Resistance, Terrorism, and Violence in Lebanon
Two Shiʿi participants in ʿAshura processions in al-Nabatiya. Both wear headbands honoring the Imam Hussein as the leader of martyrs. Copyright A. R. Norton, 2000.
The 1980s was a decade of extraordinary violence and chaos in Lebanon, often remembered in the United States with indelible images of the ruins of the U.S. marine barracks obliterated by a suicide bomber on a Sunday morning in October 1983. The lives of 220 marines, 18 sailors, and 3 soldiers, in addition to the wife and four children of a Lebanese janitor, were snuffed out in the attack. Simultaneously 58 French paratroopers were killed by a second bomb-laden truck. The French, like the Americans, were participants in the Multinational Force (MNF) that had been dispatched to Beirut to bring stability to Lebanon in the wake of the June 1982 Israeli invasion of that country. Israel’s goals were twofold: to destroy the PLO as an important political force and to install a friendly government in Beirut. The MNF’s involvement began that summer after the retreat of most armed Palestinian guerrillas from Lebanon by ship and land. More than three hundred thousand Palestinians remained, most of them refugees or descendents of refugees from the first Palestinian war of 1948–49. After the catastrophic suicide bombings of October 1983, the marines, to use Ronald Reagan’s word, “redeployed” by early 1984, and the MNF ceased to exist.
There is little question that the attacks were carried out by Lebanese Shiʿi militants, under Iranian direction. A blue-ribbon investigating commission established by the American government and headed by retired admiral Robert L. J. Long, described the October bombing as an “act of war” and found Iran largely responsible. Iran is also widely believed to be responsible for the earlier suicide bombing and decimation of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983. The oft-unnoticed precedent for the 1983 attacks was established in mid-December 1981, when the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut was leveled by a suicide bomber. The Iraqi al-Daʿwa party claimed credit for the attack, citing Iraq’s invasion of Iran in September 1980.
Lebanon, porous to outside influence and militarily weak, had long been the site for proxy wars, and this was especially the case in the 1980s, with war materials supplied by rival political and military sponsors, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Israel, the United States, France, Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet Union. Among the contestants for power, Syria and Iran played key roles, though not always in cooperation with each other. Although Damascus and Teheran shared an interest in thwarting U.S. influence in Lebanon and defeating Israel’s occupation of the country, throughout the decade Syria revealed great suspicion of Iran and its protégé, Hezbollah. Early in the 1980s Hezbollah existed less as a concrete organization than as a cat’s paw of Iran. As Hezbollah’s strength grew over the course of the decade, Syria periodically tried to contain it, most dramatically when the al-Asad regime killed twenty-three Hezbollah members in 1987. Syria also provided support to Amal in that rival Shiʿa organization’s ferocious battles with Hezbollah, in 1988 and 1989. Four years earlier, in 1985, Syria also provided material support for Amal’s “war of the camps,” a three-year campaign to eliminate the power base of Palestinian militants in the refugee camps surrounding Beirut. Although Amal imposed great suffering on Palestinians in the camps, the armed Palestinian militants were never fully subdued, largely because Hezbollah gave them extensive support. Whereas many Amal members were hostile to the Palestinian guerrillas for their abusive behavior in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah supported them on principle. The revered Shiʿa religious authority Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah backed Hezbollah’s position and condemned the Amal campaign. Because of this crucial clerical approval, and despite Syrian opposition, Hezbollah won increasing support among the local Shiʿa. By 1990 the organization had largely supplanted Amal in the environs of Beirut.
Lebanon became infamous, in the 1980s, for the kidnapping of Westerners, thirty in all, most of whom were hapless innocents snared at a time of venomous xenophobia. Kidnapping for vengeance, politics, or profit was a well-practiced craft throughout the civil war. After the Israeli invasion in June 1982, however, the first foreigners kidnapped were not Westerners but four Iranian diplomats snatched by the Maronite Lebanese Forces militia and subsequently murdered. The string of Western hostages began in 1982 with David Dodge, the president of the American University of Beirut (AUB), who was held for a year, including some time in Iran. The Dodge kidnapping was apparently intended as a rejoinder to the disappearance of the four Iranians, as well as to strike a blow at the most obvious and well-known symbol of America’s connection to Lebanon, namely, the AUB.
