The teenagers who had volunteered as my guides, translators, and advocates led me to the much larger section of the camp where everyone else lived and slept in white tents.
“Which party are you with?” I asked them.
“Hezbollaaaaaaaah,” said the lead kid and grinned. “Here, here, take a picture of this car!”
I took a picture of a car with a Nasrallah poster taped to the back window.
The kids talked and moved fast with the boundless energy of young people on an adventure.
“That’s Hassan Nasrallah,” he said and pointed at the poster in the car window I had just photographed. “Do you know Hassan Nasrallah? He is a big hero.”
“Why is he a hero?” I said.
“He resists the Israelis!”
“Are all of you guys with Hezbollah?” I said.
“Yes!” one of them said. “We are all with Hassan Nasrallah!” They seemed to expect me to agree with them that Hassan Nasrallah was a big hero, even though they knew I was American. At least they didn’t seem to think I’d mind that they supported Hassan Nasrallah. I doubted they felt any hostility toward me personally.
“So, what is it you hope to accomplish downtown?” I said.
“We want Siniora to leave,” one of them said.
“We want to fuck Siniora,” said another.
“I know,” I said. “Why do you want to get rid of him, though? What do you want from the government that you can’t get with Siniora?”
“War!” said one of the kids.
“We want war!” said another.
A third kid slapped the second on the side of his head. The slapped kid laughed and pushed his hand in his friend’s face.
I couldn’t tell if this playful spat broke out because they didn’t agree with each other about wanting more war or because they weren’t supposed to admit it in front of a foreign reporter. Some Hezbollah supporters truly didn’t want more war with Israel. Some sincerely believed Israel would attack again no matter what, that Hezbollah was Lebanon’s only defense.
“We want to unite Lebanon and have a democracy,” said the kid who seemed to be their leader. He was the most mature and collected, and the others deferred to him with their body language.
“You have a democracy, though,” I said. “You didn’t win as many seats in the parliament as you would like, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a democracy. You can’t always get what you want in a democracy.”
“The American government rules Siniora,” said another. “They interfere in my business.”
“In what ways?” I said.
“America helps Israel against Lebanon and sells them weapons.”
None of these kids wanted to give me their names. I took notes of our conversation, but I can’t tell you who exactly said what.
“What about Syria?” I said. “America helps Lebanon against Syria.”
“Bush killed all those politicians because he doesn’t want peace in Lebanon.”
“Why wouldn’t Bush want peace in Lebanon?” I said.
“I don’t know!”
“Americans don’t want war in Lebanon,” I said. “It would not serve our interests or yours. Do you think Americans want chaos in Lebanon just for the heck of it?”
“We don’t hate the American people, only the government.”
“Okay,” I said. “So why then does Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly say ‘Death to America’?” I asked these questions in the most friendly and casual tone of voice I could muster.
“He only means death to the American government.”
“Why doesn’t he make that clear then?” I said.
“He does!”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “He says ‘Death to America.’ What would you think if George W. Bush gave speeches where he screamed ‘Death to Lebanon’? Come on, guys. Be honest with me. I want to know what you really think.”
“I want to go to America,” the leader kid said. “I love America and I want to live in America. America is rich and free. I want to be rich and free, too.”
I think he was sincere. His politics were a product of Hezbollah’s schools, his community, and his peer group. But politics in the Middle East were less personal than in the West, in part because Middle Easterners were accustomed to having their politics dictated to them from above. Politicians were usually above accountability and beyond control of the people. These kids assumed that’s how it was in the Western countries, as well.
Street-level anti-Americanism was sometimes more moderate, complicated, and contradictory than it appeared from far away. There often was a vast gulf separating those in the Arab world who incited anti-Americanism and those who more passively went along with it. The difference in temperament between Hezbollah’s grim security guards and the kids who showed me around was just one example.
“So,” I said. “Who do you think won the war in July? Israel or Hezbollah?”
“Nasrallah!”
“We beat Israel!”
“Does that mean you want to do it again?” I said.
“Yes!” half of them said.
“No!” the other half said simultaneously.
One of the kids who said “no” slapped one of the kids who said “yes.” Again, I couldn’t tell if that was because they didn’t agree with each other or because they weren’t supposed to sound like warmongers in front of Americans.
Most Lebanese gave me their honest opinions. Even those with completely crazy opinions told me straight up what they thought without showing even a hint of embarrassment. Sometimes, though, I wasn’t convinced people were straight with me. This was one of those times.
The gang took me around the tent city and introduced me to their friends. Some were a bit wary. I could read it on their faces. Who’s this American, and why am I meeting him? Most, though, were perfectly friendly. They shook my hand, smiled, and said “Welcome.”
For some now-forgotten reason, I thought one of the people I was introduced to was Druze, and I was surprised. Only a minuscule handful of Druze supported Hezbollah. The overwhelming majority were with Walid Jumblatt and the March 14 government. So I was happy to meet one of the tiny fraction who were outside the community’s mainstream.
“You’re Druze?” I said to him.
