Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Aloof from the mayhem around him, a young Hezbollah fighter dressed in black uniform stood by with his rifle, eyeing the looting and pointless gunplay with an expression of disdain. He said that he and his comrades were under orders not to harass Christian residents of the border district. “Our people said, ‘Don’t show your guns. Don’t let them say you came in with your guns,’ ” he said quietly. “We have instructions not to enter Christian villages.”

  Hezbollah’s leadership had deliberately issued the order to prove wrong those who had predicted that bloody chaos and revenge killings would follow in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal. The leaders knew that the eyes of the world were upon them in their moment of triumph and were careful to ensure that their cadres maintained discipline.

  In Qlaya, the mood among the few remaining Maronite residents grew more resentful as the day progressed with no letup to the triumphalism of the mainly Shia crowds. Most of the population of Qlaya, the cradle of the SLA, had fled across the border, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the six thousand militiamen and their families who left for Israel. Another fifteen hundred militiamen turned themselves in to the Lebanese authorities.

  Bassam, who a week earlier had proudly displayed his $650 worth of weapons, ammunition, and equipment on his living room floor and proclaimed his intention to stay and fight, was gone, along with his family. The front door of his home was not even locked, such had been his haste in departing.

  Inevitably, rumors soon circulated that houses belonging to fleeing SLA militiamen were being looted and roadside shrines to the Virgin Mary desecrated. But Sheikh Nabil Qawq promised that the Christians and other residents of the zone would be treated well.

  “From tomorrow morning you will not see any weapons being carried here. We will provide protection for everyone, including the Christians,” the white-turbaned cleric told me when we bumped into each other at the entrance to Khiam prison. Qawq had just toured the prison’s cramped, fetid cells and interrogation rooms, which reeked of stale sweat, urine, and unwashed bodies. Among the visitors wandering the narrow corridors of the detention blocks were former detainees, some released the previous day, others freed long ago, who could not resist returning to a place where they had experienced such hardship and misery.

  “This place proves for sure that Israel is the number one terrorist state in the world,” Qawq said.

  As Hezbollah’s southern commander, Qawq had played a key role in the resistance campaign against Israel. It was evident that he was elated with the outcome, but even in that moment of victory, the tall cleric cast his brown eyes toward the sepia-tinted Shebaa Farms hills to the east of Khiam.

  “Our feeling is one of great happiness and victory. It’s a big holiday,” he said. “We look forward to many more victories, hopefully the Shebaa Farms, and, having seen Khiam prison, hopefully the rest of our detainees will come home soon.”

  The late afternoon light bathed southern Lebanon in a pale gold as I drove up the steep lane from Arnoun to Beaufort Castle, fulfilling a personal ambition to visit the Crusader fortress the day the Israelis left. I steered through the open swing gate that had marked the edge of the occupation zone, where an Israeli soldier once had leveled his rifle at my companions and me in the pouring rain, past the rubble of the homes bulldozed by Israeli troops eighteen months earlier when the lane had been a “roadside bomb alley,” past the spot the crowds had reached in their game of dare with Israeli machine gunners in the wake of Arnoun’s brief liberation. The Israelis had dynamited their concrete bunkers, machine gun posts, and accommodation blocks beside the castle the previous night. Some Lebanese assumed the distant explosions meant that the castle itself was being destroyed. But Beaufort’s eight-hundred-year-old walls remained standing, although the open area between its western wall and a bulldozed earth rampart was filled with smashed cinder blocks, broken chunks of reinforced concrete, cracked green-painted cement slabs, and collapsed T-walls, the air caustic with cement dust and chemical residues from the explosions. An acrid pile of rubble was all that remained of Israel’s presence at the castle.

