Friends and colleagues who knew him warned me not to mention the Palestinians. Apparently, he liked to lecture foreign journalists about Israel for as long as an hour if given the chance. Still, it was as difficult to talk about Lebanon without bringing up Israel as it was to ignore Syria and Iran. In any case, he started in on Israel without being prompted, and as soon as he did, it was difficult to steer him back to anything else.
“Our only enemy up until now is Israel,” he said. “We don’t want to have any other enemy. Syria is a sister country. We want to make the best of the situation with Syria, but on the basis of full respect for our freedom and independence, for our special characteristics and features, for our values.”
He had little choice but to say about Israel what his Sunni constituents wanted to hear, but there was nothing pro forma about it. I knew Lebanese Sunnis and Shias who weren’t obsessed with Israel the way he was, and I even knew a few who quietly sympathized to an extent with the Israelis, but theirs was a distinct minority position, and they kept quiet about it in public. Siniora may as well car bomb himself before saying anything nice about Israel, but I doubted he’d have much nice to say anyway. He seemed entirely uninterested in destroying his southern neighbor, and he was especially uninterested in using Lebanon as a launchpad for Iranian missiles, but that hardly meant he had to like Israel.
“The occupation is responsible,” he said, “for restraining development and adaptation to change in the Arab world.”
It would have been more accurate to say Arab despots used Israel as an excuse for restraining development and adaptation to change in the Arab world. Al-Assad justified his dictatorial “emergency” laws on his state of war with the Zionists, but Dubai managed to prosper and grow and adapt despite Israel. Dubai even did a little business with Israelis and allowed them to visit. Tunisia was a perfectly lovely place, and none of the problems it did have had anything to do with Israel. Iraq’s problems were catastrophic, but Israel had no more to do with them than Brazil.
If Siniora had as much power as al-Assad had in Syria, Lebanon might look like an Arab version of Greece or even Italy. Israel wouldn’t get in the way. The Israelis wouldn’t even think about Lebanon much, just as they rarely thought about Cyprus except when they went there on holiday and peaceably ate next to Lebanese tourists in the same restaurants. What held Lebanon back—and Siniora knew this perfectly well—were the totalitarian anti-Zionist forces inside and outside his country that wished to turn the Arab world’s Riviera into a garrison state.
“In the years before 1948,” he said, referring to the year Israel declared independence from the British Mandate, “I was a kid. I come from the city of Sidon. We had plenty of Jews, and we were living together, doing business with them. All the coups d’état in this region, all the revolutions, all the problems, all the bloody confrontations were influenced by Palestine, the presence of so many Palestinian refugees, and the continuation of the occupation that has been in place for the past sixty years. I’m not saying there aren’t other issues in the region, but this is the main one. There are others, yes—political, social, economic, lack of adaptation—but this problem is getting worse.”
Hezbollah was not fighting Israel when its gunmen rampaged through Beirut the previous May. Syria was not fighting Israel when it occupied Lebanon and assassinated journalists and members of parliament. Iran was not fighting Israel when it murdered dissidents, and Iraqi insurgents were not fighting Israel when they massacred civilians with car bombs. And while the Israelis fought Hezbollah ineptly in 2006, they never targeted Siniora or his government. On some level he knew this, even if he could not admit it in public, especially after Hezbollah denounced him as a “Zionist hand.”
Nasrallah’s hatred of the prime minister made perfect sense. If the whole Arab world were like Siniora, the Arab-Israeli conflict would wind down in short order. There would be no militias, no death squads, no suicide bombers, and no rocket wars. Arabs and Israelis don’t have to like each to live near each other in peace. Turkey and Greece worked out a way to quietly coexist near each other despite feelings of mutual hostility, and they’re both even members of NATO.
Siniora hoped to work toward a similar modus vivendi, one step at a time, with the Israelis. He hinted at it in public, but Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah would not let him discuss a separate peace before the rest of the Arabs went first. The most he could ask for was a nonviolent cold war.
