“I know a guy who can translate for us,” Dan said. “He owns a woodcrafting shop in Achrafieh and his English is perfect.”
So Dan called his man Abdullah and asked him to meet us for coffee ahead of our appointment. The café he chose wouldn’t have been out of place in Seattle or Portland except that it served European-style espresso instead of American. Abdullah and his wife waited for us at a table in the back.
The four of us shook hands and sat down to talk.
“Do you always work in countries at war?” Abdullah’s wife asked me while squinting and nervously smoking her cigarette. Lebanon wasn’t at war at that time, but the car bombs had made the country just dangerous and unstable enough that I didn’t immediately catch that she was exaggerating.
“This isn’t a war,” Abdullah said gently. “This is a crisis.”
He didn’t seem to feel perfectly comfortable about going to the dahiyeh to meet with Hezbollah, although he was willing.
“Have you been down there before?” I said.
“Why would I have been there before?” he said. “For some sightseeing?”
Dan and I laughed.
He didn’t say much in the taxi on the way. And he looked nervously out the window as we rolled past Hezbollah’s flags and posters of “martyrs.”
When we were left alone in Hezbollah’s waiting room, he looked profoundly uncomfortable. His eyes turned to saucers when he saw the gigantic poster of the grim-faced Khomeini on the wall.
“This is nuts,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m here.”
Hussein Naboulsi made a brief appearance, introduced himself to Abdullah, and chaperoned us down the hall to Mohammad Afif’s spacious office.
Afif wasn’t friendly and didn’t pretend to be. His handshake was perfunctory, he wouldn’t smile, and he had no interest in small talk.
I turned on my voice recorder and placed it between myself and Abdullah. Dan snapped pictures as I rattled off questions.
Almost everything Afif said had been scripted and packaged for Western consumption. He did not say to us what Hezbollah said on its Al-Manar TV station, which was banned in the United States for broadcasting terrorist propaganda.5 He didn’t refer to Israel as “the Zionist Entity,” nor to the United States as “the Great Satan.” He condemned the car-bomb assassinations of his Lebanese political enemies, although it sounded like he only did so because he was supposed to. He said Hezbollah wasn’t interested in destroying Israel, only in justice for Palestinian refugees.
I groaned silently to myself while wishing he would say something, anything, remotely interesting and worth publishing. Almost an hour passed before he did.
He droned on and on, lecturing me and Dan about Palestinian suffering. He didn’t know it, but I actually did sympathize with Palestinian suffering and did not need to be lectured.
“You should visit the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps,” he said. “You need to see how Palestinians in Lebanon live.”
“I have seen those camps,” I said, which seemed to surprise him. Charles Chuman had shown them to me, and they were unspeakably squalid. What I said next surprised him much more. “And it’s obvious to me that Palestinians are treated much worse in Lebanon than they are by Israelis.”
He sat bolt upright in his chair. That, apparently, was the last thing he thought I would say. But he quickly recovered.
“Yes,” he said. “You are right. I am sorry about that.” It was my turn to be surprised. At last he didn’t have a scripted response, and his answer was honest.
More interesting than anything Afif actually said were his facial expressions. I wished Dan had brought a video camera instead of a still camera so he could capture them.
“You must know,” I said, “that Americans are sick to death of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Is there any chance we’ll see peace in this region any time soon?”
Afif didn’t need Abdullah to translate the word “peace.” He knew exactly what it meant in English just as almost every Westerner in the Middle East knew how to say it in Arabic. And when he heard me say “peace,” when he was relaxed and not thinking about the fact that I was carefully watching his face, he twisted his flat expression into a grimace. The moment was fleeting, and he composed himself almost instantly, but it’s almost impossible for even the most accomplished poker players and liars to control all involuntary facial muscles that reveal their inner thoughts and emotions.
What Afif actually said—that Hezbollah sincerely hoped for peace and a mutually agreeable settlement between Israelis and Arabs—was simply not credible. Hezbollah said nothing of the sort in its own media and said nothing of the sort in its schools and its summer camps, where it indoctrinated children into a culture of martyrdom, death, and resistance.
Aside from the oft-repeated Death to Israel and Death to America slogans, those suckled on Hezbollah schooling and weaned on Hezbollah media were bombarded with hysterical bigotry, conspiracy theories, and warmongering.
“The Jews invented the legend of the Nazi atrocities,” Hassan Nasrallah said6 in a declaration on April 9, 2000. “Anyone who reads [Islamic and other monotheistic holy] texts cannot think of co-existence with them, of peace with them, or about accepting their presence, not only in Palestine of 1948 but even in a small village in Palestine, because they are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment.”
The only terrorism and “resistance” Afif sincerely opposed was that committed by al Qaeda’s fanatical Sunnis. “We hate them,” he said, showing real emotion for the first time. “They call us cockroaches and murder our people.”
