Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  “We face an entity that conquered the land of another people, drove them out of their land, and committed horrendous massacres,” Nasrallah told Egyptian television two weeks after Israel’s withdrawal in 2000. “As we see it, this is an illegal state. It is a cancerous entity and the root of all crises and wars and cannot be a factor in bringing about a true and just peace in this region.”45

  A few months later, he boasted, “We have liberated the south. Next we’ll liberate Jerusalem.”

  Hezbollah’s jihadist cult continued to recruit potential suicide bombers. Shops in the dahiya sold Hezbollah videos of previous attacks, while T-shirts were imprinted with martyrs’ faces. Little boys marched in Hezbollah parades wearing bands around their heads—in green, black, or red, each inscribed with a Koranic verse—as potential future martyrs. Toy stores sold miniature tanks and guns with the Hezbollah logo.

  After two Israeli invasions, Nasrallah claimed that his militia provided a defense capability that no other force could provide. “The Israeli Air Force could destroy the Lebanese army within hours, or within days, but it cannot do this with us,” Nasrallah told me. “We don’t have a classical presence. We exercise guerilla warfare…. Lebanon still needs the formula of popular resistance.”

  Along the fifty-mile border, tensions remained high after 2000. Hezbollah launched sporadic attacks against Israeli troops, mainly around Shebaa Farms. It fired at Israeli overflights as their sonic booms cracked the sound barrier. And twice, Hezbollah launched unmanned drone spy planes over Israel’s northern Galilee. To beef up Hezbollah’s military capabilities, Iran secretly shipped even more potent arms, including missiles with a much longer range than the old Katyushas.

  I asked Nasrallah about Iran’s arms supplies, noting international alarm about Hezbollah’s deadly arsenal. He smiled coyly.

  “At the military level, there is an expression: ‘The pen broke,’ meaning this issue is not open for discussion,” he told me. “Because if I say there is no military cooperation, they are not going to believe me. But if I say there is military cooperation, this will be harmful. Therefore I leave this issue. It is possible we can talk about it in the future.”

  I told Nasrallah I was leaving Lebanon in a couple of days.

  He smiled again. “By the future,” he said, “I mean, maybe, in twenty years.”

  Yet Hezbollah operations during the third phase were noticeably limited—defying predictions of a hot new guerrilla war along the border, the kind the Palestinians had fought.46 An Israeli think-tank assessment concluded that Hezbollah seemed in no rush to liberate Jerusalem, that it had deliberately “circumscribed” operations to avoid massive Israeli retaliation, and that it had even blocked plans by Palestinian cells still operating from refugee camps in Lebanon to fire across the border. Hezbollah’s focus was primarily deterring Israel, it concluded, not destroying the Jewish state.47

  Nawaf al Musawi, Hezbollah’s burly external-relations chief, put it a different way. “This is the new Cold War.”

  Hezbollah’s strategy was partially produced by the international reaction to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden’s operation forced the Lebanese movement for the first time to publicly define itself on terrorism—and to differentiate itself from al Qaeda.

  Hezbollah TV initially reported that the suicide hijackings were the work of Israeli agents, not al Qaeda. The story, based on widespread rumor in the region, alleged that Israel had tipped off some four thousand Jews employed at the World Trade Center, so they would not report to work on September 11.

  But Nasrallah soon shifted gears. He issued a communiqué condemning the attack on the World Trade Center. He publicly called it a “barbarity” that contradicted the teachings of Islam.48

  Shortly after September 11, he also assembled a group of Lebanese not in his movement. Among them was Jamil Mrowe, publisher of The Daily Star, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and a Shiite. Mrowe is a handsome man with a full head of silvering hair who likes a good scotch or two, can talk a blue streak, and has been my friend for more than two decades. He recounted the meeting called to analyze the impact of September 11 and what it meant for Hezbollah.

  Mrowe was blunt with the leadership about its rhetoric and mission.

