The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel

by Michael Totten

  “So,” Noah said. “What do you guys think of Iran?”

  That was the real question, wasn’t it?

  “Syria and Iran are helping us,” Jad said. “We don’t want them to rule in Lebanon. I like drinking and chasing girls and having a good time. We don’t want to be like Iran. If Hezbollah tried to make us like Iran, that would be a big problem for us.”

  They were secular, yet they supported a militia that was loyal to an Islamist police state. Lebanon’s Shias had long been politically and economically marginalized by the Sunnis and Christians, so a Shia militia with power and guns seemed like the best thing going. If the leaders of their community had different politics and different priorities, these guys would have likely gone along with that, too. They didn’t actually buy what Hezbollah was saying. They would camp out downtown to oust the Sunni prime minister, but not for Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqih.

  Two men heard us speaking in English and—once again, and for no other apparent reason—felt compelled to come over and harass me and Noah.

  “Where are you from!” the first man yelled.

  “United States,” I said and looked away from him, uninterested. He gritted his teeth, leaned forward, and jutted his face next to mine.

  “Do you like Bush?” he demanded.

  “No,” I said calmly. It didn’t matter what I thought of the American president. This was the only acceptable answer if I didn’t want trouble.

  “Do you like Olmert?” he said, referring to the Israeli prime minister in a particularly nasty tone of voice.

  “No,” I said. “No.” There was a chance that answering “yes” to that question might have been dangerous, but I answered him honestly. Ehud Olmert was arguably the worst prime minister in Israel’s history. Huge numbers of Israelis agreed with that assessment, and even many Lebanese I spoke to said they wished Ariel Sharon—who was seriously hated in Lebanon—was prime minister instead of Olmert in 2006.

  The guy was obviously spoiling for a fight. Even if I had been Olmert’s biggest fanboy, I would have kept my mouth shut at that moment. He was satisfied, though, when I said I didn’t like Olmert. So he and his buddy walked off.

  An older fat man in a red shirt waddled over. He had the wide eyes of an agitated extremist.

  “Gulf Arabs give bombs to Israel to kill my people!” he roared.

  This, of course, was nonsense on stilts. Israel didn’t receive weapons from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or any other Arab country. Don’t write off what he said as just another Middle Eastern conspiracy theory, though. An important geopolitical shift had occurred, and he knew it.

  Sunni Arab governments—notably those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia—implicitly took Israel’s side during the opening days of the July War. And every Arab government in the world except Syria’s supported Lebanon’s government against Hezbollah. Hezbollah, as a Shia militia fronting the Persians, had no more support in the halls of Sunni Arab power than it had among the Sunnis of Lebanon.

  Nasrallah had a new talking point that seemed to be filtering down. He was calling Prime Minister Siniora a tool of the “Zionist Entity.” Siniora was continuing the July War on Israel’s behalf, Nasrallah said, because he was pushing, albeit weakly, for Hezbollah’s disarmament.

  Al Qaeda, meanwhile, called Hezbollah a Zionist tool because Nasrallah wouldn’t allow Sunni terrorists to use South Lebanon as a launching pad for attacks against Israel.

  Six Arab governments—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, and Tunisia—threatened to pursue nuclear weapons programs of their own to counter Iran’s. None of these Arab countries sought nuclear weapons to balance out Israel’s. They feared and loathed the Shias of Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran much more than they worried about Zionists, regardless of what they said.

  Some analysts were even beginning to wonder if the strife between Sunnis and Shias, whose epicenter at the time was in Baghdad, might supplant the Arab-Israeli war as the region’s most defining conflict at some point in the future. At the time, though, the Arab-Israeli conflict was used by both sides of the inter-Islamic divide to score propaganda points against the other.

  I was a bit embarrassed on Lebanon’s behalf after showing Noah downtown. His first impression of the country was radically different from mine.

