Israeli intelligence agents at the Ministry of Defense told me they feared missile war was replacing terrorist war. It seems they were right. Hamas later replicated Hezbollah’s strategy and ramped up its own relatively low-key rocket war out of Gaza against the Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon. Only missile war could force hundreds of thousands of Israelis to flee their homes, and both Hamas and Hezbollah threatened to one day blanket the entire country with barrages of missiles and make Israel uninhabitable once and for all.
Feelings of existential dread increased markedly after the Second Lebanon War. Israel is a small country, haunted by horrors past. “Daytime Israel makes a tremendous effort to create the impression of the determined, tough, simple, uncomplicated society ready to fight back, ready to hit back twice as hard, courageous, and so on,” Israeli novelist Amos Oz once said.12 “Nocturnal Israel is a refugee camp with more nightmares per square mile I guess than any other place in the world. Almost everyone has seen the devil.”
This war was a transition, the testing of a new doctrine. It was a potential disaster for Israel but in the end an even bigger disaster for those who thought it was a terrific idea. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near Lebanon or the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza if sophisticated Iranian-made Zelzal missiles were crashing into the sides of Tel Aviv apartment towers and skyscrapers.
When I left Israel and made plans to return to Lebanon, I could feel it: War was coming again, and it was coming like Christmas.
CHAPTER NINE
hezbollah’s putsch
Lebanon no longer wishes to make battle on your behalf or on behalf of your half-baked medieval ideas.
—LOUIS-NOEL HARFOUCHE
All those against the revolution must disappear and quickly be executed.
—AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI
The July War briefly united most Lebanese against Israel. Nobody ran off to join Hezbollah, but tensions were largely smoothed over while most felt as though they were under attack by the same enemy.
It didn’t last. Few thought it would.
Lebanon at the best of times felt like it might explode at any moment. The country barely held together, like unstable chemicals in a nitroglycerin vat. Even before the war, the slightest ripple of sectarian or political tension sent people scattering from the streets and into their homes. They were far more twitchy than I was, in part, I think, because they understood better than I did just how precarious their civilized anarchy was.
Friends in Beirut sent messages to me while I was in Israel during the war. Most Lebanese were going easy on Hezbollah while the bombs were still falling, they said, but a terrible reckoning awaited as soon as the war ended.
Some people couldn’t even wait that long.
Clashes broke out in south Beirut’s flash-point neighborhoods where Sunni areas abutted the dahiyeh. Farther north, Christian mobs smashed cars displaying Hezbollah logos. A friend said the atmosphere reeked of impending sectarian conflict like never before. One radical Christian militiaman from the bad old days said the civil war would resume a month after Israel cooled its guns. “Christians, Sunnis and Druze will fight the fucker Shia,” he told reporter Emily Dische-Becker,1 “with arms from the U.S. and France.”
Some Israelis thought that would be great. The Lebanese might take care of Hezbollah at last! But the March 14 government couldn’t win a war against Hezbollah, not even after the Party of God was weakened by more than a month of Israeli air strikes. Hezbollah was the most effective Arab fighting force in the world, and the Lebanese army was the weakest and most divided. The Israelis beat three Arab armies in six days in 1967, but even they couldn’t take down Hezbollah after almost two decades of bloody counterinsurgency. I could never understand why Israelis thought the drastically weaker Lebanese army could disarm Hezbollah if they couldn’t.
The majority of Lebanon’s people were wise enough to take the gun out of politics at the end of the civil war. Lebanon was the only Arab country that chose dialogue, elections, compromise, and debate over the rule of the boot and the rifle. Hezbollah, though, remained outside that mainstream consensus and did everything it could, with backing from the Syrian and Iranian governments, to strangle Lebanese liberalism in its cradle.
Seizing Hezbollah’s weapons by force wasn’t possible, so the March 14 coalition hoped to disarm Hezbollah through persuasion and consensus. There was never a chance they could have succeeded only a year after Lebanon achieved independence, not with the al-Assads and the Khomeinists in power in Damascus and Tehran.
