That sentiment didn’t last long. Olmert blamed the Lebanese government, not just Hezbollah, for the attack. It didn’t matter to most Israelis that the Lebanese government had nothing to do with the killing and kidnapping of their soldiers—the attack came from inside Lebanese territory. So the Israeli Air Force destroyed targets even in areas outside Hezbollah’s control. Even some Christian and Sunni regions where the overwhelming majority despised Hezbollah were hit by Israeli air strikes.5
Sympathy inside Lebanon for the Israeli “enemy of my enemy” plunged after that happened. Hezbollah briefly managed to rebrand itself as a national fighting force. Israel’s air strikes overwhelmingly landed in Hezbollah-controlled areas, but not all of them did, so almost everyone in Lebanon felt like they could be killed. The Lebanese army—as usual during Israel’s wars—sat out the fighting. If Hezbollah didn’t fight the Israelis, nobody would fight the Israelis.
Temporarily lost in all this was the fact that Israelis wouldn’t be shooting at Lebanon in the first place if it weren’t for Hezbollah.
On July 30, 2006, Lebanese rage against Israel reached its apogee when history eerily repeated itself. The Israeli Air Force destroyed a three-story building in the village of al-Khuraybah near the larger town of Qana. Twenty-eight people, many of them children, were killed.6 IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz apologized for the deaths of civilians and blamed Hezbollah for using them as human shields. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora accused Israel of committing a war crime.
Killing civilians near Qana—and it didn’t matter whether or not the Israelis did it on purpose—was bound to send the Lebanese over the edge. Qana was where a nearly identical incident took place ten years earlier. On April 18, 1996, the IDF shelled a United Nations compound while Hezbollah fired Katyusha rockets into Northern Israel from a few hundred yards away.7 One hundred and six people were killed. The incident is known inside Lebanon as the Qana Massacre, and it is infamous.
Whatever remaining scrap of sympathy or understanding some Lebanese had for Israel’s point of view vaporized after “Qana” was repeated. The Israelis knew they screwed up, and they knew they screwed up badly. Air strikes were halted for forty-eight hours even as the Katyusha rockets kept flying.
I told Michael Oren that I’m not normally pessimistic about the performance of Western armies in wars but that this one didn’t look good. Cities, towns, villages, roads, bridges, and houses in Lebanon had been bombed. Hundreds of civilians had been killed. Hezbollah fighters had also been killed, but the Katyushas were still flying just as fast and as often as they were at the beginning. It didn’t look like much had been accomplished. Hezbollah, astonishingly, was popular in Lebanon all over again, yet another civil war could easily ignite once the inevitable postwar backlash kicked in.
“Talk me out of it,” I said. “Tell me if I’m wrong.”
He didn’t want to say much. I could tell from the look on his face that he was not happy either, but he was an official spokesman and had to be careful with what he said on the record.
“Has anything been permanently accomplished up there?” I said.
“Some things, yes,” he said. “We destroyed a lot of their infrastructure. They had more weapons and more underground bunkers and tunnels than we had any idea. People coming out of there say it’s vast.”
“What do you think about the proposal for an international force on the border?” I said. The United Nations would, in fact, soon put more troops on the Lebanese side of the border ostensibly to prevent Hezbollah from controlling that part of the country again.
“The problem with that,” he said, “is that the force could act as a shield for Hezbollah. Hezbollah could fire missiles right over the tops of their heads and make it very difficult for us to go in there and stop them. It needs to be a combat force in Lebanon, not a peacekeeping force.”
“Hassan Nasrallah declared victory today,” I said.
Oren laughed. Of course he would laugh. It was obvious well in advance that Hezbollah’s secretary general would declare victory no matter what happened as long as he wasn’t captured or killed. The Arab bar for military victory had been set low for decades. All their side had to do was survive. They “won” even if their country was torn to pieces. The very idea of a Pyrrhic victory, where losses exceed paltry gains, seemed not to occur to leaders incapable of defeating the State of Israel in battle.
“Look at Nasrallah today,” Oren said. “In 2000 he did his victory dance in Bint Jbail. He can’t do that this time. His command and control south of Beirut is completely gone. We killed 550 Hezbollah fighters south of the Litani River out of an active force of 1,250. Nasrallah claimed South Lebanon would be the graveyard of the IDF, but we only lost one tenth of 1 percent of our soldiers in South Lebanon. The only thing that went according to his plan was their ability to keep firing rockets. If he has enough victories like this one, he’s dead.”
“Have Hezbollah’s fighting techniques evolved or degraded since 2000?” I said.
“They’re the same,” he said. “They’re good. These guys are very experienced. They have been fighting for a long time. But we’ve killed more than 25 percent of their fighting force. I think they’ll break. All armies break. Killing even 1 percent of a Western army is a disaster. It’s prohibitive.”
Another IDF spokesman stood at Oren’s side. I was surprised to see this guy. He was the famous Hollywood screenwriter Dan Gordon, and he volunteered for the job. Credits to his name include The Hurricane with Denzel Washington and 1994’s Wyatt Earp. I thought it was crazy that an American civilian would volunteer to work in a Middle Eastern war zone until I remembered that I was doing exactly the same thing myself.