  “I told them that no one starts a restaurant in order for it to close. Everyone wants to succeed, including their endeavor,” he told me over dinner at a renovated café on the old Green Line that once divided Christian and Muslim militias. “I told them: ‘Let us imagine you win your war with Israel. You will have millions of Jews on your hands. What do you do with them? Kill them?’

  “Two people sprang up and said, ‘Do you not know our religion? How can you even say that? These [Jews] are people of the Book!’” Mrowe recalled, shaking his head.

  “If they want to play that game, they have to take that responsibility,” he added. “And that kind of recognition of religion was not reflected in their political positions.”

  During our meeting a few days later at his headquarters, I also asked Nasrallah about Hezbollah’s attitude about September 11—and what circumstances or causes justified violence.

  “To give a very clear answer, in any war or ongoing battle, you need to distinguish between those who are partners in the war against me and those who have nothing to do with this war,” he replied. “There is the division criterion—partner, accomplice, or innocent.”

  On September 11, he applied the distinction. “What do the people who worked in those two towers, thousands of employees, women and men, have to do with war that is taking place in the Middle East? Or the war that Mr. George Bush may wage on people in the Islamic world?” Nasrallah said. “Therefore we condemned this act—and any similar act we condemn.”

  “But not the attack on the Pentagon?” I asked him.

  Nasrallah paused. “I said nothing about the Pentagon, meaning we remain silent. We neither favored nor opposed that act,” he said.

  In the West, al Qaeda and Hezbollah are often lumped together as violent Islamist groups. Both were put on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups—Hezbollah in 1997, al Qaeda in 1999. Both have ideological roots in religion, use identical terrorist tactics, and hate the United States and Israel. But they are hardly identical. The Sunni-Shiite divide also runs deep between the two movements, igniting public friction.

  The al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, condemned Hezbollah as the “enemy of the Sunnis” in a videotape message released just days before he was killed in an American air strike in 2006. Zarqawi accused the Shiite movement of protecting Israel from Palestinian attacks—which in fact, and ironically, it did. Hezbollah wanted to control the conflict on its own border on its own terms. It sent aid and arms to Hamas for operations in the Palestinian territories. One major weapons shipment was discovered in transit via Jordan, Hezbollah officials told me. But the militia did not want Palestinians operating again from Lebanese soil. Underneath the common enemy were different national loyalties. So Hezbollah restrained militant cells in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps.

  Nasrallah also loathed Osama bin Laden.

  The Hezbollah leader needed no prompting to talk about al Qaeda and its Afghan allies, the Taliban. “We do not endorse the method of bin Laden, and many of the operations that al Qaeda carried out we condemned very clearly,” he told me. “We disagree with bin Laden at the intellectual level, theoretical level, practical level, and also on priorities…. We are two completely different movements.

  “That’s why since the beginning of Hezbollah and the beginning of al Qaeda there has never been any contact between us and them,” he said.

  And the Taliban, Nasrallah continued at a determined clip, was “the worst, the most dangerous thing that this Islamic revival has encountered. The Taliban presented a very hideous example of an Islamic state.”

  I asked Nasrallah how his criterion on violence applied to Iraq. The Hezbollah leader did not always take s
tereotypical positions.

  Iraq’s breakup into sectarian pieces, he said, would create a new model of collapse, internecine fighting, sedition, and divisions for the entire Middle East. “The most popular project today in Iraq, unfortunately, is federalism or separation,” he had lamented in a speech broadcast on Hezbollah TV. “Everyone wants to live alone and to stay away from his brother in the Iraqi homeland.”49 Yet when we spoke, he also did not want American troops to remain to hold Iraq together. Any foreign presence on Muslim land was wrong—and justified violent resistance.

  “The Iraqis have the right to fight any occupation force, American or non-American. But should they fight or should they not fight? This is something to be decided by the Iraqis themselves,” Nasrallah said.

  At the same time, he pronounced, doing harm to the innocent was forbidden.

