“Can we go with you guys into Lebanon?” Noah asked one of the soldiers.
“Do you want to?” the soldier said.
“Yeah,” Noah said.
The soldier didn’t know if it was possible. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t.
I didn’t want to. I would later embed with American soldiers and Marines in Iraq, but I felt queasy about hitching a ride with an army on its way into Lebanon. I wasn’t Lebanese, and I didn’t like Hezbollah any more than the Israelis did, but Lebanon was the closest thing I had in the world to a second home.
One Israeli soldier I spoke to whom I’ll call Eli spent the entire war in and out of South Lebanon. He and his unit worked in some villages nine or so miles in from Metula. His job was to go in and mark artillery targets.
“These whole villages,” he said, “they were empty, just filled with Hezbollah terrorists. No civilians were walking around South Lebanon. I know. I was in their villages. In their houses. Anyone who was there was definitely working for the Hezbollah or working as a Hezbollah fighter.”
“You didn’t see any women?” I said. “It was mostly men and no children?”
“I never saw one woman or any children in Lebanon,” he said. “I was going in and out for the whole time since the day the soldiers were kidnapped. We flew from my unit straight to the north in helicopters.”
Houses all over South Lebanon were destroyed, sometimes by Hezbollah, mostly by Israelis. It’s not clear, though, that Israelis deserved most of the blame. Not only did Hezbollah build houses explicitly for use during a war but they also used civilians and their strictly residential houses as shields. They hid behind private homes and fired rockets from inside populated areas. The Israeli Air Force took out every rocket launcher it could, thus destroying much of the civilian infrastructure next to the launchers.
“Did they use populated areas to fire?” Eli said. “It was clear that they did. Except Israel also dispersed fliers ordering all the civilian population of South Lebanon to leave. Anyone who was in those villages was probably helping Hezbollah fighters. Hezbollah could take any house they wanted because the whole place was empty. Everyone left. When we were fighting, we were fighting from house to house. They would just skip houses and go to a different house. We would detonate one house; they would fire a few from another house and skip to yet another one. They would go wherever they wanted. It was their area in South Lebanon. It’s not like they thought about them as civilian houses.”
Australian reporter Chris Link published revealing photographs in the Herald Sun newspaper on July 30, 2006, that showed Hezbollah fighters wearing civilian clothes and operating an antiaircraft gun in a suburban neighborhood.8 Perhaps Hezbollah neither knew nor cared, but installing military targets like antiaircraft guns in residential neighborhoods is against the laws of war. It recklessly endangers the civilians who live there. Meanwhile, destroying an antiaircraft gun in a residential neighborhood with an air strike isn’t a war crime. The laws and conventions of war are absolutely clear about this,9 and they squarely said Hezbollah was at fault for turning those areas into targets.
“If there was a full-out war,” Eli said, “you know, tanks against tanks, combat units against combat units, and everything done out in the open—Israel would definitely, totally defeat and win. Guerrilla warfare is extremely hard. It’s stressful because it’s not a real army; it’s not an army. It’s like cells. You’re fighting against cells that are operated by bigger cells.”
The Americans were fighting the same kind of war at the same time just a few hundred miles away in Iraq. It wasn’t going much better for the U.S. than it was for Israel. The Americans were just as bewildered in Iraq as the Israelis were in Lebanon. Both fought invisible enemies in the alleyways of an alien society where they had little leverage. American soldiers and Marines weren’t strictly limited to one- or two-day little jaunts into Iraq followed by hasty withdrawals, and at least they weren’t trying to fight a counterinsurgency primarily with the Air Force, but the wars in both Lebanon and Iraq were going badly for similar reasons. Guerrilla fighters and terrorists were humbling two of the most powerful and sophisticated armed forces in history. Whatever institutional knowledge about effective counterinsurgency strategies that once existed within the ranks of Western military officers seemed, in the middle of 2006, to have been lost.
