Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Yet the Lebanese would consider the adoption of the Morning Twilight plan to be a redeployment, not a full withdrawal, thus making the Israeli army’s prediction of continued fighting a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hezbollah consistently declared that it would continue to attack Israeli forces as long as “one inch” of Lebanese land remained under occupation.

  The Israeli-Syrian talks had gone into limbo following the failure of the Shepherdstown meeting in January. But by late March, the Clinton administration had extracted some bottom-line concessions from Barak over the extent of the withdrawal from the Golan Heights, and the U.S. president prepared to sell the package to Assad. The two met at a summit in Geneva on March 26. The sight of the visibly frail Assad wearing a wool overcoat and flat cap making the effort to meet Clinton in the icy cold Swiss city suggested that the peace deal was all but done.

  But it was not to be. According to Dennis Ross, the American Middle East peace coordinator who attended the summit meeting, Assad simply showed no interest as Clinton carefully read out Barak’s concessions.2 Ross concluded that Assad’s priorities had shifted to ensuring a smooth transition to the presidency for his son, Bashar, rather than achieving peace with Israel. Assad had been angered by Barak’s foot-dragging in Shepherdstown, which may have dampened his enthusiasm for a deal.

  But the Syrians have a contrary explanation for the summit’s failure. According to Abdel-Halim Khaddam, then Syria’s vice president, Assad had wanted to conclude a peace deal with Israel before his death because he believed it would smooth the succession of Bashar to the presidency. Despite his ill health, Assad undertook the trip to Geneva because he had been told by Sharaa that Barak was willing to withdraw to the June 4, 1967, line, thus satisfying the Syrian president’s long-standing demand. He had also been reassured by Clinton, who telephoned Assad prior to the Geneva summit to say that he was bringing some new and serious proposals from the Israeli prime minister.

  “I think if he had known the position did not include the withdrawal of all the territory prior to 1967, he would not have even accepted to go to Geneva,” Khaddam told me. “Of course, he was disappointed. He thought he was tricked by the Americans.”

  Clinton and Barak initially blamed Assad for the failure at Geneva. Since then, however, even Israeli negotiators acknowledge that the primary responsibility rested with Barak, who dithered at the crucial moment in Shepherdstown when the Syrians were clearly eager for a deal.3 Even Clinton subsequently wrote in his memoirs that he believed Assad was serious about peace and that Barak had gotten “cold feet.”4

  The collapse of the Israel-Syria track in March 2000 set in motion a series of events that have helped shape the current political landscape in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. If a peace deal had been concluded in the spring of 2000, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria probably would have enjoyed calm and stability along their respective borders for the past decade. Lebanon would have followed Syria’s lead and signed a deal with Israel, Hezbollah would have been disarmed under Syrian fiat, and quiet would have prevailed along Israel’s northern border. There would have been no Shebaa Farms campaign, no military buildup by Hezbollah in south Lebanon from 2000 on, and no war in 2006, nor would the Lebanese and Israelis continue to be living under the unremitting threat of a fresh conflict that promises to be even more destructive than the last.

  “A Worthless Piece of Land”

  After Geneva, Barak abandoned hopes of achieving a withdrawal from Lebanon within the framework of an agreement with Syria and began preparing for a unilateral pullout. Initially, on the advice of his military staff, Barak leaned toward implementing Morning Twilight’s partial withdrawal option, but he changed his mind when warned by the UN that the Security Council would recognize only a full pullout to the international border.

  The Lebanese and Syrian authorities, meanwhile, appeared to be in denial about the impending troop withdrawal, a denial that slowly evolved into panic. Lebanese officials believed—or hoped—that the promise of an Israeli pullout was just a bluff and that Barak would not have the courage to take a plunge into the unknown. Nabih Berri told Terje Roed Larsen, the UN Middle East peace coordinator, that he would “eat his hat and dance with you in the street” if the withdrawal actually went ahead.

