“It, too, was used when the Lebanese-Israeli border was open,” Eitan said. “Hezbollah blew it away. Nasrallah wanted to make sure there was no contact at all between our two peoples.”
It’s a lot easier to hate people when you don’t know them personally, when you can’t hang out and talk, when you don’t work together, and when you can’t wave hello. An open border and a free exchange of thoughts and ideas was Hezbollah’s worst nightmare. The vitriolic and eliminationist propaganda from Iran and Hezbollah was instantly proven ridiculous upon contact with average Israelis.
“What do you want to see happen here, Eitan?” I said.
“I wish we could have peace and an open border,” he said. “Like a normal country. Like it is between Oregon and California. Right now we call the Lebanese enemies. But they are not really enemies. I know them. Some are my friends. The only enemy is Hezbollah.”
Eitan and Zvika leaned against the front of the truck. Eitan thought Israel’s withdrawal from South Lebanon was a mistake.
“Hezbollah is the only Arab army to ever defeat us,” he said.
Zvika patiently shook his head. “They didn’t defeat us,” he said.
They got into a minor civil argument about it. The officer thought it was wise to withdraw the armed forces. The civilian did not. The officer insisted Hezbollah did not defeat Israel. The civilian insisted Hezbollah did. The officer feared Hezbollah. The civilian did not and even seemed to respect Hassan Nasrallah as well as Lebanon’s Shia civilians. The officer’s point of view made sense. Eitan’s was a bundle of unworked-out contradictions.
Israelis couldn’t reach out in friendship and park tanks on Lebanese streets at the same time, especially not after all that bloody history. There was something else, too, something Eitan had not seemed to consider. The only reason Hezbollah lost its popularity in Lebanon was because Israel had withdrawn to its side of the border. Lebanese didn’t like Israelis occupying their land any more than they liked Syrians occupying their land. The Cedar Revolution may not even have happened if Israel still occupied part of Lebanon in 2005. Syria may well have seemed like the lesser of enemies.
Eitan took us back to Malkiya and showed us the community day care and nursery. He told me the residents built their nursery in the center of the kibbutz, where the children are surrounded by protective adults, “just as a baby in the womb is protected by the body of its mother.”
Stairs led down a passageway under the children’s playground to an entombed concrete bomb shelter. I wondered how on earth the adults could raise infants mere feet from murderous enemies, but I didn’t ask. The question was too implicitly critical. I liked Eitan, and I wasn’t about to tell him how he should raise his children.
He seemed to sense my unease, though, and said it would be a catastrophe if the northern part of his country were left abandoned and darkened.
The Lebanese on the other side of the fence felt the same way. Most didn’t realize Israel had no intention of reoccupying South Lebanon. They also felt like they were on the rim of a volcano. Most Shias in the south felt safer thanks to Hezbollah. Hezbollah did an excellent job of convincing its support base that it was a defender of Lebanon rather than a potential magnet for an invasion.
Lisa and I stopped at the grocery store on our way out and bought snacks for the road. We had two more stops to make before returning to Tel Aviv. Eitan came with us into the store. When I pulled cash out of my pocket, he told me to put it away.
“We don’t use money here,” he said. “This is a community!” Zionist socialism suddenly seemed a little less dead than he had let on.
Lisa and I said our good-byes to Eitan and Zvika, got back in the rental car, and headed up the road toward Metula and Ghajar.
Metula was the place Leena had shown me, the one I first thought was in Lebanon. It was so close to the fence that a Lebanese kid could hit somebody’s house with a rock. Lisa and I wanted to see the Israeli side of nearby Fatima Gate, which Israelis called The Good Fence.
She told me that several groups of Israelis had driven up there and peacefully confronted the rock throwers. “We don’t hate you,” they said.
It never did any good. People who went out of their way to throw rocks at others couldn’t be easily dissuaded by niceness. Besides, being friendly with Israelis was treason.
The road to Fatima Gate was closed that day. IDF soldiers told us we weren’t allowed beyond a barricade that shuttered the road. So we drove on toward Ghajar, the Alawite village that had been split down the middle between Israel and Lebanon and that one day might be returned to Syria.
