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

by Michael Totten

  I could drive or even walk into the suburbs south of Beirut without being stopped. I could not, however, drive or walk into the Hezbollah-occupied south without a permit from the Lebanese army. Soldiers set up checkpoints on every road approaching the Israeli border, and they treated those checkpoints as if they marked the actual border. They couldn’t help me if anything happened while I was down there, and they would not let me pass if their intelligence officers thought it too dangerous.

  A Lebanese woman said she could get me through if she came with me. “I know what to say to them,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  Her name was Leena, and she worked part time as a freelance reporter while helping foreign correspondents like me in her spare time.

  She was born and raised a Shia in the south, but she didn’t think much of her home region’s politics. “I like to drink and dance on tables,” she said. “So of course I don’t agree with Hezbollah.”

  She wore Western-style clothes and dyed a red streak in her hair, so she didn’t look like the type of person who would sympathize with an Islamist militia. Some Lebanese Shias, though, supported Hezbollah anyway for sectarian reasons. Hassan Nasrallah brought real power to their community for the first time in its history, and that was a lot.

  Many secular Shias didn’t fret too much about Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqih ideology that came with the Hezbollah package as long as they lived where the state wielded authority. The sovereign parts of Lebanon, ruled as they were by a multiconfessional coalition of parties, were no more theocratic than Europe.

  “So you’re with March 14, then?” I said to Leena.

  “I’m independent,” she said. “I have problems with both sides in our political system.”

  She seemed like the ideal person to accompany me in the south. Even before Hezbollah blacklisted me, I decided I didn’t actually want to be chaperoned by one of their authoritarian minders trained in the art of dissembling. Most March 14 people, though, weren’t familiar enough with the Hezbollah-controlled areas in the south to show me around, and I didn’t want all my information to come from anti-Hezbollah partisans anyway.

  At first I suspected that Leena declared political independence because she was a journalist who strived for objectivity. I reconsidered, though, as I came to understand Lebanon better.

  Never mind the Manichean standoff between the Hariri-led March 14 and the Hezbollah-led March 8 coalitions. Lebanon had more opinions than people and almost as many parties to match. March 14 alone was more politically diverse than most countries. Opposition to Syrian and Iranian hegemony was its primary common denominator. Everyone from radical-left socialists and the strict Muslim Brotherhood to libertarian capitalists and former Christian militiamen belonged to that bloc.

  There was a serious problem, however, with what was otherwise a very large tent. March 14 didn’t include any significant and credible Shia political parties. The secular Shias of Amal were welcome to join, but March 14 couldn’t even pry their leader and Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri away from Hezbollah with a crowbar.

  So if you were a Lebanese Shia who detested Hezbollah, you had two unpalatable options. You could join one of the predominantly Christian, Sunni, or Druze parties as a marginalized minority, or you could refuse to join any political party at all. Those who chose independence, and who therefore rejected both sectarian and partisan politics, suffered fewer symptoms of groupthink than anyone else I met in the country. Leena was one of those people.

  We met for breakfast at a café on the morning we agreed to take our trip to the south. I savored my espresso and soaked up as much of the French-Mediterranean ambience as I could before we hopped in her car and drove to the shatter zone.

  The Lebanese government lost control of the south in the 1970s and still hadn’t recovered it. Since then, the area had been ruled by Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), or Hezbollah. It was a battleground almost the entire time.

  The Cairo Agreement2—brokered by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser between Arafat and the Lebanese army in 1969—gave the PLO sovereignty over Palestinian refugee camps inside Lebanon and access to the Israeli border so they could fire rockets and artillery shells at their nemesis.

  In 1971, Jordan’s King Hussein banished Arafat and the PLO to Lebanon after they tried to topple his government. Not content to live the good life on the Mediterranean in a new land that welcomed him nor chastened by his violent expulsion during what he and his men called “Black September,” Arafat continued his guerrilla and terrorist war against Israel from Lebanon. The Maronites were incensed by all this, and their anger reached the boiling point as the PLO slowly transformed West Beirut and the south into its own de facto state within a state.