  After the Israeli government formally declared that the IDF would leave Lebanon by July, Farouq al-Sharaa said Israel would be committing “suicide” to withdraw without making a deal with Syria first. “They will bear the consequences and should never use this possibility as a means of pressure against us,” he said.5

  The evident unease that Barak’s pledged withdrawal evoked in Damascus and Beirut was a paradox that did not go unnoticed in the Arab world. “It was as though he [Sharaa] were urging Israel not to withdraw but to remain in south Lebanon, thus contradicting Arab and indeed Syrian policy, which demands day and night that Israel should withdraw unilaterally,” wrote columnist Abdel Bari-Atwan in Al-Quds al-Arabi. “If such a withdrawal were indeed tantamount to ‘suicide’ for Israel, then let it go ahead and commit suicide and do us all a favor.”6

  The Syrians stood to lose an important means of leverage against Israel if the unilateral withdrawal went ahead as planned. If there were no longer any Israeli soldiers for Hezbollah to kill in south Lebanon, how could Syria exert pressure on Israel to yield to Damascus’s peace demands? With an end to the occupation of south Lebanon, any future attacks across the border into Israel would be deemed acts of aggression against a sovereign state, not legitimate resistance against illegal occupiers. Hezbollah faced the same dilemma. How could it continue to justify bearing arms if there was no occupation to resist?

  There was, however, one possibility: a small, remote, almost uninhabited mountainside of weathered limestone, dense thickets of evergreen oak, and a few long-abandoned stone hovels, known collectively as the Shebaa Farms.

  Ever since the Israelis had seized the lower slopes of the Shebaa Farms mountain in the June 1967 war and secured the upper reaches over the following three years, the occupation of the area had lingered only in the memory of a handful of aging residents living in the adjacent villages of Shebaa and Kfar Shuba. Although the place name was familiar to most Lebanese and cited as one of the enduring examples of Israeli aggression against Lebanese sovereignty, few knew where it was located, let alone what it contained.

  In early May, the Lebanese government told Terje Roed Larsen that the Shebaa Farms was sovereign Lebanese territory and demanded that Israel withdraw from the mountainside along with the rest of the south. Larsen was told that the territory had been transferred to Lebanon in an oral agreement with Syria in 1964, but the border had not been formally re-delineated and demarcated on the ground.

  As far as the UN was concerned, however, the Shebaa Farms area was inside Syria. Maps submitted by Syria and Israel to the UN in 1974 during the process of establishing a UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights clearly marked the Shebaa Farms as Syrian territory. On that basis, the Shebaa Farms was not included within the UNIFIL zone in 1978, and twenty-two years later, Israel was not required to pull out of the area to satisfy UN Resolution 425. If the area was Lebanese, the UN noted, why had the Lebanese government in 1978 not protested the exclusion of the Shebaa Farms when 425 was adopted and UNIFIL’s mandate determined?

  It was true, however, that the exiled farmers who once tilled the stony soil of the Shebaa Farms were Lebanese, not Syrian, citizens. Even though they had been evicted three decades earlier from their mountain farms, they still possessed their property deeds as proof of ownership.

  The haziness of who bore rightful sovereignty over the area provided sufficient excuse for the Lebanese—prodded, as ever, by the Syrians—to argue to the UN that if Israel failed to withdraw from the Shebaa Farms, then Beirut would consider Israel still an occupying power, leaving open the option for continued resistance operations.

  “My Lebanese and Syrian counterparts did not want a full withdrawal,” Larsen recalls. “That was why the Shebaa Farms
[issue] was raised. I went to see the Shebaa Farms and saw it was a worthless piece of land. I very quickly realized that this was what they would construct in order to say that this was not an end to the occupation and use it as a justification for having Hezbollah as a resistance.”

  “It’s Occupied Arab Land”

  The UN studied more than eighty maps from sources in Damascus, Moscow, Paris, and London, among other locations, to determine the sovereignty of the Shebaa Farms. All of them portrayed the Farms as lying inside Syria. But the ham-fisted attempts by the Lebanese and Syrians to persuade the UN that the territory belonged to Lebanon at times verged on farce.

  Just as Lebanon’s case for the Farms was looking increasingly flimsy, Larsen was summoned to a meeting at the presidential palace with Emile Lahoud and Jamil Sayyed, the powerful head of the General Security department. Lahoud triumphantly presented the UN envoy with a Lebanese map dating from 1966 that clearly marked the Shebaa Farms as being inside Lebanon. Larsen took the map back to New York, where it was examined by UN cartographic experts.

  “Yes, indeed, the map was from 1966,” Larsen says, “but the ink was not dry on the line drawn on the map. It was two weeks old.”

  Larsen returned to Beirut and confronted Lahoud and Sayyed, telling them that the map was of “questionable authenticity” and that if he ever heard about this map again, he would go public with the forgery. “Of course they were completely mad at me, but I never heard again a word about that map,” Larsen says.

