Hezbollah and its junior partner Amal could have joined the political mainstream, but Nasrallah and his people didn’t take naturally to compromise and the give-and-take of pluralist politics. Hezbollah had grievances to avenge—against the Sunnis, the Christians, the Druze, the Israelis, the Americans, the Saudis, just about everyone. Nasrallah needed to plan something radical, something extreme, to overturn Lebanon’s new anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian politics. So he did.
Israel startled me from the air.
Whoa, I thought, as I looked out the window of the plane over the suburbs of Tel Aviv. If the border had been open, I could have driven down there in just a few hours from my apartment, but this place looked like the other side of the world. Trim houses sprawled in Western-style suburban rows. Their red-tiled roofs looked somehow more Southern Californian than Mediterranean. Swimming pools sparkled in the sunlight.
My Lebanese friend Hassan called Israel “Disneyland.” I thought about that and laughed while watching it roll by from above.
The airport shocked me, as well, although it probably wouldn’t shock most Westerners. I had just spent six consecutive months in an Arab country and suddenly saw more straight lines and right angles than I was used to. There were more women, children, and families around than I had seen for some time. Obvious tourists from places like suburban Kansas City were everywhere.
Arab countries have a certain feel. They’re masculine, languid, worn around the edges, and slightly shady. Israel felt brisk, modern, shiny, and confident. With its clean and orderly streets, its glass skyscrapers, and its booming technology sector, Israel looked richer and more powerful—and it was.
Lisa Goldman kindly welcomed me to the country and met me for drinks in a smoke-filled bohemian bar. We talked, as almost everyone did, about The Conflict.
She was a journalist who had moved from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Israel years before when Ehud Barak was still the prime minister. Peace between Israelis and Palestinians looked imminent then. Israel was on the threshold—finally—of becoming an accepted and normal country in the Middle East. It was the perfect time to relocate, a time of optimism and hope. A cruel three weeks later, that dream was violently put to its death. The Second Intifada exploded. Israel was at war.
“2002 was Israel’s annus horribilis,” she wrote on her website.7 “The economy had bottomed out; suicide bombers were detonating themselves in Israel’s cities nearly every day; and Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen were killing each other in the occupied—and re-occupied—territories. Each day brought a stupefying new tragedy, for Jews and Arabs alike. Confined by the IDF to his headquarters, the Muqata, in Ramallah, Yasser Arafat had become an international media darling—’cause everyone loves the perceived underdog. Many international airlines had suspended their flights to Israel, having deemed it too dangerous. The hotels were empty of tourists; Israel had become a pariah nation.”
“It was so traumatizing,” she added in person when we met. “And everybody blamed us. I don’t think I will ever get over it.”
She kept going to restaurants, cafés, and bars even while bombs exploded almost daily. She even chose to sit in front of the windows, the least safe place in any establishment.
“The staff kept asking me if I was sure I wanted to sit there,” she said. “I did. Even when the Intifada was at its peak, you were far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than by the bombers.”
She was right about that. Most dangerous countries in the Middle East were safer than they appeared from a distance. The region was not one never-ending explosion. Even so, suicide bombs are far more terrifying and traumatizing than car crashes. They’re murderous. They’re malevolent. They’re on purpose.
My American friend in Beirut, the one Hezbollah shot at when he tried to drive into South Lebanon, also lived through the Intifada. He thought he had grown used to the threat of random violence and that it hardly fazed him anymore. One morning, while sipping a latte at a Starbucks in Beirut, he realized he had been kidding himself.
“I was just sitting there reading the newspaper,” he said, “when somebody walked in and shouted. I dove under the table and sent my chair flying. Nobody else hit the floor. Everyone stared, wondering what on earth had got into me.”
Palestinian suicide bombers often yelled “Allahu Akbar,” God is great, just before depressing the detonator and exploding themselves. Few things in Israel terrified like a man stepping into a public establishment and screaming all of a sudden, and my friend carried that fear with him into Lebanon.
“It’s especially disturbing when you know what those bombs do to the human body,” Lisa said.
“Do I want to know?” I said. I was not sure I did.
She shrugged.
“Okay,” I said. “Just tell me.”
“Arms and legs go flying in every direction,” she said. “Heads pop off like champagne corks. You just can’t believe anyone hates you that much.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
everything could explode at any moment
This country is like a cake.
On the top it is cream.
Underneath it is fire.
—HEZBOLLAH SPOKESMAN
In late 2005, the Palestinian front in the Arab-Israeli conflict was unusually quiet. The Lebanese-Israeli border, though, was getting ready to blow. No one I knew had heard the first thing about it. The only reason I had any idea something was wrong was because a Lebanese army officer wouldn’t give me a permit for the checkpoints.
Lisa and I drove up there from Tel Aviv to see if Israeli military officers were more willing to talk about what was happening than their Lebanese counterparts were.
We met Israel Defense Forces Spokesman Zvika Golan at a base in the north. He told us to follow him in his jeep as he drove to an elevated lookout point next to an IDF watchtower that opened up over Lebanon.