  “To have Iraqis confronting the occupation army, this is natural. But if there are American tourists, or intellectuals, doctors, or professors, people who have nothing to do with this war, they are innocent, even though they are Americans,” he told me. “It is not acceptable to harm them.”

  In 2004, Hezbollah issued a communiqué condemning the beheading of American contractor Nicholas Berg by al Qaeda in Iraq as a “despicable act” that did “grave damage to Islam and the Muslims.”50

  The day before we spoke in 2006, a suicide bomber had detonated himself at the entrance of a Tel Aviv fast-food restaurant during the busy lunch hour, killing eleven and wounding more than sixty innocent civilians. The bomb was laced with nails and other projectiles; the injuries were particularly gruesome. Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed group, claimed credit.

  I asked Nasrallah how he applied his metric on civilians to Israelis. He replied that the issue was “complicated.”

  “It is our opinion that in Palestine, women and children need to be avoided in any case,” he said. “But it came after more than two months of daily Israeli killing of Palestinians, and the destruction of houses and schools, and the siege that is imposed on the Palestinians.

  “There is no other means for the Palestinians to defend themselves,” he said. “That is why I cannot condemn this type of operation in occupied Palestine.”

  Nasrallah’s aides tried to end the interview several times. Each time one of two aides interjected or pointed to their watches, he nodded, and then he continued. He had spoken for almost two hours, and it was almost ten P.M.

  Nasrallah had one last issue he wanted to talk about—America’s push for democracy in the Islamic world. He brought it up. For the first time, he ruminated, at length. To talk about democracy and freedoms for the Arab world was “lovely,” he began. But then he asked, rhetorically, if Washington understood the long-term damage when it did not recognize the results—or tried to undermine the parties elected if they were not American allies.

  “Your administration says it is assisting the democratic process in our countries, but it has to respect the results of this process,” he said.

  “After the Palestinian elections, in my opinion, the American administration made a historic mistake. The Palestinian people have chosen Hamas, and the American administration is punishing all the Palestinian people because they elected Hamas,” he said. “Now the Palestinian people are being starved, besieged, and subjected to huge pressures.

  “What will the result be?” he said. Almost certainly, he answered, even greater support for Hamas.

  “In the longer run, the real democratic process in our countries will often produce, will bring into being, governments that will be Islamist,” he said. “But you can have mutual respect and ties with them.”

  And then he was ready to go. He offered to answer further questions at another time, but he said he still had work to do. Then he got up, offered a polite nod instead of a handshake, and walked across the long room past all the faux-brocade couches, his robes swaying. His security detail asked that I stay until Nasrallah had left.

  When I drove out of the dahiya that night, most of the lights were out for blocks in all directions. A few generators rumbled noisily in the distance.

  During political transitions, vacuums are often filled, at least initially, by those who get there first.

  Hezbollah’s fourth phase began on July 12, 2006, a scorching hot summer day along the dusty Lebanese-Israeli border. At 9:05 A.M., as Hezbollah fired rockets in other directions to divert attention, a band of Shiite guerrillas scrambled across the fortified security fence into Israel’s northern farmland. The militants found their target on a secluded stretch of road near a peach orchard. In a lightning strike on the small Israeli border patrol, they fired rockets that blew up two Israeli military Humvees, killed three Israeli troops, and wounded two other soldiers.

  The Hezbollahis then nabbed the two injured Israelis—Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, both army reservists on their last day of duty—and fled back across the border. Once on Lebanese soil, the Shiite militants shed their fatigues, bundled the wounded Israelis into cars, and sped off.51

  The raid changed Hezbollah—and the Middle East.

  The attack should not have come as a total surprise. Five months earlier, Nasrallah had publicly promised to free prisoners held by Israel in 2006—a vow made at the annual Ashura commemoration of Hussein’s death.52 The issue of prisoners and long-term detainees—whose offenses ranged from murdering Israeli children to being in the wrong place at the wrong time when Israel carried out its own abductions inside Lebanon—was always wrapped up in the Shiite sense of injustice.

