1—THE MEETING
The village of Ras al-Ein, which is situated in
the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, falls under the overlapping control of
the Syrian Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the
Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, or Party of God. The village is
seedy and brown, and is decorated with posters of martyrs and
potentates—Ayatollah Khomeini is especially popular—and with
billboards that celebrate bloodshed and sacrifice.
I visited Ras al-Ein this summer to interview the leader of a
Hezbollah faction, a man named Hussayn al-Mussawi, who, twenty years
ago, was involved in kidnapping Americans. Many of those kidnapped
were held in Ras al-Ein; they were kept blindfolded, and chained to
beds and radiators. It is thought that Ras al-Ein is where William
Buckley, the Beirut station chief of the Central Intelligence
Agency, was held for a time before he was killed by Hezbollah, in
1985.
When I arrived, it was midday; the air was still and the heat
smothering, and the streets were mostly empty. A man was selling ice
cream in a park at the center of town. Slides and swing sets, their
paint peeling, dot the park; in the middle is a pond covered by a
skin of algae. Several women and children were there. The women wore
gray chadors, and their heads were covered by scarves, pinned high
and tight under the left ear, so that no strand of hair could
escape.
Like the rest of the town, the park was crowded with ferocious
Hezbollah art. One poster showed an American flag whose field of
stars had been replaced by a single Star of David. Another portrayed
the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine in Jerusalem, cupped in the
bony hand of a figure with a grotesquely hooked nose. A third
poster, extolling the bravery of Shiite martyrs, showed a Muslim
fighter standing on a pile of dead soldiers whose uniforms were
marked with Stars of David. The yellow flag of Hezbollah could be
seen everywhere; across the top is a quotation from the Koran, from
which Hezbollah took its name—"Verily the party of God shall be
victorious"—and at the center is an AK-47 in silhouette, in the hand
of the Shiite martyr Husayn, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. In
the background is a depiction of the globe, suggesting Hezbollah's
role in the worldwide umma, or community
of Muslims. Along the bottom of the Hezbollah flag is written "The
Islamic Revolution in Lebanon." I did not see the
red-green-and-white flag of Lebanon anywhere in Ras al-Ein.
I had taken a taxi from Ashrafieh, the prosperous Christian
neighborhood in Beirut, to Ras al-Ein, a two-hour trip over potholed
roads and through a modest number of roadblocks. The soft
Mediterranean air soon gave way to the dry-bones heat of the Bekaa.
The taxi-driver, an elderly Christian, had been hesitant about the
trip (Lebanon's Christian minority is fearful of Shiite gunmen), but
he smoothly negotiated the passage through two Syrian Army
checkpoints. At one, a sergeant of about thirty, who carried a side
arm and wore a round helmet covered in black mesh, inspected my
American passport, handed it back to me, and said, enigmatically,
"Osama bin Laden."
We had by then reached the outskirts of Baalbek, the main Bekaa
town. Baalbek is famous for three well-preserved Roman temples, of
Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus. (A statue of Hafez al-Assad, the late
dictator of Syria and the father of the current dictator, stands at
the entrance to the town.) The temples, which are enormous—the two
main temples are larger than the Parthenon—are the site of an annual
international cultural festival that draws the élite of Beirut, and
Lebanese officials like to point to it as proof of Lebanon's
normalcy. This year, the festival featured a performance of Michael
Flatley's "Lord of the Dance." Ras al-Ein is a couple of miles from
the temples, and we soon arrived at the Nawras Restaurant, next to
the park, where I was to meet Mussawi. I sat at a table outside,
with a view of the street. Two men nearby were smoking hookahs. I
ordered a Pepsi and waited.
Shiism arose as a protest movement, whose
followers believed that Islam should be ruled by descendants of the
Prophet Muhammad's cousin Ali, and not by the caliphs who seized
control after the Prophet's death. The roots of Shiite anger lie in
the martyrdom of Ali's son Husayn, who died in battle against the
Caliph Yezid in what is today southern Iraq. (I have heard both
Shiites from southern Iraq and Iranian Shiites refer to their enemy
Saddam Hussein as a modern-day Yezid.) At times, Shiism has been a
quietist movement; Shiites built houses of mourn-ing and study,
called Husaynias, where they recalled the glory of Husayn's
martyrdom.
In Lebanon in the nineteen-sixties, the Shiites began to be drawn
to the outside world. Some joined revolutionary Palestinian
movements; others fell into the orbit of a populist cleric, Musa
Sadr, who founded a group called the Movement of the Deprived and,
later, the Shiite Amal militia. Hezbollah was formed, in 1982, by a
group of young, dispossessed Shiites who coalesced around a cleric
and poet named Muhammad Hussayn Fadlallah. They were impelled by a
number of disparate forces, including the oppression of their
community in Lebanon by the country's Sunni and Christian élites,
and the rapture they felt in 1979 as Iran came under the power of
"pure" Islam. A crucial event, though, was Israel's invasion of
Lebanon in June of 1982.
Fatah, which is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization,
had been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel from Lebanon,
where it had its main base, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, on
the advice of his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, ordered Israeli
forces into Lebanon. The stated purpose was to conquer what had come
to be known as Fatahland, the strip of South Lebanon under Yasir
Arafat's control, and to evict the P.L.O.'s forces. Sharon, though,
had grander designs: to secure a friendly Christian government in
Beirut and to destroy the P.L.O. It was not so much the invasion
that inspired the Shiites, who were happy to see the South free of
Arafat and Fatah. The Shiites took up arms when they realized that
Sharon, like Arafat, had no intention of leaving Lebanon.
Hezbollah, with bases in the Bekaa and in Beirut's southern
suburbs, quickly became the most successful terrorist organization
in modern history. It has served as a role model for terror groups
around the world; Magnus Ranstorp, the director of the Centre for
the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, at the University of
St. Andrews, in Scotland, says that Al Qaeda learned the value of
choreographed violence from Hezbollah. The organization virtually
invented the multipronged terror attack when, early on the morning
of October 23, 1983, it synchronized the suicide bombings, in
Beirut, of the United States Marine barracks and an apartment
building housing a contingent of French peacekeepers. Those attacks
occurred just twenty seconds apart; a third part of the plan, to
destroy the compound of the Italian peacekeeping contingent, is said
to have been jettisoned when the planners learned that the Italians
were sleeping in tents, not in a high-rise building.
Until September 11th of last year, Hezbollah had
murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group—two hundred
and forty-one in the Marine-barracks attack alone. Through terror
tactics, Hezbollah forced the American and French governments to
withdraw their peacekeeping forces from Lebanon. And, two years ago,
it became the first military force, guerrilla or otherwise, to drive
Israel out of Arab territory when Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew
his forces from South Lebanon.