  A few dozen curious sightseers climbed the ramparts, following walkways guarded by metal railings that wound over the castle’s overgrown ruins. Someone had already hoisted a yellow Hezbollah flag atop one of the turrets where 24 hours earlier the blue and white Star of David had fluttered. From the parapets, the whole of southern Lebanon was laid out below like an aerial photograph. Far to the west, across the rolling, hazy hills, the silver Mediterranean shimmered as the sun sank ever lower in the sky. The castle’s eastern ramparts were perched on the edge of the six-hundred-foot precipice of the Litani gorge, the river itself fleetingly visible far below as it gushed and frothed beneath the shadows of the dense undergrowth that lined its banks. On ridges farther east lay the red-roofed houses of Marjayoun, and beyond that Khiam. In the far distance the Shebaa Farms hills and Mount Hermon gradually turned crimson in the face of the setting sun. Metulla, with its neat rows of houses, and the flat plain of northern Galilee could be seen to the southeast; no wonder the Israelis once called Beaufort “the Scourge of Galilee” when Palestinians had manned its lofty parapets. With its latest defenders gone, the tired ruins of Beaufort were back in the hands of the Lebanese state for the first time since the 1960s.

  That night, far to the south of Beaufort Castle, in a refugee camp on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, angry and bitter SLA militiamen and their families dwelled on their new status as exiles in a foreign land.

  One unwelcome visitor to the SLA refugee camp near Tiberias that first bleak night was Antoine Lahd, who arrived in Israel from his home in Paris only after the withdrawal was over. The Lebanese refugees angrily accused Lahd and Israel of betrayal. What had happened to all the promises from Barak that the SLA would be protected? What did their future hold now that they had been forced to abandon their homes and flee their country? Lahd yelled back at his former comrades-in-arms and then stormed out of the camp. As he climbed into his car, the ex-militia leader was heard to mutter, “C’est fini.”

  The Blue Line

  Two days after the last Israeli soldier departed Lebanon, Hezbollah held a huge victory rally in Bint Jbeil. Some hundred thousand people descended on the border town to hear Nasrallah speak on his first visit to the former occupation zone. It was a moment for the Hezbollah leader to savor, the culmination of eighteen long years in which the Islamic Resistance was born, nurtured, shaped, and developed until it had achieved a feat of arms unprecedented in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Neither the armies of Jordan, Egypt, nor Syria had been able to drive Israeli forces from occupied Arab land. But a relatively small yet resolute band of Shia warriors from Lebanon had achieved just that. Nasrallah stood on a podium inscribed with the figure 1,276, the number of Hezbollah “martyrs” since 1982, and gazed out at the sea of supporters before him. Significantly, a Lebanese national flag hung behind the Hezbollah leader; Nasrallah wanted to convey the message that this was a day of victory for all Lebanese, not just one party.

  But he also served warning that the struggle against Israel was not over just because Israeli troops had left Lebanon. The confrontation would continue. The resistance, he said, was determined to win the freedom of the remaining Lebanese detainees in Israel and secure the return of the Shebaa Farms.

  The most significant part of Nasrallah’s address was directed toward the Palestinians. Hezbollah’s victory over the Israelis in Lebanon, he said, represented a model of resistance that could be adopted and adapted by other subjugated people:

  [W]e offer this lofty Lebanese example to our people in Palestine. You do not need tanks, strategic balance, rockets, or cannons to liberate your land; all you need are the martyrs who shook and struck fear into this angry Zionist entity. You can regain your land, you oppressed, helpless, and besieged people of Palestine.… The choice is yours, and the example is clear before your eyes. A genuine and serious resistance can lead you to the dawn of freedom.… I tell you:
the Israel that owns nuclear weapons and has the strongest air force in the region is weaker than the spider’s web.

  It was a powerful and compelling message, and it was sown on fertile ground. For unrest was building in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip even as the Clinton administration was preparing a fresh push at striking a deal between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. For decades, the Arabs had viewed the small but potent state of Israel with a mixture of hostility, awe, and trepidation. But Nasrallah was telling them that there was no need to fear Israel, because for all its military might and international influence, it could be defeated, as proven by Hezbollah’s successful resistance in Lebanon. Israel’s “threats and menaces,” he said, “do not scare us anymore.”