  The Shias of the south likewise detested the PLO and wanted it gone. Their villages suffered collateral damage from Israeli counterattacks, which they blamed, rightly, on Arafat. No one asked or even cared how they felt about being pushed around by a foreign Sunni militia or the transformation of their quiet part of the world into a war zone.

  Beirut went to hell when clashes between the PLO and the Maronite Phalangist militia sparked the civil war in 1975, and the south exploded in 1978 when the Israelis invaded. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon3 (UNIFIL) was established soon after as a peacekeeping force, but the PLO wouldn’t quit.

  The Israelis mounted a much more serious invasion in June of 1982, and this time they went all the way to Beirut. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon vowed not only to throw the PLO off the border but also to do what King Hussein of Jordan had done and evict Arafat and his men from the country entirely.

  The IDF punched through the PLO on the border and reached Arafat’s command and control center in Beirut in eight days. They struck PLO positions from sea, air, and land, and cut off food, water, and electricity, placing the whole of West Beirut under siege. Thousands were killed in the fighting.

  The city’s Sunni leaders summoned Arafat and his aides and said they had put up a good fight, but Lebanon had suffered enough. Lebanon, in fact, had suffered a lot. By August, French and American peacekeeping troops agreed to escort Arafat and his men out of the country.

  He and his lieutenants were banished to Tunisia, another pleasant Arab country on the Mediterranean, only this time without an Israeli border to shoot at. “In Beirut, we were in exile,” one of his senior aides said to reporter Thomas Friedman in Tunis.4 “Here we are in exile from exile.”

  South Lebanon’s Shias greeted the Israeli soldiers as liberators. It didn’t matter that the Shia were Arabs and Muslims. What mattered was that they weren’t Palestinians. They weren’t even Sunnis. Palestinians—and the Lebanese Sunnis who embraced them and gave them license—were to blame for most of their problems. The Israelis were welcome to rid their land of that menace as long as they didn’t stay.

  But the Israelis stayed. Sharon and Begin had a side project going at the same time to bolster Lebanon’s newly elected president Bashir Gemayel.

  Gemayel, political front man for the Kataeb (Phalangist) militia, was elected in August as the PLO was evacuating the country, and he promised the Israelis a peace treaty. Before he was inaugurated, however, Habib Shartouni of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party killed him and twenty-six of his aides with a bomb hidden in an apartment above his headquarters.5

  His older brother Amin was elected president in his place, and he stepped back from his party’s alliance with Israel. Meanwhile, the Kataeb militia, under the leadership of Elie Hobeika, retaliated for Bashir’s assassination by massacring hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in southern Beirut.

  Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv in the largest demonstration in their country’s history. Their soldiers didn’t participate in the massacre, but they were allied with the Maronite militia that did. They even illuminated the camps at night with aerial flares so the Phalangists could
do their dirty work in the dark. In 1983, Israel’s Kahan Commission6 found Ariel Sharon “personally responsible” and recommended that he be relieved of his post. He resigned under a storm of public pressure.

  Israel drastically scaled back its objectives and left the Phalangists to fend for themselves—which suited most of Lebanon’s Maronites fine. The country was not remotely prepared for a treaty or alliance with Israel, especially after Sharon’s bloody siege of Beirut.

  The Lebanese state was little more than a government in name only anyway. Amin Gemayel could not have enforced a peace treaty even if the government had ratified one, nor could he secure his own southern border. The IDF eventually gave up and withdrew to a “security zone” ten or so miles deep into Lebanese territory, hunkered down behind a line of defenses, and hoped to keep the war from spilling over the border again.

  It didn’t work. Swapping a PLO statelet for an Israeli occupation was not what the Shias of the south had in mind. Their hospitality quickly turned to frustration and, later, to hatred.