Using various names, including the Islamic Jihad Organization and
the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, Hezbollah remained
underground until 1985, when it published a manifesto condemning the
West, and proclaiming, "Every one of us is a fighting soldier when a
call for jihad arises and each one of us carries out his mission in
battle on the basis of his legal obligations. For Allah is behind us
supporting and protecting us while instilling fear in the hearts of
our enemies."
Another phase began in earnest in 1991, when, at the close of
Lebanon's sixteen-year civil war, the country's many militias agreed
to disarm. Nominally, Lebanon is governed from Beirut by an
administration whose senior portfolios have been carefully divided
among the country's various religious factions—Maronite and Greek
Orthodox Christians, Sunnis and Shiites and Druze. But in fact
Lebanon is under the control of Syria; and the Syrians, with
encouragement from Iran, have allowed Hezbollah to maintain its
arsenal, and even to expand it, in the interest of fighting Israel
as Syria's proxy. The Syrians also allowed Hezbollah to control the
Shiite ghettos of southern Beirut, much of the Bekaa Valley, and
most of South Lebanon, along the border with Israel.
Hezbollah's current leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, is as
important a figure in Lebanon as the country's ruling politicians
and the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. Hezbollah officials run
for office in Lebanon and win—the group now holds eleven seats in
the hundred-and-twenty-eight-seat Lebanese parliament. But within
Hezbollah there is little pretense of fealty to the President of
Lebanon, Émile Lahoud, who is a Christian, and certainly none to the
Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, who is a Sunni Muslim. The only
portraits one sees in Hezbollah offices are of Khomeini and of
Ayatollah Khamenei, the current ruler of Iran.
Hezbollah has an annual budget of more than a hundred million
dollars, which is supplied by the Iranian government directly and by
a complex system of finance cells scattered around the world, from
Bangkok and Paraguay to Michigan and North Carolina. Like Hamas in
Gaza, Hezbollah operates successfully in public spheres that are
closed off to most terrorist groups. It runs a vast and effective
social-services network. It publishes newspapers and magazines and
owns a satellite television station that is said to be watched by
ten million people a day in the Middle East and Europe. The station,
called Al Manar, or the Lighthouse, broadcasts anti-American
programming, but its main purpose is to encourage Palestinians to
become suicide bombers.
Along with this public work, Hez bollah continues
to increase its terrorist and guerrilla capabilities. Magnus
Ranstorp says that Hezbollah can be active on four tracks
simultaneously—the political, the social, the guerrilla, and the
terrorist—because its leaders are "masters of long-term strategic
subversion." The organization's Special Security Apparatus operates
in Europe, North and South America, and East Asia. According to both
American and Israeli intelligence officials, the group maintains
floating "day camps" for terrorist training throughout the Bekaa
Valley; many of the camps are said to be just outside Baalbek. In
some of them, the instructors are supplied by the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran's Ministry of Intelligence. In
the past twenty years, terrorists from such disparate organizations
as the Basque separatist group ETA, the
Red Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, and the Irish Republican
Army have been trained in these camps.
A main focus today appears to be the training of specifically
anti-Israel militants in the science of constructing so-called
"mega-bombs," devices that can bring down office towers and other
large structures. The explosion of a mega-bomb is the sort of event
that could lead to a major Middle East war. In fact, such attacks
have been tried: in April, a plot to bomb the Azrieli Towers, two of
Tel Aviv's tallest buildings, was foiled by Israeli security
services; in May, a bomb exploded beneath a tanker truck at a fuel
depot near Tel Aviv, but did not set off a larger explosion, as
planned. Had these operations been successful, hundreds, if not
thousands, of Israelis would have died. Salah Shehada, a Hamas
leader in Gaza, is said by Israel to have been planning a
coördinated attack on five buildings in Tel Aviv. (In July, an
Israeli warplane dropped a one-ton bomb on the building where
Shehada lived; he was killed, along with at least fourteen others,
including nine children.)
Gal Luft, an Israeli reserve lieutenant colonel and an expert on
counterterrorism, told me that Hezbollah's role in these plans is
unknown. "Hezbollah has experience with bulk explosives," Luft said.
"You can make the case that the Hezbollah provides inspiration and
advice and technical support, but I wouldn't rule out its own cells
trying this." Luft said that it is only a matter of time before a
"mega-attack" succeeds.
Hezbollah agents have infiltrated the West Bank and Gaza, and
Arab communities inside Israel, helping Hamas and Islamic Jihad and
attempting to set up their own cells; many Palestinians revere
Hezbollah for achieving in South Lebanon what the Palestinians have
failed to achieve in the occupied territories. In the past year,
Hezbollah has also been stockpiling rockets for potential use
against Israel. These rockets, most of which are from Iran, are said
to be moved by truck from Syria, through the Bekaa Valley, and then
on to Hezbollah forces in South Lebanon.
Hezbollah has not been suspected of overt anti-American actions
since 1996, when the Khobar Towers, in Saudi Arabia, were attacked,
but, according to intelligence officials, its operatives, with the
help and cover of Iranian diplomats, have been making surveillance
tapes of American diplomatic installations in South America,
Southeast Asia, and Europe. These tapes, along with maps and other
tools, are said to be kept in well-organized clandestine
libraries.
In recent days, top American officials have suggested that
Hezbollah—and its state sponsors—may soon find themselves targeted
in the Bush Administration's war on terror. Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage recently called Hezbollah the "A-team" of
terrorism and Al Qaeda the "B-team." The C.I.A. has lost at least
seven officers to Hezbollah terrorism, including William Buckley.
Sam Wyman, a retired C.I.A. official, who recommended Buckley for
the job in Beirut, told me that "those who work the terrorism
problem writ large, and those who are working the Hezbollah problem
writ small, know that this is an account that has not been closed."
The chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Bob Graham, of
Florida, says he wants the Administration's war on terrorism to
focus not on Iraq but on Hezbollah, its Bekaa Valley camps, and its
state sponsors in Iran and Syria. "We should tell the Syrians that
we expect them to shut down the Bekaa Valley camps within x number of days, and, if they don't, we are
reserving the right to shut them down ourselves," Graham said last
month.
After drinking a third Pepsi, I watched a Land
Cruiser pull up to the restaurant and deliver a stiff and
unhappy-looking man with a well-kept beard. The man sat down
silently across from me. Three men, one of whom wore a leather
jacket, despite the terrific heat, stood quietly by the Land
Cruiser.
The bearded man was not Hussayn al-Mussawi, whom I had hoped to
meet. He said that his name was Muhammad, that he was an aide to
Mussawi, and that he had been sent to assess my intentions. I was
here, I said, to examine the claim that Hezbollah had transformed
itself into a mainstream Lebanese political party.