There was no “kidnapping-central” but a cabal of militants, some certainly linked to Hezbollah, others in various other gangs and groups, including some that were in the hostage business, selling and trading hostages for profit (a phenomenon that presaged similar criminal activities in Iraq). The UN official who played the lead role in many of the hostage negotiations was Giandominico Picco, whose memoir, Man without a Gun (Random House, 1999), leaves little doubt that Syria had almost no influence over the kidnappers, and Iran’s leverage was operationally limited.
Although Iran did not exercise direct control of the kidnappings, its revolutionary regime did exert strong ideological influence and was particularly effective at sowing the suspicion that Westerners in Lebanon were agents for imperialist Americans and Israelis. The hostage seizures were fully consistent with Hezbollah’s declared goal of expunging America from Lebanon, its citizens as well as its diplomatic presence. Western hostages were held in Lebanon in despicable conditions, often alone and chained to radiators for months on end, denied even the slightest dignity. The longest held was Terry Anderson, a reporter for the Associated Press, who spent seven long years as a hostage. CIA Station Chief William Buckley died in captivity, after being brutally interrogated and tortured. The hostages’ fate was often manipulated to serve the interests of Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran. Lebanon became so dangerous for Americans that, in 1987, the State Department banned the use of U.S. passports for travel to the country, a ban that was not lifted until 1997 (although tens of thousands of Americans ignored the ban in the 1990s after the civil war ended and simply avoided having their passports stamped).
The hostage crisis gave rise to “Iran-Contra,” the 1986 scandal that revealed the willingness of then U.S. president Ronald Reagan to trade arms to Iran in return for the freeing of hostages. Unfortunately the hostage releases made possible by these deals were shortly followed by the snatching of others, and four more years would pass before the hostage era ended in Lebanon. Unquestionably Iran exploited the hostages to serve its interests. Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Hosein Sheikholeslam confirmed Iran’s stake, when, in 1988, he expressed his hope that “the hostage situation would be resolved in a way that serves the objectives for which they were kidnapped.” (Chehabi 2006, 228)
Lebanon was a cockpit for violence and a breeding ground for terrorism in the 1980s, but endemic violence began to ebb as the civil war ended in 1989 and 1990. Simultaneously Syria tightened its control over Lebanon with the implicit consent of the U.S., which rewarded Syria’s symbolic participation in the 1990–91 Gulf War coalition against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In the South, however, Israel’s occupation continued to provoke resistance, not least by Hezbollah. Before turning to a fuller examination of the situation in southern Lebanon in the course of the 1990s, we should pause to reflect more generally on the relationship between terrorism and political violence.
Hezbollah and Terrorism
Can all of Hezbollah’s military activity be classified as terrorism? U.S. and Israeli policymakers certainly think so, and they have defined Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Anyone supporting Hezbollah is supporting a terrorist group. By definition, any act of violence that it commits or seeks to commit is an act of terrorism, and so there are no gray areas of justifiable behavior in which terrorists may lurk. Whether for law enforcement officials, spies, or soldiers, the issue is assumed to be settled.
“Terrorist” is a useful rhetorical bludgeon that many states have wielded to outlaw or de-humanize radical or revolutionary groups. Thus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, before Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo accords, almost any mention of PLO included the description “terrorist,” and any Israeli aerial bombing of the PLO, which was in those days a major armed presence in Lebanon, was an attack on terrorist targets, according to Israeli spokespersons and journalists.
Following the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13224 specifying a series of steps that were to taken to combat al-Qaeda, and its affiliates and resources. The groups described in that executive order as terrorists of “global reach” did not include Hezbollah, even though the U.S. Department of State, in 1997, had labeled it a “foreign terrorist organization.” Nor was the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas included, even though it, too, had long been included in the State Department’s terrorist list.