Gordon walked me to another lookout point just at the top of another ridge over Lebanon. A village with apparently intact buildings lay just below. We had no cover. The windows of the buildings looked threatening. The last time I stood on that border just a few months earlier, Zvika Golan warned me that Hezbollah might be watching us through a sniper scope.
“Have you had any sniper attacks?” I asked Gordon.
“Yes, actually we have,” he said and stepped back. “This is probably not a good place for us to be standing.”
I thought it strange that I was more sensitive to the danger than he was. That, I suppose, was an advantage of being unaccustomed to war zones. My extreme discomfort kept me from feeling like I was invincible. That would come later after I adapted.
“Hardly any journalists have mentioned this,” he said, “but at the very beginning of this thing, when Hezbollah captured our soldiers, they also tried to invade, conquer, and hold the town of Metula along with two other towns. And they were repulsed.”
Of course Hezbollah was repulsed. It was a guerrilla army. It didn’t have standard infantry troops.
“We do have one serious asset from this war,” he said. “Hassan Nasrallah got his ass kicked. And he knows it.”
“Did he really get his ass kicked?” I said. “The IDF fought Hezbollah for years to a standstill before. What made you think it would be easy to get rid of them this time?”
“This time it’s different,” he said. “This time we’re going in there to kill them. We are not trying to hold on to territory. This is actually working. We are not stuck in the mud. Oh, and here’s another tangible: Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon no longer exists.”
Later I received a phone call from my friend and colleague Allison Kaplan Sommer in Tel Aviv. “Have you heard the news?” she said.
I hadn’t.
Neither had Dan Gordon. Neither had Michael Oren.
“The cease-fire is dead,” she said. “The ground invasion is starting.”
Individual ground units had been making brief jaunts into Lebanon from the beginning, but Olmert had just decided to launch the real thing.
Noah and I lost access to our spokesmen. The war was ramping up and they were summoned to meetings. So we drove to the border town of Metula, the one Hezbollah had tried to invade
, and watched Israel’s invasion of Lebanon from the roof of the Alaska Inn.
War does strange things to the mind. The first time you hear the loud boom, bang, and crash of incoming and outgoing artillery, you will jump. You will twitch. You will want to take cover. You will want to hide. You will feel like you could die at any second, like the air around you is drenched with gasoline, like the universe is gearing up to smash you to pieces.
It’s amazing how fast you get used to it, even if you have no military training and grew up in tranquil suburban America.
It took me four hours.
Any given location in Northern Israel and South Lebanon would almost certainly never be hit with a missile, bullet, bomb, or artillery shell. Lebanon was hit more frequently, and Israel was hit more randomly, but the vast majority of people in both places weren’t even scratched, let alone killed.
Explosions jack your survival instinct up to eleven, but after a while, straight math kicks in. You run numbers in your head, even subconsciously. Most places aren’t ever hit, so what were the odds, really, that you would be standing in one of the few places that were hit at the precise moment it happened?
Being under fire in Northern Israel was not like, say, walking around loose by myself in Baghdad. No one was out to get me. Only Hezbollah fighters and its leaders in Lebanon were targeted as individuals. All of Northern Israel was a collective target, but a very large one that I vanished into almost completely.
The odds that any given place in Northern Israel would be hit were the same as the odds that any other given place in Northern Israel would be hit. Hezbollah’s rockets landed almost at random. They were pathetic military weapons, but perfect terrorist weapons.
There were a few exceptions. Kiryat Shmona was hit quite a lot. Metula was hit hardly at all, although Hezbollah did fire a mortar round into the side of the Alaska Inn two hours before Noah and I arrived. Still, anywhere out in the open was just as dangerous as anywhere else out in the open.
This is logical, but the mind doesn’t always work like that when sensing danger from the environment.
Driving on an empty road and looking at an impact site up ahead was unsettling. Kibbutz HaGoshrim put me at ease because it was idyllic and sheltered by shade trees. Yet neither location was safer or more dangerous than the other.
The trees at the kibbutz blocked out the sky and made me feel protected. Obviously, the branches of trees could do nothing to stop or slow a Katyusha rocket, but when you’re under fire from above, the sky feels like a gigantic malevolent eyeball. When you’re underneath trees, the gigantic malevolent eyeball can’t see you. Therefore a rocket won’t hit you. That’s not how it was, but that’s what it felt like.
During my first several hours in the war zone, I constantly tried to figure out what I could do to make myself safer. Should I stand here instead of there? How about if I crouch down a little bit? Maybe if I sit on the ground, a rocket will miss my head? I figured it was better to stand near things than away from things, as long as those things were not cars.
All this thinking was useless. I would either be hit or I wouldn’t. Walking or driving faster could get me away from an incoming rocket, or it could get me closer. It was all totally random.
Fear has a purpose. It forces you to think hard and fast about what you can or must do to protect yourself. As soon as you realize there is nothing more you can do, fear loses its purpose and vanishes. It really does.
New York City immediately after September 11, 2001, was a much scarier place than Northern Israel during the war once I got used to it. It wasn’t safer, not even remotely, but there is only so much adrenaline in the human body.