“There are people walking around towns,” Eli said, “with weapons, who aren’t wearing uniforms. They look like civilians. I mean, in every civilian house in Lebanon, there is a shotgun. And that’s not because they’re against the IDF or because they’re against Israel; it’s that most people in the small villages, they’re hunters. They hunt for food. But we also saw people walking around with AK-47s and handguns. Those are definitely Hezbollah people in civilian clothes.”
Arabs were once among the most militarily powerful people on earth. Shortly after the founding of Islam in what today is Saudi Arabia, they surged north into Mesopotamia and the Levant and west across North Africa in a massive and rapid expansion of power. It had been a long time, though, since the Arab world fielded competent armies capable of conquering territory. Some Israelis thought that was the only reason they could even survive in the Middle East while surrounded and greatly outnumbered by enemies. When legendary war hero Moshe Dayan was asked about Israel’s secret to success in modern warfare after defeating three armies in six days in 1967, he said, if you have to go to war, it helps to fight Arabs.10
Hezbollah fighters, though, were the most formidable enemies Israelis had ever faced. “We think of Hezbollah as the Iranian army,” IDF Spokesman Jonathan Davis told me, and they were not entirely wrong in doing so.
“The chief of the military in Israel did not come from the army,” Eli said. He came from the Air Force. “He did not use the ground troops as well as he should have. He would send ground troops one kilometer in, they would stay for a few days and walk out. And every time we went in and went out, people got killed.”
Night fell. The Israeli soldiers were gearing up for a real ground invasion this time instead of just a quick hop over the border, and they were getting twitchy. There’s something about darkness in war, even during the quiet times. All were less talkative than before, and there was clearly no way Noah and I could get any useful or interesting information out of them at that point.
So we walked the line of tanks.
“Don’t be here,” a soldier said.
“We’re journalists,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “But this is a war zone. Don’t be here.”
So we went back to the hotel in the dark and sat on the roof.
The view north into Lebanon was an ominous sight.
The Lebanese town of Kfar Kila directly faced Metula across a small patch of farmland. There wasn’t any no-man’s-land in between. The two towns were in different countries, but they were almost in the exact same location. If it weren’t for the border, I could have walked from one to the other in less than ten minutes.
But that night all of Lebanon was black. It was as if Lebanon did not exist. The lights of emptied Israeli ghost cities twinkled behind me, but Lebanon was enveloped in a vast darkness.
A fire burning in a Lebanese field off to my right grew bigger and brighter. No fire department existed on the other side that could douse it. South Lebanon, always lawless and beyond the control of the state, was a truly anarchic and perilous place on the night of August 11.
Distant flashes lit up the horizon. A low rumble of war in the distance sounded like thunder. It sounded like the physical breaking of Lebanon.
The next morning Noah and I heard loud automatic weapons fire coming from the other side of the fence in Kfar Kila. No one seemed to be guarding either side of the border. No one could have stopped us from walking to our doom had we been dumb enough to cross over.
We did not dare. Most of the violence was on Lebanon’s side. We were near enough to hear it and could walk to it in just minutes, but we were just
out of range as long as we stayed in Israel.
Far more dangerous were the Hezbollah fighters themselves. If we were caught and questioned, and if they found no recent Lebanese entry stamps in our passports, they would know we had crossed illegally from the Israeli side. We had no good reason to think we would be released unharmed under such circumstances. It’s possible, and perhaps even likely, that Hezbollah would assume, if they found us, that we were Israeli intelligence agents. Risking that would not have been brave; it would have been stupid.
The most surprising thing about looking into Kfar Kila from Metula was how little damage was visible. I had expected to see serious destruction in the Lebanese border towns, but the towns I could see didn’t appear damaged at all.
Noah scanned the buildings from the roof of the Alaska with a pair of binoculars borrowed from another reporter. He couldn’t locate a single damaged building or house, not even among those that were right on the border and easiest for Israelis to hit.