  A few hours after the raid, Nasrallah appeared at a hastily organized press conference in the dahiya. “This is the only way to shed light on the suffering of ten thousand Lebanese, Palestinian, and Arab detainees in Israeli prisons…after diplomatic means, political discussions, the international community’s interventions, and organizations failed to release them.”

  Operation Faithful Promise—hatched a year earlier, planned for five months—was not the first scheme to force a prisoner swap. Hezbollah had done it before.

  In 1998, Israel had turned over sixty Lebanese prisoners and the corpses of forty Hezbollah fighters—including Nasrallah’s son, nine months after his death—in exchange for the remains of one Israeli soldier.

  In 2000, another Hezbollah cross-border raid had seized three Israeli soldiers, who all died during the operation. In 2004, Nasrallah had swapped their bodies, along with an Israeli businessman who had been in Lebanon under questionable circumstances, in return for 400 Palestinian prisoners, twenty-nine prisoners from other Arab nations, and the bodies of sixty Lebanese guerrillas.

  But Israel still held more than 9,000 Palestinians and an unknown number of Lebanese, including three prisoners that Hezbollah particularly wanted.53 So the Shiite movement organized another raid for another big swap.

  Hezbollah claimed that it did not want to fight Israel. “That is not our intention,” Nasrallah told reporters. “We committed to calm all this time, despite all the circumstances. The only exception—and I told some political leaders about it—is imprisonment. We will not forget, ignore, or postpone this suffering…. [But] if the Israelis are considering any military action to bring the hostages home, they are delusional, delusional, delusional.”

  Nasrallah miscalculated—grossly.

  Israel struck back, instantly and ferociously. It unleashed the most punishing artillery, air and naval assault on Lebanon in almost a quarter century. On the first day alone, its warplanes hit Hezbollah missile launchers and military sites in southern Lebanon. It bombed roads and bridges across the nation, along borders, and in between cities to cut off Hezbollah’s fighters and resupply attempts. It struck power stations, television transmission centers, and Beirut International Airport. Within hours, Lebanon was cut off from the outside world. Israel also sent troops back into Lebanon for the first time since 2000.

  Israel wanted more than its two soldiers. The government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in office only three months, decided to use Nasrallah
’s mistake to eliminate his militia as a threat—and perhaps eliminate it altogether. Preferably, that included Nasrallah. Since 1997, Israel had kept a small DNA sample from Nasrallah’s son—in case it was ever needed to identify his father’s body.54

  “It seems like we will go to the end now,” Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon told me. “We will not go part way and be held hostage again. We’ll have to go for the kill—Hezbollah neutralization.”

  Nasrallah went into hiding. Two days later, the Hezbollah chief abandoned his offer of calm. “The battle today is no longer one of prisoners,” Nasrallah said in a recorded audio message that was relayed across a crackling telephone line to a Beirut television station. “You wanted an open war, let it be an open war. Your government wanted to change the rules of the game, let the rules of the game change.”

  The sixth modern Middle East conflict had erupted.

  The dynamics of this war were different than any other in the Middle East, especially Israel’s previous thrusts into Lebanon. Its 1978 and 1982 invasions had targeted a secular Palestinian guerrilla movement made up of outsiders no longer welcome in much of Lebanon. Yasser Arafat’s troops were predominantly Sunni, with a smattering of Christians. The fight had its roots in the creation of Israel in 1948 and the conquest of Arab territory in 1967. The battle was between rival nationalisms over a piece of land.

  The 2006 conflict, in contrast, played into fourteen centuries of Shiite history and their sense of minority persecution. Israel this time was targeting the most popular Lebanese political and military force on its own turf. The fight pitted one religion against another. And the issues were existential.

  “You don’t know who you’re fighting today,” Nasrallah warned. “You’re fighting the children of the Prophet Mohammed, Ali and Hussein and all the Prophet’s household. You’re fighting people who have faith.