When the Hezb Recruits Children and Justifies It...

When Hezbollah, or those orbiting within its sphere, are questioned about their practice of recruiting children — a category that UNICEF defines precisely, through the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as any human being under the age of eighteen — the answer invariably moves between a few registers: they claim the children want it themselves, that they are mature enough, or that it is perfectly normal and consistent with the practice of every revolution in history. A rosary of references then unspools, carrying us back several centuries.

We find ourselves, at once, mired in countless fallacies.

To begin with, the definition of age categories is not a fixed datum: it shifts across eras. It is worth consulting Ariès’s encyclopedic work on childhood in particular, and the Annales School more broadly. Childhood as a concept did not exist in the Middle Ages; the child was treated as a small adult. There was no clear boundary between the world of children and the world of adults — not in upbringing, not in clothing, not in play. Early integration into the adult world was the norm, and it was within that framework that their enlistment in wars was considered “acceptable.”

But norms and concepts transform over time, which means that what was once held to be “natural” may become morally and legally inadmissible in another era.

We know well that child labor was commonplace during the Industrial Revolution, and that it persists today in the most impoverished countries. Yet this has not prevented the international recognition of children’s rights and their need for protection and care on every level — educational, medical, and psychological — so as to support children in growing and flourishing in a healthy way. History itself thus demonstrates that societies abandon practices they once considered “normal.”

It is within this logic that UNICEF made its legal determination, through the Convention on the Rights of the Child: every human being under the age of eighteen is a child. This is not a cultural opinion open to interpretation, but an international standard and a legal rule that imposes binding obligations, and underpins the policies of states and organizations alike.

As for the argument drawn from revolutions, it is no less fallacious. Revolutions did indeed use children, but child labor was also acceptable at the time, the absence of education was unremarkable, slavery was legal, the deprivation of women’s rights was not only widespread but ordinary, and systematic violence was equally the norm. Does any of this make these things acceptable today? Of course not.

There is another fallacy into which they sink: measuring the present by the standards of the past — a practice they extend, moreover, to every domain — while simultaneously availing themselves of the most advanced products of modern technology, from drones to digital media to smartphones, which we know facilitated the pager operation whose consequences are by now well known. One cannot live by the technology of the twenty-first century and justify one’s social practices by the standards of the Middle Ages.

What they are actually doing is a redefinition of childhood: they drain the word of its contemporary meaning and replace it with an elastic definition — “aware,” “ready,” “mature” — in the service of policies dictated by their employer, Iran. They dismantle the definition of childhood in order to reconstruct it according to their needs. They convert the child from a “subject of protection” into an “instrument of conflict,” in direct contradiction and violation of developmental psychology, international law, and the whole of contemporary ethics.

To invoke historical practices in order to justify the recruitment of children today is to deliberately ignore the evolution of human values and standards — just as one cannot justify slavery, child labor, or the oppression of women by arguing that they were once widespread. The existence of something in the past confers no legitimacy upon it in the present; otherwise, we would have to accept slavery and the dispossession of women of their rights.

The problem does not lie in history itself, but in the attempt to instrumentalize it in order to justify what is no longer tolerable today.

Everything they do amounts not to any kind of “fidelity to origins,” but to utilitarian selectivity and the projection of rules onto a reality governed by entirely different rules — in other words, they mix distinct normative frameworks in a manner that appears arbitrary but is in fact systematically calculated.

One cannot live by the technology of the twenty-first century and justify one’s conduct by the standards of the Middle Ages. And if a concept has evolved, one cannot regress to earlier stages to legitimize the practices of today.

What is actually happening is the stripping away of the child’s legal minority, his transformation into a “little fighter,” on the pretext that he is sufficiently “aware” of what he is doing — and it is precisely this mechanism that deprives him of the legal protection to which he is entitled.

These same actors invoke international law when it serves them, and ignore it when it does not. They appeal to it when speaking of the rights of peoples, of aggression, of sovereignty… This is not a principled stance, but an instrumental use of norms, which we might name plainly: normative selectivity, or utilitarian double standards, exercised through the manipulation of concepts.

The question is not what happened in the past, but what standards we adopt today, and whether we apply them consistently or use them selectively according to the interest of the moment — invoked when they serve the position, set aside when they do not, with the fundamental concepts redefined as needs require.