  Hezbollah had all but conquered downtown. From Noah’s point of view, Nasrallah must have looked like the strong horse. The Party of God certainly looked that way from the Israeli side of the border. Most Israelis were convinced they had either lost what they called the Second Lebanon War or that the conclusion was at best a draw. Almost everyone in the world—or in the Middle East, anyway—seemed to believe that.

  Noah and I were about to see something, though, that proved everybody was wrong.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  so this is our victory

  How many times can we be burnt and resurrected?

  —LEBANESE POLITICAL JOURNAL

  I called up Leena, the Shia woman who showed me around South Lebanon the previous year, and asked if she could meet me for coffee to discuss a return trip to the border. She had taken a number of journalists down there during and after the war, and she knew the area better than almost anyone. Noah and I both wanted to survey the destruction and see what Nasrallah’s “divine victory” looked like.

  So Leena and I met at a coffee bar in West Beirut’s Hamra district just up the street from my old apartment.

  “I’m too busy to take you there now,” she said. “But you can go by yourself.”

  Most Beirutis I knew thought it would be a bad idea if Noah and I drove to South Lebanon at that time without at least one local person accompanying us. Unlike Leena, though, none had been down there since the July War. Perhaps they were a bit paranoid, but I didn’t want to dismiss what they said out of hand.

  “If we get stopped by Hezbollah,” I said, “and they call headquarters, we might get in trouble. I’m blacklisted, and they have a file on me in their computer.”

  “What computer?” Leena said.

  I just looked at her for a second, unsure what she meant. Then it hit me.

  “Of course,” I said and laughed.

  The Israeli Air Force destroyed Hezbollah’s media relations department, including its paper and electronic files, with building-buster bombs in July. What was left of the office was smashed up at the bottom of a crater in the dahiyeh, most likely filled with water and garbage by now.

  “I wonder what happened to Hussein Naboulsi,” I said, referring to my old nemesis who ran the department. He wasn’t my favorite person, but I hoped he hadn’t been killed. A small part of me still wanted to talk some sense and moderation into him, although I knew the idea was silly.

  “He quit,” Leena said.

  “He quit the department?” I said.

  “He quit Hezbollah,” she said.

  I just about spilled my coffee.

  The previous year, I had asked Leena if she could set up an interview with someone who had quit Hezbollah. I did not care with whom. I just wanted to talk to somebody who used to be an actual member of Hezbollah and no longer was.

  She found a guy in the south who said he would tell me anything as long as I wouldn’t publish his name. Leena and I set up an appointment with him for lunch in Sidon, a Sunni city where nobody knew him.

  He thought better of it after a while. As far as he and Leena knew, only four or five card-carrying members had ever quit the party. If he talked to me even anonymously, Hezbollah could figure out who he was and make him pay for it.

  Hussein Naboulsi, then, had joined a very small club.

  “I want to talk to him,” I said. Suddenly, my urge to buy him a beer (or, more realistically, coffee) didn’t seem quite so ridiculous.

  “He won’t talk to the media,” she said. “He’d rather tell his story himself. He’s writing a book.”

  So that was it, then. Leena couldn’t take Noah and me to the south, and Hussein would not talk to anyone, let alone me.
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br />   Noah and I found someone else to escort us down there—Said and Henry, two men who grew up in the area and came highly recommended as guides. Leena was a Shia, but these guys were Maronites. And they weren’t politically neutral like she was.

  They picked us up at our hotel first thing in the morning.

  Said (pronounced Sah-EED) rode up to the front door on his motorcycle. Henry arrived in his car.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Said said as he shook our hands. “Shall we go in your car?”

  “If you prefer,” I said.

  “Let me drive,” Said said. “It is better. We know the best roads to take.”

  Noah donned his sunglasses, pulled on a light red and black jacket, and climbed into the back next to Henry. I sat in the passenger seat next to Said.

  These guys were good. Not only did they know their way around the back roads of the south but they were also battle-hardened veterans of Lebanon’s civil war.

