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

by Michael Totten

  How could Jumblatt laud Hezbollah when he knew as well as anyone else that Nasrallah brought the Israelis into Lebanon through his own militant foolishness? It was partly because he felt compelled to do so by the dictates of Lebanon’s internal politics, but also because his family’s long-standing dedication to the Palestinian cause all but precluded him from saying anything nice or even neutral about Israel.

  “My past,” he said, “my political heritage, from my father to myself, was to defend the Palestinian cause. Okay? And my father, although he was killed by the Syrians, was killed because he was defending the Palestinians in Lebanon.”

  “Is there any realistic way to either disarm Hezbollah or integrate them within the state and the army?” I said. “Or will this problem go on and on?”

  “I think it will go on and on and on,” he said. “I think so. Unless—if you ask them, most of the Shia will give up their weapons in exchange for a political price. The political price will be maybe reshuffling of the actual Lebanese system. More power to the Shia community within the Lebanese sectarian system. At the same time, because, I mean, they are proud to have defended Lebanon against the Israelis. After the war in Gaza, they said, ‘Look, now you are asking us to surrender our weapons? Are you crazy?’”

  “Israelis wouldn’t even come into Lebanon if Hezbollah wasn’t kidnapping or shooting them,” I said.

  “They have invaded several times with excuse and without excuse from 1978 up until now,” he said. “They came clear to Beirut. Nothing has changed in Israel. Now it’s Nasrallah; before it was Yasser Arafat.”

  “But if Hezbollah was disarmed,” I said, “or integrated into the state and the army, and the border was quiet, they wouldn’t come back here. I mean, why would they?”

  “The people of the south,” he said, “think the weapons of Hezbollah are protection against Israeli incursions.”

  That much was true. Supporting Hezbollah as a deterrent was perfectly logical if you believed Israelis wanted to invade Lebanon so they could expand their borders, steal Lebanon’s water, or for some other nefarious purpose. The problem with this, however, was that there was no constituency whatsoever in Israel for anything of the sort. It was a conspiracy theory, a fantasy, and it was a fantasy that started wars and got people killed.

  “You talk about the increasing strength of Hezbollah and the difficulty of your own supply lines,” Jonathan Foreman said. “Is there any way to strengthen the position of Hezbollah’s opponents? Is there any way you and others can become stronger in relation to Hezbollah?”

  “There is no way,” Jumblatt said. “Again, it would be suicidal and an endless civil war without any results. I’m concerned this very afternoon about the kidnapping and death of one of my Druze community members. We have to prepare for funerals tomorrow. And tomorrow there is this big Hezbollah celebration in the dahiyeh for [assassinated Hezbollah commander Imad] Mughniyeh. The Shias will come from the south to Beirut through some areas where we have Druze. I have been told now by the army that they have caught some people, and I hope they found who killed this guy. The people of Hezbollah are much more organized. It’s a regular army.”

  He offhandedly mentioned “the obsolete and backward mentality” of some of the Maronites.

  “Is that the socialist Jumblatt speaking?” Hitchens said.

  We all laughed, including Jumblatt, but Jumblatt laughed a bit darkly and sadly.

  “The socialist Jumblatt died a long time ago,” he said. “He died with my father. He had a dream with the leftist parties to change Lebanon. It was my father’s vision to change the system. This is also one of the reasons why he was killed. He was seen by the Arab world as backing the communists.”

  “Can you say a few words about what the Progressive Socialist Party means to you and what you might mean for them?” Hitchens said.

  “My father studied in Europe at one time,” Jumblatt said. “As a member of a minority, he wished to achieve equality. He said it’s time to abolish the sectarian system in Lebanon. It’s time to have social justice; it’s time to redistribute land. He started with his own land because we were at that time one of the biggest feudal families of Lebanon. So he started with his properties. My mother told him, ‘Well, okay, but wait until you reach power.’ My father said he had to be equal, like others. The sectarian system was against his wishes. And he paid.”