He shook his head in confusion, clearly because he didn’t understand English. I switched to Arabic.
“Inta Durzi?” I said. Are you Druze?
A look of horror and disgust washed over his face.
“La,” he said. No. “Ana Shia.” I am Shia.
I didn’t mean to insult him, but apparently I did. So much of what passed for politics in Lebanon was really just sectarianism.
“Jumblatt is a handicap,” the leader said.
“Can I take a picture of you guys?” I said.
Most said no. So many people in Lebanon were paranoid about somebody or other. Most feared the Syrians. Hezbollah feared the Americans and the Israelis. These kids might have even feared their own government.
Two did let me take their picture, however.
I said my good-byes, genuinely thanked them for their time and hospitality, and walked toward downtown Beirut’s restaurants and shops.
Every business was closed, even those away from the camp. The military had blockaded all streets leading to the center of town with checkpoints and coils of razor wire. The government didn’t want Hezbollah to seize the portion of Beirut rebuilt and refurbished by Hariri’s people.
I approached a Lebanese army soldier standing watch.
“Is it okay if I take a picture?” I said.
He put his hand on his heart. “No, please, not today,” he said. “I am sorry.”
“No problem,” I said. “Thank you, though.”
He must have had no idea why I thanked him. I did so because I appreciated that he spoke to me like a normal human being and like a typical Lebanese—friendly, welcoming, and polite. The contrast between average Lebanese people—and I’m including Hezbollah’s
casual supporters in that group when I say this—and Hezbollah’s official party members and elite was extraordinary.
Hezbollah’s top men were temperamentally identical to inflexible communist dogmatists. If they ever made themselves rulers of Lebanon—and it would surely mean war if they tried—the country would no longer be recognizable.
CHAPTER TEN
from jerusalem to beirut
There is a Lebanon that exists in the distance, too far away to see from Israel’s northern border.
—NOAH POLLAK
“Before departing for Lebanon,” Noah Pollak wrote in Azure magazine,1 “the traveler who has been in Israel should purge himself of any evidence of having stepped foot in the Jewish state, from bus tickets and loose change to the notepad with Hebrew writing on the spine. The voyage from Jerusalem to Beirut could take, under different circumstances, four hours by car or forty-five minutes by air—the two cities are about 150 miles apart—but today it involves a daylong travail of buses, taxies, aircraft, the duplicitous use of two passports, and the making of false statements to Lebanese customs officials.”
Noah did all these things because he joined me in Beirut from Jerusalem to cover Hezbollah’s putsch and to survey the destruction in the south of the country. Anyone who had ever set foot in Israel, even as a tourist, was barred from entering Lebanon. The government wasn’t particularly strict about enforcing the ban, but an Israeli stamp in your passport would likely get you deported and possibly even arrested.
This was Noah’s first trip to Lebanon. I was happy to show him around and introduce him to the “party” that fired missiles in our direction when we covered the July War together from the Israeli side of the border.
His plane landed at two o’clock in the morning, and his taxi driver took him alongside the edge of Hezbollah’s downtown encampment. Even in the middle of the night, demonstrators were out the streets screaming slogans.
“What are they saying?” Noah said.
The driver rolled down his window and told the demonstrators an American was in the car and wanted to know what they were saying. One of the men in the street came up to the taxi.
“We will cut Siniora,” he said, referring to the prime minister. “We will cut him!”
The next day, I took Noah downtown so we could sit and talk with the malcontents. First, though, we had to stop by a Hezbollah propaganda stand so I could buy a “resistance” scarf and go incognito into the tent city.
Don’t laugh. I knew what I was doing, and it worked. All the hostile bullshit I had to put up with from Hezbollah’s security people vanished entirely as soon as I donned one of their scarves. The men with their sunglasses and earpieces stopped staring at me, stopped tracking my movements, and stopped twitching when I took pictures. They were strikingly obtuse individuals if wearing a scarf was all it took to blend in with the crowd.
Flags, T-shirts, and rearview-mirror ornaments were also for sale. Noah bought the biggest Hezbollah flag in stock. I had to carry it out of the country for him because he didn’t want airport security to find that in his luggage when he flew back to Israel from Jordan.
A Lebanese woman smirked and asked us where we were from.
“United States,” I said.
“And . . .” she said. “You like Hezbollah?” She tried hard not to laugh at us.
“Not really,” I said under my breath so the sales guy couldn’t hear. “We just want souvenirs because we think it’s funny.”
She smiled and knowingly nodded.
I had bought a Hezbollah T-shirt in Baalbek the year before—because it was ironic, not because I ever intended to wear it. A Lebanese army soldier watched me hand the vendor ten dollars, and he shook his head sadly in grave disappointment. He was twenty years older than me, and I doubted he would understand Generation X humor even if I explained it. Surely he thought I was a duped useful idiot. I have a whole collection of Hezbollah souvenirs in my office—the T-shirt, a flag, a key chain, even a bracelet. Some people collect refrigerator magnets and stamps. I collect tourist gimcrack from terrorist organizations.
