presidency of Elias Sarkis and compromising Sadr's struggle for social and political reforms. The secularization of Amal provided the Najaf deportees with an ideal setting to spread their militant brand of Shia activism.

Whereas Musa Sadr viewed the Lebanese state as a legitimate entity in need of reform and had developed close ties with reform-minded Christian politicians, some Lebanese seminarians in Najaf refused to accept the state of Lebanon, its current borders, or its consociational power-sharing formula as unassailable facts. This group organized under supervision of Iraqi Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (the cousin of Musa), one of the leading clerics in the Shia seminary (hawza) of Najaf in Iraq. These clerics theorized about an Islamic state woven of a clandestine network that became known as Hizb al-Da'wa (the "Party of the Calling"), which established a twin party in Lebanon. This network was established in Lebanon by clerics who returned from Najaf like Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah and Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi.

Hezbollah's emergence The organization developed in a milieu which underwent a sequence of radicalizing events. Following independence in 1943, the Lebanese Shia community was disproportionately the poorest community in the country, and was marginalized by a ruling Sunni–Christian duo and severely underrepresented relative to the community's size. In 1976, more than 100,000 Shias were forcefully displaced from the East Beirut canton into Dahieh and Southern Lebanon following violent events of Karantina massacre and the siege of Shiite neighborhood of Naba'a and Tel al-Zaatar, a Palestinian refugee camp with 43% Shiite inhabitants.Amal Saad-Ghorayeb (2001) Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion. London: Pluto Press. The context of radicalization was further enhanced with the disappearance of Musa Sadr in 1978, and notably the success of the Iranian revolution in 1979. The latter's impact was so profound that when the Iran–Iraq War raged in September 1980, around 500–600 Amal volunteers went to Iran to join Mostafa Chamran.

The most crucial event for Hezbollah's emergence is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Prior the invasion, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had used Southern Lebanon as its base of operations against Israeli targets. Israel invaded Lebanon to evict the PLO and install their ally Bachir Gemayel as president, destroying 80% of villages in Southern Lebanon in the process and causing around 400,000 refugees to flee their homes, which ultimately led to the formation of Hezbollah as an armed organization to expel the occupying Israeli forces.

According to Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh in "In the Path of Hizbullah", four crisis conditions catalyzed the emergence of Hezbollah: 1. Identity crisis and marginalization When Lebanon became independent on November 22, 1943, "the Shiites felt that they were the despised stepchildren of a state governed by a Maronite-Sunni alliance."Hamzeh, Ahmad Nizar (2004), In the Path of Hizbullah, p:12 The Shias were ripe for every Shi'a protective organization like Hezbollah. 2. Structural imbalance Shias were politically underrepresented, based on the National Pact of 1943, which vested legislative and executive as well as military positions in rough proportion to the demographic size of the country's eighteen recognized sectarian groupings. In 1946, the Christian Maronites and the Sunni Muslims occupied 40 and 27 percent respectively, of the highest civilian posts. In contrast, the Shia occupied 3.2 percent. By the 1980s, Shias had become Lebanon's largest single confessional community with almost 1,400,000 people, surpassing the Maronite and Sunni populations, which were each estimated at nearly 800,000 a piece.Hamzeh (2004), p:13 The Shiites believed that their representation was not commensurate with their numerical size. Economically the broader Shia community in Lebanon was very poor. Almost 85 percent lived in the rural region of South Lebanon and in one area of the Beqaa Valley, and subsisted on what they earned, mostly from selling tobacco to the state monopoly or growing vegetables. They were also exposed to the military fighting between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). To escape these conditions, many Shias migrated to the slums of eastern Beirut and shantytowns in the suburbs south of Beirut. Hamzeh writes that "[t]hese two areas, known as the "belt of misery," became the breeding ground of Shia militancy in the 1980s.Hamzeh (2004), p:14 Even in the 1960s and 70s, the charismatic leader Imam Musa al-Sadr began to activate the politically quiescent Shias of Lebanon. 3. Military Defeat "When identity crisis and structural imbalance are reinforced by military defeat, a society's militancy potential increases markedly. Military defeat followed by foreign occupation opens the way for militant movements fostering political organization or employing guerrilla warfare and enjoying widespread grassroots support.Hamzeh (2004), p:15 This is what happened when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 (Operation Litani) and 1982 (Lebanon War), actions which, according to Hamzeh were undertaken in order to remove the PLO from Lebanon and disassociate Lebanon from Syria's influence. Israel hoped that "a Lebanon freed from Syria and the PLO, with a Christian-dominated regime, would bring peace and closer connections between the two countries."Hamzeh (2004), p:16 But these operations oppressed Shi'a which lived in south Lebanon. The Israelis killed more than one thousand civilian Shias, leading to a mass exodus of yet more Shia refugees to the Beirut slums. Israel's 1982 invasion and occupation of Lebanon bolstered the fortunes of Hizbullah by "providing a politic-military environment that legitimated the group and gave a rationale for its guerrilla warfare. Similarly, the presence of the Western foreign troops in Lebanon, particularly of the U.S. Marines, also boosted the fortunes of Hezbollah, which considered fighting such forces to be as legitimate as fighting the Israeli occupation." 4. Demonstration Effect ( Iran's Islamic Revolution) According to Hamzeh "Iran's revolution had its greatest impact in Lebanon," even though the two countries are not adjacent, because Lebanon's long-suffering Shias were most receptive to Iran's Islamic revolutionary message.Hamzeh (2004), p:18 Shia clerics from Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, in particular Khomeini, had known each other well in the Shia city of Najaf in Iraq where they participated in their "circles of learning." Soon after Khomeini's victorious return to Iran on February 1, 1979, he became the unchallenged leader and chief ideologue of the Shias inside and outside Iran."Hamzeh (2004), p:19 He met with militant Shia clergy (e.g., Sheikh Subhi al-Tufayli, Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi) and other militants in August 1982 at the Islamic Movements conference in Tehran—the so-called First "Conference for the Downtrodden".Hamzeh (2004), p:25

Foundation

Scholars differ as to when Hezbollah came to be a distinct entity. Various sources list the official formation of the group as early as 1982Council on Foreign Relations, 2008 whereas Diaz and Newman maintain that Hezbollah remained an amalgamation of various Shi'a groups until as late as 1985.Diaz & Newman, 2005, p. 55 Another version states that it was formed by supporters of Sheikh Ragheb Harb, a leader of the resistance killed by Israeli Shin Bet agents in February 1984.