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

by Michael Totten

  I still saw hardly any Lebanese flags in the south. Hezbollah’s waving of the national flag at its made-for-TV event downtown a few days earlier looked even more cynical from the south, where the cedar tree emblem was so rarely flown it may as well have been banned.

  Another striking difference between the Shia regions of Lebanon and the rest was which kind of “martyrs” were famous.

  Hezbollah and Amal venerated “resistance” fighters killed in battles with Israel and still hung their portraits from the sides of electrical poles. Many had been killed recently during the war in July. Almost all were healthy young men. Most had neatly trimmed beards. Some had what looked like halos of light behind their heads.

  While March 14 coalition leaders often denounced Israel in their speeches, it wasn’t hard to figure out that they saw Syria as Lebanon’s principal enemy. In the Sunni, Christian, and Druze parts of the country, portraits of Lebanese journalists and members of parliament assassinated by Syrians were everywhere. Anti-Israel sentiment existed in those places, but anti-Israel posters and billboards did not.

  In parts of the country not under the jurisdiction of Hezbollah or Amal, giant billboards saying I Love Life in Arabic, English, and French proliferated. The campaign was a jab at one of Nasrallah’s famous sayings:2 “We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win because they love life and we love death.”

  In Beirut I saw little round stickers that said No War stuck in some of the shop windows. A friend of mine photographed a Muslim woman wearing a conservative headscarf at a rally downtown and holding up a placard that said War No More. In the suburbs north of Beirut, an enormous mural on the side of a commercial building urged citizens to Wage Peace.

  The year before, a series of billboards all over Beirut said Say No to Anger, Say No to War, and Say No to Terrorism. Hezbollah would never have allowed anything of the sort to be erected in their parts of Lebanon, even though I knew lots of Shias who agreed with those sentiments. Almost all of Hezbollah’s roadside propaganda was about terrorism, “resistance,” and war.

  The majority of the people in the south were Shias, but there were some Christian, Sunni, and Druze villages, too.

  “The Christians down here are cornered,” Henry said. He could have mentioned that the Sunni and Druze were, as well. “They have no freedom of movement. They only have freedom of speech inside their own villages. Outside their villages, they can’t speak or talk to the press unless they leave the south.”

  “They have been a long time under Hezbollah control,” Said said. “It’s the same scenario as 1975, only with different players.”

  We drove past a concrete T-wall along the side of the road that had been painted top to bottom with the Hezbollah flag. The contrast between Hezbollah’s militant logo, with its upraised AK-47 assault rifle, and the aesthetically pleasing rolling green hills in the background was jarring. It was impossible to forget who ruled the roost in the south.

  “Nasrallah will go all the way now unless Siniora and Saad Hariri surrender,” Said said. “Only if they surrender will Nasrallah spare them from the final solution.”

  This struck me as a bit on the paranoid side. Hezbollah could almost certainly win a defensive war against fellow Lebanese, but no one was strong enough to conquer and rule the whole country. “Everyone is against everyone else,” President Amin Gemayel famously said3 during the civil war, “and it all keeps going around and around in circles without anyone ever winning or anything being accomplished.”

  The totalitarian Velayat-e Faqih doctrine of the Iranian Revolution had quite a few takers in South Lebanon, even so. Portraits of Iran’s dead grim-faced tyrant Ayatollah Khomeini and the current “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamenei were as ubiquitous as ever.

  As we drove through a small village, an imam screamed slogans in angry Arabic from the muezzin’s speaker atop a mosque minaret. It was a sharp contrast to what I was accustomed to hearing from the mosques in Beirut. In the capital, the muezzin’s call to prayer was haunting and beautiful. It sounded spiritual, as though the muezzin himself were no longer tethered to this world. I could make out only some of the words from this southern mosque, but what the loudspeakers broadcast was clearly political and not religious.

  “What exactly is he saying?” I asked.

