Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East

by Jared Cohen

  They filled out my surveys, but I didn’t look at what they wrote until after we parted ways.

  In one sentence, if the United States could change anything to gain the support of the youth, what should it do?

  One of the kids had written, “America is the biggest imperialist and the only thing I want is to see America destroyed.” Another survey read, “Nothing. We hate the American government, they support Israel and kill Palestinians.” These words sent chills down my spine.

  Following my arrangements with Bashar, we all met at a kebab fast-food restaurant near Bliss Street in downtown Beirut. It had that cafeteria feel to it, with the buffet-style servings and the plastic trays. It was filled with students, some studying while chowing on some kebab, others just socializing with friends and using food as the excuse. In the same way that I could smell McDonald’s before even entering the fast-food joint, the smell of mass-produced beef kebab lingered in the air. But I wasn’t fussy, because they were paying. The only people I recognized were Bashar, who was wearing a backward New York Yankees hat, and his friend, whose name I couldn’t remember. The other three kids were new.

  I sat down, introduced myself, and gave what became my usual pitch to his friends.

  “I’m doing research on youth in the Middle East to try and make the world aware of how you all think and what is important to you. I have not come here to judge, but rather collect perspectives….” And so on. This was my way of appearing amiable and disarming to them.

  They were all business. No sooner had we finished introductions than they began speaking about the highly contentious Arab-Israeli conflict. As it turned out, three of the guys present were members of Hezbollah and the others were Shi’a supporters of the organization, meaning they were part of the Hezbollah political party. Mohammad was one of the political party members. He was big, but not fat. His hair was disheveled and bushy, which as I would later infer had likely resulted from the mere two to three hours of sleep he had had the previous night. He insisted on letting me know who he was, and by this I realized he meant a particular category of people.

  “I am a Shi’ite from Dahiyeh, but I am not a member of Hezbollah,” he explained to me. “Without Hezbollah I would not have seen my village. I am now twenty-one years old and I saw my country—my village—just from the year two thousand because it was conquered. So Hezbollah brought me home. We are grateful to them. Now, if we don’t support Hezbollah politically and vote for them, they do not have the legitimacy they need to continue.”

  His friend Omar nodded in agreement. Positioned with his elbows on the table he explained to me how they view themselves vis-à-vis Hezbollah: “We are part of a nation that admires what Hezbollah did; we are a people who support, admire, vote for, and recognize the Party of God.”

  A third member of the group, Ali, introduced himself to me as a committee member of Hezbollah. This was a subtle way of letting me know he was actually part of the organization, although he wouldn’t tell me in what capacity.

  “Let me ask you this,” he said. “If someone came into your house and murdered your sister in the middle of the night, what would you want to do to that person?” This was kind of a random question and certainly out of context. I wasn’t exactly sure where he was going.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean, what would you want to see happen to that person?” Was he interviewing me? I thought about it for a minute and told him quite honestly, “I would want to see that person punished as much as possible.”

  “How old is your sister?” he asked.

  “Twenty-six,” I said.

  There was a long pause. His face said that he had a point, but I had no idea what it was.

  “In 1996, the Israeli military came to my house and shot my sister. Do you know how old she was? She was six years of age.”

  I didn’t know what to say in response, so I waited for him to continue.

  “You said you would want that person to suffer as much as possible, so you can see and understand why we want to fight against Israel. It is our right to seek justice.”

  He had put words in my mouth and tricked me into agreeing with him. He had me cornered. This was my glimpse at how Hezbollah recruits new members, how they sell their ideology, and how they make their points. Regardless of what one might think of Hezbollah—and there are certainly varying opinions—the operatives are strategic and well-trained in spreading their message. They can be very convincing to someone without knowledge and can be very manipulative to someone with knowledge. They always tried to pull this trick on me and it was surprising how often it worked.