Democracies don’t hold up well in seas of autocracy. It looked like Beirut’s Spring might die the same death as the Prague Spring in the late 1960s, crushed under the treads of Soviet tanks and smothered until the day the world around it had changed.
Israel and Lebanon—especially Lebanon—were both doomed to burn as long as Hezbollah existed as a foreign-sponsored militia freed from the leash of the state. The punishment for taking on Hezbollah was war. The punishment for not taking on Hezbollah was war. War, as it turned out, was inevitable even if the actual shape of it wasn’t.
No one could know what would happen in Lebanon in the aftermath of July. But I was almost certain the country would fly apart into pieces. The only question was how far the pieces would fly and how hard they’d land.
I no longer lived in Beirut, but I returned during the coolness of late November, three and a half months after the end of the hot summer war, and found that the city was little changed, at least on the surface. My old neighborhood of Hamra in West Beirut was intact. Reconstruction of civil war-era damage had continued downtown. More restaurants and pubs had opened on the east side. Beirut looked and felt more hip than it used to. The city didn’t appear to be reeling from or slouching toward war at all.
On second glance, though, all was not well. I was the only guest in my eight-story hotel, and I startled the staff when I stepped into the lobby first thing in the morning. “Why are you still here?” one bartender asked me. He didn’t know I was a reporter, and he thought it strange I hadn’t bolted for the exits as the next political crisis was gearing up to punish the country.
Most of my friends and many of my acquaintances left during the last crisis and hadn’t returned. Milk was still hard to come by in grocery stores and even some restaurants because the Israeli Air Force destroyed Lebanon’s milk factory. Party and sectarian flags were flown on the streets in abundance, a telltale sign that post-Syrian patriotism and unity were coming apart even on the March 14 side.
Just nine days earlier, on November 21, 2006, four gunmen assassinated MP Pierre Gemayel, the minister of industry and the son of former President Amin Gemayel, by ramming his car with their own and brazenly firing 9mm rounds into him through the front windshield.2
And to top it all off, Iran’s private army threatened to topple Lebanon’s government.
The March 14 coalition commanded a majority of votes in the parliament and the cabinet, and Hezbollah was disgruntled. It had its own state within a state, but not enough clout inside the legitimate state to block what it didn’t like.
The Party of God wasn’t particularly concerned the government would attempt to disarm it by force. March 14 may have had enough votes, but it did not have enough bullets. Nor did it have the will. No one in Lebanon’s political elite wanted to fire the first shot in a new civil war. Hezbollah was, however, all worked up about the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon set up to investigate and indict the assassins of Rafik Hariri.
Nasrallah had the power to more or less do what he pleased, but the veto-proof March 14 majority also had the power to do what it pleased short of defanging Hezbollah. The party could not, and did not, sit idly by while the Lebanese government and the international community geared up to punish Hariri’s assassins.
Hezbollah felt under siege—by the Israelis, by the Americans, by Arab heads of state, by the United Nations, and even by the Lebanese government. Nasrallah wanted—he needed—
more power than he had in Beirut. So he sent thousands of his supporters downtown to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, and he told them to stay there until his March 8 bloc was given veto power in Lebanon’s cabinet. If the government wouldn’t voluntarily submit to a Hezbollah veto, Nasrallah’s people would occupy and shut down the city center until the March 14 bloc surrendered.
Aside from Hezbollah, the Syrian Baath Party, and a few irrelevant crackpots on the margins, hardly anyone in the world thought anti-Syrian demonstrations and sit-ins constituted a crisis during the Beirut Spring in 2005. But nearly everyone—including the Arab League and every Arab government in the world except Syria’s—recognized, for one set of reasons or another, that it’s a problem if a terrorist army loyal to another state topples or neutralizes a legitimate government.
I had barely recovered from jet lag before Hezbollah took over the streets. I asked Carine, one of my few remaining friends who had not left the country, if she wanted to join me downtown, but she refused to be seen anywhere near the made-for-TV event. She didn’t want to artificially inflate Hezbollah’s headcount by one. So I went down there alone with my camera and notepad.