  I wanted to ask him how much of the Jumblatt family land was redistributed to poor Druze in Lebanon; if any, in fact, had been redistributed. He seemed to have plenty left, and his home would likely be a tourist attraction if it weren’t his private residence.

  He had to cut our time short, however, after his cell phone rang and he was told about a crisis that had to be defused at once.

  As he said earlier, a Druze man had just died after being attacked by Hezbollah supporters. Enraged Druze citizens wanted revenge, and they set up roadblocks on the highway to exact it. They stopped every vehicle on the road from Beirut to Damascus and checked ID cards—a disturbing echo of the civil war.

  When they identified individuals as Lebanese Shias—not Hezbollah members, but ordinary Shias who may well have detested Hezbollah—they dragged them from their vehicles and beat them, gangland-style, on the side of the road with long wooden sticks.

  Jumblatt ordered his men to seal the roads leading into and out of the Chouf. We would be allowed out, but no one was allowed in. And he raced to the scene in a convoy and put a stop to the beatings at once.

  It was the right thing to do, of course, not only on general principle, but to stop the tit-for-tat cycle of violence before it spread. Wars can start over this sort of thing in his country.

  There was also more to it than that. He had mellowed with age and was no longer as ruthless as he once was. “He did not want Shia blood on his hands,” Abu Kais wrote.3 “This I believe. It took him a long time to wash off Christian blood.” He hadn’t undergone as powerful a transformation as Samir Geagea, nor was he a pacifist like Fouad Siniora, but he was, or at least he seemed, a bit more liberal in the general sense of the word than he was during the war when his men engaged in a sectarian cleansing campaign against Maronites.

  The biggest reason of all, though, wasn’t so lofty. His weakness had been exposed during the conflict in May. Druze fighters could defeat Hezbollah in a short war on their home turf. They proved that. At the same time, Hezbollah proved it could sever the roads leading into their territory. A long war could easily starve Lebanon’s Druze of bullets and food.

  Jumblatt had to run fresh calculations after that happened. An election was coming up. He needed March 14 to win, but he might not have the luxury to stand by Geagea’s and Siniora’s side for very much longer. If he was going to pivot—and he knew he might have to pivot—it would be all the more difficult with Druze gangs beating innocent Shia civilians with sticks on the road to Damascus.

  The warlord in his castle was slowly but inexorably preparing himself and his people for another surrender. Abu Kais may have sounded slightly hysterical during the conflict in May when he said that “the dark age of Hezbollah is upon us,” but he was right.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  a hurricane in the land of the cedars

  For them, the real danger has always been independent thought—against which they can only muster media that threaten, crowds that threaten, and security services that best them both by implementing the threats.

  —MICHAEL YOUNG

  Hamra was cooked.

  It looked like my same old neighborhood on the surface, but it had been violated. The ground no longer felt stable. Beirut’s most cosmopolitan and international district felt much like my house once did after a burglar had broken in. What happened to Hamra, though, was much worse than a mere breaking and entering. Hezbollah and its militant allies shot the place up and killed people.

  Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Foreman, and I set out from our hotel, the Bristol. Christopher needed a new pair of shoes. Jonathan needed a shirt.
I needed a coffee. So I led the way as the three of us strolled down to Hamra Street, where we could buy just about anything.

  On the way I told them how the Syrian Social Nationalist Party had a serious presence there now. During the invasion in May, its members had placed their spinning swastika flags up on Hamra Street itself, one of the city’s premier places to shop. Those flags stayed there for months. No one dared touch them until Prime Minister Fouad Siniora ordered city employees to take them down.

  It was a warning of sorts—or at least it would have been heeded as such by most people. I didn’t go looking for trouble, Jonathan was as mild-mannered a writer as any I knew, but Christopher was brave and combative, and just hearing about what had happened riled him up.

  When we rounded a corner onto Hamra Street, an SSNP sign was the first thing we saw.

  “Well, there’s that swastika now,” Christopher said.