I said that I also wanted to gauge the group's feelings about
America, and look for any sign that its implacable opposition to the
existence of Israel had changed.
"Are you going to ask about past events?" Muhammad asked. I
indicated that I would.
When he pressed me further, I admitted that I was curious about
one person in particular, a Hezbollah security operative named Imad
Mugniyah. Mugniyah, who began his career in the nineteen-seventies
in Arafat's bodyguard unit, is the man whom the United States holds
responsible for most of Hezbollah's anti-American attacks, including
the Marine-barracks bombing and the 1985 hijacking of a T.W.A.
flight, during which a U.S. Navy diver was executed. He is also
suspected of involvement in the attack on the Khobar Towers, in
which nineteen American servicemen were killed.
Last year, the U.S. government placed Mugniyah on the list of its
twenty-two most wanted terrorists, along with two of his colleagues,
Ali Atwa and Hassan Izz-al-Din. (Atwa and Izz-al-Din are wanted
specifically in connection with the hijacking of the T.W.A. flight
in 1985.) The very mention of Mugniyah's name is a sensitive issue
in Lebanon and Syria, which have refused to carry out repeated
American requests—one was delivered recently by Senator Graham—to
shut down Hezbollah's security apparatus, and assist in the capture
of Mugniyah. Lebanon's Prime Minister Hariri became agitated when,
in a conversation this summer, I asked why his government has
refused to help find Mugniyah and his accomplices. "They're not
here! They're not here!" Hariri said. "I've told the Americans a
hundred times, they're not here!"
Seated in the Nawras Restaurant in Ras al-Ein, across from a man
who called himself Muhammad, I said yes, Imad Mugniyah would figure
in my story. At that, Muhammad rose, looked at me dismissively, and
left the restaurant without a word.
II—THE GOAL
The chief spokesman for Hezbollah is a
narrow-shouldered, self-contained man of about forty named Hassan
Ezzeddin, who dresses in the style of an Iranian diplomat: trim
beard, dark jacket, white shirt, no tie. His office is on a low
floor of an apartment building in the southern suburbs of Beirut,
which are called the Dahiya. Hezbollah has five main offices there,
and all are in apartment buildings, which helps to create a shield
between the bureaucracy and Israeli fighter jets and bombers that
periodically fly overhead. The shabby offices are sparsely
furnished; apparently, the idea is to be able to dismantle them in
half an hour or less, in case of an Israeli attack.
The eight members of Hezbollah's ruling council are said to meet
in the Dahiya once a week. Lebanese police officers are stationed at
a handful of intersections, but they don't stray from their posts.
The buildings housing Hezbollah's offices are protected by gunmen
dressed in black, and plainclothes Hezbollah agents patrol the
streets. Once, while walking to an appointment, I took out a
disposable camera and began to take pictures of posters celebrating
the deaths of Hezbollah "martyrs." Within thirty seconds, two
Hezbollah men confronted me. They ordered me to put my camera away
and then followed me to my meeting.
The Shiite stronghold in the southern suburbs of the city is only
a twenty-minute drive from the Virgin Mega-store in downtown Beirut,
but it might as well be part of Tehran. Ayatollah Khomeini and
Ayatollah Khamenei stare down from the walls, and the Western
fashions ubiquitous in East Beirut are forbidden; many women wear
the full chador. The suburbs are the most densely packed of Beirut's
neighborhoods, with seven- and eight-story apartment buildings, many
of them jerry-built, jammed against one another along congested
streets and narrow alleys. The main businesses in the Dahiya are
believed to be chop shops, where stolen automobiles and computers
are taken apart and sold.
I was introduced to Ezzeddin by Hussain Naboulsi, and he
translated our conversation. Naboulsi is in charge of Hezbollah's
Web site. He spent some time in America, and incorporates American
slang unself-consciously into his speech. He is young and
gregarious, but he grew evasive when the subject of his background
came up. "We lived in Brooklyn, and I was going to go to the
University of Texas, but then we moved to Canada. . . ." He trailed
off.
Ezzeddin said that anti-Americanism is no longer the focus of his
party's actions. Hezbollah, he said, holds no brief against the
American people; it is opposed only to the policies of the American
government, principally its "unlimited" support for Israel. Like all
Hezbollah's public figures, Ezzeddin is proud of the victory over
Israel in South Lebanon, two years ago, and he spoke at length about
the reasons for Hezbollah's success. He quoted a statement of
Hezbollah's leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, made shortly after the
Israeli withdrawal: "I tell you: this 'Israel' that owns nuclear
weapons and the strongest air force in this region is more fragile
than a spiderweb." Ezzeddin explained that Ehud Barak pulled out his
troops because the soldiers—and their mothers—feared death. This
isn't true for Muslims, he said. "Life doesn't end when you die. To
us, there is real life after death. Reaching the afterlife is the
goal of life. Once you have in mind the goal of dying, you stop
fearing the Jews."
After Israel withdrew from south ern Lebanon,
many experts on the Middle East assumed that Hezbollah would focus
on social services and on domestic politics, in order to bring about
a peaceful transformation of Lebanon into an Islamic republic. Even
before the Israeli pullout, a leading scholar of Hezbollah, Augustus
Richard Norton, of Boston University, wrote a paper entitled
"Hezbollah: From Radicalism to Pragmatism?" In his paper, Norton
said that in discussions with Hezbollah officials he had got the
impression that the group "has no appetite to launch a military
campaign across the Israeli border, should Israel withdraw from the
South."
But Hezbollah is, at its core, a jihadist organization, and its
leaders have never tried to disguise their ultimate goal: building
an Islamic republic in Lebanon and liberating Jerusalem from the
Jews. Immediately after the withdrawal, Hezbollah announced that
Israel was still occupying a tiny slice of Lebanese land called
Shebaa Farms. The United Nations ruled that Shebaa Farms was not
part of Lebanon but belonged to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights,
and thus was a matter for Israeli-Syrian negotiations. Hezbollah
disagreed, and, with Syria's acquiescence, has continued to launch
frequent attacks on Israeli outposts in Shebaa.
Ezzeddin seemed to concede that the Hezbollah campaign to rid
Shebaa of Israeli troops is a pretext for something larger. "If they
go from Shebaa, we will not stop fighting them," he told me. "Our
goal is to liberate the 1948 borders of Palestine," he added,
referring to the year of Israel's founding. The Jews who survive
this war of liberation, Ezzeddin said, "can go back to Germany, or
wherever they came from." He added, however, that the Jews who lived
in Palestine before 1948 will be "allowed to live as a minority and
they will be cared for by the Muslim majority." Sayyid Nasrallah
himself told a conference held in Tehran last year that "we all have
an extraordinary historic opportunity to finish off the entire
cancerous Zionist project."