The city looked like a besieged wartime capital bracing for an invasion. The Lebanese army had deployed in full force. Soldiers stood watch on most central-area streets. Armored personnel carriers were parked in the middle of intersections. Guns with enough firepower to shoot through buildings were mounted on corners.
Hezbollah also dispatched its “discipline” men to prevent and break up fights. It was oddly comforting that Hezbollah’s pragmatic higher-ups would be protecting me and everyone else from their fans.
Rally organizers blasted earsplitting military music through gigantic speaker towers. Some of it sounded more or less like the patriotic pop I heard at March 14 rallies the previous year. Other pieces of music, however, sounded like the soundtrack to a fascist revolution or putsch.
Most people behaved well, but the city felt creepy.
Squads of rowdy militant teenagers shouted “Nasrallah! Nasrallah! Nasrallah!” and violently pumped their fists into the air.
A loutish gang of young Shia men from the dahiyeh walked along the line of separation between downtown and middle-class Christian East Beirut. They loudly booed and jeered as they looked east, all but daring the Christian residents to come out and “get some.” Beirut felt a bit like Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the time of the “troubles.”
A small angry-looking child wearing military fatigues wandered around loose on his own. He was dressed like a guerrilla fighter, but he could not have been older than four.
A twelve-year-old kid with a Hezbollah flag saw me and sneered.
Hezbollah’s own security guards with their walkie-talkies and earpieces stared at me and closely watched every move I made.
Nasrallah ordered his people to fly only Lebanese flags. A swarming mass of menacing green and yellow “resistance” banners featuring an upraised AK-47 assault rifle wouldn’t look good in front of the cameras. So Hezbollah waved Lebanon’s benign national cedar tree flag instead.
Since I had visited Hezbollahland, the sheer cynicism of flying the Lenanese flag was obvious. Lebanese flags were ubiquitous in the Christian, Sunni, and Druze parts of the country. Lebanon was one of the most beflagged countries I had ever seen. But national flags scarcely existed in the areas under control by Hezbollah. The Party of God had a state within a state, after all, with parallel institutions, schools, military, police, and even its own foreign policy. So why shouldn’t Hezbollahland have its own flag? The cedar tree banners downtown were mere props in a media battle. Hezbollah wanted to look mainstream and patriotic.
Michel Aoun’s predominantly Christian Free Patriotic Movement did fly its orange flags downtown, though. The Aounists were Hezbollah’s Christian fig leaf, the only non-Shia party of any significance that dared form an alliance with a party so implacably hostile to the Lebanese project. What good would a fig leaf be if it were invisible? So the Aounists burnished their orange. The Aounists had to be seen.
I felt better with them around. The Hezbollah demonstrators who came downtown early were the true believers, the ones who would have come down even if Hezbollah had not paid them to do so. (Each person was paid thirty dollars to attend the rally, and everyone who camped downtown during the long occupation was paid another thirty dollars for each day they stayed.) Hardly any women were down there at 1:00 p.m., and some of the men were pumped full of macho swagger like coked-up frat boys looking for fights.
The Aounists in orange may have been fools for forming an alliance with a bullying Islamist militia, but they were civilized people who had no interest in war or jihad. If anyone in the crowd were to give me any trouble, the nearest group of Aounists could provide a friendly refuge.
A handful of other microparties showed up—Marada, the Communists, and a few that were so insignificant I did not even know they existed until I ran into them. Most damning was the presence of the swastika-looking flag of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, founded by Antun Saadeh in 1932 and modeled after the Nazi and Fascist parties of Germany and Italy.
At 2:45 p.m., the March 8 crowd had become genuinely enormous.
