The Hostage's Daughter

by Sulome Anderson

  One night that summer, I was spread-eagled on the grass in my friend’s yard. The night jittered and danced, full of color and mystery, thanks to the mushrooms I had eaten earlier and the coke that followed. I remember lying on the damp earth, looking up at the sky, and thinking, Maybe this has gone too far.

  4. THE RESISTANCE

  If someone puts their hands on you, make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.

  —MALCOLM X

  NOW

  The way Hezbollah tells it, they saw God leave their ruined country, and they wanted to bring him back.

  I’m at a house in Dahiyeh, the Shia suburb of Beirut, sitting on a couch facing Hamza akl Hamieh. He looks to be in his early sixties, grizzled, with a calm demeanor and a patient smile. He used to be an Amal militiaman and one of the most prolific airplane hijackers in the world. Hamza completed six hijackings between 1979 and 1982, including Kuwait Airways Flight 561 in 1982 and the longest hijacking in history, that of the Libyan Arab Airlines 727, which he took control of midair and proceeded to fly six thousand miles in three days, making multiple stops throughout Europe and the Middle East before landing in Beirut. He claims he never harmed a single person he hijacked. Whether that’s true or not, he certainly saw the Shia uprising in Lebanon with his own eyes and fought in their war to be heard by the world.

  “Where did your journey begin, hajj?” I ask him through my interpreter. Hajj is an honorific for men who have completed the Islamic pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. I generally have someone translate interviews like this for me, so as not to miss anything. It’s also quite useful to pretend not to speak any Arabic in these situations. That way, I can listen to what they’re saying about me when they think I can’t understand them.

  “We had demands of our government,” Hamza begins. “In the early seventies, there was a movement headed by Imam Musa al-Sadr to demand the improvement of the lives of less fortunate people in Lebanon. We wanted the development of Akkar, Baalbek, Hermel, the south, and the misery belt on the outskirts of Beirut. It was for all the oppressed people in Lebanon, but we, as Shia, were the ones suffering most. So it became a Shia movement.”

  “This was before the civil war?” I ask.

  “Yes, but then the war started, for several very complicated reasons,” Hamza responds. “At the time, Israeli incursions into the south of Lebanon were increasing. So Imam al-Sadr called for the establishment of a Lebanese resistance to defend the south, because the government refused to send troops there. We called this the Movement of the Deprived, and it was a political, social movement. Amal, or the Lebanese Resistance Detachments, was the armed wing of this movement. We started training and organizing local youth.”

  In August 1978, Imam Musa al-Sadr disappeared while traveling in Libya. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was widely blamed for his disappearance, although Gaddafi’s motives remain unclear to this day. Amal is still around, of course. Its cartoonish green-and-yellow flag flutters from many buildings in the Shia areas of Lebanon. But Amal, which means “hope” in Arabic, is now a shadow of its child, a breakaway faction that would eventually become the most powerful militia and political party in Lebanon: Hezbollah, the group many believe is a latter-day incarnation of the Islamic Jihad Organization.

  Today, in Hezbollah territory, there is little unregulated crime, because criminals aren’t remanded to the corrupt and inefficient Lebanese justice system. Hezbollah has its own justice, and it’s usually better avoided. Dahiyeh, part of what was once known as the misery belt, isn’t exactly luxurious, but it’s not so miserable these days. Hezbollah isn’t just a militia; it also provides many social services for the poor and runs the areas under its control with order and precision. It’s as much a part of Lebanon now as the grotto at Jeita or the Roman ruins in Baalbek. But Hezbollah started as a murmur of discontent; a rebellion within the ranks of the Deprived.

  In 1978, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was formed by the UN in response to a request from the Lebanese delegation. They wanted Israel out of southern Lebanon. Israeli troops had just invaded and occupied the region in response to PLO incursions into Israel. Always the considerate houseguests, Palestinian militants had been using Lebanon, their reluctant, fragmenting host country, as a base to launch attacks against their hated enemy.

  But according to some historians and observers of the Middle East, what the PLO actually, inelegantly did was kick down a door the Israelis had been trying to open for years. Veteran journalist David Hirst’s Beware of Small States, an excellently sourced history that traces the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, makes the case that Israel had been eyeing its little northern neighbor for a long time. According to Hirst, who uses documented statements by the very first Zionist leaders to support this narrative, Israel’s founding fathers had hoped to add some enviably lush Lebanese territory to the rapidly expanding Jewish state. In what was left of Lebanon, they planned to install a sympathetic Christian government that would be an ally against the hordes of angry Muslims that surrounded them.

  I’m going to digress for a moment here and address the elephant some of you may have noticed stomping around in the middle of the room. It’s no secret that I disagree strongly with Israeli government policy, both then and now. A glance at my Twitter feed will remove all doubt about that. I never quite saw the point of hiding my personal opinions about the Middle East in an attempt to be perceived as “objective.” It always felt like lying. This is an approach I’ve been attacked for, but journalists are people too, and we see things most Americans don’t. What we see shapes our beliefs about the regions in which we work—and because we are close observers, our opinions are important. I still believe in the value of objectivity in journalism, but I think one can have opinions and still write as fairly as possible.