  Nabih Berri had his own brush with cartographic ignominy in early May, when, before assembled television cameras, he proudly unveiled an “American” military map that he said marked the Farms inside Lebanon. Berri said he had received the map within the past week and that it refuted a recent claim by Ehud Barak that Lebanon possessed no documents showing the Farms as Lebanese territory. “I’m presenting this map today to Arab and international public opinion through the Lebanese media in response to Barak’s claims,” he said, jabbing a finger in the general direction of Shebaa on the map.

  The map brandished by Berri was prepared by the Defense Mapping Agency Topographic Center, a former division of the U.S. Department of Defense. It was, in fact, the standard map used at the time by UNIFIL in south Lebanon. Indeed, I had a copy of that very same map on the wall of my study. There was a problem, though. The map clearly portrayed the Shebaa Farms inside Syria, not Lebanon. Presumably, someone had a quiet word with Berri after his press conference, for no more was heard about the “American map.”

  The farce continued into 2001, when someone noticed that the two-inch-high map of Lebanon on the thousand-lira bill placed the Shebaa Farms inside Syria. The revelation sparked a scandal, with a writer, Naji Zeidan, filing a lawsuit against the currency designers. The thousand-lira bill was first issued in 1988 during the term of President Amine Gemayel, a onetime ally of Israel, which only deepened the conspiracy theories. Zeidan’s lawyer said that his client claimed the thousand-lira bill was helping the Israelis “because they can say that all Lebanese are walking around with maps that show the Shebaa Farms are not part of Lebanon.”

  The Lebanese were not alone in tripping over their own feet in attempting to convince the UN that the Shebaa Farms rightfully belonged to Lebanon. The Syrians were also in a bind over the sovereignty of the mountainside. Damascus wanted the Shebaa Farms to serve as the new casus belli that would validate Hezbollah’s keeping its weapons and continuing to attack Israeli troops after Israel had withdrawn from the rest of south Lebanon. But they could not bring themselves to state to the UN in clear and simple terms that the territory was Lebanese, not Syrian. Syria, even before the advent of the Baathist regime, had never really accepted the notion of Lebanese independence. Lebanon, the Syrians averred, was an aberration, ripped from the motherland at the behest of separatist Maronites and the indulgence of their French colonial patrons.

  When the Shebaa Farms issue arose, Larsen traveled to Damascus and met with Bashar al-Assad and Farouq al-Sharaa to hear Syria’s view on the sovereignty of the area. In his meeting with Sharaa, Larsen asked the foreign minister, “Is it [the Shebaa Farms] Lebanese or Syrian? I want a straight answer.”

  “It’s occupied Arab land,” Sharaa said.

  “That’s not my question. Is it Syrian or Lebanese occupied land?” Larsen asked again.

  Sharaa looked hard at Larsen. “It’s occupied Arab land,” he repeated.

  “That was the best answer I got [from Damascus] at the time,” Larsen recalls.

  Sharaa subsequently informed Kofi Annan by telephone that Damascus supported Lebanon’s demands for the restoration of all its occupied land, including the Shebaa Farms. But it would take more than a vague assurance over the phone to persuade the UN of the validity of Lebanon’s argument for the Farms.

  On May 22, Kofi Annan released a report on the implementation of Resolution 425 in which he stated that Israel would be required to withdraw to a line “conforming to the internationally recognized boundaries of Lebanon.” But the Lebanese, unsurprisingly, lost the argument for the Shebaa Farms, leaving its fate subject to future peace negotiations between Israel and Syria.

  Keeping Up the Pressure

  Meanwhile, in the south, the Israeli withdrawal had already begun. Trucks crossed the border bringing fresh supplies to Israeli outposts but returned to Israel filled with equipment. By mid-May, several Israeli outposts had been handed over to the SLA. Only some 120 Israeli soldiers were estimated still to be in Lebanon by May 19, half of them in frontline bases and the rest in positions on the border. The Israelis intended that by July 7, the stated deadline for the withdrawal, there would be only a skeleton crew of soldiers left in Lebanon manning positions all but stripped of equipment. The Lebanese would wake up one morning and discover that the last Israelis had slipped away overnight, and that would be that.

