Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  Tactically, the Israelis told us, the town was impossible to secure properly even though there were regular attacks on their people emanating from the place. Consequently, Nabatiya acquired a sinister reputation. Had the same thing happened to the Germans, they would have dragged ten men out and shot them for each one of their own casualties, but such things had become passé after 1945. They still are, though I believe it will happen again when things deteriorate still further – if not in the Middle East or Central Asia, then in some other trouble spot. History has a curious way of repeating itself.

  We would drive along the narrow main road through Nabatiya, always in daylight. The eyes that met ours were Shi’ite, surly, aggressive and clearly incensed. Many of these people had lost kinsmen in the war and there was no mistaking their sentiments: they despised us Western types who, uninvited, had come scratching about on their turf. To be sure, there would be a good sprinkling of Hizbollah among their ranks, many trained combatants who were biding their time for the opportunity to show their mettle.

  Men and women would stand firm on the side of the road, arms folded, heads held high and give us the evil eye. I saw that look often enough in South Africa in the apartheid era when riot police went into the townships. As they say, creed really does sometimes spawn as many bigots as race.

  The people of Nabatiya and its surrounds believed that there was a special place in Hell for what they termed these ‘Jewish intruders’ in their American trucks with their American .50 Brownings and American M40 106mm recoilless rifles mounted on American Jeeps or APCs. There was an even deeper loathing – be that possible – for IDF troopcarriers and, as might have been expected as the war progressed, it was those vehicles that became ‘preferred’ targets, as they still are when Jerusalem takes the war to the enemy.

  It’s worth mentioning that some of the very first of the improvised explosive devices of the modern period (IEDs as we know them today) were planted in these same foothills, usually laid along the same southern Lebanese byways that we travelled. The IDF called them side bombs, which was appropriate because they were always laid at the side of the road, usually with wires attached.

  Nabatiya was then – and still is – a city very different from all others in Lebanon. In a sense it might be compared to the holy city of Qom in Iran, apart from when the Shi’ite populace would celebrate Ashura, which marked the martyrdom of the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed. Then great swathes of the faithful would draw blood as they flagellated themselves across the chest and back with chains and pieces of broken wire, after which the town would sometimes be ominously quiet.

  It was not at all like the rest of Lebanon and though we didn’t know it at the time, much of what we observed underscored the fanatically religious commitment that Hizbollah – also largely Shi’ite – exploited so efficiently in later years.

  It was also at Nabatiya that the IDF, purposefully or otherwise, on 16 October 1983 committed what must arguably be the worst single tactical blunder of three decades of conflict in the Middle East. In military terms, in the minds of Israeli field commanders and their seniors, it was an almost insignificant event; a simple faux pas that happens in wartime. To Shi’ites, worldwide, the offence was the most damning assault on Shi’ite Islam.

  On that bright October day, an IDF military column arrived in Nabatiya, where some 50,000 to 60,000 Shi’ites from all over the region had worked themselves into a frenzy of chanting, wailing and bloody self-mutilation. There was no possibility of even trying to reason with such a mob; they were in the throes of what some have termed ‘the great cleansing process’ and the crowd was mindful only of their total religious commitment.

  Impatient at not being able to pass, the Israeli convoy commander decided to force a passage through the crowd anyway and he ordered the column forward. That was when the mob turned on them.

  In seconds there were tens of thousands of people screaming obscenities, throwing stones and then setting tyres alight in a bid to prevent the column from passing. Once an IDF troop carrier had been set alight, the shooting started and left two dead with more than a dozen wounded.

  That the officers responsible were subsequently disciplined was of no consequence. A terrible religious atrocity had been committed, declared the head of Lebanon’s Higher Shi’ite Council from Beirut. He also issued a fatwa, a religious edict that made it illegal for any Shi’ite, anywhere, to cooperate with Israeli troops. Effectively it was a declaration of war.

  The Israelis have been known to be indiscriminate in their use of artillery. More than 100 people – almost all of them civilians including large numbers of women and children – were killed when a cluster of IDF shells hit the Shi’ite town of Qana in South Lebanon. There were no apologies and the investigation that Jerusalem said took place afterwards yielded little. Among the seriously wounded were several members of the UN Fijian Battalion. (Author’s collection)

  Almost three weeks later at the IDF headquarters at Tyre, a place I would visit often on my way in or out of the country, the Shi’ites took their revenge by detonating a truck loaded with explosives at the front entrance of the two-storey building. Altogether 61 people were killed by the blast, roughly equal numbers of Israelis and Arab political prisoners.

  In her book, Sacred Rage, my former colleague Robin Wright tells us that it was the largest single toll Israel had incurred since the invasion: ‘A lone Shi’ite suicide bomber had killed more in one day that the PLO had claimed in the five years leading up to the invasion.’1

  She goes on: ‘As one of the most hard-line Shia mullahs explained, “Israel could have won the southerners’ hearts and minds, but instead, its warlike style has turned people against it”.’