  They weren’t Rambo types. They placed their guns in the glove box. I seriously doubted we would need their services as trained killers or bodyguards. We couldn’t shoot our way out of the south in a worst-case scenario anyway. Still, I felt better with them along after hearing from so many people that it might be a bad idea to visit the south while Hezbollah was ramping up its push against Lebanon’s government.

  Normally, you can drive from Beirut to the Israeli border fence in just over two hours. Lebanon, though, wasn’t normal in late 2006, especially not in the south. In July and August the Israeli Air Force bombed most, if not all, of the bridges on the coastal highway. Reconstruction moved along quickly enough, but snarled traffic had to be rerouted around the construction sites, at times onto side roads too narrow and small to handle the overflow.

  Said and Henry had day jobs that had nothing to do with politics, but they also worked part time for a man named Toni Nissi. He labored tirelessly lobbying the Lebanese government and the international community to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 that mandated Hezbollah’s disarmament. Hezbollah hysterically dubbed Nissi’s office “the Beirut branch of the Mossad.”

  After only a few minutes of driving, we crossed Beirut’s city limits. To our right was the Mediterranean. To our left was Hezbollah’s dahiyeh.

  “There is Nasrallah now,” Henry said from the back seat as we drove past a billboard proclaiming Hezbollah’s “divine victory” over Israel a few months before. Every foreign visitor to Lebanon saw billboards like these along the airport road before they reached downtown Beirut. Shortly before the war, I saw one banner draped above the highway—placed there by Hezbollah, of course—that said All Our Catastrophes Come from America.

  Apropos of nothing, Said asked Noah if he was Jewish.

  Noah didn’t hesitate. “I am,” he said.

  Most Lebanese people weren’t hostile to Jewish visitors. Some told me they were less anti-Semitic as a whole than Europeans. On some days, I even believed them. I had several Jewish friends who lived there and never once had a single problem with anyone. Noah was the type of person who likely would have answered “yes” to that question regardless. He was no shrinking violet and was angered, rather than intimidated or silenced, by bigots.

  Neither Henry nor Said seemed remotely bothered by Noah’s Jewishness. I would have been surprised if they were.

  “You are welcome, my friend,” Said said.

  Hezbollah’s people, though, were violently anti-Semitic and would surely suspect Noah was Jewish if they stopped us, looked at his passport, and read his first name. There was even a chance they might suspect he was Israeli. The fact that he carried an American passport didn’t prove that he wasn’t. Lots of Israelis had dual citizenship, and Israeli journalists visited Lebanon once in a while on second passports. Noah lived in Israel, and he worked at an Israeli think tank and magazine. If Hezbollah men stopped and detained us for some reason, as they had detained me and my photographer colleague Dan the previous year, they could have learned all this and more about Noah just by punching his name into Google. I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about what Hezbollah might do to him, or even to both of us, if they thought he was an Israeli spy.

  “What do you think about Israel’s invasion in July?” I asked Said and Henry.

  “Of course, what Israel did wasn’t good,” Said said. “They only care about themselves. Hezbollah doesn’t pay taxes, so the rest of us have to pay for all the infrastructure the Israelis destroyed.”

  “What do you think about Israel in general?” I said. “Aside from the war in July?”

  “I have nothing against Israel,” Henry said. “They are good people and they do good for themselves. We need to make peace with everyone. They are open-minded people, but we have had no way to communicate with them since the Syrians came.”

  “I would love to visit the Holy Land,” Said said. “My mother went there when the border was open before 2000. It is a good place. If you want to make peace with people, you can make peace, especially with the Israelis. They just want to live in their country, so it is no problem.”

  “Is the U.N. doing much in the south?” Noah asked from the back seat.

  “The multinational forces don’t have the authority to stop Hezbollah unless they are smuggling weapons out in the open,” Said said. “The Lebanese army is not taking sides because of the volatile political situation and the violent clashes taking place in Beirut.”