“We want to go back to the Armistice of 1949 with Israel that was restated in the Taif Agreement,” he said. “Israel has to understand that its security cannot be achieved through the use of power or force. As to my vision of Lebanon, we are ready for peace with the other Arab countries, not before them.”
Recall what Lebanon Renaissance Foundation head Eli Khoury told me about what Siniora meant when he said this. “This is the statement of those who want to make peace but know that they can’t. They don’t want to get ganged up on by the Arabs. We are the least anti-Israel Arab country in the world.”
Even so, Siniora blamed Israel more than the Arabs for making peace difficult. He seemed to think that if Israel turned to pacifism, the problem would be solved, though pacifism so far had not worked at all well for him.
“Sparta was the nuclear power of its time,” he said. “Figuratively, I’m saying. What happened? What’s left of Sparta? Nothing. There are two examples where Israel resorted to force in order to solve problems and ended up complicating the problems. In 1982 they invaded Lebanon hoping to finish the Palestine Liberation Organization. They came in. They even occupied Beirut, hoping that with force they could do whatever they wanted, but they laid the seeds for Hezbollah. Then in 2006 they came to Lebanon hoping they could finish Hezbollah, but ended up with Hezbollah becoming stronger, with longer-range missiles and a larger number of missiles.”
All that was true, but it didn’t logically follow that refusing to use force would somehow work better. Siniora had to surrender to Hezbollah, but Israel didn’t.
Siniora was so traumatized by the civil war that he clung to pacifism like a life raft. Many Europeans reacted similarly after the continent all but destroyed itself in the inferno of World War I, and an even larger number reacted that way after the second round against the Axis a few decades later. Siniora, though, sounded and acted like a man who wouldn’t defend himself even from someone breaking down his door with an ax.
Pacifism only works when it’s reciprocated. Holland could afford to be more or less pacifist because it was surrounded by European Union countries with a similar disposition. Lebanon and Israel faced hostiles who used violence as a matter of course.
Unlike Israel, though, Lebanon’s government was so weak, it had few other options. March 14 would almost certainly lose a fight with Hezbollah, and Lebanon absolutely would lose a war against Israel. Picking a fight with a more powerful adversary is rarely a wise decision. Siniora was many things, but he was not reckless, and he was not stupid.
At the same time, the only way to survive as a liberal anomaly in a violent and authoritarian neighborhood is to fight back when attacked. That’s what Israel did. Siniora was right that the Israelis had yet to solve their problems this way, but Israel endured as a democracy in a sea of autocracy while Lebanon couldn’t.
Siniora might have seen things differently if his government were stronger than Hezbollah. He did, after all, send the Lebanese army into battle against Fatah al-Islam in Nahr al-Bared in 2007. He wasn’t opposed to the use of force then. Hezbollah, though, had him effectively cornered at gunpoint with his hands over his head. Nonviolence was his only practical option.
“Is there a solution to the Hezbollah problem?” I asked him. “Do you have any idea how you can integrate them into the mainstream by either disarming them or making them a subservient part of the army?”
“First of all,” he said, “we do not have the word disarm in our vocabulary.” He sounded annoyed and slightly offended. “Violence is not the way. We want ultimately
to engage in dialogue, open dialogue, and try to find a way at the end of the day that protects the people, even Hezbollah. That way is the state. The state has to come back and be fully in charge. The Lebanese government can’t be dragged into a war without being consulted.”
I did not mean to suggest he go to war with Hezbollah. He’d lose. Everyone in Lebanon knew he would lose. Many in his Sunni community were frustrated that he didn’t want them to defend themselves when they were attacked on their own streets, but even they knew starting a war of disarmament would end in disaster.
“It is not possible for me to start a war against my countrymen in order to disarm them,” he said, “while at the same time they argue that the enemy is occupying a part of my country.”
He meant the Shebaa Farms, that tiny uninhabited sliver of land that the United Nations said was actually Syria’s.