  Looking back, one was always left with the impression that Nabatiya was a most unusual place. Other Lebanese towns – then and now – are noisy and rambunctious with everyday activity. There were always people fixing things, women calling, children shrieking and, if you listened carefully towards late afternoon, Arab flutes, which, to our Western ears might have sounded a little discordant. It was the kind of music you needed to get used to, as, with time, I did. To me these were reassuring echoes, some still resonating long after we’d left a settlement.

  In Nabatiya, by contrast, you could almost feel tingles of hatred on the back of your neck. While going through the place, nobody spoke as we passed, there was no music, no kids playing in the street and you just knew that there was trouble waiting to happen. Most often, we couldn’t wait to get out of there, yet time after time we’d go back, almost as if we were tempting the gods.

  The IDF soldiers who travelled with us felt much the same. When they returned to Israel from Beirut, they’d groan when they were told that their route would take them through Nabatiya. Unpleasant things happened there, they would comment among themselves and, as we approached, they’d be that much more vigilant.

  When I visited the town a decade later, very little had changed. Nabatiya had become a regional headquarters for Hizbollah and, according to Jerusalem, almost all attacks launched into Upper Galilee were planned from there; which is why the town is still blasted so often by the Israeli Air Force today.

  To me, Sidon wasn’t much better. I once spent two days there, ostensibly to visit some of the Palestinian camps south of the town. What an experience that was.

  The camps – which were like concentration camps without towers and manned by troops with machine-guns – were appalling. They were cesspits of misery, as I wrote in one of my reports. The children looked as though they were starving, the majority clad in rags and playing in some of the slimy pools that formed during winter months. Most families were housed in little more than shacks that gave almost no shelter from the cold and the wet. Even so, in this inner circle of purgatory, the occasional incongruity of a youngster bubbling with enthusiasm couldn’t be missed.

  It was during one of my earlier visits that I joined an Israeli patrol checking vehicles and civilians in the centre of Sidon, which was
not unlike some Israeli towns in the north, perhaps 40 years before. A section of eight paratroopers was doing a fairly good job of a distasteful task and hating it. It was as much an insult to unit elán as to the civilians who were subjected to their pawings.

  De’Ath and I went about with them, filming or taking stills, and we soon saw that the people viewed us just as they did the soldiers who were making their lives a misery. We were regarded as the enemy, because we’d arrived with this hated ‘Zionist Scum’ as Lebanese propaganda leaflets called the Israeli Army. We were in the process of recording on film their activities as they stopped traffic, searched vehicles and persons, checked IDs and asked impertinent questions. It mattered little that we were foreign journalists with foreign passports. The local Arabs even had a name for us: jundi, which in their dialect meant hated foreigners. That we were hobnobbing with the aggressor spoke for itself; by our very actions we were darkening shadows within shadows.

  What the Israeli troops in an occupied area were doing to the locals was harassment, pure and simple, and things sometimes turned violent. When George and I spoke about it afterwards, we agreed to give the opportunity a miss should it be offered again. Journalists in other parts of the world have had similar experiences and generally, you cannot avoid seeing it, because it is part of the job.

  During the course of many years of visiting the region, much had taken place, especially after I returned to the Israeli border in 1996.

  I met some members of an IDF unit that had had a few uncomfortable moments with a landmine. Earlier, one of the soldiers had found some wires alongside the road, which was something nobody ignored.

  Each potential bomb had to be investigated and it was invariably a risky process. Experience had taught that anything involving batteries or wires could be attached to command-detonated bombs. It was also apparent that those opposed to these occupiers, quickly learnt to excel in the unconventional, as they do today in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  A UN soldier at Naqoura in South Lebanon displays one of the IEDs that had been placed alongside a road used by Israel forces. It was almost indistinguishable from the rocks among which it had been laid. (Author’s collection)

  I arrived shortly after the foot patrol had gone some distance into Lebanon, well beyond the ‘Good Fence’. It was the same tedious routine, the men keeping good distance, one group watching the left and the other the right. They were all within hearing distance; no need for the radio, though it was there.

  The sergeant had noticed something in his path, nothing in particular that he could remember afterwards, but something different. He’d been doing the job long enough for it to become almost second nature.

  ‘You get the feel of it after a time…you sort of just know’, he told me in good English. On that occasion he didn’t know why he’d stopped where he did. Then he spotted the wire at his feet. ‘It’s instinctive’, he reckoned.

  His name was Avi, a cockney from Limehouse, London, he’d tell us with a chuckle. He and his family had done their Aliya when he was eight and, as is customary, he’d been called up for his regulation 36 months of military service after leaving school.

  Whenever he saw that the ground in an area where he was working had been turned or freshly dumped, he would raise his hand and tell the others to get back. ‘Far back!’ he’d shout. He did so this time too. Five or six others in the patrol positioned themselves in two shallow dips in the road after making sure that they too hadn’t been booby-trapped. Hizbollah sometimes purposely leave visible signs in one place, which, when disturbed, blow up in another nearby location – perhaps a ditch, or alongside some rocks that offer potential cover. Often enough it might be where the rest of the patrol had taken shelter. It’s a smart trick in this filthy game.

  The sapper sergeant spoke into his lapel to the command post. He had a problem, he told them, his Hebrew as fluent as any of his Sabra mates.