A car roared past bristling with Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and Marada flags. Marada was a tiny pro-Syrian Maronite party in North Lebanon headed by Suleiman Franjieh. Seeing Aounists and people from Marada in the same car was bizarre. During most of Syria’s postwar occupation of Lebanon, the Aounists were at times the fiercest critics of the Syrian occupation. Much of the Christian community was enraged by Aoun’s new alliance of sorts with the erstwhile enemy, and he lost a great deal of his popularity as a result.
The Aounists had the distinction of having been present at both major rallies—at the massive anti-Syrian demonstration on March 14, 2005, and at the Hezbollah-led push against the March 14 government. I doubted they understood how strange they looked to distant observers who wondered why on earth a supposedly democratic Christian political party was aligned with Islamists.
So when I found two Aounists sitting at an outdoor table at an East Beirut café adjacent to downtown, I asked if I could join them and if they would be willing to explain themselves to a primarily American audience.
“Of course,” said one and gestured for me to sit.
“Pull up a seat,” said the other. “Can I buy you a coffee?”
The first wore an orange hat. The second wore an orange scarf. Both smoked cigars and calmly watched the crowd. A man at the next table scowled at them both.
Everyone else ate their lunch as though it were a normal day in Beirut, as though a huge mass of Hezbollah supporters chanting slogans weren’t just a few dozen feet from the tables. The dreadful feeling of a renewed civil war hung over Lebanon like a pall, but if these people weren’t nervous, how could I be? Then again, we were a self-selecting lunch crowd. Thousands of Beirutis turned on the news, braced for the worst, and stayed home.
The first man introduced himself as Jack and said he worked as a pilot for a major airline. The second said his name was Antonios. He worked as a tour guide at the Roman ruins at Baalbek.
“So why are you with Aoun and Hezbollah?” I said.
“Aoun is honest and correct,” Antonios said. “Hezbollah in America is seen as terrorists, I know. I understand. But they are a large party in Lebanon and we have to live here with them. So we have to convince them to come back, to put down their arms and join the rest of us. We cannot do it by fighting.”
At least they didn’t want to do it by fighting on that day. Another Aounist I knew explained their strategy to me the previous year: “We’ll extend our hand and ask them to join us,” he said. “But we can’t wait forever. If they refuse to disarm, we’ll crack the shit out of them.”
“On the other side,” Jack said, “is the Hariri family, which has governed since 1990 with and without help from the Syrians. They’re only interested in keeping the Ministry of
Finance so they can pay no taxes and steal from us. Hariri spent ten million dollars in the north on his election campaign. But he stole that money from the government, from us.”
“Siniora should accept this and resign,” Antonios said. “We are voting with Aoun because he is honest and not corrupt. March 14 doesn’t want a man like that in charge of finance.”
I doubted most Aounists were aware that after Khomeini took power in Iran, he smashed his liberal and leftist former allies. Aoun’s people, by cozying up to Khomeini’s militia in Lebanon, were playing with fire.
“I understand why you don’t want a war with Hezbollah,” I said. “But why does that mean you have to form an alliance with them? Do you really believe Hassan Nasrallah is your friend?”
“No,” Jack said. “He isn’t our friend. But if Hezbollah is truly a part of the government, they will give up their arms.”
“Hezbollah no longer uses arms against Lebanese,” Antonios said.
This was almost true, but not quite. I would soon meet Lebanese in the south whom Hezbollah had shot at with machine guns during the July War. I hadn’t met those people at the time, though. Jack and Antonios may have had a hard time accepting it even if I had told them about it.
“Hariri accepted Hezbollah’s arms back in 1990,” Jack said, which was true.
The situation was different then. South Lebanon was still under Israeli occupation.
Hardly anyone who wasn’t a Shia supported Hezbollah keeping its weapons after Ehud Barak ordered the IDF out of South Lebanon. Nasrallah’s guns warped Lebanon’s delicate power-sharing arrangement. The Shia had their own foreign-backed army while no one else did. Not even Hezbollah’s allies in the March 8 bloc, like these Aounists, thought that was acceptable.
The Aounists had legitimate grievances against the March 14 government, but they paid little attention to the broad picture.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 16