  The Israeli preparations were evidently under way when I toured the zone’s western sector with UN observers in mid-May. From the UN observation post on the border near Markaba village, we watched Israeli engineers reinforcing an outpost just inside Israel with bulldozed earth and concrete T-walls. The huge Israeli position on top of Sheikh Abbad Hill, recognizable by its distinctive twin radio masts, was being dismantled. The outpost straddled the border, and the Israelis were dragging equipment from the Lebanese half and rebuilding the position on the Israeli side of the line. Far below us in a deep wadi, Israeli soldiers milled around a self-propelled 155 mm cannon, one of five established as a temporary artillery post. Some of the soldiers sunbathed on armored personnel carriers, others lounged in the grass outside a row of canvas tents.

  However, Hezbollah was not allowing the construction activity to proceed unhindered. As we drove along the border road close to the Israeli position on Sheikh Abbad Hill, a terse alert was broadcast over the UN radio: “Warning, warning, warning. Operational activity is taking place in Irishbatt.”

  Several mortar rounds exploded against the Sheikh Abbad outpost, sending plumes of dust and smoke into the sky. We pulled over in a nearby village to sit out the attack. Moments later came the thunderclap of outgoing Israeli artillery fire from a position a few hundred yards away on the other side of the border. “This is typical of what’s going on here,” said Major Brendan O’Shea, the Irish operations officer for the UN observers. “They [Hezbollah] are keeping up the pressure.”

  Indeed, Hezbollah was determined that Israel would leave under fire. In late April, Hezbollah fighters mounted an audacious operation against the SLA outpost on the edge of Aramta village in the mountainous northern tip of the occupation zone. Shortly after dawn, a Hezbollah man, accompanied by several comrades riding trail bikes, drove a car packed with explosives down the road from Jezzine to Aramta. As the group approached the village, the trail bikers hung back and the car continued up to the outpost. Simultaneously, Hezbollah mortar teams began shelling the outpost and SLA compounds on surrounding mountaintops. With shells exploding nearby, the Hezbollah man, pretending to b
e a civilian, asked the SLA if he could enter the compound with his car to escape the barrage. The militiamen agreed, and he drove his vehicle in through the front gate. Parking the vehicle, he slipped out the gate, seconds before the car bomb blew up. The huge blast killed three militiamen, wounded another four, and almost completely destroyed the outpost. The SLA abandoned the position and withdrew two miles farther south to Rihan.

  Hezbollah stepped up its psychological warfare campaign against the SLA, exploiting their insecurities with bloodcurdling threats. Nasrallah said no mercy should be shown the SLA, who must either “leave with the Jews, turn themselves in, or be killed.”

  On May 18, I headed back into the occupation zone for what, as it turned out, would be my last trip there. I was driven to Jezzine, just north of the zone, by Abed Taqqoush, a jovial Beiruti who was one of a breed of taxi drivers who made a living chauffeuring foreign journalists around Lebanon during the civil war years. He was the favorite driver of visiting BBC correspondents, having worked for the British broadcaster for twenty-five years, and had ferried one of my colleagues from The Times of London around Lebanon a few months earlier. He scarcely stopped chatting all the way from Beirut to Jezzine. He was looking forward to the Israelis’ leaving, as that meant the BBC and other foreign television crews would be arriving in Lebanon to cover the big story. For Abed, the love of the story was even greater than the promise of lucrative work. Abed dropped me off in Jezzine, where I was to catch a ride with a taxi driver from Marjayoun. Our trip was delayed an hour or so, as Hezbollah had spent the night battering Israeli and SLA positions in Rihan, the frontline village ten miles to the south.

  Guns or Toys?

  The shelling sputtered out midmorning, and we took advantage of the lull to head south toward Rihan along the same winding road down which Johnny, the SLA militiaman, and his two comrades, Nimr and the terrified Manny, had ridden the last armored personnel carrier from Jezzine almost a year earlier. One of my three fellow passengers in the cab had brought a small round drum with him. He tapped out a rhythm and sang to calm our nerves; Hezbollah’s shelling could have resumed at any moment. On the northern edge of Rihan, we lined up to hand our papers to a plainclothes SLA officer who checked off our names in a ledger. As I waited, a militiaman staggered toward me. He looked shell-shocked. His bloodshot eyes bulged from their sockets as he pawed at my shirt and gabbled in broken English, stumbling over the unfamiliar words. His faded olive-green Israeli army uniform fit him like a second skin. He had scribbled a cross in blue ballpoint on his snug but tatty flak jacket, God’s protection augmenting man-made Kevlar. Short and squat with an unkempt beard, tangled curly hair, and grimy creases around his eyes, he looked like a militiaman of many years’ standing.