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s head-chopping and mosque-burning al Qaeda in Iraq said it was God’s will that Shia Muslims be slaughtered. And al Qaeda matched its words with deeds. Thousands of Iraqi Shias had been car bombed to death by Sunni psychotics in Baghdad and elsewhere. I was hardly less offended by this than Hezbollah was. And I found myself wishing Afif and his people were moderate, reasonable, and smart enough to realize al Qaeda and other like-minded groups posed a far bigger threat to him than Americans and Israelis did. Americans, I thought, might naturally sympathize with them, with the abuse they suffered in the modern era and through the ages, if it weren’t for Hezbollah and Khomeini’s Islamic Republic.
A huge number of Shias in Iraq at the time were willing to fight alongside Americans, not only against Sunni death squads and terrorists but against Iranian-backed Shia militias much like Hezbollah. That was a bridge too far for most Lebanese Shias, however, who remained firmly under the thumb of Hezbollah’s Khomeinists.
“People in the United States find it hard to understand how people in Hamas and Hezbollah think,” veteran Middle East reporter Jeffrey Goldberg told me when I met him in Washington. “It’s alien. It’s alien to us. The feverish racism and conspiracy mongering, the obscurantism, the apocalyptic thinking—we can’t relate to that. Every so often, there’s an eruption of that in a place like Waco, Texas, but we’re not talking about ninety people in a compound. We’re talking about whole societies that are captive to this kind of absurdity. So it’s very important—and you know this better than almost anyone—to go over there yourself and tape it, get it down on paper, and say, ‘This is what they actually say.’”
I never published most of what Afif said to me, though, because it was too slickly packaged and disingenuous. I wanted to let Westerners know what the Party of God really believed, but Afif was smart enough not to tell me.
Hezbollah got itself too much bad press in the West when its members and officials were allowed to say whatever they wanted, unfiltered, to journalists. Goldberg himself published a devastating two-part exposé in the New Yorker in 2002 before Hezbollah figured this out and clamped down.7
Firas Mansour, for example, a film editor at Hezbollah’s Al-Manar station, showed Goldberg a work in progress and said he wanted to call it “We Will Kill All the Jews.” When Goldberg said he thought a title like that might encourage the recruitment of suicide bombers, Mansour
answered, “Exactly.”
Hezbollah eventually learned to send journalists like me and Dan to men like Mohammad Afif who were well practiced in the art of saying little that was controversial or even of interest.
On our way out, Hussein asked how the interview went.
“Great!” I said to be polite. “It was great. Thank you for everything.”
“Excellent,” he said and placed his hand affectionately on my back. “I am glad I could help.”
“Can I ask you to set up another interview for us?” I said, hoping to meet someone a little less disciplined.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Journalists can only have one.”
“Only one?” I said, stunned. It would have been nice if he had told me that before the interview started. Hezbollah’s message, though, had to be tightly controlled, especially since the withdrawal of the Syrian military left it exposed and with an uncertain future.
“I can invite you to an iftar this Thursday,” he said, referring to a fast-breaking meal just after sunset during the month of Ramadan. “Hassan Nasrallah will be there.”
Dan smiled. “Nasrallah will be there?” he said.
“Yes,” Hussein said. “You are both welcome. And you can take pictures. I will add your names to the list.”
Dan and I would soon stand within feet of the boss. The event was one of the last of Nasrallah’s life before he blew up the Eastern Mediterranean and found himself driven underground like an urban-dwelling Osama bin Laden.
CHAPTER THREE
we know where you live
You’d like to believe that if reporters are being physically threatened into presenting a particular message—well, you’d hope that they would find a way to push back.
—OMRI CEREN
Hezbollah’s iftar was segregated. Only women, journalists, and VIPs were allowed in. It was held outside the dahiyeh across the street from the Marriott Hotel in an area controlled, if that is the word, by the Lebanese government.
Dozens of people, nearly all of them women, walked up a flight of stairs toward a double set of doors. Most wore an enveloping black abaya or a headscarf over their hair.
Dan snapped a photo.
A group of men abruptly stood up from a bench and walked toward us.
“Salam Aleikum,” I said. Peace be upon you.
“You took pictures without permission,” one of them said, even though we were standing in a public place.
“Who are we supposed to ask?” Dan said.
“Come with me, please.”
The man led us up the steps to the front of a wide and squat concrete building. There were two separate entrances, one for women, the other for journalists and VIPs. A gaggle of Hezbollah security agents manned the doors. Several sat behind a long table. This, apparently, was where we were supposed to check in.
Dan and I showed our passports and press credentials to the man who looked like he was in charge. He stuffed them in his briefcase. Then he confiscated Dan’s camera.
“Hey,” Dan said. “Give me my camera back.”
“Just one minute, please,” he said and set the camera aside.
I sat in a chair next to the table. Dan remained standing.
“Which hotel are you staying at?” the man asked me.
I didn’t like the idea of telling Hezbollah where I was staying, but I answered his question. I didn’t tell him I was moving into an apartment two days later.
They kept us waiting for almost half an hour for no discernable reason while thousands of people, including at least a dozen journalists, got in ahead of us.
“What is the problem?” Dan said.
“Just five more minutes, please,” the head of security said. Five more minutes for what? Our names were supposed to be on the list, and we had credentials.