This was where Hezbollah launched its most recent invasion the previous November.2 Lisa told me she saw local Arab residents screaming on the television news, demanding that Israel ramp up the security in their town and better protect them from Iran’s proxy killers.
She and I both wanted to interview some of these people. I wanted to explore the prosperous Israeli side and compare it with the destitute Alawite Village I had seen in Lebanon. It didn’t look promising, though. Everyone driving into Ghajar had to navigate a slalom-like obstacle course of concrete blocks just to get to a checkpoint.
The soldiers at the checkpoint turned us back for our protection. They were braced for an attack. Everything could explode at any moment.
CHAPTER EIGHT
the july war
Israel’s final departure from Lebanon is a prelude to its final obliteration from existence.
—HEZBOLLAH
Early in the morning on July 12, 2006, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were on patrol near the Northern Israeli town of Zar’it, just south of the border with Lebanon, when unseen guerrillas ambushed their Humvee. Three of their fellow soldiers were killed in the attack, but Goldwasser and Regev fared even worse: they were captured by Hezbollah and dragged over the border fence into the wilds of South Lebanon.1
The Israeli response was formidable. Another Israel Defense Forces soldier, Gilad Shalit, had been snatched just two weeks before by Palestinians and smuggled through a tunnel into Gaza. Israelis were in no mood to tolerate cross-border attacks on two fronts at once. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised2 “a very painful and far-reaching response.” He launched artillery and air strikes at Hezbollah’s positions in South Lebanon, at the command and control centers in the suburbs south of Beirut, and at infrastructure throughout the country, including roads, bridges, and Beirut’s international airport.
Hezbollah’s response was likewise ferocious. Its fighters fired thousands of World War II-era Katyusha rockets at Israeli civilian-population areas in the cities of Haifa, Kiryat Shmona, Nazareth, and Tiberias. The entire northern sixth of the country—including Arab-majority areas—was blanketed with constant daily rocket attacks. Hezbollah wanted a brief border skirmish and an exchange of prisoners but instead found itself in a full-scale war that produced millions of refugees and devastated parts of both countries.
I was in Iraq when it started and could not get back to Lebanon—the Israeli Air Force had put holes in the runway at the airport to prevent Hezbollah from flying the captured soldiers out to Iran. So I teamed up with my friend and colleague Noah Pollak, then-assistant editor at Azure magazine in Jerusalem, and took a rental car from Tel Aviv to the Israeli side of the front.
By then the war had been blazing for weeks. The Israeli government was proposing a cease-fire to end it even though Israel had so far gained practically nothing. It wasn’t yet over, but it was already widely seen as a debacle. There was talk in the local newspapers about removing Olmert from the prime minister’s office immediately. But the farther north we drove, the less relevant any talk of cease-fires and parliaments seemed. The fighting raged on, and we were approaching Hezbollah’s shooting gallery.
Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, was empty and burning, as was every other city in the country near the Lebanese border.
Traffic thinned as we drove, but we hadn’t yet seen overt signs of war. At some point we would cross an
invisible boundary between the “safe” part of Israel, supposedly beyond the range of Hezbollah’s rockets, and the kill zone. Neither Noah nor I knew exactly where that boundary was, but every mile we traveled brought us closer.
When we arrived at the resort town of Tiberias on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, it looked like a city at the end of the world. The streets were entirely empty of people and cars. More than a million civilians had packed up their valuables and fled south in their vehicles. Only a handful of brave, elderly, sick, poor, stubborn, and possibly suicidal people remained. It would have made a terrific set for a zombie movie.
“Stop the car,” I said to Noah. “I want to get out.”
Noah stopped the car in the middle of a major intersection. There was no need to pull over or park because there was no traffic.
I stepped out of the car. It was the middle of summer, and we were well below sea level. The air was unbearably hot, humid, heavy, and still. Nothing moved. Nothing seemed real. I heard no sound at all, except the chirping of birds, in the middle of a major city at noon. We shouldn’t be here, I thought. I expected an explosion at any moment, but I couldn’t see any damage and wasn’t sure whether we were actually inside, or just near, Hezbollah’s rocket range.