The balance of forces on Israel's northern border suggests that
Hezbollah's ambitions are unrealizable. Its fighters number in the
low thousands, at most; the Israeli Air Force is among the most
powerful in the world. But the pullout from Lebanon heightened
Hezbollah's self-regard, its contempt for Jews, and its desire for
total victory. "Everyone told us, 'You're crazy, what are you doing,
you can't defeat Israel,' " Ezzeddin said. "But we have shown that
the Jews are not invincible. We dealt the Jews a serious blow, and
we will continue to deal the Jews serious blows."
The withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern
Lebanon, after eighteen years, closed a disastrous chapter in
Israeli military history. The conflict destroyed the government of
Menachem Begin, and Begin himself; he lived out his final days as a
recluse. An Israeli commission held Ariel Sharon, his defense
minister, "indirectly responsible" for the massacre by pro-Israeli
Christian militiamen of approximately eight hundred Palestinians at
the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, in Beirut, in 1982. The Lebanon
invasion seemed to have ended Sharon's career. By the time the
troops left, more than nine hundred Israeli soldiers had been killed
in Lebanon. The withdrawal was badly managed and chaotic. The Army
abandoned equipment, and also deserted its Christian allies, a
militia called the South Lebanon Army.
In one of the Israeli Army's final acts, sappers tried to bring
down the twelfth-century Beaufort Castle, a fortress that sits high
over the upper Galilee. The castle had served as a platform for
P.L.O. rocket attacks on Israeli towns and farms before Sharon's
invasion, and, in the final days of the occupation, the Army was
hoping to deny the Palestinians the shelter of its battlements. The
Israelis succeeded only in part. The walls did not crumble, and the
Hezbollah flag now flies from the highest tower.
I visited Beaufort on a brilliantly hot day this summer, and the
only people around were a handful of Hezbollah fighters, a group of
Beirutis on a day-long excursion through the South, and two Iranian
tourists, with cheap cameras hanging from their necks. One of the
Hezbollah guerrillas, a pimply man in his early twenties named
Na'im, showed me around. We picked our way across half-collapsed
battlements, among thorn bushes and patches of purple and yellow
wildflowers, to the remains of the outer rampart, which overlooks a
steep drop to the floor of the Litani River valley. Na'im wore
bluejeans and a redand-green plaid shirt. He carried a rifle, which
he used as a walking stick. He told me that the castle dated back to
the Islamic conquest of the Holy Land. In fact, Beaufort was built
by the Crusaders, but in Na'im's version the castle began as a
Muslim fortress. "Saladin used this to defeat the Crusaders," he
said, in a rehearsed manner. "Hezbollah will use it to defeat the
Jews."
From where we stood, we had a clear view into the Israeli town of
Metulla, with its red-roofed, whitewashed houses, small hotels, and
orchards. "The Jews are sons of pigs and apes," Na'im said. We
walked down the crumbling rampart, past a dry cistern, and up a
ridge to the high tower, where the Hezbollah flag waved in the
wind.
From Beaufort, I headed to the village of Kfar Kila, and the
border, where the Fatima Gate is situated. During the occupation,
Israel called it the Good Fence; it was the entrance to Metulla for
Lebanese workers. The Good Fence has been sealed, and is now famous
as the place where Palestinians and Lebanese throw rocks at Israeli
soldiers.
I saw, on my drive down, the digging of what appeared to be
anti-tank trenches, but, though the South may be a future
battlefield, it is also a museum of past glory. Of the four or five
main Islamic fundamentalist terror organizations in the Middle East,
Hezbollah has by far the most sophisticated public-relations
operation, and it has turned the South into an open-air celebration
of its success against Israel. The experience of driving there is
similar in some ways to driving through Gettysburg, or Antietam;
roadside signs and billboards describe in great detail the battles
and unit formations associated with a particular place. One
multicolored sign, in both Arabic and English, reads:
On Oct. 19, 1988 at1:25 p.m. a
martyr car that was body trapped with 500 kilogram of highly
exploding materials transformed two Israeli troops into masses of
fire and limbs, in one of the severe kicks that the Israeli army had
received in Lebanon.
Most of the signs place the word "Israel" in quotation marks, to
underscore the country's illegitimacy, and every sign includes a
fact box: the number of "Israelis" killed and wounded at the
location, and the "Date of Ignominious Departure" of "Israeli"
forces. The historical markers also carry quotations from Israeli
leaders praising the fighting abilities of Hezbollah's martyrs. One
sign reads, "Zionists comments: 'Hezbollah's secret weapon is their
self-innovation and their ability to produce bombs that are simple
but effective.' " The attribution beneath the quote is "Former
'Israeli' Prime Minister Ihud Barak."
According to Israeli security sources, the Israelis have never
been able to infiltrate Hezbollah as they have the P.L.O. One
intelligence official told me that Hezbollah leaders have so far
been immune to the three inducements that often lure Palestinians to
the Israeli side. In Hebrew, they are called the three "K"s: kesef, or money; kavod, respect; and kussit, a crude sexual term for a woman.
The centerpiece of Hezbollah's propaganda effort in the South is
the former Al-Khiam prison, a rambling stone-and-concrete complex of
interconnected buildings, a few miles from the border, where I
stopped on the way to Kfar Kila. For fifteen years, the prison was
run by Israel's proxy force in Lebanon, the South Lebanon Army, with
the assistance of the Shabak, the Israeli equivalent of the F.B.I.
Prisoners in Al-Khiam—which held almost two hundred at any given
time—were allegedly subjected to electric-shock torture and a
variety of deprivations. The jail has been preserved just as it was
on the day the Israelis left. There are still Israeli Army-issue
sleeping bags in the cells. Hezbollah has added a gift shop, which
sells Hezbollah key chains and flags and cassettes of martial
Hezbollah music; a cafeteria; and signs on the walls of various
rooms that describe, in Hezbollah's terms, the use of the rooms. "A
Room for Investigation and Torturing by Electricity," reads one. "A
Room for the Boss of Whippers." "A Room for Investigation with the
Help of the Traitors." And "The Hall of
Torturing-Burying-Kicking-Beating-Applying Electricity-Pouring Hot
Water-Placing a Dog Beside." A busload of tourists, residents of a
Palestinian refugee camp outside Beirut, were clearly in awe of the
place, treating the cells as if they were reliquaries and
congratulating the Hezbollah employees.