“I don’t want to disarm my countrymen,” he said. “I want to convince them. I want to have a dialogue with them and get them to agree to give back sovereignty to the state. But in the meantime, the basic illness is the occupation.”
He kept going back to that, even after Hezbollah shot up Hamra, his own neighborhood, while the Israelis left him alone. I sometimes had the feeling he spoke at a forty-five-degree angle to the truth, as Middle Eastern leaders so often did, but perhaps he really believed that.
Most Sunnis elsewhere in the region thought Iran—and by extension its proxies—was the larger of the two problems. Like him, they lacked the strength to project power beyond their own borders, and in many cases they lacked the strength to even defend themselves. The Saudis and Kuwaitis relied on the United States to protect them from Saddam Hussein, and none of the Arab states could stop or even slow Iran’s ascent to hegemony.
They were horrified by the creeping realization that they may have to rely on the Israelis for that. Washington, it seemed, was in no mood to take a hard line on Iran’s nuclear weapons program even though that’s what most Arab governments wanted.
The Sunni Arab states made it clear to everyone who was paying attention in 2006 that they tacitly supported Israel, at least initially, in the July War when they publicly condemned Hezbollah for starting it. The war was fought in an Arab country, but it was a proxy war between two non-Arab powers. Lebanon merely provided the battle space. One U.S. diplomat even told Lee Smith that the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia were privately thrilled when Israel initiated its counterattack.
David Samuels put it bluntly in Slate:2 “Israel has effectively become the hired army of the Sunni Arab states.” Somebody had to resist the resistance. Israel may have been everyone’s last choice, but either Jerusalem would lead the resistance or nobody would.
This was all but unthinkable for Siniora and the rest of the Sunnis of Lebanon. Israeli resistance meant bombs fell in their country, and incompetent Israeli resistance meant Lebanon suffered for nothing.
A few weeks before I spoke to Siniora, the Israelis had finished fighting a small war in Gaza against Hamas to put a stop to Qassem and Grad rocket attacks in the cities of Sderot and Ashkelon. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak took Israel’s side even more blatantly than he did during the July 2006 war, announcing in advance that under no circumstances should Hamas be allowed to win the war against Israel.
The Times of London even said Riyadh gave Israeli war planes permission to fly through Saudi air space en route to Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities.3 The story could have been bogus. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied it. He’d have to deny it even if the story were true, however, to prevent diplomatic pressure on the Saudis to reverse their decision.
John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if the story was true.4 He thought the news was “entirely logical.” None of the Arab leaders he talked to, he said, “would say anything about it publicly, but they would certainly acquiesce in an overflight if the Israelis didn’t trumpet it as a big success.”
According to the Financial Times, a majority of citizens in eighteen Arab countries thought Iran was more dangerous than Israel.5 In that sense, Fouad Siniora was wildly out of step with the Sunni Arab mainstream in the Middle East for focusing so relentlessly on Israel. Yet he was, a bit paradoxically, less stridently anti-Israel than mainstream Sunni Arabs who thought Iran was an even bigger problem.
According to a report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,6 a substantial number of Saudi citizens supported military action against Iran. A third of Saudi respondents said they would approve an American strike, and a fourth said they’d back an Israeli strike. This was extraordinary. Supporting Israel was taboo in the Arab world, and that went double when Israel was at war. This was not the sort of thing most Arabs were comfortable admitting to strangers, yet one-fourth of Saudis surveyed were willing to do so. The percentage who privately felt that way was almost certainly higher.
Iran’s rulers constantly threatened Israel with violence and even destruction because they knew the Arabs were against them. The ancient conflicts between Sunnis and Shias, and between Persians and Arabs, were far more important at the end of the day than a sixty-year-old conflict between Israelis and Arabs. The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s killed orders of magnitude more people than all the Arab-Israeli wars put together. The Iranian leadership needed to change the subject to something they and the Sunnis agreed on. Ever since Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in 1979 and voided Iran’s treaty with Israel, regime leaders believed they’d meet less resistance while amassing power for themselves in the region by saying, “Hey, we’re not after you; we’re after the Jews.”
