Beirut’s Daily Star reported more than 250 explosions.1 Israel said it was the largest counterattack inside Lebanon since the withdrawal of their occupation forces five years before. One Israeli and three Hezbollah gunmen were killed.
Hardly anyone in Lebanon or Israel was surprised. The only way Hezbollah could justify its existence as an autonomous militia was by getting into a shooting war with the “Zionist Entity” once in a while. Israel had to be seen as a threat. If it looked like a peaceful lamb of a country, the Islamic Resistance would have to close up its shop.
Hezbollah especially needed a conflict with Israel in late 2005. United Nations investigator Detlev Mehlis had just fingered top Syrian officials in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, and the international community was gearing up to punish al-Assad and his government. Hezbollah leaders hoped to channel the ire of their countrymen onto Israel instead of their besieged patron regime in Damascus.
Israeli planes dropped leaflets along the southern border and over Beirut. “Hezbollah brings a strong prejudice to Lebanon,” the text said.2 “It is an instrument in the hands of its Syrian and Iranian masters. The state of Israel is watching over the protection of its citizens and sovereignty. . . . Who is protecting Lebanon, who lies to you? Who throws your sons into a battle for which they are not prepared? Who wants the return of destruction?”
Public opinion in Beirut hardly budged. Border clashes with Israel were ho-hum at this point. Almost every Lebanese person I knew thought the al-Assad regime was a more pressing problem—an unacceptable state of affairs for Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. Hezbollah needed Israel to be seen as the greater of threats, whether it was or not.
Hezbollah didn’t have much of an excuse for starting a shooting war. The only territory left to “liberate” in 2005 was the microscopic Shebaa Farms.
Hezbollah claimed the land as Lebanese, but it was taken from Syria in the 1967 war.
Israel wished to be rid of it. Why give Hezbollah an excuse to keep fighting?
“Shebaa is two fields and a cow,” activist Nabil Abou-Charaf told me. “Nobody lives there.”
The United Nations wouldn’t let Israel hand Shebaa Farms over to Lebanon since the tiny area supposedly belonged to Syria.3 Syria, though, wouldn’t claim or renounce it. Al-Assad wanted the acreage to remain in a nationless limbo. Hezbollah was still useful to him, and Hezbollah needed something to fume about.
Temporary flare-ups had been erupting on the Lebanese-Israeli border in and near the Shebaa Farms ever since the IDF withdrawal, and the pattern was always the same. Hezbollah started a fight, Israel responded for a few hours with more deadly and accurate firepower, and Hezbollah stood down. Few people were hurt or killed on either side, and neither the Lebanese nor Israeli public even seemed to mind very much. The skirmishes looked and felt to most like aftershocks from the previous war that was supposed to end in 2000.
A few days later, an Israeli paraglider crossed the border, either intentionally or by accident, and landed in Lebanon. Hezbollah fighters opened fire. Israeli soldiers cut a hole in the border fence, pulled the man through to safety, and placed him under arrest. Hezbollah claimed he was a soldier. Israel insisted he was a civilian.
Hezbollah fighters shot at everyone they saw crossing the border for any reason. One of my American friends in Beirut lived in Israel the previous year, and he told me he once foolishly tried to cross from there into Lebanon with some friends. He had visited Lebanon before and knew a place where a gate in the fence was sometimes left open, most likely for cross-border smuggling. He thought he could just drive a rental car through since the border didn’t look guarded.
Unseen Hezbollah fighters put bullet holes in the hood of his car the instant he nosed into Lebanon. He slammed the car into reverse, ducked his head under the dash, and drove backward as fast he could. Hezbollah stopped firing as soon as he was back on the Israeli side and had crashed the car into a tree.
That border was no place to screw around or act like an idiot. Soon it would be no place for Americans like me or him to visit at all. Hardly anyone on either side of the border had any idea, but the latest eruption was just a prologue for something much larger.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian from the city of Zarqa, founded al Qaeda in Iraq in 2004. He had four principal goals: destroy the government, eject the Americans, subjugate the Shias, and impose a fanatically rigid Sunni Islamist dictatorship.