  Ashura is a Shia religious holiday, and it is not joyous. It marks the anniversary of the Battle of Karbala in the year 680, where Hussein—son of Ali and grandson of the Prophet Muhammad—was slain by the forces of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid. On this day, pious Shias engage in a public demonstration of grief and lamentation. Some Shia men even flail themselves with chains or cut their heads with swords and conspicuously bleed on themselves as they make their way through the streets.

  In 1983, a year after the PLO had been vanquished, IDF patrol trucks made a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of an Ashura procession in Nabatieh. The drivers fatefully tried to barge their way through a crowd. Some of the mourners threw rocks, and Israeli soldiers shot them. The IDF looked to the faithful like a modern Yazid.

  It was the last straw for many, and not only because they now had a grievance to nurture. While the Israelis proceeded to wear out their welcome, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers were busy indoctrinating the local population and organizing its disgruntled members into guerrilla and terrorist cells. According to Magnus Ranstorp at the Swedish National Defence College, Iran redeployed as many as 1,500 Revolutionary Guard members7 to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley from battlefields in the Iran-Iraq war immediately after the Israeli invasion.

  Using hit-and-run guerrilla attacks, precision sniper and mortar fire, and—what would soon become their specialty—suicide bombers, the Islamic Resistance kept the IDF bogged down in a grinding counterinsurgency even after Lebanon’s civil war ended.

  The Israeli public eventually grew sick to death of it all. The “security zone” in South Lebanon looked more like an insecurity zone. Israel made no claims on Lebanese territory. Most Israelis never wanted to be drawn into Lebanon in the first place and figured Hezbollah would leave them alone if they left.

  The mothers of four soldiers killed in the zone galvanized public opinion8 when they campaigned for a military withdrawal. In 1999, Israelis elected Ehud Barak prime minister in part because he promised to bring the soldiers in Lebanon home. Like everyone else swayed by the Four Mothers Movement, he figured the Lebanese army would take the IDF’s place and secure its own border.

  The Israelis left hastily, though, without coordinating with Beirut. Hezbollah fighters flooded the zone and set up positions along the fence. Tehran itself may as well have taken control of the border. The United Nations certified that Israel had withdrawn from 100 percent of Lebanon’s territory, but to the astonishment and horror of just about everybody in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Hezbollah continued its war against Israel.

  “From small arms to standoff weapons,” Ranstorp at the Swedish National Defence College wrote,9 “Hezbollah gradually acquired an impressive arsenal, from over a thousand 122 mm Katy-usha rockets, AT-4 antitank missiles, and rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) to mortars and antiaircraft batteries. This made it among the most sophisticated and well-armed guerrilla/terrorist groups in the world. . . . In this lethal enterprise there are few organizations as capable, precise and dangerous.”

  That was in 1990. By the time I arrived in South Lebanon fifteen years later, Hezbollah had boosted its arsenal by several orders of magnitude.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  welcome to hezbollahland

  Between Beirut and Tel Aviv there is . . . this strange dark kingdom.

  —JONATHAN SPYER

  Leena and I pulled up to the last Lebanese army checkpoint before Hezbollah’s territory began. “Who’s he?” said the soldier in charge. Leena didn’t need a permit to enter the zone, but I, as a foreigner, did. And I didn’t have one.

  “He’s a friend,” she said.

  “Where’s he from?” the soldier said.

  “I’m American,” I said. There was no point in pretending I was anything else. I looked like an American, talked like an American, and carried an American passport. There wasn’t a chance I could convince him I was from South Lebanon.

  “Like I said, he is a friend,” Leena said in Arabic with a southern accent that can’t be easily faked. “I’m taking him to my family’s house so I can show him where I come from.”

  The soldier nodded and let us pass. So much for needing a permit.