  Nasrallah’s defiance clearly hit a nerve among the Palestinian leadership, which found itself caught between its commitment to the peace process and the growing impatience of the Palestinian street. At the end of June, Yasser Abed Rabbo, an adviser to Arafat, told Ephraim Sneh, the Israeli deputy defense minister: “With you Israelis, one should only speak in ‘Lebanese.’ It’s the only language you understand.”3

  In the days that followed the liberation of the south, crowds continued to roam the former occupation zone, gathering at several places along the border such as at the former Fatima Gate crossing and on top of Sheikh Abbad Hill to hurl stones and abuse across the fence at increasingly irate Israeli soldiers. UNIFIL began armored patrols of the border district, but the Lebanese government refused to permit a full deployment of army troops and UN peacekeepers into the border area until the process of verifying Israel’s withdrawal was completed.

  In early 2000, when it became clear that Israel was planning to leave Lebanon, the UN had begun to focus attention on Lebanon’s long-neglected border with Israel. Clearly, the exact path traced by the boundary would have to be identified on the ground in order to confirm that Israel had fulfilled Resolution 425 and pulled out of all Lebanese territory. But Lebanon’s southern border, first delineated in 1920, demarcated three years later, and reaffirmed as the Armistice Demarcation Line in 1949 at the end of the first Arab-Israeli war, had not been surveyed properly for decades. Israel had altered the shape of the border with its Purple Line incursions; the original whitewashed stone cairns had long ago disappeared, and what existing boundary markers remained often fell in the middle of the chain of minefields planted by Israel stretching almost the entire length of the frontier.

  At a two-day seminar in April in New York attended by diplomats and cartographic experts from the UN and the U.S. State Department, it quickly became evident that attempting to re-delineate Lebanon’s southern border was impractical. Instead, Miklos Pinther, the UN’s chief cartographer, suggested devising a line, matching the border as much as possible, that could be used to gauge the extent of Israel’s compliance with Resolution 425. To forestall endless bickering between the Lebanese and Israeli governments, the line of withdrawal—which later became known as the Blue Line—was a temporary measure without prejudice to any future alterations to the international border agreed upon by Lebanon and Israel.

  The path of the Blue Line left the Shebaa Farms under Israeli control, but it bisected the village of Ghajar, which had been occupied by Israel since the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war when the adjacent Golan Heights was seized. The village’s Alawite residents had accepted Israeli citizenship in 1981, when the Syrian territories occupied fourteen years earlier were formally annexed by Israel. Since then, what had been an impoverished and isolated farming community had grown relatively prosperous. Residents found steady work in Israel, while others earned a lucrative income from smuggling drugs from Lebanon, helping transform Ghajar into a village of whitewashed and pastel-tinted houses and streets lined with lush purple bougainvillea. But the Blue Line threatened to disrupt that peaceful existence.

  “Just Juggled Things Around”

  While the Israelis objected to the partition of Ghajar, the Lebanese also had reservations over the path of the Blue Line. One complaint was a curious anomaly beside the kibbutz of Misgav Am, which abuts Lebanese territory. During the years of Israeli occupation, the kibbutz had expanded across the original border onto Lebanese soil. The UN cartographers finessed the problem by bending the Blue Line around the kibbutz, thus sparing the Israelis from evacuating their homes. They justified the decision on a misleading description of the Lebanon-Israel border from a fifty-year-old UN report, even though it clearly deviated the Blue Line from the original boundary.

  Another Lebanese complaint was over a three-mile stretch of the border southeast of Metulla, where the UN placed the Blue Line a hundred meters north of the true frontier. The UN team appeared to have misread the original 1923 Anglo-French boundary agreement, a point Miklos Pinther subsequently conceded to me when I raised it in an interview in July 2000. The delineation of the Blue Line at this point was “murky,” he said, due to conflicting sets of data, and he and his team “just juggled things around.” The result, however, was that Israel was not required to pull back another hundred meters along this stretch of the frontier, which allowed it to keep one military outpost intact and saved Israeli farmers from losing some apple orchards.