It wasn’t enough anymore. Even apocalyptic anti-Zionism and the arming of terrorist organizations that fought Israel weren’t enough anymore. Most Arabs simply did not believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei when they not-so-cryptically suggested that their nuclear weapons would be pointed only at Israel. By a factor of three-to-one, Saudis believed Iran would use nuclear weapons against either them or another state in the Gulf region before using them against Israel.
With only a handful of exceptions, the region had been firmly controlled by Sunni Arab regimes since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, yet all of those governments had become secondrate regional powers at best. The political agenda in the Arab Middle East was now being set by non-Arabs in Jerusalem, Tehran, Washington, and Ankara. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad helped set the regional agenda as the logistics hub in the Iranian-Hezbollah axis, but he was a non-Muslim Alawite, not a Sunni, and he was doing it as a mere sidekick of the Persians. If all that weren’t enough, the Sunnis now depended on the hated Israelis to defend them, and they weren’t even sure the Israelis would ever go through with it.
Tehran hoped to convince Sunni Arab governments to do more than just issue boilerplate denunciations of the “Zionist Entity.” Ahmadinejad and Khamenei wanted them to actually join the Iranled resistance and fight Israel like they used to, before Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties. Instead, Sunni Arabs outside Lebanon and Syria were falling in behind their Jewish enemies, though they dared not admit it in public.
“The area has suffered a great deal of wars and losses,” Siniora said, “and it’s high time to go to peace. It’s in the interest of the Israelis more than anybody else. It has been proven in history that the best security for any country is its ability to build good relations with its neighbors, no matter how many weapons you have in your arsenal.”
Few would argue with that, but no one could plot a plausible course from here to there. The Israelis tried everything, and nothing worked—not dialogue, not diplomacy, not a peace process, not withdrawal from occupied territory, and not war. Everything would become rapidly worse if Iran developed nuclear weapons, but Siniora had no idea how to stop that from happening.
“We do not believe in having nuclear weapons in the Middle East,” he said. “We also don’t believe in using force to disarm or attack Iran. We are against the use of force. We believe it’s th
e origin of the problem.”
While Siniora was an outdated throwback to the 1960s in some ways, he was also, at the same time, way ahead of his peers. Many in the Middle East preferred war. There is no getting around this. Millions pumped their fists, thrilled to resistance, and lionized martyrs. Siniora wouldn’t stand for it, but he couldn’t stop it.
“We believe,” he said, “at the end of the day, that this country cannot be ruled except through openness, dialogue, and understanding each other. We cannot satanize others. What has been developing over the past few years is what prevailed in the Middle Ages, where the world was composed of two camps, the camp of the devil, and the camp of the angels and righteous. The problem is that everybody thinks that he is in the camp of the righteous and that the others are the devil. We don’t believe that. The world is not like this.”
His beautiful vision for Lebanon stood little chance while his country was bullied by ruthless totalitarians abroad and their proxies at home. The Arabist in his palace was a tragic and lonely figure, a premature liberal, a democrat before the Middle East was safe for democracy. He stood in Hezbollah’s way, not as a barricade, but as a speed bump.
“We do not believe in violence,” he said. “We don’t believe in weapons of any kind, not even a stick.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
the warlord in his castle
How dangerous emperors are when they go mad.
—WALID JUMBLATT
I met up with British American journalist, essayist, polemicist, and literary critic Christopher Hitchens at the Bristol Hotel, where the nascent March 14 coalition met to plot against the Syrian occupation authorities in the weeks before Rafik Hariri was killed. Hitchens hadn’t been to the country since right after the civil war ended, when Beirut was a howling wilderness of bullet-pocked and mortar-shattered towers.
“I hardly recognize the place,” he said. “I would not have thought it possible that the city could look like it does now.”
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 30