I got back in the car and we continued to drive. Just past the city and beyond the shores of the sea, we saw hillsides scorched from Katyusha fire. We were inside the zone now and could be killed at any time without warning.
As we approached the city of Kiryat Shmona, I braced for hell. It seemed to be Hezbollah’s target of choice. It was so close to the border—less than two miles away—that there was no time to warn civilians to head to the bomb shelters when incoming rockets were detected on radar. They often exploded at the same instant the air-raid sirens turned on, and sometimes even before.
Storms of incoming rockets moved through the north like malevolent weather. Lisa Goldman had been up there just a few days earlier with a colleague, and she described the scene as a horror.
“The nearly abandoned city reminded us of scenes in Hollywood movies set in Grozny,” she wrote,3 “or Sarajevo, circa 1992. Brush fires set off by Hezbollah rockets blazed everywhere, creating a thick pall of smoke that dimmed the usually bright Levantine sunlight. Bits of ash floated about like snowflakes, the smell of smoke permeated the air and was absorbed in my clothes and hair. And the constant booms, explosions and sirens provided loud background music—a live, postmodern version of Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor for this long shot of Apocalypse Now: The Middle Eastern Version.” Lisa and her journalist colleague drove as fast as physically possible through burning streets, walls of fire just feet from each side of the car.
Noah and I heard air-raid sirens wailing even out in the countryside as we closed in on the city. Israeli civil defense instructed everyone to pull over and get out of and away from their cars when they heard the sirens. A nearby explosion could startle drivers and cause them to crash. That wasn’t all. Katyusha shrapnel punctured vehicles as though they were made of paper, and direct hits to gas tanks instantly turned cars and trucks into fireballs.
When we finally reached the city, it looked surprisingly okay from the main road. Although we drove fast through the streets and the nonfunctioning traffic signals, I saw no fires, no smoke, and no serious damage. It was a good day to drive through.
I unfolded our map and looked for the turnoff to Kibbutz Misgav Am. Military historian Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War4 and spokesman for the IDF Northern Command, waited for us there. It wasn’t clear which road we should take, so after we passed Kiryat Shmona, we pulled off to the side of the road and asked directions from two officers in an idle police car.
I stepped out into the road and nearly jumped out of my skin as I heard and felt a loud BOOM from just on the other side of a nearby hill.
“Outgoing,” Noah said to put me at ease. I laughed and said “Of course,” although to me at the time there was no such thing as of course. Noah had visited the border just a few days before and was much more comfortable in that environment. I hadn’t yet learned to distinguish the sounds of incoming and outgoing.
The officers told us how to get to Kibbutz Misgav Am, which was was near a military base on the border. They didn’t ask us who we were, what we were doing, or why on earth we wanted to go there. War creates a crazily “libertarian” environment where, as was said in the time of the Roman Empire, the law falls silent.
Once we knew where we were going, Noah and I drove through an increasingly dodgy-looking environment where tents, tanks, and heavy artillery pieces were set up in fields burned away by incoming fire.
We turned left past Kiryat Shmona and drove up the steep hill toward the base. Thick smoke boiled off the top of a ridge. Israel was on fire. I did not want to be there.
Concrete bomb-blast walls lined the road. In a few short minutes, we reached Misgav Am overlooking the snaking fence on the Lebanese border. Noah parked next to the remains of a car that had taken a direct hit and was utterly blown apart. The largest piece remaining was a hubcap. A thick black oil spot pooled in the center of the former car’s wreckage.
I stepped out of our car and braced for an explosion. The Israelis fired artillery shells over our heads every couple of moments toward points unknown on the other side of the horizon. I jumped every time and tried in vain to get used to it.
Noah approached a reservist sitting next to a bomb-blast wall and asked if he knew where we could find IDF Spokesman Michael Oren. The reservist had never heard of him. Oren would later become Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
“It’s quiet today compared with yesterday,” the reservist said. “A rocket fell thirty meters from me yesterday. But I just kept reading the newspaper.”