I stood next to the fence and looked onto a Shia village a quarter mile or so down the hill. Groves of olive trees had been planted halfway up another hill on the other side of the village. Lisa, Zvika, and I stood at a forty-five-degree angle from the roofline, and we stood in the open without protection. People below in Lebanon could easily see us.
“You aren’t safe here right now,” Zvika said.
“I know,” I said. “The Lebanese army wouldn’t let me anywhere near the border a few weeks ago. What’s going on?”
“Hezbollah is planning an operation,” he said.
“How do you know?” I said.
“We know,” he said and nodded.
The Lebanese military officer told me more or less the same thing a few weeks before when he wouldn’t let me cross into Hezbollah’s territory. He didn’t say the threat was from Hezbollah, but he didn’t have to.
“We really want the Lebanese army on this border,” Zvika said.
Lebanon and Israel technically had been at war for many decades, but the two countries’ armed forces had never actually fought one another. Israel had fought in Lebanon, but not against the Lebanese army or government. Israel’s Lebanon wars were only waged against the PLO, the Syrian army, and Hezbollah.
“Are you in contact with the Lebanese government?” I said.
“We pass messages to the Lebanese army through the U.N.,” he said.
“How well are they received?” I said.
“Oh, they’re received very well,” he said. “The only problem is the Lebanese army can’t act against Hezbollah.”
He introduced me to a young bearded lieutenant on border patrol duty.
“I have worked on the Jordanian and Egyptian borders,” he said. “This is the worst. The strangest feeling here is that the other side is a no-man’s-land. There is no authority that you’re working against. It is extremely out of the ordinary to see any Lebanese police or army. Only Hezbollah is armed.”
“What do you see when you look at Lebanon?” I asked him.
“I see poverty and difficult circumstances,” he said. “I see poor far
mers who work hard. After so many years of war, the last thing they probably want is more war.”
“Do you know what you’re looking at when you look into the towns?” I said.
“We track movement on the other side,” he said. “I can tell you exactly what each of those buildings are for.”
The buildings weren’t far. If the border were open and the fence not in place, we could have walked there in just a few minutes.
“What about people?” I said. “Can you tell who belongs to Hezbollah and who just happens to live there?”
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, I know who I’m looking at by their face,” he said. I smiled when I imagined Hussein Naboulsi in Hezbollah’s media relations department reading that if he still kept a file on what I wrote.
The lieutenant was easily ten years younger than me, but he was so ground down from world-weariness he sounded like a man thirty years older who had not slept for days.
“Any minute now something huge could break out,” he said. “I am afraid to go home and leave my soldiers. When Hezbollah decides to do something, they do it. And they’re pretty good at it.”
“What do you think they’ll do next?” I said.
“I have no idea,” he said. “They could do anything. Kidnapping. Sniper.”
“How do you feel about that?” I said.
“Well,” he said. “You get pretty cynical about it after a while.”
“Do you think they’re watching us?” Lisa said.
“They are watching you right at this second,” the lieutenant said. “You are definitely being photographed. It’s possible you’re being watched through a sniper rifle.”
To say I felt naked and exposed at that moment would be a real understatement. I felt like my skin was invisible, that psychopaths were boring holes with their eyes straight to the core of my being. At the same time, I knew they did not see me as a person. They saw me as a potential target.
Hezbollah wouldn’t hurt me in Lebanon, even after Hussein Naboulsi called up and threatened me. All bets were off while standing next to IDF soldiers in Israel, though.
I wouldn’t say I felt scared, but I certainly didn’t feel comfortable. The earth seemed slightly tilted. Lebanon looked unhinged and psychotic from the Israeli side of the line. I kept having to remind myself that there was a lot more to the land of the cedars than nutcases with guns in the hills who liked to pick off Jews on the border.
“How dangerous is it here, really?” I asked the lieutenant.
“I say this to my guys every morning: Everything could explode at any moment. Just after I said it this morning, a busload of pensioners showed up on a field trip. An old woman brought us some food. It’s crazy. They shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here.”
“What’s happening here is very unusual,” Zvika, the IDF spokesman, said.
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers had moved into South Lebanon again to help Hezbollah construct watchtowers fitted with one-way bulletproof windows right across from Israeli army positions.
“This is now Iran’s front line with Israel,” an IDF officer told a reporter at London’s Daily Telegraph.1 “The Iranians are using Hezbollah to spy on us so that they can collect information for future attacks. And there is very little we can do about it. More powerful weapons, including missiles with a range of thirty miles, are also being brought in.”
I asked Zvika about the last time Hezbollah and Israel got into a hot war, when the divided village of Ghajar came under attack.
“It was last November,” he said. “Hezbollah invaded Ghajar in white jeeps that looked like they belonged to the U.N. We bombed their positions with air strikes. After a while, the Lebanese army asked us to stop. So we stopped right away.”
“You stopped just because the Lebanese army asked you to stop?” I said.