  The militia’s flags had been taken down, but a commemorative marker was still there. It was made of metal and plastic and had the semipermanence of an official No Parking sign. SSNP member Khaled Alwan shot two Israeli soldiers with a pistol in 1982 after they settled their bill at the now-defunct Wimpy café on that corner, and that sign marked the spot.

  Some SSNP members claimed the emblem on their flag wasn’t a swastika, but a hurricane or a cyclone. Many said they couldn’t be National Socialists, as were the Nazis, because they identified instead as Social Nationalists, whatever that meant.

  Most observers did not find this credible. The SSNP, according to the Atlantic in a civil war-era analysis,1 “is a party whose leaders, men approaching their seventies, send pregnant teenagers on suicide missions in booby-trapped cars. And it is a party whose members, mostly Christians from churchgoing families, dream of resuming the war of the ancient Canaanites against Joshua and the Children of Israel. They greet their leaders with a Hitlerian salute; sing their Arabic anthem, ‘Greetings to You, Syria,’ to the strains of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’; and throng to the symbol of the red hurricane, a swastika in circular motion.”

  They wished to resurrect ancient pre-Islamic and pre-Arabic Syria and annex Lebanon, Cyprus, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, and parts of Turkey and Egypt to Damascus. Their vision clashed with Hezbollah’s, but the two militias had the exact same list of enemies and they were both Syrian proxies, so they worked together.

  Many Lebanese believed members of the SSNP were the ones who carried out many, if not most, of the car-bomb assassinations in Lebanon on behalf of the Syrians since 2005. In December of 2006 some of their members were arrested by the Lebanese army for storing a huge amount of explosives, timers, and detonators amid a large cache of weapons. Then-party leader Ali Qanso responded,2 saying, “We are a resistance force, and we use different methods of resisting, among which is using explosives.”

  Christopher wanted to pull down their marker, but couldn’t. He stuck to his principles, though, and before I could stop him, he scribbled “No, no, Fuck the SSNP” in the bottom-right corner with a black felt-tipped pen.

  I blinked several times. Was he really insulting the Syrian Social Nationalist Party while they might be watching? Neither Christopher nor Jonathan seemed to sense what was coming, but my own danger signals went haywire.

  An angry young man shot across Hamra Street as though he’d been fired out of a cannon. “Hey!” he yelled as he pointed with one hand and speed-dialed for backup on his phone with the other.

  “We need to get out of here now,” I said.

  But the young man latched onto Christopher’s arm and wouldn’t let go. “Come with me!” he said and jabbed a finger toward Christopher’s face. These were the only words I heard him say in English.

  Christopher tried to shake off his assailant, but couldn’t.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said.

  We needed to get out of there fast. Standing around and trying to reason with him would serve his needs, not ours. His job was to hold us in place until the muscle crew showed up in force.

  “Let go of him!” I said and shoved him, but he clamped onto Christopher like a steel trap.

  I stepped into the street and flagged down a taxi.

  “Get in the car!” I said.

  Christopher, sensing rescue, managed to shake the man off and got into the back seat of the taxi. Jonathan and I piled in after him. But the angry young man ran around to the other side of the car and got in the front seat.

  I shoved him with both hands. He wasn’t particularly heavy, but I didn’t have enough leverage from the back to throw him out. The driver could have tried to push the man out, but he didn’t. I sensed he was afraid.

  So my companions and I got out of the car on the left side. The SSNP man bolted from the front seat on the right side. Then I jumped back in the car and locked the doors on that side.

  “He’ll just unlock it,” Jonathan said.

  He was right. I hadn’t noticed that the windows were rolled down on the passenger side. The young man reached in, laughed, and calmly unlocked the front passenger door.

  I stepped back into the street, and the young man latched once again onto Christopher. No one could have stopped Jonathan and me had we fled, but we couldn’t leave Christopher to face an impending attack by himself. The lone SSNP man only needed to hold one of us still while waiting for his squad.

  A police officer casually ambled toward us as though he had no idea what was happening.