  We moved on to other issues. I asked them about the relationship between Hezbollah and the Palestinians. This was something I had been particularly curious about. Like Palestinian militant groups, Hezbollah had also directed much of its effort against Israel, yet while Palestinian groups were predominantly Sunni Muslim, Hezbollah was Shi’a. A Druze friend had told me that Hezbollah will never help the Palestinian groups because they are Shi’a and the Palestinians are Sunni; they will fear that the Sunni won’t appreciate their support. There is no way that my Druze friend was correct. All I had heard from Shi’a and Sunni was a similar gripe against Israel. As a Jew, these sentiments would always make me quiver, but that was all the more reason to understand where their perspectives came from.

  Ali fielded my question. He explained that as Hezbollah, he wanted peace in Lebanon, which he felt included the disputed Shaba Farms. Shaba Farms is one of the last remaining pieces of land that Hezbollah claims to be fighting for and undoubtedly the most significant in size and location. It is located on the border of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, and Hezbollah has attempted to lay claim to the land as belonging to the Lebanese. In reality, Shaba Farms has been Hezbollah’s excuse to continue its military expeditions. Ali said as Hezbollah, he will fight Israel over Shaba Farms, but it is not his responsibility to fight Israel over the Palestinian issue. After explaining this to me, he was careful to at least mention that he would support the Palestinians at the UN. I facetiously thought to myself, That is so diplomatic of you, but I hardly believed it.

  Lacking confidence in Ali’s answer, I pushed harder to figure out what the connection was between Hezbollah and the Palestinians. He sensed my skepticism and muttered something incomprehensible to his friend. He was either pissed off at me for not believing him, or he was frustrated that I didn’t understand his answer.

  One of the other boys spoke up. His name was Karim and he was the oldest of the group, but I thought the least articulate. He wore a tattered white T-shirt and ripped blue jeans. He looked like he had just crawled out of bed. His answer was a little more believable as he explained, “We as Hezbollah are not fighting for the Palestinians; we are supporting the Palestinians because they also defend their country, which is Palestine.” Of course, Karim was careful not to give the details of what that “support” entailed.

  I knew I could squeeze these details out if I just pushed a little bit, so this is what I did. Karim took the bait and explained that they might support them financially, but they will never send them soldiers. It made sense to me now. Thematically it appeared as though Hezbollah saw eye-to-eye with their Palestinian colleagues. They shared a common enemy in Israel, but their objectives, grievances, and struggles were different.

  Ali chimed back in, explaining that it is not their pleasure to have peace with Israel and that most Lebanese don’t want this. Karim had already made this point, but I think he didn’t like someone else being the center of attention.

  When I asked why they don’t want peace with Israel, Mohammad, who up until now had been the quiet one, offered a fiery answer. “We can’t have peace with a country that shouldn’t exist. If we accept Israel, then we accept Zionism. Egypt did this and they fucked all the Egyptians. Peace with Israel will lead us to destroy ourselves.” I am sure I looked aghast, because what do you really say in response to this? The Hezbollah guys were big on exampl
es. Ali told me a story about how in 1996, Israel attacked his village of Qana and killed not just all the children in his village, but also all of the UN workers there. While I didn’t doubt that Israel had launched an attack in his village, I had trouble believing that Israel had used explosive teddy bears and had deliberately targeted women and children. What I didn’t doubt was that he had heard something like this on Al-Manar Television, which is Hezbollah’s media.

  Ali asked me if I knew why Hezbollah has been able to fight against Israel. He wanted to remind me why, in his opinion, the organization would be here to stay. He doesn’t believe it matters how advanced or modern the weapons are. In his Hezbollah world, they have an even more valuable weapon. This weapon, he explained, was not tanks, nuclear weapons, or airplanes. Instead, he argued, their strongest weapon is faith. I saw the others nodding in affirmation as Ali explained that the Hezbollah youth are willing to die just for the sake of killing Israeli soldiers because they know God is on their side. My reaction was not so much shock that they actually believed this, but instead a sense of tragedy that, growing up, they were probably never told anything different. They really did believe that killing Israeli soldiers would put them in God’s good graces.