Like me, the tourists were headed for the border at Kfar Kila,
where one can walk right up to the electrified fence, and where
Israeli cameras feed real-time pictures to a series of fortified
observation stations just south of the line. An Israeli bunker sits
about fifty feet in from the fence—one man told me that the Israeli
soldiers never show their faces—and the Palestinians took turns
taking pictures and yelling curses. I drove a short distance to a
Hezbollah position that faces a massive concrete Israeli fortress
called Tziporen. The tour bus, headed for the same place, stopped on
the way at an overlook, and the Palestinians got out. On the Israeli
side, on a track that ran parallel to the Lebanese road, was a
Humvee and three Israeli soldiers. They were protecting a group of
workers who were repairing a section of the road. The Israelis were
no more than forty feet away, on the lower part of the slope. The
experience for the Palestinians—and for a group of Kuwaitis who
arrived by car—was something like a grizzly sighting in a national
park. "Yahud!" one Kuwaiti said,
dumbfounded. "Jews!" His friends produced video cameras and began
filming. The Israeli soldiers waved; the Arabs did not. A few began
cursing the soldiers and, once it was decided that the workers were
Israeli Arabs, cursed them, too. "Ana bidi'ani
kak!" one Palestinian yelled at the soldiers—"I want to fuck
you up." "Jasus"—"spy"—another called out.
An argument broke out on the ridge, and the Palestinians decided
that it was not right to curse the Arab workers, who were only
earning a living in oppressive circumstances. Apologies were
offered, and what was by now a cavalcade moved forward, to the
Hezbollah position opposite the Israeli fortress.
Tziporen, the fortress, overlooks the mausoleum of a Jewish sage
named Rav Ashi, who was the redactor of the Babylonian Talmud, and
who died in 427. The modest mausoleum sits half in Lebanon and half
in Israel. Barbed wire runs atop it, and, with the help of a
southerly breeze, the Hezbollah flag planted on the Lebanese side of
the mausoleum flapped into Israel. The fighters at the Hezbollah
position warned us not to get too close to the fence; the Israelis
might fire. Rock throwing from a comfortable distance was
encouraged, and the Palestinians aimed for the roof of the fort. On
weekends, when the crowds are thicker, villagers drive in tractors
full of rocks to supply the tourists.
Because it was too risky to approach the fence, it was impossible
to read a large billboard planted three feet north of the line. It
faced south into Israel, carrying what was obviously a message for
the Israelis alone. The border is, of course, sealed, so it was a
month before I got a clear look at the billboard. It read, in
Hebrew, "Sharon—Don't Forget Your Soldiers Are Still in Lebanon."
The message was written under a photograph of a Hezbollah guerrilla
holding, by the hair, the severed head of an Israeli commando.
III—THE SUICIDE CHANNEL
The true propaganda engine of Hezbollah is the Al
Manar satellite television station. Unlike most of Hezbollah's
public offices, the studios of Al Manar are not shoddily built or
cheaply decorated. The station's five-story headquarters building in
the Dahiya, at the end of a short side street, is surrounded by
taller apartment buildings. Guards carrying rifles patrol its
perimeter, but, inside, Al Manar has a corporate atmosphere. The
lobby is glass and marble, and behind the reception desk a pleasant
young man answers the telephone. He sits beneath a portrait of Abbas
al-Mussawi, the previous Hezbollah leader, who was assassinated ten
years ago by Israel. At the reception desk, women whose dress is
deemed immodest can borrow a chador.
Al Manar's news director is Hassan Fadlallah, who is in his early
thirties and is a member of the same clan as Muhammad Hussayn
Fadlallah, the Hezbollah spiritual leader. Fadlallah, a
studious-looking man who had several days' stubble on his face, is
working on a Ph.D. in education. He apologized for his poor English.
A waiter brought us orange juice and tea.
I began by asking him to compare Al Manar and the most famous
Arabic satellite channel, Al Jazeera. "Neutrality like that of Al
Jazeera is out of the question for us," Fadlallah said. "We cover
only the victim, not the aggressor. CNN is the Zionist news network,
Al Jazeera is neutral, and Al Manar takes the side of the
Palestinians."
Fadlallah paused for a moment, and said he would like to amend
his comment on CNN. "We were very happy with Ted Turner," he said.
"We were so happy that he was getting closer to the truth." He was
referring to recent comments by Turner, the founder of CNN, who
talked about suicide bombers and the Israeli Army and then said, "So
who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are
involved in terrorism." Turner was criticized harshly in the
American press and by supporters of Israel, and later said that he
regretted "any implication that I believe the actions taken by
Israel to protect its people are equal to terrorism." Fadlallah
claimed that Turner revised his statement because "the Jews
threatened his life." He said Al Manar's opposition to neutrality
means that, unlike Al Jazeera, his station would never feature
interviews or comments by Israeli officials. "We're not looking to
interview Sharon," Fadlallah said. "We want to get close to him in
order to kill him."
Al Manar would not rule out broadcasting comments from
non-Israeli Jews. "There would be one or two we would put on our
shows. For example, we would like to have Noam Chomsky." Fadlallah
suggested, half jokingly, that I appear on a question-and-answer
show. (Later, another Al Manar official suggested that I answer
questions about what he termed "the true meaning of the
Talmud.")
Fadlallah said that one of Al Manar's goals is to set in context
the role of Jews in world affairs. Anti-Semitism, he said, was
banned from the station, but he was considering a program on
"scholars who dissent on the issue of the Holocaust," which would
include the work of the French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.
"There are contradictions," Fadlallah said. "Many Europeans believe
that the Holocaust was a myth invented so that the Jews could get
compensation. Everyone knows how the Jews punish people who seek the
truth about the Holocaust."
It would be a mistake, Fadlallah went on, to focus solely on Al
Manar's antiIsrael programs. "We have news programming, kids' shows,
game shows, political news, and culture." At the same time, he said,
Al Manar is "trying to keep the people in the mood of suffering,"
and most of the station's daily schedule, including its game shows
and children's programming, tends to center on Israel. A program
called "The Spider's House" explores what Hezbollah sees as Israel's
weaknesses; "In Spite of the Wounds" portrays as heroes men who were
wounded fighting Israel in South Lebanon. On a game show entitled
"The Viewer Is the Witness," contestants guess the names of
prominent Israeli politicians and military figures, who are played
by Lebanese actors. Al Manar also has a weekly program called
"Terrorists."
Avi Jorisch, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, a pro-Israel think tank, who is writing a book about Al
Manar, has visited the station and watched several hundred hours of
its programming. The show "Terrorists," he told me, airs vintage
footage of what it terms "Zionist crimes," which include, by
Hezbollah's definition, any Israeli action, offensive or defensive.
According to Jorisch, Al Manar, with its estimated ten million
viewers, is not as popular in the Arab world as Al Jazeera, although
he noted that Arab viewership is not audited. He said that his
Lebanese sources credit Al Manar as the second most popular station
among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. (Al Manar can be
received in the United States via satellite.)