  “Help,” Christopher said to the cop. “I’m being attacked!”

  Our assailant identified himself to the policeman. The officer gasped and took three steps back as though he did not want any trouble. He could have unholstered his weapon and stopped the attack on the spot, but even Lebanon’s armed men of the law feared the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

  A Lebanese man in his thirties ran up to me and offered to help.

  “What’s happening?!” he said breathlessly as he trembled in shock and alarm.

  I don’t remember what I told him, and it hardly matters. There wasn’t much he could do, and I did not see him again.

  “Let go of him!” I said to the SSNP spotter and tried once more to throw him off Christopher.

  “Hit him if you have to,” I said to Christopher. “We’re out of time, and we have to get out of here.”

  “Back to the hotel,” Christopher said.

  “No!” I said. “We can’t let them know where we’re staying.”

  Christopher would not or could not strike his assailant, so I sized the man up from a distance of six or so feet. I could punch him hard in the face, and he couldn’t stop me. I could break his knee with a solid kick to his leg, and he couldn’t stop me. He needed all his strength just to hold onto Christopher, while I had total freedom of movement and was hopped up on adrenaline. We hadn’t seen a weapon yet, so I was pretty sure he didn’t have one. I was a far greater threat to him at that moment than he was to us by himself.

  Christopher, Jonathan, and I easily could have joined forces and left him bleeding and harmless in the street. I imagine, looking back now, that he was afraid. But I knew the backup he’d called would arrive any second. And his backup might be armed. We were about to face the wrath of a militia whose members could do whatever they wanted in the streets with impunity. Escalating seemed like the worst possible thing I could do. The time to attack the young man was right at the start, and that moment had passed. This was Beirut, where the law of the jungle can rule with the flip of a switch, and we needed to move.

  I saw another taxi parked on the corner waiting for passengers, and I flung open the door.

  “Get in, get in,” I said, “and lock all the doors!”

  Traffic was light. If the driver would step on the gas with us inside, we could get out of there. Christopher managed to fling the man off him again. It looked hopeful there for a second. But seven furious men showed up all at once and faced us in the street. They stepped in front of the taxi and cut off our escape.

/>   None wore masks. That was an encouraging sign. I didn’t see any weapons. But they were well built, and their body language signaled imminent violence. We were in serious trouble, and I ran into the Costa Coffee chain across the street and yelled at the waiter to call the police.

  “Go away!” he said and lightly pushed me in the shoulder to make his point. “You need to leave now!”

  This was no way to treat a visitor, especially not in the Arab world, where guests are accorded protection, but getting in the way of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party could get a man killed, or at least beaten severely. Just a few months before, the SSNP attacked a Sunni journalist on that very street and sent him bleeding and broken to the hospital in front of gaping witnesses.3 A Lebanese colleague told me he was brutally assaulted merely for filming the crew taking down the SSNP flags as Siniora had ordered. “He didn’t do anything to them,” she said. “He just filmed their flag.”

  Christopher was encircled by four or five of them. They were geared up to smash him, and I reached for his hand to pull him away. One of the toughs clawed at my arm and left me with a bleeding scratch and a bruise. I expected a punch in the face, but I wasn’t the target.

  Christopher was the target. He was the one who had defaced their sign. One of the guys smacked him hard in the face. Another delivered a roundhouse kick to his legs. A third punched him and knocked him into the street between two parked cars. Then they gathered around and kicked him while he was down. They kicked him hard in the head, in the ribs, and in the legs.

  Jonathan and I had about two and a half seconds to figure out what we should do when one of the SSNP members punched him in the side of the head and then kicked him.

  Christopher was on the ground, and Jonathan and I couldn’t fend off seven militiamen by ourselves. I was reasonably sure, at least, that they weren’t going to kill us. They didn’t have weapons or masks. They just wanted to beat us, and we lost the fight before it even began. I could have called for backup myself, but I didn’t think of it—a mistake I will not make again in that country.