He looked surprised by my question.
“Of course we stopped because they asked,” he said. “We have very good relations with them. We’re working with them and trying to help make them relevant.”
The Lebanese government never even hinted at anything like that in public.
The rhetoric that came out of Beirut in Arabic rarely had much to do with reality. The government regularly affirmed its “brotherhood” with Syria, its former murderous master that knocked off elected officials and journalists. Undying loyalty to the Palestinian cause was constantly trumpeted, even as Lebanon treated its hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees like zoo animals. Arab Nationalism was another regular theme in its pronouncements, even though Arab Nationalism was more dead in Lebanon than in any other country around.
“The U.N. says Hezbollah started the last fight,” I said to the lieutenant. “Do you ever start any fights?”
“They always initiate,” he said. “We never do. I want to go home. I want to read the newspaper and get more than three hours of sleep every night. We have no business here.”
“Are you scared?” I said.
“I am scared,” he said. “As an officer, I want my men to be scared.”
“Are they?” I said.
“Not enough,” he said. “Not enough.”
Lisa and I followed Zvika as he led us in his jeep to the kibbutz of Malkiya right on the border, within immediate striking distance of Hezbollah’s rockets and mortars.
He pulled off to the side of the road, pointed out a U.N. base just over the fence on the Lebanese side, and yelled something at the U.N. soldiers in Hindi. They waved and hollered back, also in Hindi. By happy coincidence, both Zvika and the peacekeepers were from India. Theirs was, perhaps, the only verbal communication that ever crossed that fence.
At Malkiya we met Eitan Oren, an Israeli Kurd from Eastern Turkey. He gave Lisa and me a quick tour of the place, which was unremarkable in almost every way. It looked, to my eyes anyway, like just another small Israeli town, only with fewer roads and more footpaths connecting the buildings.
“It’s dying here,” Eitan said. “Socialism is out. Capitalism is in. The ideology collapsed. I was never a socialist. I don’t belong in the concrete jungle of Tel Aviv. I’m a nature boy. I belong here.”
Here, though, was right on the rim of a volcano. Hezbollahland was right there. And, as Zvika kept telling Lisa and me, the border was gearing up to explode.
The four of us got into Eitan’s pickup so he could take us on a brief driving tour.
“Since our withdrawal, the enemy—Hizb Allah—is on the fence,” he said. “See that post on the mountain?” A rocky hill loomed above us just over the border with a small square building on top of it. I could just barely make out a Hezbollah flag when I squinted. “They are watching us right now. You are safe, though.”
“Don’t believe what he says,” Zvika said and laughed darkly. “You are not particularly safe right now.”
I later met a young Israeli woman who had also moved from Turkey to Israel. She toured the border with some university classmates, and they found themselves face-to-face with Hezbollah militiamen patrolling their side of the fence.
“It was terrifying,” she said. “They bared their teeth at us like wolves. One of them slashed his throat with his finger.”
Zvika took off the top half of his uniform and stripped down to a T-shirt so he would look like a civilian. He did that, I think, to protect Eitan, Lisa, and me more than himself.
Eitan pulled off the main road and into his peach orchard next to the fence.
“Lots of drug fields right across the border right here,” he said. “Across the border are mostly Shias. We used to have a great relationship with them.”
That was sort of true, up to a point. Israelis once had a great relationship with some of the Lebanese Shias who served in the South Lebanon Army, worked day jobs in Israel, or even went down there as tourists through Fatima Gate.
“Nasrallah is a bright guy,” Eitan said. “I wish his energy were directed toward something good, but Hezbollah has been infected by Iran.”
“What do yo
u think of ordinary people on the other side?” I said.
“Every day I wave at Lebanese people,” he said.
“Do they ever wave back?” I said.
“Not usually, no,” he said. “They are cold. A few are friendly, though.”
“Do you know why most of them are cold?” I said.
I wasn’t sure how much Israelis knew about why things were the way they were inside Lebanon. He already knew I had been living in Beirut, and he could tell by the tone of my voice that I knew the answer.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”
“Because waving hello to an Israeli is treason,” I said.
He looked startled and more than a little disturbed.
“I didn’t know that,” he said. “Some wave hello to me anyway. Do you know why?” I didn’t. “Because they are my friends. They know me.” He sounded more cheerful now. “We used to work together when the border was open. Come with me, my friends. I want to show you something.”
Lisa, Zvika, and I got into his pickup and drove for another few minutes along the fence.
We got out at an elevated clearing.
“Look at this,” Eitan said and pointed to what was left of a small stone structure just off the road. “It’s the old British customs building.”
The walls were mostly intact, but the roof was gone. It appeared to have been damaged in war, as though a rocket or mortar had landed on top of it.
“Look over there,” he said and pointed into Lebanon. “You see that destroyed building just on the other side of the fence? That’s the old French customshouse.”
The French building obviously had been destroyed by charges placed at the base. The roof was almost at ground level; the building had pancaked onto itself.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 12