  The Israel-bashing continued. I was used to this from other Lebanese youth, but the way Hezbollah talked about Israel was particularly violent. They always made it sound like self-defense: the suicide bombings, the kidnappings, the senseless rocket attacks; they believed that they were the victims. They felt constantly under attack by Israel and believed it was their duty to take them out at all costs.

  The metaphors they used to illustrate their points were bizarre. At one point in the conversation Mohammad compared sexual harassment with being pro-Israel. He tried to reason that if you stand beside a girl and someone insults her, the natural response is to want to attack him no matter how big he is. OK, I understood this logic. But he then went on to suggest that Israel was the male bully and the Palestinians were the metaphorical girl being victimized. Besides being a strange analogy to draw, it didn’t make any sense.

  What would a conversation with Hezbollah be without a candid discussion about suicide bombing? Always feeling awkward to bring this up, I introduced the topic by suggesting that a lot of scholars and journalists have described this practice as immoral and contrary to Islam.

  Bashar chose to field my inquiry. He suggested that as a people under attack, they have two options: sit down or go and fight. In his view, choosing to fight was a kind of suicide because you could likely die in battle. But he was careful to tell me that whether someone dies in battle or by detonating himself as a bomb, “We do not believe this is suicide because your goal is your country, your God, and your dignity.”

  Eager to get his point in, Karim added that Hezbollah strongly disagrees with the idea of using weapons on its own people. It still wasn’t clear to me whom they viewed as their people: the Shi’a? Lebanese? Muslims? He explained that their people are the Shi’a and the Lebanese and recalled that even when they were fighting against their historical Shi’a rival group Amal, they did not employ suicide bombing. In a strange acknowledgment, he then went on to say that “we only kill ourselves for the special situation when we cannot do anything else against Israeli soldiers.” He elaborated by describing how Israel has radars and weapons and all they have is their bodies and explosives. I didn’t buy this, but I listened. It was difficult for me to believe that in all the years of conflict in Lebanon, Hezbollah had no other Lebanese blood on their hands. Armed with missiles and rockets as well as funding from Iran, the organization is the most substantial military force in Lebanon. And if they don’t believe in killing their own, this seems to contradict the very idea of suicide bombing.

  It is because of Hezbollah’s known and diverse weaponry, rather than its capability as an organization that can employ suicide tactics, that make it especially dangerous. UN Resolution 1559 called for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias. Hezbollah believes that despite the UN resolution, it cannot disarm. So long as it continues to believe it is the defender of Lebanon’s borders and the militia for the Lebanese people, this is unlikely to change.

  Feeling true to their duty, other members of Hezbollah raised doubts about whether or not Israel would stay out of the South even after they disarmed. They often explained that they are on constant alert because they must exist as a moving presence or Israel will attack them. His mention of the mobile presence is a key characteristic of Hezbollah. Its arms, offices, and stations are scattered throughout its territories. Its weapons are in the private homes of its members and supporters. All of its weapons caches are underground or clandestine. Hezbollah wants to create the aura of an unlimited weapons supply that potentially includes weapons of mass destruction (WMD), yet it wants the true nature of what it possesses to remain a secret. The reality is that the weapons are scattered in so many places that they themselves probably don’t know exactly how much they have.

  It all sounded very scary to me, with the potential for a minor border skirmish to escalate if the right buttons were pushed.

  I heard from them time and again that their weapons are not for the Lebanese people and that they would not attack any Lebanese movement, only Israel, and only in self-defense. As the world would learn a year later, however, Hezbollah’s tactics in its war with Israel would ultimately lead to the deaths of the innocents Hezbollah pledged to leave unharmed. I don’t think that these youth realized that Hezbollah was in fact looking for a fight. If the Hezbollah youth were talking this way, then they were duped by an older generation that wanted something different than the protection of Lebanese borders. My instincts were right. The Hezbollah-orchestrated kidnappings that sparked the July 2006 war with Israel showed the world a militia looking for a fight. This fight enabled the older generation to hijack the goals of their youth and quash any hope that a more progressive youth would drive the organization away from terrorist activity and into a role that would see them as an internationally recognized part of Lebanese politics.