Obviously, there was damage in South Lebanon. Those thousands of outgoing artillery shells weren’t landing on nothing. For all I knew at the time, Hezbollah’s de facto southern capital Bint Jbail was a pile of rubble. I would soon visit Bint Jbail and find that much of it really was a pile of rubble, but Lebanon’s towns in the vicinity of Metula seemed to be more or less intact.
The war was just about over. IDF spokesmen were given gag orders and couldn’t say anything to me, Noah, or anyone else. Military police shooed us away from the soldiers and told us to stay in the hotel or get out of the area. We decided it was time to head back to Tel Aviv.
Our fuel was running low, so we stopped to fill up the gas tank just south of Kiryat Shmona.
Israeli gas stations could be incredibly frustrating for foreigners. After Noah swiped his credit card at the pump, the computer asked for his Israeli national ID number. Noah lived in Israel at the time, but he’s American. He didn’t have a national ID number to enter. Obviously, I didn’t either. So we asked an IDF soldier who happened to pull up in a truck if he would use his credit card and ID number to get us some gas if we gave him cash.
“Of course,” he said and swiped his card into the machine. “Where are you guys from?” he said as he punched in his number.
“We’re both Americans,” Noah said.
“Are you tourists?” he said.
I laughed. “Here?” I said. “No, we’re not tourists. We’re journalists.”
“There are adrenaline tourists up here,” he said. “There are agents in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem who set up the tours.”
It couldn’t be too dangerous in Northern Israel if this sort of thing was going on, I thought. Surely there were no “adrenaline tours” in South Lebanon at the time.
Just then a Katyusha rocket exploded inside a residential neighborhood in Kiryat Shmona a few hundred yards from where we were standing.
“Wow,” Noah said. “Let’s go take pictures of that.”
“No,” said the soldier. “Don’t go there.”
More rockets often followed the first. They arrived in pairs and in threes. So we didn’t go. We went kinda sorta near it, but we kept a prudent distance. We drove to a place where we could take pictures without actually standing where another rocket was likely to explode at any moment.
On the way back to Tel Aviv, we passed once again through entire towns eerily emptied of people. Very few houses or stores had been looted. It would have been easy to steal just about anything in cities depopulated of even police officers, but hardly anyone did. War brings people together with a shared sense of purpose. While the laws fell silent in the north of the country, common human decency didn’t.
Common human decency held up on the Lebanese side, too, for the most part. Despite the fact that large numbers of Christians and Sunnis feared and loathed Lebanon’s Shias and blamed them for starting the war, many provided shelter in their own homes for refugees fleeing the south.
Hezbollah didn’t behave nearly as well.
On July 16, 2008, Hezbollah agreed to return the bodies of captured soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in exchange for Israel releasing captured Hezbollah fighters and the infamous child murderer Samir Kuntar. On April 22, 1979, in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, Kuntar killed policeman Eliyahu Shahar, civilian Danny Haran, and Haran’s four-year-old daughter, Einat, by placing her head on a rock and smashing her skull with the butt of his rifle.
When the bodies of Goldwasser and Regev were returned to Israel, former Chief Rabbi of the IDF Yisrael Weiss said, “If we thought the enemy was cruel to the living and the dead, we were surprised, when we opened the caskets, to discover just how cruel. And I’ll leave it at that.”11
What Israelis call the Second Lebanon War, and what Lebanese call the July War, created hundreds of thousands of refugees on each side of the border. That’s where proportion ended. Israel had a real army and a real air force and was able to inflict severe damage on its enemies. Hezbollah, meanwhile, was only strong enough to inflict light damage and a relatively small number of casualties.
The so-called Party of God could sabotage Lebanon and terrorize Israel, but Hassan Nasrallah’s “martyrs” could not repel or even slow an invading army. They could only harass that army and kill a minuscule percentage of its soldiers.
While most foreign journalists packed up and left Israel as soon as each side stopped shooting, I drove back to Kiryat Shmona to do a little postwar inspection of what had just happened.