“How can you do that?” I said. I felt raw and exposed, horribly vulnerable to Hezbollah’s random destruction. Even the thunderous sound of outgoing ordnance made me want to dive into the dirt.
“I have to keep myself normal and clear,” he said. “I have been here for three weeks. There have been lots of rockets in Haifa today. But none here.”
Earsplitting outgoing artillery shells exploded from cannons just a few dozen yards from where I stood. Car alarms went off everywhere. Ten thousand volts of adrenaline instantly kicked into my system. I instinctively ducked my head and wondered, for a split second, whether I should take cover behind the wall. For the uninitiated, even the sounds of nonthreatening outgoing fire trigger every urgent survival mechanism in the human body.
Three Katyusha rockets slammed into the side of the Golan Heights on the other side of the valley. Rockets often landed in clusters. Hezbollah usually fired several rockets at once in the same direction. If one hit anywhere even vaguely near you, watch out. More were probably coming.
I didn’t know what the Israeli army was shooting at when they fired their shells into Lebanon. Those who fired the shells didn’t know either. Unlike Hezbollah, though, they were shooting at actual targets. They were not just firing at random toward Lebanese farmland and towns. IDF soldiers on the other side of the border marked specific targets and called in coordinates.
Michael Oren still hadn’t arrived. Where was he? Noah and I got back in the car and drove down the hill toward Kiryat Shmona. Noah punched Oren’s number into his cell phone.
“Where are you guys?” he said and paused. “Okay, we’ll wait for you at the bottom of the hill.”
So we drove to the bottom of the hill and got out of the car next to an open field arrayed with tanks and gigantic guns.
Bang, followed by an arcing tear in the atmosphere.
Bang, followed by the sound of ripping sky.
A mile or so in front of us, a series of glowing surface-to-surface missiles hurtled toward Lebanon at impossible speeds and somehow got faster as they flew farther.
Jets screamed overhead on their way into Lebanon. The Israeli Air Force scrambled their fighters to take out Katyusha launchers and rain down hell from the sky onto H
ezbollah’s critical infrastructure—especially in the town of Bint Jbail and in the dahiyeh.
The air-raid sirens wailed. Rockets were detected crossing the border, which was less than a mile from where we were standing. Noah and I moved into a bus stop fitted with bomb-blast walls and hoped the rockets would hit the fortified side, not the open side, if they landed anywhere near us.
Bang. Bang. More outgoing artillery. Shells tore menacingly across the sky in an arc over my head.
The air-raid siren kept wailing. It sounded like World War II outside.
Hurry up and get here, Michael Oren, I thought. I can’t take much more of this.
Whump. An incoming Katyusha landed somewhere off in the distance. The air-raid siren winded down.
“Man, this is intense,” I said to Noah. “Are we crazy to be here?”
“Probably,” he said.
We finally found Michael Oren back up top where we had looked for him before, standing on a ridge next to some bushes and squinting through binoculars at Lebanon in the distance.
Noah knew Oren from the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and introduced me to him. Oren greeted both of us warmly.
The Israeli government was proposing a cease-fire. I wanted to know what Oren thought of it, although I suspected already that he wasn’t thrilled. Israel had accomplished very few of its objectives in Lebanon.
“It’s probably the best we could get under the circumstances,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of leverage right now.”
Israel’s Second Lebanon War looked, to me anyway, like a disaster in the making almost from the very beginning. Successful foreign interventions are nearly impossible to pull off in Lebanon without either massive public support from the Lebanese—something the Israelis were extremely unlikely to ever receive—or a massive deployment of ruthless brute force of the sort only the Syrians had recently been comfortable using.
The war almost looked as though it might have gone differently during the first couple of hours. Many Lebanese initially shrugged at Israel’s opening counterstrike. Everyone knew Hezbollah started it, and the Party of God wasn’t well liked by the majority of Lebanese anyway. Some even welcomed and cheered Israel’s bloody-minded reaction. The Lebanese army wasn’t strong or cohesive enough to give Iran’s private militia a thrashing, so if the Israelis didn’t fight Hezbollah, nobody would fight Hezbollah.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 13