  “It is about Palestine,” Said said. He listened. “He is saying, ‘If we win this fight against the Siniora conspiracy, we will only have Palestine to liberate. We won’t have Israel as an obstacle.’”

  “They won’t have Israel as an obstacle?” Noah said in a bemused tone of voice.

  Just then we drove past a Hezbollah billboard atop a small local grocery store that had been punctured with holes by shrapnel from an Israeli air strike. One of the holes passed straight through the center of an image of Nasrallah’s turban.

  A convoy of Lebanese army trucks passed us on their way north.

  “One thing we are worried about,” Said said, “is the weakening of the south because the army has to go north. This is part of the plan.”

  We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills dotted with villages and terraced for agriculture that make up the region just north of Israel’s border. Few trees grew there. Many places were too rocky for farming, but the region still looked a bit like a tranquil Arcadia.

  “It’s beautiful here,” Noah said. “This would be a great place for an artist’s retreat if it weren’t so dangerous.”

  “Beautiful country, fanatic people,” Said said.

  Most of the villages and towns were more or less intact, at least so far. We only occasionally drove past damaged houses or places where buildings had recently stood. But the farther south we drove, the more destruction we saw.

  Dour-looking men stood on street corners and in the middle of intersections and carefully watched all the cars and people who entered the area. A few more on mopeds paid me a considerable amount of extra attention. I had seen similar young men doing the same thing in the Bekaa Valley just south of Baalbek. I didn’t feel comfortable taking pictures with them around.

  “You see the watchers?” Said said.

  “They couldn’t be any more obvious,” I said. “Can we get out and talk to people around here?”

  “I do not recommend it,” Said said. “They cannot talk freely. These watchers will come up to us if we get out of the car, and they will make sure anyone who talks to us only tells us what they are supposed to say.”

  Soon we reached Bint Jbail, Hezbollah’s de facto capital in South Lebanon. The outskirts were mostly undamaged, but the city center had been almost completely demolished by air strikes and artillery.

  Said parked in the center of what used to be downtown and now looked like a rubble quarry. The four of us got out of the car. Noah and I walked around, dizzied by the extent of the 360-degree devastation.

  We were surrounded on all sides by rocks, cinder-block rubble, glass, dirt, and bent rebar. I took a photograph of a dust-covered shoe that I hoped wasn’t on somebody’s foot when whatever happened to it had happened. The few walls left standing were pocked with shrapnel holes. Pieces of paper and plastic trash were scattered around. A few buildings around the rim of oblivion were only half destroyed, as if the fronts had been violently ripped away and tossed into the rubble pit. What was left of a roof draped precipitously over the sheared-off edge of one building like a curtain of concrete.

  Strangely, a medium-sized tree grew amid this desolation. Somebody must have recently planted it.

  “The devastation was stunning,” Noah later wrote in Azure.4 “The outer ring of the city had been less thoroughly bombed, but in the center there were only a handful of structures that even remained standing, much less intact. It had become a moonscape of pulverized rock. . . . The piles of rubble and crumbling Party of God buildings were in large part monuments to Israel’s refusal to let Hezbollah’s July provoca
tion go unanswered. I understood that every day since the war, and for many months to come, Hezbollah’s prideful warriors would be surrounded by this destruction, would hear the rubble crunching under their feet as they walked, would taste the dust that filled their mouths as they breathed. I wished that every Israeli could experience the feeling that had come over me; from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it looked as if the war had ended ambiguously. Not in Bint Jbail.”

  “So this is our victory,” Said said. “This is how Hezbollah wins. Israel destroys our country while they sleep safely and soundly in theirs.”

  Nasrallah’s declaration of “divine victory” wasn’t only belied by the physical destruction wrought on South Lebanon. One hundred sixty-three Israelis were killed in the war,5 compared with as many as 1,191 Lebanese.6 Hezbollah claimed it lost 250 fighters; Lebanese and United Nations officials said the number is closer to 500, while the Israel Defense Forces insisted it killed 600.