  More significantly, minor deviations in the path of the Blue Line additionally spared the Israelis from having to pull back their forward outposts on the mountain peaks of the Shebaa Farms. The most common delineation of the border in this area places the boundary along the watershed, running from mountaintop to mountaintop. But if the Blue Line had followed this exact path, it would have shaved off the edges of three IDF outposts, requiring the Israelis to dismantle the positions. Instead, the Blue Line follows the border but loops around each IDF compound.

  “The UN saw that the border cut right in front of our positions, so they gave us a few tens of meters in front of each one,” Giora Eiland, in 2000 the head of the IDF’s Operations Branch, confirmed to me nine years later.

  The UN also had to contend with more arcane challenges. One of them concerned the sovereignty of the tomb on the summit of Sheikh Abbad Hill near Houla village. The local Lebanese insisted that the tomb belonged to the eponymous Sheikh Abbad, a hermit who lived in the area some five hundred years ago and achieved local renown for the quality of the reed mats he and his followers made and sold by the Sea of Galilee. The Israelis, however, claimed that the tomb belonged to Rabbi Ashi, the fifth-century editor of the Babylonian Talmud, an interpretation of Jewish oral law. When the Israelis constructed their compound on Sheikh Abbad Hill after 1978, a new tomb containing the remains of the Lebanese cleric, or the rabbi, was erected on a platform in the center of the compound along with an archway and an inscription in Hebrew.

  The Lebanese government insisted that Sheikh Abbad’s final resting place remain inside Lebanon; rabbinical authorities in Israel were equally insistent that the Barak government retain Rabbi Ashi’s tomb inside the Jewish state. The dilemma facing the UN was that the tomb lay within the five- or six-yard GPS margin of error of boundary pillar 33 on the original 1923 border, which the Blue Line was supposed to follow.

  The solution was provided by Brigadier General Jim Sreenan, UNIFIL’s deputy commander, who headed the UN team tasked with verifying Israel’s withdrawal on the ground. Sreenan, a burly no-nonsense Irishman, suggested a Solomonic compromise in which the Blue Line would pass down the middle of the tomb, allowing access from both sides. The eastern half would fall inside Israel and could be acclaimed as Rabbi Ashi’s resting place, while the western half would lie inside Lebanon and could be recognized as that of Sheikh Abbad.

  Dancing on Sheikh Abbad’s Tomb

  The UNIFIL and Lebanese border inspection teams in early June jointly began the process of formally verifying Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in compliance with UN Resolution 425. But it quickly became evident that an exercise that should have been completed within a few days, was going to take much longer owing to the dawdling of the Lebanese team and repeated petty border violations by the
Israelis.

  The process grew increasingly rancorous as the weeks trickled by. One morning, a hidden Israeli sniper fired shots at the border inspectors and the small band of reporters following them when we tried to cross through an old gate some hundred yards north of the Blue Line. Several bullets ricocheted off the road just a few feet from Sreenan and General Amin Hoteit, the head of the Lebanese border team. A furious Hoteit ordered an immediate halt to the operation for the day.

  At Manara, the Blue Line actually ran alongside the road running around the western edge of the Israeli settlement. The Lebanese even complained that the streetlights were an Israeli “violation” because they now fell on the Lebanese side of the line. In a bizarre scene emblematic of the process, Israeli soldiers standing on the road in Israel chatted amiably with Ghanaian UNIFIL peacekeepers standing on the curb in Lebanon, the two groups separated by nothing more than fresh splotches of blue paint marking the path of the Blue Line. Astonished Israeli motorists slowed down and gaped at the UN soldiers and the small crowd of Lebanese reporters filming them on the side of the road. Other Israeli residents of Manara wandered up to see what was going on. Like shy teenagers at a school dance, they stared at the Lebanese, who stared back at them in mutual awed silence.