After Saddam Hussein’s Sunni Baath Party regime was demolished by the United States in 2003, Iraqi Shias—who made up about 60 percent of the population—were placed in the saddle through democratic elections. Most Iraqi Sunnis found this intolerable, but they weren’t in the mood to do much about it. History was not on their side any longer.
Al-Zarqawi wanted to change that. Al-Zarqawi wanted to fire them up. An insurgency was rising against the American occupiers; perhaps the Shia government could be swept away along with the superpower. He wanted his civil war. And he got it in early 2006 after a half-dozen of his men sneaked into the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, tied up the guards, and planted explosives that destroyed the golden dome later that morning.
The al-Askari Mosque, also known as the Golden Mosque, contained one of the holiest shrines in all of Shia Islam. The tenth and eleventh imams—direct descendents of the Prophet Muhammad—were buried there in the year 944. Shia militias responded exactly as al-Zarqawi expected they would—by fighting back, death-squad style.
Iraq’s civil war was officially on, and it reverberated powerfully in South Lebanon.
I drove down there from Beirut with British historian Andrew Apostolou in the spring of 2006, just a few weeks after al-Zarqawi’s atrocity.
There was no chance I could talk our way past the checkpoints on our way into Hezbollahland as Leena had, so we stopped at the Lebanese army base just east of Sidon and asked for a permit.
“What is your nationality?” the ranking military officer said.
“He’s British,” I said, referring to Andrew. “And I’m American.”
The officer clasped his hands loudly together. “You are not going down there today,” he said.
“Why not?” I said.
He made an I-don’t-know face that was terrifically, intentionally, and even comically insincere.
“Is it for security reasons?” I said.
“Of course,” he said. “You can go,” he said to Andrew. A British passport apparently wasn’t a problem. “But you,” he said, meaning me, “can’t go anywhere near the border right now.”
“Why not?” I said. “What’s going on?”
He laughed.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You can tell me. Who am I going to tell?” He didn’t know I was a journalist.
“No,” he said firmly and shook his head.
“Are you worried I will do something?” I said. “Or are you worried something will happen to me?”
“Something might happen to you,” he said.
“Is it Hezbollah? The Israelis? What?”
He made his goofy what-do-I-know face once again. “I am sorry,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. You aren’t going.”
Andrew was given a permit in a matter of minutes.
“I can drive you as far as Nabatieh,” I said to him as we walked back to the car. “You can take a taxi from there to the border.”
“Thanks, mate,” he said.
So we drove together as far as Nabatieh, a small Shia city just outside the Hezbollah zone. When we reached the city center, I thought for a moment that we had driven into an anguished Ashura procession, just as an Israeli convoy had in 1982 when Hezbollah’s insurgency took off.
Thousands of wailing mourners paraded through the streets carrying black Shia flags. Banners bearing the face of Ali streamed from the lampposts. Loudspeakers broadcast a furious sermon.
But this wasn’t Ashura—the annual commemoration of the slaying of Hussein at the Battle of Karbala. That had taken place a few weeks before. This was a funeral,
if that’s the right word, for the al-Askari Mosque and its golden dome that al-Zarqawi and his vicious sectarians had blown apart in Iraq.
My heart ached for these people and their justified rage. There was a problem, however. Hezbollah, like the Khomeinist regime in Iran, accused American soldiers of destroying the mosque.
“They invade the shrine and bomb there because they oppose God and justice,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said.4 “Such actions are the acts of a group of defeated Zionists and occupiers.”
“This probably isn’t where we should be right about now,” I said to Andrew.
He nodded. “Let’s head to the outskirts of town,” he said, “and I’ll hop in a taxi to the border from there.”
I found three parked taxis in front of a café and helped him secure a reasonable fare with the driver. He wasn’t particularly worried about heading into Hezbollahland without me, despite what the Lebanese army officer had told us earlier and despite the seething and misplaced anger in Lebanon’s Shia community over the terrorism committed against their brothers and sisters in Samarra.