  Three severe-looking men walked up to Said and Henry.

  “Who are they, who are you, and what are you doing?” said the man in charge.

  “They are international reporters,” Henry said. He did not say, and should not have said, that we were American reporters. “They are here to document Israel’s destruction of our country.”

  The men seemed satisfied with his answer and left us alone. I was glad Henry and Said were there with us. They were the ones asked to do the explaining rather than Noah and me.

  I kept snapping pictures.

  “Oh, man,” Noah said. “Some real pain got dropped on this place.”

  We contemplated the destruction in silence for a few more minutes, then got back in the car. Said looked for the road to Maroun al-Ras, the next hollowed-out southern town on our itinerary. The streets, though, were confusing now that so many landmarks no longer existed. Only after a few laps around town could Said reorient himself.

  “Three times on the same road, not good,” Henry said.

  Bint Jbail looked and felt totalitarian. So many people watched us carefully, suspiciously, as we drove past.

  Noah could pass for Lebanese much more easily than I could. Of the four of us, I was the eye magnet. He should have been in the front seat instead of me.

  If Said was right that the locals weren’t allowed to speak freely, assuming they dissented from Nasrallah’s party line, it must have felt totalitarian to some of the locals, as well. It wasn’t North Korea by any means, but it was what Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky called a “fear society.”

  I was reminded of what a Shia friend who grew up in the dahiyeh had said to me when I asked him what would happen if he stepped into the street and yelled “I hate Hezbollah!”

  “I’d get my ass kicked,” he said. “No one would do that.”

  We reached Maroun al-Ras only a few minutes after leaving Bint Jbail. On the way into town, we passed a blown-up car on the side of the road that had nothing left but the rear bumper, the passenger side door, two front seats, and the floor.

  Maroun al-Ras was the first Lebanese village seized by the IDF during the war. The scene was familiar—much of the center of town had been reduced to rubble.

  One site stood out, though. At the top of a hill overlooking the Israeli border stood a mostly intact mosque surrounded by panoramic destruction. Scaffolding had been erected around the minaret, but whatever patchwork it needed appeared to be finished.

  Israel may have overreacted in July and selected targets (the milk factory, bridges in the north, and so on) that should not have been hit, but the stark scene on the hill of Maroun al-Ras demonstrated that the Israeli military did not bomb indiscriminately, as some critics claimed. Unlike Hezbollah, the Israelis were able to hit what they wanted. They were also able to avoid hitting what they did not want to hit. That mosque had obviously been deliberately spared and would not have been standing if the Israelis had resorted to carpet bombing.

  “My mother is from Deir Mimas,” Said said. “In July, Hezbollah brought their weapons out of the caves and valleys and into the village. My family has a small house there that was burned during the war.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Eh,” Said said. “It’s okay. It is fixed now. Anyway, at first Hezbollah fired their missiles from groves of olive trees. Then they got hit by the Israelis. So they moved into Deir Mimas because the other nearby option was Kfar Kila. Hezbollah didn’t want the Shia villages hit, so they moved into Christian villages instead.”

  I wasn’t sure that was right, but it was at least plausible. Noah and I stood right across from Kfar Kila during the war. The town was literally on the border, only twenty feet or so from the fence next to the Israeli town of Metula. Noah and I saw no damage whatsoever in Kfar Kila, and we were there just one day before the end of the war. We did hear automatic weapons fire in Kfar Kila, though, so there seemed to be some Hezbollah activity even if that activity didn’t include the shooting of rockets.

  We stopped at a roadside Christian-owned restaurant for lunch. There would be no men from Hezbollah inside. As Said parked the car, he turned the dial on the car stereo.

  Scratchy voices in Hebrew came through the crackling static.

  “Do you hear them?” he said. “Do you hear the Israelis?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Those are Israelis.”

  “We are right next to the border,” Henry said.