Noah and I paid for our items. I put the scarf around my neck and felt as ridiculous as I must have looked.
Hezbollah’s security men left me alone, though, so it was worth it. (Needless to say, I would not have dared to wear that scarf in any other part of Beirut.) Noah did not need a scarf. He had an olive skin tone and an ethnically ambiguous appearance that allowed him to pass as Lebanese, or as someone from anywhere else around the Mediterranean. He wasn’t a magnet for the paranoid and suspicious like I was.
He and I walked toward the tent city and passed an angry looking group of young women on their way out. One narrowed her eyes at me.
“Where are you from?” she said. She looked me in the eye, looked at my Hezbollah scarf, looked me in the eye again, and looked back and my Hezbollah scarf. Then she yelled at me. “Are you from the States?!”
“Yes,” I said. “We’re from the States.”
For a second I thought she was yelling at me because she did not like Americans. We were at the Hezbollah encampment, after all. But that wasn’t it. She yelled at me because she thought I was a stupid American who supported Hezbollah.
Not everyone who ventured downtown that day supported the “resistance.” Some were March 14 supporters who went down there as horrified onlookers.
One of the young woman’s friends took her by the shoulders and turned her away from Noah and me. As they began walking away, she nodded her head and flexed her hands as though she were trying to restrain herself and calm down.
A few Westerners in Lebanon actually did support Hezbollah. They were the same kinds of alienated intellectuals who supported the Soviet Union during the Cold War, before communism was universally understood to differ from fascism in only the details. Other Western expats in Lebanon were what you might call “soft on Hezbollah,” or defensive on Hezbollah’s behalf, even though they weren’t outright supporters. I wasn’t at all annoyed that this young woman had yelled at me. She thought I was one of those people. It was a reasonable, if wrong, assumption for her to make since I was wearing the scarf.
Noah and I walked the grounds without getting any attitude or even attention from Hezbollah security. We did, however, get some unwanted attention from some of Hezbollah’s fans.
Next to the closed-off area where most of the restaurants were located was a small Roman Empire ruin site. It was discovered for the first time in the 1990s when civil war-era rubble was cleared out of the way.
Noah and I leaned up against the railing next to two young Shia women wearing headscarves. Noah snapped a picture. We talked among ourselves—about what I don’t remember. I smiled at the two women.
Then an older man walked up to us. He muttered something under his breath in Arabic and plowed his shoulder into Noah’s, knocking him sideways. The man could not possibly have known our political views. He was just mad because he heard us speaking English. My Hezbollah scarf didn’t ward everyone off. It only seemed to work with the oblivious security people.
“Hi,” Noah said to him as though nothing had happened. “What’s up?”
I braced myself for anything. Our rude new “friend” said something else unintelligible and stalked off.
Beirut was an open and cosmopolitan city when Hezbollah wasn’t occupying the center of it. An encounter like that between a Beiruti and a guest from abroad was all but unthinkable under normal circumstances.
Aside from this character and a few other hostile individuals, Hezbollah’s campout was more mellow than it was the first time I saw it. The passion had cooled. Fewer people screamed slogans. Most appeared to have succumbed to some kind of torpor. It isn’t easy to be hopped up on protest adrenaline for days in a row. Eventually you have to sit down, eat a sandwich, and smoke a narghile.
The environment downtown was very different from what most Westerners would likely expect from an assault on a capital mounted by an Iranian proxy militia demanding
more government power. Prominent figures gave public speeches to roaring applause, not to bullets shot into the sky. College students held teach-ins. Patriotic and Arabic pop music blared through speaker towers. Snack stands were set up all over the place.
“It’s like a Phish concert down here,” Noah said. “Only it’s a Phish concert for terrorists.” The only things missing were drum circles and pot. These guys brilliantly copied leftist American political theater. “They’ll get a lot more international support this way than if they came down here wearing ski masks and waving rifles around.”
We walked the maze of tents and snapped pictures, looking for someone who seemed approachable enough to be interviewed. Few people paid us any mind, and we sat on a curb to drink a soda and smoke cigarettes.
Three young men walked up to us.
“Hello,” said the first. He introduced himself as Jad. “Where are you from?”
“We’re from the U.S.,” Noah said.
“Welcome to Lebanon,” he said. “What is your impression?” Lebanese often asked me this question.
“You mean, what do we think of the political situation?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Eh,” I said. “We’re Americans. We’re not the biggest fans of Hezbollah.” The contrast between what I said and what I was wearing—the Hezbollah scarf—did not seem to register.
“Where are you from?” Noah said.
“From Beirut,” said another of the young men.
“Do you mean the dahiyeh?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “From the dahiyeh. Have you been there?”
“I have; he hasn’t,” I said and gestured to Noah. “Cigarette?”
“Please,” Jad said.
I gave Jad a cigarette.
“This is your first trip to Lebanon?” he said to Noah.
“Yep,” Noah said and sipped from his drink. “It’s great.”
The five of us discussed Lebanese and international politics. Our conversation was civil and pleasant even though we disagreed about whether Hezbollah was fighting the good fight.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 18