His driver took him to the ruins of the Beaufort crusader castle—now with a Hezbollah flag snapping defiantly from the rampart—overlooking the border area. “The mosque in the valley below was blaring out Nasrallah,” he later told me. “And the looks in some of the villages were not friendly. It was a beautiful place, but perhaps time to head back to Beirut.”
I felt slightly nervous myself while driving north out of Nabatieh and back toward Beirut. Even though most people who lived there were Shias, the city was not controlled by Hezbollah. The mood on the street, though, was so tense I could practically feel it on my skin.
I got lost on my way back to the main road and found myself in a poor part of town where portraits of Bashar al-Assad were bolted to the lampposts. Every third or fourth person scrutinized me and my car. I was obviously not from around there. The colored license plate that marked every rental car in Lebanon gave me away, as did my European complexion. From the point of view of the more paranoid residents, I was likely a spy.
South Lebanon wasn’t Iraq, but it looked, felt, and was much more volatile than it had been when I went down there with Leena.
If I wanted to know what had changed on the border, I would need to swing around and talk to officials on the other side. It was time to visit the Zionist Entity.
The hatred for Israel among Lebanon’s Shia cannot be explained simply by the fact that they were Muslims and Arabs and were therefore supposed to hate Jews—not when they initially hailed the Israelis as liberators from Arafat and the PLO. Nor can a bloody dustup during Ashura explain it. Not even the fomenting of a “resistance” culture by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps units was enough by itself.
The Shias of Lebanon adopted the view of the strangers from Persia for complex cultural and historical reasons that had little to do with Jews or with Israel. Khomeini promised to lead them out of the wilderness once and for all. He gave them dignity. He gave them respect. And he gave them fire. Musa Sadr—also a stranger from Persia, yet emphatically not a Khomeinist—had already stirred them with his call to political action. Their day in history had, at long last, arrived.
Many welcomed Iranian power in Lebanon as long as it boosted their own. Why shouldn’t they? The Iranians may have been Persians, but they also were Shias. Besides, everyone else in Lebanon had foreign support. The Christians had the French and the Americans, and the Sunnis had the Saudis and the rest of the Arabs aside from Syria. Until Khomeini came along, the Shias didn’t have anybody. Even their own feudal leaders could hardly be bothered about their material and political needs.
If militant anti-Zionism was part of the bargain, so be it. Why shouldn’t they fight off the Zionists anyway? The Zionists, from their point of view, acted just like the Caliph Yazid’s men in Karbala when they occupied land that didn’t belong to them and shot people dead in the streets during Ashura.
Shia hatred of Israel, in both its Persian and Arabic forms, may never have matured had the Sunni Arabs reached a settlement with the Israelis before the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Virulent hatred of Jews was never a strong force in Persian culture. Before Khomeini overthrew him, the Shah had excellent relations with Jerusalem. And why shouldn’t he? Most Persians, just like most Kurds, were reluctant to side with their ancient Arab foes against Israel or anyone else. The Arab-Israeli conflict, after all, was between Arabs and Israelis, not Muslims and Israelis. It was also, more specifically, a conflict between Sunni Arabs and Israelis.
The Islamic Republic leaders did their damnedest to change this, no doubt for sincere reasons, but also because it served them strategically. They wished to be hegemons of the whole Muslim world, and they couldn’t achieve that without first dominating the Arab world of the Middle East. That wouldn’t be possible if they were allies with Israel. Iran’s alliance with Israel was a serious liability and had to be scrapped. And that raised the question: If points were deducted for an alliance with Israel, shouldn’t points be gained for resistance?
Khomeini made his pitch to the Arabs. They feared and loathed him as a Shia and a Persian, but they had to admit that what he and his successors said was compelling.