  In my reporting, I try my hardest to quiet my own views and imagine what it’s like inside the heads of the people on both sides of whatever conflict I’m writing about. That requires more than just including a perfunctory, requisite quote from the side I don’t agree with, a tactic many news outlets use as a nod to “objectivity.” Accurately portraying the complexity of these issues demands a certain level of empathy, even for people whose actions I have the most trouble understanding. It’s not a perfect process, and I don’t always succeed, but I do believe in its importance.

  I came to my current beliefs through half a lifetime spent in the Middle East, and the evidence I’ve accumulated through research and on-the-ground reporting. I’ve examined this conflict in all its ugliness and horror, and I’ve learned one thing: there are no good guys here. There are assholes and bigger assholes. Moral of the story: don’t be an asshole, and if you are, I’m going to write about it.

  It would be naive in the extreme to believe Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are morally pure or motivated simply by concern for the Palestinian people. Certainly Lebanon and other Arab nations have demonstrated that Israel is not the only country willing to persecute and marginalize Palestinians.

  However, any real examination of the facts, uncolored by political agenda or propaganda, will reveal that we in America are not getting the full story of what goes on in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. While every instance of Palestinian violence against Israelis is fairly well publicized, for instance, there is barely a whisper in international news coverage when an Israeli soldier shoots a Palestinian boy, sometimes in the back as he flees, or a Palestinian child is deliberately run down by an Israeli settler’s car, as is reported to have happened several times in the past two years alone. In these instances, arrests are seldom made and the killings continue to occur with impunity. To be clear, any act of violence offends my nature, including those committed by Palestinians. I’m simply pointing out that by and large, the West is primarily hearing one side of this issue.

  I once called Dad from Beirut, shortly after I had started working there, in a rage at what I felt was the injustice of the things I was seeing a
nd hearing about. “Sweetheart,” he said. “You’re certainly not the first journalist—nor will you be the last—to take a look at the Middle East and notice things aren’t the way you’ve been told they are.”

  I’m certainly not an anti-Semite with an ax to grind. The man who put the diamond ring I now wear on my left hand grew up Orthodox Jewish. Which God you pray to or where you come from means nothing to me. As far as I’m concerned, you can paint yourself purple and worship the moon. You’re a person, I’m a person, and I will treat you with the respect you deserve by virtue of your humanity. It’s not about whom you were born to, because that’s essentially the only difference between us: an accident of birth.

  I think the Jews and the Shia have more in common than either would like to admit. Both have been pushed around for generations; both carry a tremendous legacy of oppression around their necks. Both have emerged from their suffering with a drive to make sure no one ever pushes them around again. Both have been stockpiling money, power, and weapons for decades, determined to break from historical patterns. This time, world, you try to hurt us, and we’ll make you wish you hadn’t. It’s an underlying mantra I hear in the rants of Iranian ayatollahs and the threats of Israeli generals. No more. Not this time.

  Unfortunately, this approach to the world is much like an ouroboros, that familiar image of a snake eating its own tail. When you live in constant fear of persecution, you often act in ways that create situations certain to invite more persecution. Human nature being what it is, instead of learning from the suffering of our people and trying not to cause suffering in return, we often disregard those hurt in our quest to make sure we don’t suffer again.

  If I were an Israeli in 1978, living in my still-new homeland not long after the Holocaust, with millions of furious Arab faces glaring at me from across my fragile borders, I might be frightened and angry enough to justify the kind of aggression Israel demonstrated in its repeated invasions of Lebanon as well as its brutal treatment of the Palestinians. I might grip handfuls of the earth on which I built my house, the land I’d been promised for so long, now warm and real between my fingers. I might look at the enemies who wanted to take it from me and think, No. Not this time. But that doesn’t make the Israeli government’s actions any more right than kidnapping human beings and holding them against their will to achieve political goals.

  Let me be clear: Israelis have not escaped unscathed from this conflict. While Israeli casualties are dwarfed by the total number of Palestinian deaths resulting from hostilities, that doesn’t mean the Israeli lives lost were any less valuable or precious to the people who loved them. Also, living in a constant state of terror that your country will be attacked—regardless of why—must take its toll on the collective Israeli psyche. I imagine that kind of fear must generate a lot of preemptive aggression. I also think it’s probably just an exhausting way to live.

  But what seems even more apparent to me is a burgeoning cultural identity crisis: who are the Jews? What do they stand for? Increasingly, large numbers of secular Jews have turned away from the hardline policies of the Likud government. Many diaspora Jews, Americans in particular, seem to be losing faith that Israel’s current government is on the path to a peaceful, prosperous existence for the Jewish people.

  By and large, American Jews tend to be liberal in their politics. They care about the poor and disenfranchised. As social media exposes the ever-mounting inequality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I believe it’s becoming more and more difficult for them to reconcile Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with their own values. Simultaneously, the expanding population of ultra-religious Jews has embraced Likud policies wholeheartedly. The resulting fracture is increasingly noticeable to me.