  United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701,1 passed on August 11, 2006, mandated Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah. UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, even sent additional troops to South Lebanon to assist the Lebanese army and government. Not much changed, though, except for one thing: The government regained at least nominal sovereignty over the border region. The army had a serious presence there for the first time in decades, and Hezbollah was forced to keep a low profile.

  UNIFIL was widely assumed to be doing little aside from standing around while Hezbollah reconstituted its weapon stocks for the next round of war. Even though Hezbollah was supposed to be disarmed, Israeli intelligence officials later believed Hezbollah had more than twice as many rockets as before the 2006 war began.

  Even so, the Lebanese army did confiscate a small number of Hezbollah’s rockets smuggled across the Syrian border. Nasrallah demanded the return of those weapons from the army even though Hezbollah’s very existence as an autonomous militia was against Lebanese and international law.

  Said was right, though, that the army didn’t have the authority to disarm Hezbollah. Hezbollah was better armed, better trained, and overall more powerful than the army, which suffered fifteen years of deliberate neglect and degradation under Syrian overlordship. Many of the army’s top officers were installed by the Syrians, and they were still loyal to the regime in Damascus. More important were fears that the army would break apart along sectarian lines if orders to disarm Hezbollah were given. Parts of the army split off into sectarian militias during the civil war, after all, and could easily do so again. Roughly a third of the soldiers were Shia conscripts. Many were more loyal to Hezbollah than to the legal authorities.

  “The Lebanese army is partly controlled by Syria, not like before 1975,” Henry said. “Before 1975, the Lebanese army was pro-Western and neutral toward Israel.”

  As we left the city and the suburbs behind, apartment towers on the side of the road gave way to soft beaches and the floppy leaves of banana trees. The weather was still warm and sunny even late in the year. Lebanon, as always, looked greener than I remembered it when I was away.

  “How badly was the south hit in July and August?” I asked.

  Said laughed and shook his head. “You will see, my friend. You will see.”

  We passed through the conservative Sunni coastal city of Sidon, where Rafik Hariri was born, and continued down along the shore of the Mediterranean toward the southern city of Tyre.

  “What exactly, for the record
, do you guys do in your organization?” I said.

  “We advise the international community on how to implement U.N. Resolution 1559,” Said said. “And we try to convince Lebanon to be less conservative, more open and liberal and democratic. We try to convince the international community that most of us are not fanatics, to make Lebanon a good example for everyone. We want to live our lives as free people like you do in the U.S. and Europe. We have a right.”

  “The Hezbollah camp downtown is ugly,” Henry said. “This is not us. But it shows the world our differences. Most people think we live in a desert and ride camels and are all Muslims.”

  “Hezbollah is trying to distract the world from Iran’s nuclear bomb,” Said said, “by making trouble in Lebanon, killings, dissolving the government, and so on. Can you imagine what Iran would do if they got the nuclear bomb? My God. Even right now they do what they want and don’t listen to anyone.”

  A young man stood in the middle of an intersection and waved glossy pamphlets at cars. Said pulled up alongside him.

  “What is he handing out?” Noah said and rolled down his window.

  “Hezbollah propaganda,” Henry said.

  Said stepped on the accelerator as Noah tried to grab one of the pamphlets.

  “I want one of those,” Noah said. But the Hezbollah man kept the pamphlets tightly clutched in his fingers.

  “He is selling them,” Said said, “not giving them away.”

  “Oops,” Noah said. “I wasn’t trying to steal one.”

  “He doesn’t care about money or propaganda,” Said said. “He is watching. This is the beginning of their territory. He reports on who is coming and what they are doing.”

  “Whenever you see something blown up from here,” Henry said, “it is because it was owned by Hezbollah people or because Hezbollah had something to do with it.”

  As we entered a small Shia town on the coast, a car-sized poster of a grinning Hassan Nasrallah on one side of the road was connected by a yellow banner over the top of the road to an equally large poster showing Amal party leader and Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri on the other side. It looked and felt like we had passed through an actual gate into Shia territory.