  As he had done possibly a score of times in the past, Sergeant Avi Issel moved slowly forward and studied the untidy little mound of soil that had caught his eye. He moved a tuft of grass and with a small metal probe, poked about until he clinked against another metal object, and that little gesture triggered the biggest alarm in the region in a month.

  It took the Israeli engineers who stepped into the breech a short while later about 30 minutes to expose the device, but by then, more troops had begun scouring the surrounding hills. They found nothing.

  Later, I was able to establish that a Hizbollah strike unit had been around, probably attached to the Islamic resistance that was operating out of the Beka’a Valley. By the time we arrived, they’d all melted into the hills.

  Just as well. The TM-57 landmine of Soviet origin that was eventually uncovered was linked by wires to still more explosive devices. There were mines and artillery shells dispersed along the length of the road over a distance of about 200 feet. Had the sergeant not found that bomb, the next IDF convoy that used the road might have been targeted and there would almost certainly have been casualties.

  My old friend Uri Dan, an Israeli political and military commentator whom I interviewed for one of my television documentaries, told me a few years before that South Lebanon was the fulcrum upon which the future of all Israeli relations with the rest of the Arab world would ultimately hinge. I’ve quoted him on the subject often enough, and with good cause; Uri believed that any arrangement without watertight guarantees for the security of Northern Israel would be suicide as long as Syria was fomenting war against his people. It was difficult to argue against such logic.

  Israeli forces along the border with South Lebanon. Specially converted road moving equipment was sometimes used to check for mines and IEDs. (Author’s collection)

  His conviction was branded short-sighted by some and it may well have been. Only time will tell whether the Israelis did the right thing by pulling back behind their own frontiers a decade ago because while they were there, South Lebanon offered the IDF an outstanding – if brutal – training ground. There was round-the-clock experience of the real thing, at a price, of course.

  It was not to be. Those 70 square Levantine miles next to the Israeli border where the IDF occupied what it referred to as its Exclusion Zone (or as some liked to say, its Zone of Influence) were a welcome if uncomfortable buffer. Eventually, Hizbollah cadres became so active in South Lebanon that the pundits in Jerusalem thought they’d cut their casualties and pull out. They dismantled their radio and radar masts, as well as the early-warning radar station near Naqoura, blew up their bunkers and living quarters, set booby traps and left.

  Nobody had counted on the IDF going into South Lebanon in force again in the summer of 2006, with disastrous consequences. Casualties that resulted from that experience – altogether 3,000 troops were deployed – were horrendous. It lasted a bit more than a month and was Israel’s first real military defeat in a ground campaign of that duration.

  While legends of the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars remain potent in the minds of Jewish people everywhere, the Arabs learnt from the 2006 misadventure that Israel really was not the indomitable megapower that Western media so often liked to portray in the past. Instead, the country was shown to be vulnerable and the fact that there had been one terrible IDF tactical or command blunder piled atop another while the shooting lasted, compounded issues.

  Suddenly, it was demonstrated to Arabs everywhere that the hated enemy was not invincible. That alone gave Hizbollah an impetus like no other event had done in decades.

  It has also made things difficult for those who report on such things. Although the shooting war was halted soon enough, the entire region south of Beirut suddenly became much more of a restricted area. It had always been a tough region to visit, but since the summer of 2006, those with dubious agendas were regarded with greatest circumspection. Simply going by the experiences of some of my colleagues, it would appear that nothing is likely to change very soon.

  South Lebanon, impasse or not, is not only a dangerous place for
strangers, it is also difficult to get to. You can try to get in overland from Beirut, or possibly across the Shouff from Damascus. Either way you will end up on the coast road, which will take you through Sidon and Tyre. Apart from the roadblocks, of which there are scores, chances are your embassy will be making enquiries about you after a week or two, especially if there is no good reason for being there in the first place.

  Some lucky people, with the right clearance, might be able to pass through Israeli lines at Rosh Haniqra, north of the town of Natanya, like we did, many times. But then again, you have to be doing something that passes Israeli scrutiny. There are many documents to be completed and the number of questions asked by the IDF can be stupefying. The chance of getting that kind of clearance today is almost zero. I tried again through the Israeli Embassy in Washington in 1999 and was denied.

  Then again, it’s like that almost everywhere you go in the Middle East these days. Try moving about in Egyptian or Syrian sensitive areas and it can be a good deal more frustrating.

  In March 1996, and once more that August, I crossed into Lebanon at Rosh Haniqra and it wasn’t much fun.

  Both young men and women do compulsory military service in the IDF. The girls play a vital role in communications, logistics, support and in certain medical spheres. This young lady sits in the radio room of an Israeli Army unit on the border with Lebanon, to the immediate west of Metulla. (Author’s collection)

  Four suicide bomb attacks had just taken place in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and there had been attempts by Hizbollah to enter Israeli territory by such ingenious means as small hang-gliders and jet-skis. Everybody was nervous. I wasn’t shot at, but others were. So, as it was throughout Lebanon before the shelling, everybody was on edge. Something was brewing but nobody could be specific.