Al Manar regularly airs raw footage of violence in the occupied
territories, and it will break into its programming with what one Al
Manar official called "patriotic music videos" to announce
Palestinian attacks and applaud the killing of Israelis. When I
visited the station, the videos were being produced in a basement
editing room by a young man named Firas Mansour. Al Manar has modern
equipment, and the day I was there Mansour, who was in charge of
mixing the videos, was working on a Windows-based editing suite.
Mansour is in his late twenties, and he was dressed in hip-hop
style. His hair was gelled, and he wore a gold chain, a heavy silver
bracelet, and a goatee. He spoke colloquial American English. I
asked him where he learned it. "Boston," he said.
Mansour showed me some recent footage from the West Bank, of
Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians. Accompanying the video was
a Hezbollah fighting song. "What I'm doing is synchronizing the
gunshots to form the downbeat of the song," he told me. "This is my
technique. I thought of it." He had come up with a title: "I'm going
to call it 'Death to Israel.' " Mansour said that he can produce two
or three videos on a good day. "What I do is, first, I try to feel
the music. Then I find the pictures to go along with it." He pulled
up another video, this one almost ready to air. "Try and see if you
could figure out the theme of this one," he said.
The video began with Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians.
Then the screen filled with pictures of Palestinians carrying the
wounded to ambulances, followed by an angry funeral scene. Suddenly,
the scene shifted to Israelis under fire. An Israeli soldier was on
the ground, rocking back and forth, next to a burning jeep; this was
followed by scenes of Jewish funerals, with coffins draped in the
Israeli flag being lowered into graves.
Mansour pressed a button, and the images disappeared from the
screen. "The idea is that even if the Jews are killing us we can
still kill them. That we derive our power from blood. It's saying,
'Get ready to blow yourselves up, because this is the only way to
liberate Palestine.' '' The video, he said, would be shown after the
next attack in Israel. He said he was thinking of calling it "We
Will Kill All the Jews." I suggested that these videos would
encourage the recruitment of suicide bombers among the Palestinians.
"Exactly," he replied.
The anti-Semitism of the Middle East groups that
oppose Israel's right to exist often seems instrumental—anti-Jewish
stereotypes are another weapon in the anti-Israeli armamentarium.
The rhetoric is repellent, but in the past it did not quite touch
the malignancy of genocidal anti-Semitism. The language has changed,
however. In April, in a sermon delivered in the Gaza Strip, Sheikh
Ibrahim Madhi, a Palestinian Authority imam, said, "Oh, Allah,
accept our martyrs in the highest Heaven. Oh, Allah, show the Jews a
black day. Oh, Allah, annihilate the Jews and their supporters."
(The translation was made by the Middle East Media Research
Institute.) In Saudi Arabia, where anti-Semitism permeates the
newspapers and the mosques, the imam of the Al Harram mosque in
Mecca, Sheikh Abd al-Rahman alSudais, recently declared, "Read
history and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the
evil forefathers of the even more evil Jews of today: infidels,
falsifiers of words, calf worshippers, prophet murderers, deniers of
prophecies . . . the scum of the human race, accursed by Allah."
Hezbollah has been at the vanguard of this shift toward frank
anti-Semitism, and its leaders frequently resort to epidemiological
metaphors in describing the role of Jews in world affairs. Ibrahim
Mussawi, the urbane and scholarly-seeming director of
English-language news at Al Manar, called Jews "a lesion on the
forehead of history." A biochemist named Hussein Haj Hassan, a
Hezbollah official who represents Baalbek in the Lebanese
parliament, told me that he is not anti-Semitic, but he has noticed
that the Jews are a pan-national group "that functions in a way that
lets them act as parasites in the nations that have given them
shelter."
The Middle East scholar Martin Kramer, a biographer of Sayyid
Muhammad Fadlallah, told me that he has sensed a shift in hard-line
Shiite thinking in the past twenty years. In the first burst of
revolution in Iran, the United States was cast by Ayatollah Khomeini
and his allies as the "Great Satan." Israel occupied the role of
"Little Satan." This has been reversed, Kramer said. Today, Shiite
authorities in Lebanon view America as one more tool of the Jews,
who have achieved covert world domination. President Mohammad
Khatami of Iran, who is often described as a reformer, last year
called Israel "a parasite in the heart of the Muslim world."
There are bitter feelings, to be sure, about Israel's invasion of
Lebanon, about Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the occupied
territories, about the Israeli Air Force's not infrequent patrols in
the skies over Beirut. But even some cosmopolitan Beirutis I met,
Christians as well as Muslims, seemed surprisingly open to
anti-Jewish propaganda—for instance, that the World Trade Center was
destroyed by Jews.
A young Shiite scholar named Amal Saad-Ghorayeb
has advanced what in Lebanon is a controversial argument: that
Hezbollah is not merely anti-Israel but deeply, theologically anti-Jewish. Her new book,
"Hezbollah: Politics & Religion," dissects the anti-Jewish roots
of Hezbollah ideology. Hezbollah, she argues, believes that Jews, by
the nature of Judaism, possess fatal character flaws.
I met Saad-Ghorayeb one afternoon in a café near the Lebanese
American University, where she is an assistant professor. She was
wearing an orange spaghetti-strap tank top, a knee-length skirt, and
silver hoop earrings. She is thirty years old and married, and has a
four-year-old daughter. Her father, Abdo Saad, is a prominent Shiite
pollster; her mother is Christian.
Saad-Ghorayeb calls Israel "an aberration, a colonialist state
that embraces its victimhood in order to displace another people."
Yet her opposition to anti-Semitism seemed sincere, as when she
described the anti-Jewish feeling that underlies Hezbollah's
ideology. "There is a real antipathy to Jews as Jews," she said. "It
is exacerbated by Zionism, but it existed before Zionism." She
observed that Hezbollah, like many other Arab groups, is in the
thrall of a belief system that she called "moral utilitarianism."
Hezbollah, in other words, will find the religious justification for
an act as long as the act is useful. "For the Arabs, the end often
justifies the means, even if the means are dubious," she said. "If
it works, it's moral."
In her book, she argues that Hezbollah's Koranic reading of
Jewish history has led its leaders to believe that Jewish theology
is evil. She criticizes the scholar Bernard Lewis for downplaying
the depth of traditional Islamic antiJudaism, especially when
compared with Christian anti-Semitism. "Lewis commits the . . .
grave error of depicting traditional Islam as more tolerant of Jews
. . . thereby implying that Zionism was the cause of Arab-Islamic
anti-Semitism," she writes.