A security agent stepped behind me as I scribbled in my notebook. He craned his neck and tried to read over my shoulder. I frowned at him and abruptly turned so he could not read what I was writing.
Dan paced back and forth in front of the security table.
“What is the problem?” the head of security asked him.
“I have a job to do,” Dan said.
“I have a job to do, too,” he said.
“You’re doing a great job so far!” Dan said.
Our first two meetings with Hezbollah had gone smoothly enough. Hussein was friendly. And he invited Dan and me to the iftar. Yet now, just a few days later, we were prevented by security from going inside Hezbollah’s one open event.
I whipped out my cell phone to dial Hussein. Perhaps he could get us in faster. The instant the head of security saw my phone, he said, “Okay, you can go in now.” He did not know who I was calling and seemed to fear I had a personal connection with someone in Hezbollah who outranked him.
Another agent led me and Dan away from the security gate, through a metal detector, and to a random space past the entrance far from everything else. He wanted us to stand in this exact spot. Not three feet over there, but right here.
“This is a parking garage,” Dan said.
No cars were inside, but he was right. Parking spaces were clearly marked out on the parts of the ground not covered by tables, chairs, security booths, or movable walls.
Thousands of conservatively dressed women sat at rows of tables in front of us. No one bothered to tell us where to go or what to do. So Dan raised his camera to take some pictures.
Three security agents descended on him.
“No photos,” one of them said.
“I was invited here so I could take photos,” Dan said.
“No photos right now,” the man repeated.
Though we weren’t allowed to photograph the women at the tables, we at least wanted to get a better look than we could from where we were standing. So we started walking.
“No!” the agent said.
It seemed we would even have to ask to use the bathroom in this place as though we were children. Or prisoners.
After standing in no place in particular like dorks for several minutes, more security guys finally led me and Dan to a small walled off area where we could sit and eat. This was the “press room.” We could not see any of the thousands of women, nor could we see the pulpit where Nasrallah was going to speak. But at least we could sit. And of course we were segregated. This was Hezbollah.
“Sit over there,” an agent said and pointed to a table away from where other, mostly male, journalists sat.
I don’t like control freaks, and I was done taking orders.
“No,” I said. “We are going to sit with other people.”
Dan and I sat at a set table draped with a clean white cloth. Yellow chicken, fatty beef, brown and white rice, hummus, yogurt, and vinaigrette salads were spread out in front of us. There was plenty of bottled water to go around. The food didn’t look great, but it looked okay. (And it was.) I smiled when it occurred to me that my meal was paid for by the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was about time they did something for citizens of the Great Satan.
The man sitting next to me introduced himself as a Lebanese journalist named John.
“Where are you from?” he asked me.
“United States,” I said.
“Ooh,” he said. “Don’t tell them that.”
“They already know,” I said. You couldn’t just walk into a Hezbollah event without being vetted.
Suddenly a muezzin screamed in Arabic over the loudspeakers. It was a thunderous call to prayer, and it was real screaming. I had heard the call to prayer hundreds of times in Beirut, but I never heard anything like this. It was electrifying and dramatic and, strangely enough, it gave me a thrilling shot of adrenaline.
Ominous military music threatened to blow out the speakers. Then the sound system switched, briefly, to music from Star Wars. It switched, briefly again, to the soundtrack from The Terminator. Someone, perhaps the same muezzin, screamed anti-Israel incitement over the music. You didn’t have to be fluent in Arabic to figure out what
that was about.
After dinner, a security agent summoned all the journalists to the women’s side of the wall. A small press area was roped off a hundred feet in front of the pulpit.
Secretary General Nasrallah emerged to a standing ovation. Then he droned on for an hour, so softly I could barely hear a word over the post-dinner chitchat. Perhaps these women didn’t show up to hear him at all. Maybe they just wanted free food.
Dan snapped photos. I sat and passively perused the “resistance” posters on the concrete pillars and walls. Scenes of explosions, gunmen, and mayhem were plastered up everywhere. Just over my head was a photo of a child clenching a bloody rock in his fingers.
Slowly, the audience began filing out, even though Nasrallah was still speaking. He wasn’t so much a blowhard as a bore. Even his “base,” at least the female half of it, didn’t think he was worth sticking around for.
Soon the hall was almost half empty. Maybe Nasrallah realized he had to get to the point. Perhaps it was scripted this way. Either way, he suddenly started to scream.
Israel this!
Israel that!
Oh, snore. I didn’t want to be rude, but I could no longer physically stop myself from rolling my eyes.
Then a belligerent fat man grabbed Dan.
“Come with me!” he said and led Dan and his camera away.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“You can stay,” he said to me. “We need to speak with him,” he said, referring to Dan.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to know what the problem is here.”
“Did I take a picture of something I wasn’t supposed to?” Dan said and swallowed hard.
Fat man fumed with rage and refused to answer. He led us to a table at a security checkpoint near the entrance to the garage. Four security agents followed and sat us down in chairs. Two stood behind us. Two sat opposite us at the table. Fat man tried to look at the pictures on Dan’s digital camera but had trouble figuring out how.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 7