  We went into the restaurant and ordered pizza and sandwiches. The walls were painted white and sparsely decorated with beer signs and the like. Boxes of Kleenex were placed on the tables for customers to use as napkins.

  Henry and I sat at a table while we waited for food. Said hovered over us, as did Noah with his camera. We were the only customers.

  “We have been screaming about this conflict for thirty years now,” Henry said as he dealt himself a hand of solitaire from a deck of cards in his pocket. “But no one ever listened to us. Not until September 11. Now you know how we feel all the time. You have to keep up the pressure. You can never let go, not for one day, one hour, not for one second. The minute you let go, Michael, they will fight back and get stronger. This is the problem with your foreign policy.”

  “Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world,” Said said. “We are on the front lines. Why doesn’t the West understand this? America can withdraw from Iraq, you can go back to Oregon, but we are stuck here. We have to stay and live with what happens.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  the siege of ain ebel

  The Western world should either defend us, or change its name.

  —A LEBANESE CHRISTIAN LEADER DURING THE CIVIL WAR

  A mid the south’s steep rolling hills, a mere handful of miles from the fence on the border with Israel, sat the besieged Christian community of Ain Ebel. It was often said that Lebanon is a victim of geography; few Lebanese were as unlucky as those who lived in Ain Ebel. For decades the people in this village were caught between the anvils of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hezbollah on one side, and the hammer of the Israel Defense Forces on the other.

  Noah and I had arranged to meet with Alan Barakat from the Ain Ebel Development Association. We met him outside a small grocery store owned by his uncle. He agreed to tell us about what happened to his community during the war in July, when Hezbollah seized civilian homes and used residents as human shields.

  Ain Ebel was small, and we walked the streets on foot. I didn’t see nearly as much destruction as I saw in the Hezbollah strongholds of Maroun-al Ras and Bint Jbail. Downtown seemed intact. In that sense, South Lebanon’s Christians were lucky.

  Downtown, so to speak, was hardly distinguishable from anywhere else in Ain Ebel. There wasn’t much to it aside from a grocery store. I saw only two restaurants—the one outside town where we had just stopped for lunch and a little pizza place around the corner and just up the hill.

  The residents were implacably hostile to Hezbollah and always had been. This was not a place where the Party of God could dig in, build bu
nkers, and store weapons. From Israel’s point of view, Ain Ebel was, in military parlance, a “target poor” environment. That did not, however, stop Hezbollah from turning it into a battleground.

  “There is a valley just below Ain Ebel,” Alan said. “I will take you there later. Until the army came after the war, Hezbollah closed it. It was a restricted military area. They built bunkers there and stored Katyusha rockets and launchers. When the war started, they moved the launchers out of the valley and into our village. When the Israelis shot back, they hit some of our houses.”

  In Bint Jbail and Maroun al-Ras, whole city blocks were pulverized from the air. Some houses and buildings were merely damaged, but others were blown to their foundations. Nothing remained of whole swaths of these towns but fields of mostly cleared rubble. Hezbollah controlled Bint Jbail and Maroun al-Ras both before and during the war. Its fighters stockpiled rockets and other weapons in houses, turning them into targets.

  Ain Ebel, however, was only used as a place to hide and as a place from which Hezbollah could launch rockets at the Israelis. Katyusha launchers weren’t placed inside houses. They were, for the most part, placed next to houses. Most of the property damage, then, was caused by shrapnel rather than direct hits.

  Most homes in Ain Ebel were simple. A few were made of stone and hearkened back to the days of the Ottoman Empire, but the majority had been constructed more recently. They were neither attractive nor unattractive. They were just basic, though fairly large, houses that wouldn’t look out of place anywhere else in the Mediterranean region.

  Some were so pocked with shrapnel holes, they looked as if some crazed militiaman had emptied entire magazines of AK-47 rounds into the walls. I saw one home where every last tile had been blown off the roof, and only the metal frame remained.