This is the fatal weakness of terrorism. What’s a terrorist to do once the terror wears off?
While Noah and I sat on the roof of Metula’s Alaska Inn watching Israel gear up for the ground invasion, a voice below blared something in Hebrew over a loudspeaker.
“What was that?” Noah asked an Israeli woman standing next to us.
“He said, ‘Go to the shelters because a rocket is about to hit the roof of the hotel,’” she said.
“Seriously?” I said.
“No,” she said and laughed. “But a rocket really is coming. It really is time to go to the shelters.”
We waited for the elevator. It seemed to take forever.
“Where is the shelter, anyway?” I said.
“I don’t know,” the Israeli woman said.
The elevator doors opened. We all got in. It took ages to get down to the lobby.
When the doors opened on the main floor, none of the people in the lobby or restaurant were moving. They were all perfectly calm as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. All of us, though, heard the sirens.
Everyone knows fear is contagious. What I think is less understood is that calm is also contagious.
I walked up to the front desk and asked the young man standing next to the register whether they had a bomb shelter.
“Of course,” he said.
“Should we go down there or does nobody care?” I said.
“Nobody cares,” he said.
“Let’s get a Coke,” Noah said.
So we grabbed two seats in the restaurant and asked the waiter for two Cokes.
I heard a faint whump somewhere off in the distance. The rocket had landed. Nobody moved. Nobody cared.
The Israel Defense Forces wanted to snap up as much territory as possible between the border fence and the Litani River before agreeing to the cease-fire that ended the war. And it didn’t take long to reach the Litani.
From our perch on the roof, Noah and I watched as much as we could. All day long, outgoing artillery shells tore through the sky on their way to Hezbollah targets. As soon as the ground invasion was set to start, all fell eerily quiet.
For a brief period, the only visible evidence of war was a fire burning in a Lebanese field off to our right.
Just south of Metula, the war was a little more obvious, even though it was quiet there, too. Tanks and heavy artillery were set up in an idyllic field. It was a jarring sight. The scenery was lovely in Northern Israel. Lots of Israelis and foreigners liked to visit on holiday because it was so picturesque and serene, yet war machinery was scattered all over the place. War, in my mind, was supposed to occur in ugly places.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon didn’t look like an American invasion of anyplace. When Americans go to war, they fly to the other side of the world and spend weeks or even months preparing, then push hundreds of miles through enemy territory on the way to their targets. Israeli soldiers just took out some wire cutters, snipped holes in the fence, and walked into Lebanon.
Tanks rolled into Lebanon, too. From the top of the Alaska, Noah and I saw a whole line of them getting ready to blast through Fatima Gate into Hezbollah’s territory.
The scene was ominous, but it felt perfectly calm. Birds chirped. You could have put the sunset on a postcard. The streets of Metula were clean and well ordered. A man in sweatpants, a T-shirt, and running shoes jogged down the sidewalk with his dog alongside him, its tongue lolling out the side of its mouth. I waved hello to an elderly grandmother in her gardening hat drinking from a tall slender glass on her front porch. Why on earth hadn’t these people left with everyone else?
Noah ordered ravioli in a restaurant and I ordered pizza. I asked a woman behind the counter whether she was being paid extra wages for serving food in a war zone. “No,” she said and shrugged, as if to say, Why should they pay me more money?
Shepard Smith from Fox News broadcast live from the roof of the Alaska, although I doubt he had much to report. Little was going on at the time. Metula was a nice little town with restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts. And that’s what it looked and felt like, at least while the war lulled for a few hours.
Shortly after the sunset, Noah and I walked down the street to the line of tanks just outside town so we could interview some of the soldiers.
A young soldier with
sunglasses and a pierced eyebrow asked me to take his picture. “Put me in your magazine,” he said, “next to the hot models in swimsuits and lingerie.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said and laughed.
I raised my camera to take another soldier’s picture.
“No, no, no!” he said and held up his hand. “Last time I went into Lebanon, every guy with me who had his picture taken earlier that day was injured. None of us who didn’t have our pictures taken were injured. I know it’s superstitious and stupid, but I need to feel good before I go in there.”
“What’s it like fighting Hezbollah?” I said.
“It depends,” he said.
“On what?” I said.
“On the place and on the day,” he said. “Sometimes when we go into Lebanon, nothing happens. We can’t find the Hezbollah. Other times they are everywhere and it’s hard.”
“Do you ever see civilians?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not in the towns. Only in the villages.”
“What do they do when they see you?” I said.
“They go inside,” he said.
“Do they say anything to you?” I said.
“No,” he said. “They don’t say anything, they don’t wave, they don’t throw rocks. They just go in their houses.”
Noah chatted with two young men who were getting ready to push into Lebanon ahead of the tanks to clear mines. They didn’t seem nervous at all, although their work must have been extraordinarily stressful.
That was about all we could get out of the soldiers. They seemed happy to see us, not at all suspicious that we might be hostile journalists or even anything other than journalists. No one asked us to show credentials, but they didn’t want to say much specific. I got the impression they enjoyed having us around as a distraction from the grim work ahead.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 14