  As soon as Leena and I drove away from the checkpoint, we had effectively left Lebanon and arrived somewhere else. Neither government soldiers nor police officers were allowed down there. The Shia-majority cities of Nabatieh and Tyre behind us were within the government’s jurisdiction, but the only authority near the border with Israel was Hezbollah. Tehran had more sovereignty there than Beirut did.

  Rapid urban migrations in developing countries are often not pretty, but the rural south appeared settled, moderately prosperous, even tranquil despite all the violence over the years. It was a relief after the impoverished and ramshackle dahiyeh. So many people in the suburbs south of Beirut came to the capital under extraordinary circumstances and left everything behind. Those who remained in the south had their reasons. Maybe they prospered there or couldn’t bear the thought of uprooting themselves. Either way, the south was their home and had been the home of their community for hundreds of years. Though the land was rocky in places and was less suitable for agriculture than the fecund Bekaa Valley, the southerners could still work it, and they could keep the fruits of the labor.

  Many single-family homes were large enough to house three generations, and every village and town had sprawling villas. The apartment buildings were simple but looked nothing like the spirit crushing slum towers in the southern suburbs. Some of South Lebanon’s money had been earned abroad in the Diaspora, and some of it came as aid from Iran’s Islamic Republic, but there was real wealth all the same. None of the south’s Shia villages or towns looked to my eyes like slums.

  It was still Hezbollahland, though. The whole place was a gigantic outdoor museum for the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon.

  Portraits of “martyrs” hung from the sides of electrical poles just as they did in the dahiyeh. Here, though, the portraits were cleaner and appeared to have been installed a little more recently. Posters portraying Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and its current Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were outnumbered only by those featuring Hezbollah’s grinning beturbaned Hassan Nasrallah.

  Billboards showed bloody and fiery depictions of mayhem and war accompanied by text in both English and Arabic. On the road beneath the crumbling Beaufort Castle, the story of suicide bomber Haitham Dbouq was told next to his portrait. “Haitham stormed into the convoy—that had 30 occupation troops in its ranks—blowing up his car amidst the vehicles that turned into fireballs and scattered bodies on the ground. Thirty Zionist casualties was the size of the material shock that hit the occupation army; the morale shock was much larger and more dangerous.”

  The entire area was strewn with scorched tanks, blasted trucks, and military ordnance carefully placed by Hezbollah in order to best show it off. I saw young children playing on one of the tanks, their tiny legs dangling from the turret. A
gigantic cardboard figure of Khomeini smiled down on them.

  Funny place, Hezbollahland. It was basically a separatist region that hadn’t declared itself a separatist region. Nasrallah knew well the benefits of existing both alongside and inside the state. Beirut may as well have been the capital of a foreign country, yet he and his deputies held a few seats in its parliament.

  They needed that state. Lebanon was Hezbollah’s vast human shield. Israel would have to think long and hard before striking Hezbollah and damaging the country that produced the Beirut Spring and was a respectable ally of the U.S. and Europe. If Hezbollah was recognized internationally as the ruler of its own sovereign state, it would be left naked and exposed to devastating military reprisals while Beirut and Mount Lebanon went their own way and prospered.

  Leena wanted to show me the village of Ghajar, a pinpoint on the map where three nations converged and formed the strangest of knots. The northern half of the village was in Lebanon. The southern half was controlled by Israel. All of it once belonged to Syria.

  After Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 war, Ghajar was stranded in a no-man’s-land between Lebanon and Israeli-occupied Syria. The residents couldn’t live suspended in limbo between the two countries forever, so they petitioned the State of Israel and asked to be annexed. They were Syrians—Arabs—not Jews or Israelis, but they would rather live in Syria under Israeli occupation than in Lebanon.

  The Lebanese-Syrian border, though, wasn’t marked. Over time, Ghajar expanded northward, without anyone even knowing it, into Lebanon.1 And in the year 2000, when Israel withdrew from its security zone, the village was thrown into turmoil.