  And let’s not forget the Israeli army. I’m sure that much of the IDF believes strongly in their government’s message and mission. But the voices of soldiers who have lost faith in their country’s policies are growing louder. One organization, Breaking the Silence, brings together former Israeli military personnel who disagree with their government’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. After reading an essay I wrote about Lebanon’s disintegrating security situation, a former Israeli soldier reached out to me and personally apologized for how his country had treated my mother’s nation. He served in Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon—a conflict I witnessed while in Beirut for a cousin’s wedding. Being American, I was evacuated to Cyprus via U.S. Navy destroyer. Lebanese people living on the country’s southern border with Israel were not so lucky. Almost twelve hundred Lebanese died in the 2006 war, the majority of whom were civilians.

  “Jewish kids were not raised to blow up villages,” an Israeli friend recently told me. “It causes a lot of trauma, for them as well as for the villagers.” He happens to be staunchly pro-government. But he’s respectful and well spoken, and my conversations with him have given me new insight into how the right-wing Israeli mindset has developed over time. I’ve started to comprehend how otherwise good people can justify some of the horrors I’ve seen and heard about in this part of the world.

  All of this may not be easy for some to swallow. These ideas are not tidy; they don’t fit neatly into traditional conceptions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But it’s called nuance, and we could use a lot more of it in this discussion.

  In any case, following the first Israeli invasion, UNIFIL was given the Herculean task of policing the nebulous “Green Line” separating the Jewish state from its vulnerable, self-destructing neighbor. Originally from Turkey, Timur Goksel was appointed spokesman shortly after UNIFIL was created, and he became the voice of a long-suffering organization.

  I interview Goksel at Café Rawda, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, the same place I would have my conversation with Robert Fisk over a year later. Goksel has helped me with a few stories before, so we have a good rapport. He’s an elderly man now, well into his seventies, still quick and energetic. He tells me about what he observed as he tried to mediate the conflict between Israel and Lebanon during the civil war.

  “It was a Shiite awakening,” Goksel says. “I don’t think Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad or all those other groups were specifically formed or shaped to oppose the Israelis. This was not their primary motive at first. They wanted to have a say in the Lebanese context and in the civil war. The Shiites were being pushed around. They didn’t have their own representation except Amal, which wasn’t very [religious].”

  “Didn’t Amal end up working with the Israelis?” I ask.

  “Well, they were easier to work with, let’s say, and Amal was a very local establishment. The local villagers, they didn’t have a structure, but they had numbers. Meanwhile, all the Shiite youngsters with guns in their hands were working with other groups, mostly the secular groups, the Communists and the Palestinians.”

  “Then they ended up hating each other, right?” I ask. “I heard some Shia actually threw rice and rosewater at Israeli tanks when they rolled into the south in ’82, because they disliked the Palestinians so much.” From what I understand, Palestinian militants angered the Shia population by running roughshod over south Lebanon when they arrived in the country after being displaced.

  “I was there,” Goksel responds. “It was not very widespread, but it happened, yes.”

  “Then the Israelis behaved badly, or so I’ve been told.”

  “Stupidly, actually,” says Goksel, rolling his eyes. “The seeds were already there, and Ashura became the ignition. That was when the clergy started to have a say in the Shia awakening.”

  Goksel is referring to an incident in the fall of 1983, when an Israeli convoy tried to drive through the southern city of Nabatieh during the sacred Shia festival of Ashura. It’s a bloody, violent event meant to commemorate the death of Husayn Ibn Ali, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson, and is marked by much wailing and self-flagellation. So many Lebanese Ashura celebrants wound themselves during festivals that the streets of Nabatieh are said to turn red. But Ashura is revered b
y Shia Muslims, and there were over fifty thousand of them taking part in the ceremony that day. Nonetheless, the Israeli convoy insisted they get out of the way to let the tanks pass, the mourning Shia refused, and at some point, the Israelis opened fire, killing two and wounding fifteen. It wasn’t a large number of casualties and didn’t seem that important in the context of the war’s violence. But to the Shia, the Israelis had committed an unforgivable act, a desecration of their religion, and that’s when opinion began to turn against Israel in earnest.

  “I started hearing that it is a blessing to kill all the Jews,” says Goksel seriously. “I took it to the Israelis. There were a couple of bright Israelis who were really careful about the Shiites and all that, but they were the minority. Nobody took notice because they were so spoiled, so arrogant.”

  Goksel recounts how the Israelis ignored his warning that the once-friendly Shia in south Lebanon were beginning to militarize against them.

  “I just told them, ‘Enjoy yourselves.’” Goksel laughs, with an edge of bitterness. “And that was how it started.”

  From what I understand, fresh from its Islamic revolution, Iran quickly recognized an opportunity in the Lebanese Shia discontent. I ask Robin Wright if the Iranians prompted the Amal-Hezbollah split.

  “Well, Amal was a Lebanese movement, and Nabih Berri [Amal’s leader] was always a secularist and a nationalist,” she responds. “I don’t think he was always happy with the Iranians or willing to be their surrogate on the ground. As the Iranian revolution mobilized clerics as allies, they looked to some of the clerics in Lebanon as alternative vehicles to work with. They were threatening to create allies in every country in the region, to have pockets that would propagate their ideology, that would do their bidding, and they were willing to pour resources into it.”