Israel’s most targeted city looked intact from a distance, and even up close, the damage wasn’t all that severe. Rockets landed all day in the city for weeks, so I expected to see destroyed homes. There may well have been some, but I drove all over town and couldn’t find any.
The worst damage I saw was relatively minor under the circumstances. A Katyusha had hit the roof of a carport. A parked van was torched. The nearby kitchen window was blown in by shrapnel. A portion of the side of the house was damaged. Anyone standing at the kitchen sink when the window blew in certainly would have been killed, but the house itself could be fixed without too much difficulty.
Katyusha rockets are pip-squeaks. They don’t feel like pip-squeaks when they’re flying in your direction, but they are. They can’t be aimed worth a damn, and they’ll only do serious damage if they ignite something else after impact, such as a fuel station or the gas tank of a car. Forget trying to use Katyushas against a properly outfitted and trained Western army. They have little military value unless they’re fired in barrages at close range. From a distance, they can be counted on only to break a few things at random in the general direction they’re aimed.
They did break a few things in Kiryat Shmona, especially because Hezbollah was clever enough to pack them with ball bearings. Buildings and houses all over the city were riddled with pockmarks from shrapnel that looked, when I squinted, like bullet holes from automatic weapons fire. Broken glass crunched under my feet when I walked. Kiryat Shmona looked like a city that had suffered massive firefights in almost every neighborhood.
Anyone who spent any significant amount of time walking those streets during the war would have been in extreme danger. The city itself, while scarred on the surface, may have been otherwise almost intact, but it was an extraordinarily lethal environment for humans while the rockets were falling.
Katyusha shrapnel kills people who aren’t wearing body armor and wounds those who are. Believe me: You don’t want to be hit with this stuff. The rockets may be nearly useless against an army or infrastructure, but they’re devastatingly effective as terrorist weapons against civilian population centers. Shrapnel may not hurt an apartment building too badly or even slow down a tank, but it will tear you to pieces if you’re in the way.
There was a lot of talk in the media about Hezbollah’s targets in Israel. Some insisted Hezbollah aimed its Katyushas at the Israeli military. The fact that twelve soldiers were killed by a rocket just before I arrived on the border was used as evidence for that clai
m.
But Hezbollah hit a little of everything in Northern Israel: houses, trees, streams, grass, apartments, roads, vineyards, and cows. Thousands of rockets exploded in that part of the country. The odds that none of the rockets would hit a single IDF soldier were minuscule.
The truth is, I was far safer on military bases, in open fields, and on tiny kibbutzim than in cities during Hezbollah’s rocket war. A disproportionate number of their rockets landed in urban areas.
Rockets rained down on Kiryat Shmona almost constantly even though there were no soldiers, no tanks, no artillery pieces, no bases, nothing of military value in the city at all. None of the journalists I met were willing to risk their lives by lingering there, but we were all relatively relaxed on IDF bases. The odds of us being hit there by a rocket were merely random, the same as if we were out among cows in the fields. The city of Haifa, which was almost twenty miles from the border, was hit more often than bases that were right on the border and which were therefore easier targets. The odds of being hit in Kiryat Shmona were fantastically higher than the odds of being hit anywhere else. Our lives depended on correctly computing the odds.
If Hezbollah really did the best they could to avoid killing civilians with their inaccurate rockets, as they and their apologists claimed, I would have set up shop in Kiryat Shmona and stayed away from Israeli soldiers for my own protection. But the situation was exactly reversed.
What happened in Israel and Lebanon in July and August of 2006 was a radical break from the past. Arab armies couldn’t invade Israel without being quickly repelled or demolished. Even terrifying waves of suicide bombers could be beaten back with separation barriers and human intelligence. But Hezbollah was able to fire barrages of rockets throughout the conflict all the way up to the cease-fire. The IDF defeated three armies in six days in 1967 but couldn’t even slow the rocket war down in a month.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 15