The Iranian message to the Arabs, Amir Taheri explained in his book The Persian Night, was straightforward.5 “Forget that Iran is Shia, and remember that today it is the only power capable of realizing your most cherished dream, the destruction of Israel. The Sunni Muslim Brotherhood promised you it would throw the Jews into the sea in 1948, but failed. Pan-Arab nationalists, led by Nasser, ushered you into one of your biggest defeats in history, enabling Israel to capture Jerusalem. The Baathists under Saddam Hussein promised to ‘burn Israel,’ but ended up bringing the American infidels to Baghdad. Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian ‘patriots’ promised to crush the Jewish state, but turned into collaborators on its payroll. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda never gave two hoots about Palestine, focusing only on spectacular operations in the West to win publicity for themselves. Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and Hamas did all they could to destroy Israel but lacked the power, like flies attacking an elephant. The only force now willing and able to help realize your dream of a burned Israel and drowning the Jews is the Islamic Republic as created by Khomeini.”
The Iranians needed credibility with Sunni Arabs if they wished to lead the Middle East. Lebanon’s Shias needed credibility, too, if they ever hoped to acquire real power for themselves in a Lebanese political system that, from their point of view, had always been leveraged against them.
And they got it by taking up sword against Israel just as Khomeini did.
Most Lebanese Sunnis hated Israel, but few were willing to die over it. Lebanon barely participated in the 1948 war against Israel and sat out the 1967 war altogether. The Sunnis wouldn’t even put up much of a fight when the Israelis invaded in 1982. Sure, they gave Arafat room for his own war, but then they let the French and the Americans take him away.
The Shias disliked and distrusted the Sunnis as ever, but at the same time they suffered from a terrible inferiority complex that was nearly as old as their religion itself and that had been exacerbated by recent events.
“The Shia of the southern hinterland,” wrote Fouad Ajami,6 who was himself from that part of Lebanon, “had endured Palestinian power, the rise in their midst of a Palestinian state within a state. The Palestinian gunmen and pamphleteers had had the run of that part of the country. Arab nationalists in distant lands had hailed that Palestinian sanctuary; Arab oil wealth had paid for it. The Shia relief in 1982, when Israel swept into Lebanon and shattered that dominion, was to the Arab nationalists proof that the Shia stepchildren were treasonous. Then a Shia militant movement, Hezbollah, rose to challenge Israel. Its homicide bombers, its policies of ‘virtue and terror,’ acquitted the Lebanese Shia in Arab eyes.”
The Islamic Resistance was genuinely popular in Lebanon while Israel occupied part of the south. Even some Christia
ns considered Hezbollah fighters heroic. But when the Israelis left, Hezbollah refused to disarm—a suspicious turn of events. The other militias had disarmed at the end of the war. Something about Hezbollah wasn’t right. Hassan Nasrallah seemed to want something else, something more, if he was holding onto his arsenal after his stated objectives were met.
Hezbollah’s political base became more supportive of the Khomeinist political program than Iranians themselves, especially after the hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad turned an enormous percentage of the Iranian public against the government. It’s strange that a community outside Iran backed the Iranian president more than Iran’s people did, but that’s what happened.
And it might have happened even without an anti-Ahmadinejad backlash. At the end of the day, Khomeinism, as Taheri makes clear, was designed to appeal more to Arabs than Persians. Khomeini only cared about Iran as a step to his leadership of the Muslim umma. There was nothing particularly Iranian or even Persian about his ideology or his political aspiration. He even claimed to be an Arab himself, and he renamed major streets in the capital after historic Arab figures.
Ahmadinejad and Khomeini’s successor Ali Khamenei were as radical as they had ever been, but much of the Islamic Republic establishment mellowed out after a while. Revolutionaries almost everywhere tend toward conservatism after they win in order to consolidate their gains and protect their new system. Very few people have the energy to maintain radical fervor for decades.
Meanwhile, their Shia comrades in Lebanon hadn’t won anything, and they were outnumbered in their own country. If they eased up, they’d lose, especially now that the Syrians were no longer around. Many feared they’d be marginalized all over again if the Cedar Revolution meant a de facto new republic was born.
The Cedar Revolution was agonizing for most of Lebanon’s Shias. Despite their vast religious and ideological differences, the Sunnis and Christians were united again, and they were united at the Shias’ expense. The main thing the Sunnis and Christians agreed on was the eviction of Syrian and Iranian power from Lebanon—which could only hurt the Shias who depended on Syrian and Iranian power in Lebanon.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 11