Saad-Ghorayeb is hesitant to label Hezbollah's outlook
anti-Semitism, however. She prefers the term "antiJudaism," since in
her terms anti-Semitism is a race-based hatred, while anti-Judaism
is religion-based. Hezbollah, she says, tries to mask its
antiJudaism for "public-relations reasons," but she argues that a
study of its language, spoken and written, reveals an underlying
truth. She quoted from a speech delivered by Hassan Nasrallah, in
which he said, "If we searched the entire world for a person more
cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and
religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not
say the Israeli." To Saad-Ghorayeb, this statement "provides moral
justification and ideological justification for dehumanizing the
Jews." In this view, she went on, "the Israeli Jew becomes a
legitimate target for extermination. And it also legitimatizes
attacks on non-Israeli Jews."
Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton
State Department, once told me, "There's a fundamental view here of
the Jew as subhuman. Hezbollah is the direct ideological heir of the
Nazis." Saad-Ghorayeb disagrees. Nasrallah may skirt the line
between racialist anti-Semitism and theological anti-Judaism, she
said, but she argued that mainstream Hezbollah ideology provides the
Jews with an obvious way to repair themselves in God's eyes: by
converting to Islam.
IV—"THE LOGIC OF WAR"
One day near the end of my stay in Lebanon, I
visited Sayyid Fadlallah, Hezbollah's spiritual leader, at his home
in the Dahiya. Fadlallah, who is sixty-seven, is a surpassingly
important figure in Shiism, inside and outside Lebanon. As many as
twenty thousand people pray with him each Friday at a cavernous
mosque near his home. He is a squat man with a white beard, and
wears the black turban of the sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet
Muhammad. Fadlallah has long denied any official role in Hezbollah.
Some experts take him at his word; others believe that he is
dissembling. However, intellectually Fadlallah has taken an
independent course, and people close to him told me that he
privately scorns Hezbollah's most important patron, Ayatollah
Khamenei, as a mediocre thinker and cleric.
Several attempts have been made to assassinate Fadlallah. He
believes that the C.I.A., working with Saudi Arabia, tried to kill
him by setting off a bomb near his apartment building in 1985, an
event cited in Bob Woodward's book "Veil: The Secret Wars of the
C.I.A. 1981-1987," which, Fadlallah told me, he has read carefully
and repeatedly. His offices are well guarded by men who have
apparently been assigned to him by Hezbollah. My briefcase was taken
from me for ten minutes and thoroughly searched by the guards. A man
carrying a pistol sat in on our interview, along with three
translators: Fadlallah's; mine (a Christian woman from East Beirut,
who had been required to wear a chador for the occasion); and Abdo
Saad, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb's father, who had arranged the
interview.
Fadlallah entered the meeting room slowly and deliberately. He
sat in a plush chair, the rest of us on couches near him. The room
was lit with fluorescent light; as always, a picture of Khomeini
stared down from the wall.
Fadlallah framed the core issues in political, not religious,
terms. "The Israelis believe that after three thousand years they
came back to Palestine," he said. "But can the American Indian come
back to America after all this time? Can the Celts go back to
Britain?" He said that he has no objection to Jewish statehood, but
not at the expense of Palestinians. "The problem between Muslims and
Jews has to do with security issues."
Like many Muslim clerics, he holds romantic, condescending, and
contradictory views of the historic relationship between Jews and
Muslims. He is aware that for hundreds of years, while Jews were
persecuted and ostracized in Christian Europe, they were granted the
status of protected inferiors by the caliphs, and subjected only to
infrequent pogroms. Yet, despite his assertion that the dispute
between Jews and Muslims was political, he made the theological
observation that the Jews "never recognized Islam as a true
religion." I asked him if he agreed with this passage from the
Koran: "Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou
find the Jews and Pagans." Yes, he said. "The Jews don't consider
Islam to be a religion."
I tried to turn the conversation to Islamic beliefs—in
particular, the rationale for suicide attacks. In the early
nineteen-eighties, Fadlallah was accused of blessing the suicide
bomber who destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, a
charge that he heatedly denied to me. He pointed out that he was
among the first Islamic clerics to condemn the September 11th
attacks, though he blamed American foreign policy for creating the
atmosphere that led to them. He has, however, endorsed attacks on
Israeli civilians. Suicide, he said, is not an absolute value. It is
an option left to a people who are without options, and so the act
is no longer considered suicide but martyrdom in the name of
self-defense. "This is part of the logic of war," he said.
On the killing of Israeli civilians, Fadlallah said, "In a state
of war, it is permissible for Palestinians to kill Jews. When there
is peace, this is not permissible." He does not believe in a
peaceful settlement between two states, one Palestinian, the other
Israeli; rather, he favors the disappearance of Israel.
I thought about Saad-Ghorayeb's argument that many in Hezbollah
consider all Jews guilty of conspiring against Islam, and I asked
Fadlallah if it was permissible to kill Jews beyond the borders of
Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors
are considered by the governments of Israel, the United States, and
Argentina to be responsible for the single deadliest anti-Semitic
attack since the end of the Second World War: the suicide
truck-bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in
1994, which left more than a hundred people dead. As in the case of
other accusations of terrorism, Hezbollah and Iran say that they
were not involved in the attack. "We are against the killing of Jews
outside Palestine," Fadlallah said. "Unless they transfer the war
outside Palestine." When I asked if they had, Fadlallah raised an
eyebrow, and let the question go unanswered.
Major General Benny Gantz is the chief of the
Israeli Army's Northern Command, which is responsible for defending
Israel from Hezbollah and Syria and any other threats from the
north. Until recently, Gantz was the commander of Israeli forces in
the West Bank.
When we met this summer, at an airbase outside Tel Aviv, he
seemed pleased to have left behind the moral and strategic
ambiguities of service in the West Bank. Gantz is forty-three, tall,
lean, and cynical. Much of his career has been spent dealing with
the Lebanon question. Before serving in the West Bank, he was the
top Israeli officer in Lebanon in the days leading up to the
withdrawal. A helicopter was waiting to carry him north to the
border after our meeting. Gantz is almost certain that he will soon
wage war against Hezbollah and Syria. "I'll be surprised if we don't
see this fight," he said.
The Israelis believe that in South Lebanon Hezbollah has more
than eight thousand rockets, weapons that are far more sophisticated
than any previously seen in the group's arsenal. They include the
Iranian-made Fajr-5 rocket, which has a range of up to forty-five
miles, meaning that Israel's industrial heartland, in the area south
of Haifa, falls within Hezbollah's reach. One intelligence official
put it this way: "It's not tenable for us to have a jihadist
organization on our border with the capability of destroying
Israel's main oil refinery."
Hezbollah officials told me that they possessed no rockets
whatsoever. But one reporter who has covered Hezbollah and the South
for several years said he believes that Hezbollah has established a
"balance of terror" along the border. The reporter, Nicholas
Blanford, of the Beirut English-language newspaper the Daily Star, said that he is "pretty certain"
that Hezbollah has "extensive weaponry down there, stashed away." He
added, "Their refrain is, we're ready for all eventualities."