  At the fast-food lunch, I asked the group of beef-kebab-eating Hezbollah members how they felt about the world viewing them as terrorists. I thought they would be agitated by this question, but instead they sought to clarify that it wasn’t the world, it was just America and its allies. He explained to me that they are also against terrorism, at which point he noted that Hezbollah is against Osama bin Laden and sees 9/11 as an example of terrorism. However, Ali, always eager to share his expert Hezbollah opinion, also noted that they do not view Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas as terrorist groups, because they are resisting within a country that is rightfully theirs. From his standpoint, they simply want to go home to Palestine. Whether I spoke to Ali, or one of his Hezbollah colleagues, it was always the same focus on motives, rather than tactics. It was as if they believed that motives rendered even the most barbaric practices justifiable. Every time I brought up suicide bombing or targeting innocent civilians, their answer was always in the motive.

  When I would return to Beirut from later trips to Palestinian refugee camps and Iraq, the Hezbollah members whom I had told I was Jewish several months prior over Happy Meals were all of a sudden less than cordial to me. They became totally unresponsive and I began to wonder why. In the past, I’d provided some of these Hezbollah youth with copies of my passport; admitting me to Hezbollah strongholds required official permission from the Hezbollah higher-ups. They had my name, place of birth, passport number, photo, and whatever else was on my passport. They also knew that I had studied at Stanford and at Oxford and that I was a Jewish American. None of this ever presented itself as a problem while I interviewed them. But when I returned to Lebanon from Iraq, these same Hezbollah members stood me up on several occasions, ignored my phone calls, and refused to respond to my text messages. They wanted nothing to do with me. The silence was actually ominous. My suspicions were confirmed when I received a cryptic text message from one of them in
dicating that they would not meet with me anymore. I wrote back, called, and talked to friends of mine who knew them. They wouldn’t see me and they wouldn’t give a reason.

  I knew that I was now on their bad side. While I had felt safe around Hezbollah so long as they were cordial to me, knowing I had somehow pissed them off was a different story. Was it possible they had done a Google search and found the photo of me holding an Israeli flag at a 2002 protest at Stanford? Had they found out about my internships at the Department of Defense and the State Department, information that could also be obtained in articles written about me on the Internet? Or had they gone so far as to check with the Iranians, who would obviously tell them that I hadn’t been allowed back in the country? I was curious, but I didn’t feel like staying around to find out.

  CHAPTER 8

  STRUGGLING FOR DIGNITY

  LEBANON (PALESTINIAN CAMPS), 2005

  Before I left Beirut the first time, I met someone who would help me get to the Palestinian refugee camps, in particular the notorious Ayn al-Hilwah. The opportunity to visit a Palestinian refugee camp presented itself to me rather unexpectedly in Beirut. On one Thursday afternoon, I was eating lunch with a group of friends, mostly Sunni Muslims, in the cafeteria at the Lebanese American University. The cafeteria was like a food court at any American college, with a few minor differences: In addition to Snickers bars and hamburgers, a student at Lebanese American University could dine on chicken kebab. Four of us sat at a plastic square table, sharing stories about the previous evening. Each one of us had spent the evening at a different bar or club. Some had met girls, others had encountered exes, and one or two others appeared to have had too much to drink the night before. As we were talking, a rather heavyset and scruffy student approached the table to say hello to Juliana, one of my friends at the table. She stood up and they exchanged three kisses on the cheek, the standard greeting in Lebanon. She then gestured to me, and said, “Achmad, I want you to meet my friend from America.”