Blanford, who has good sources in the Hezbollah leadership, said,
"They seem to be convinced that sooner or later there's going to be
an Israeli-Arab conflict. In the long term, Israel cannot put up
with this threat from Hezbollah." It seems clear that in ordinary
times Israel would already have moved against Hezbollah. But these
are not ordinary times. Intelligence officials told me that Israel
cannot act preëmptively against Hezbollah while America is trying to
shore up Arab support for, or acquiescence in, a campaign to
overthrow Saddam Hussein. To do otherwise would be to risk angering
the Bush Administration, which needs Israel to show restraint. One
Israeli Army officer I spoke to put it bluntly: "The day after the
American attack, we can move."
Both Israel and the United States believe that, at the outset of
an American campaign against Saddam, Iraq will fire missiles at
Israel—perhaps with chemical or biological payloads—in order to
provoke an Israeli conventional, or even nuclear, response. But
Hezbollah, which is better situated than Iraq to do damage to
Israel, might do Saddam's work itself, forcing Israel to retaliate,
and crippling the American effort against an Arab state. Hezbollah
is not known to possess unconventional payloads for its missiles,
though its state sponsors, Iran and Syria, maintain extensive
biological- and chemical-weapons programs.
If Hezbollah wants to provoke Israel, it has other options. Early
this year, it tried to smuggle fifty tons of heavy Iranian
weapons—including mines, mortars, and missiles—to the Palestinian
Authority aboard a ship called the Karine A. The Israeli Navy seized
the ship in the Red Sea. Intelligence officials believe that the
operation was under the control of a deputy of Imad Mugniyah, the
Hezbollah security operative. According to a story in the
London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq
al-Awsat, King Abdullah of Jordan told American officials
that Iran was behind attempts to launch at least seventeen rockets
at Israeli targets from Jordanian territory. Hezbollah, meanwhile,
is working with Palestinian groups, including Islamic Jihad, which,
like Hezbollah, is sponsored by Iran, and which, like Hezbollah, is
searching for the means to deliver a serious blow to Israel.
There is no affection for Saddam Hussein among
the ruling mullahs in Iran, which lost a vicious war to Iraq in the
nineteen-eighties, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians dead; or
in the office of President Bashar al-Assad, in Syria. But some
American analysts think that both regimes are alarmed by the
prospect of Saddam's overthrow. Dennis Ross, the Clinton
Administration's Middle East envoy, told me that American success
against Iraq would legitimatize American-led "regime change" in the
Middle East. It would also leave Iran surrounded by pro-American
governments, in Kabul, Baghdad, and Istanbul. "They see
encirclement," Ross said. "This explains the incredible flow of
weaponry to Hezbollah after Israel left Lebanon."
Ross said that Bashar al-Assad's interest in forestalling an
American attack on Iraq by igniting an Arab-Israeli war is more
subtle, but still present. "Bashar realizes that if we go ahead and
do this in Iraq he runs an enormous risk" by continuing to support
terrorist organizations. The State Department lists Syria as a
sponsor of terror. Ross also believes that Bashar, unlike his late
father, is not thoughtful enough to grasp the cost of a war with
Israel. "He still thinks that Israel will stay within certain
boundaries," Ross said. "He needs to hear from us that, if he
provokes a war, don't expect us to come to your rescue. He's playing
with fire." Indeed, in April this year the Bush Administration had
to intervene with Syria to halt Hezbollah rocket attacks on
Israel.
General Gantz told me that if Hezbollah uses rockets against
Israel his forces will be hunting Syrians as well as Lebanese
Shiites. Lebanon may be the battlefield, he said, but the twenty
thousand Syrian soldiers in Lebanon will be fair targets. "Israel
doesn't have to deal with Hezbollah as Hezbollah," he continued.
"This is the Hezbollah tail wagging the Syrian dog. As far as I'm
concerned, Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese and Syrian forces.
Syria will pay the price. I'm not saying when or where. But it will
be severe."
The Syrian Army, which used to have the Soviet Union as its
patron, is no match for Israel, Gantz said. "I think the Syrians can
create a few problems for us. But it's very hard to see in what way
they're better than us. I just don't know how Bashar is going to
rebuild his army after this. Assad, the father, was a smart guy. He
knew how to walk a tightrope. His son is trying to dance on it."
In conversations with people in Beirut, and
especially in the Christian areas to the city's north, I found great
anxiety about an Israeli counterstrike against Lebanon. Hezbollah
understands that the Lebanese have grown used to peace, and that
they fear an Israeli attack; many Lebanese would hold Hezbollah
responsible for the devastation caused by an Israeli attack. Among
some of Lebanon's religious groups, particularly the Maronite
Christians and the Druze, there is a feeling that the Syrians have
overstayed their welcome in the country. These groups fear
Hezbollah, too, but they do not express it; after all, Hezbollah is
the only militia that is still armed, long after the end of the
civil war.
Israel's foreign minister, Shimon Peres, mentioned these
constraints when I spoke to him recently. "Hezbollah must not appear
to be the destroyer of Lebanon," he said. Peres noted, however, that
Hezbollah is an organization devoted to jihad, not to logic. "These
are religious people. With the religious you can hardly negotiate.
They think they have supreme permission to kill people and go to
war. This is their nature."
When I met with Prime Minister Hariri, he alluded to some of
these worries. Hariri, a Sunni, is a billionaire builder who made
most of his money in Saudi Arabia. We spoke in a building that he
constructed in Beirut, with his own money, to serve as his "palace";
it seems to be modelled on a Ritz-Carlton hotel. Hariri has tense
relations with Hezbollah, which has accused him of trying to thwart
development in poor Shiite areas. Hariri understands that Israel
will make the Lebanese people suffer for any attacks that are
launched from Lebanese territory. He loathes and fears Ariel Sharon,
and said to me that Sharon was "no different" from Hitler in his
belief "in racial purity." The people of southern Lebanon do not
want the Israelis provoked, Hariri said. "Look around the South," he
said. "Look at all the building."
In recent weeks, the borderland has become even more unstable. An
Israeli soldier was killed last month when Hezbollah fired on an
Israeli outpost in Shebaa; and the Lebanese government, with the
endorsement of Hezbollah, announced plans to divert water that would
otherwise be carried by the Hatsbani River into Israel. Israel has
said that it will not allow Lebanon to curtail its water supply.
General Gantz assumes that internal political considerations will
not trump its desire for jihad. As he prepared to board his
helicopter and fly to the border, he said, "I was the last officer
to leave Lebanon, and maybe I'll be the first one to return." 
The New Yorker.