These omissions prompted a lively debate, with pro-Israeli lobbying groups, particularly the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the influential Washingtonbased group that describes itself as “America’s pro-Israel lobby,” as well as a number of members of Congress, arguing strenuously for including Hezbollah and Hamas in the terms of the executive order. Many officials resisted the move, arguing that America’s focus should be on al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and noting that the U.S. would need the support of many Arab states that recognize Hamas and Hezbollah as bona fide resistance groups. Although leading figures in the Bush administration, notably Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, maintained that the additional designation was unnecessary and redundant, the administration amended the executive order to include Hezbollah and other groups as enemies in the “war against terrorism.” In Israel, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon moved quickly in the days following 9/11 to associate Israel with America’s war on terrorism, thereby gaining further leverage against Israel’s enemies.
Terrorism can be defined as the intentional use of political violence against civilians and civilian sites such as schools, hospitals, restaurants, buses, trains, or planes. Putting aside for the moment that Hezbollah promotes activities and performs services in Lebanon that have nothing to do with terrorism, such as running hospitals, the organization has engaged in forms of violence that fall outside the rubric of terrorism as it is generally understood. Most notably, so long as Israel was occupying a significant area of Lebanon, there is no doubt that Hezbollah and other Lebanese groups were fully within their rights to resist the occupation forces and to do so with deadly violence. That the resistance usually restricted its attacks to enemy soldiers and the enemy’s proxy forces only reinforced their firm normative footing. The primary reason why the United States has not succeeded in convincing most European states to endorse its blanket designation of Hezbollah as “terrorist” is because many of those states insist on a more precise conception of terrorism than the U.S. habitually employs. Of course, once Israel withdrew unilaterally from Lebanon, in 2000, Hezbollah found itself on far weaker normative ground.
Also, there is no question that Hezbollah has engaged in acts that do, indeed, constitute terrorism in its more precise and generally understood sense. One such clear instance was the 1985 skyjacking, by two Hezbollah operatives, of TWA flight 847, en route from Athens to Rome. Robert Stethem, a U.S. sailor on leave and traveling on the flight, was mercilessly beaten and shot in the head. The hijackers, Muhammad ʿAli Hammadi and Hasan Izz al-Din, who remain close to the top of the FBI’s “wanted list,” disgracefully dumped his body on the tarmac of Beirut airport. Another clearcut case, cited previously in chapter 2, was the 1988 kidnapping of Lieutenant Colonel William R. Higgins of the U.S. Marines, an unarmed UN observer who was tortured and murdered by the “Believers’ Resistance,” a group sympathetic to Hezbollah.
It is generally easier to trace much of the terrorism of the 1980s and early 1990s to Iran than to Hezbollah. Iran murdered a variety of regime opponents during this time, including Shapur Bakhtiar, the last prime minister of the Pahlavi dynasty that had been overthrown in 1979, as well as members of the Pahlavi family and other former officials of the toppled regime. Especially at risk were Kurdish nationalists, who advocated greater autonomy or independence for the Kurdish minority in Iran. After the killing of four Kurds in a Greek restaurant in Berlin, an Iranian intelligence official boasted that a blow had been struck at the Kurdish opposition. An Iranian official and three Lebanese were convicted in a 1997 trial of the Berlin assassinations, and four other Iranian officials who were judged responsible, in absentia, included President Rafsanjani and the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei. The evidence of Iranian complicity in many of these attacks is clear to any impartial observer. The extent of Hezbollah’s involvement, however, is murkier. Robert Baer, a former CIA agent with extensive experience in Lebanon and in the Middle East, has argued that Hezbollah was not involved: “It’s not that Hezbollah is doing the terrorism out of Lebanon. They didn’t do the US Embassy in 1983 or the Marines. It was the Iranians. It’s a political issue [in the U.S.] because the Israelis want the Americans to go after Hezbollah” (Christian Science Monitor, July 7, 2003). But although Baer’s conclusions are accurate for many of the attacks in Europe during this period, in other instances Hezbollah’s role is more clearly indicated. Following Israel’s 1992 assassination of Hezbollah Secretary-General ʿAbbas al-Musawi, two terrorist attacks occurred in Argentina that many knowledgeable observers believe were the joint work of Iran and Hezbollah’s external security organization, which apparently operates autonomously from the party and is widely believed to be closely linked to Iranian intelligence. The first attack, within months of al-Musawi’s murder, was the detonation of a large bomb under the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing twenty-nine people. The Argentinean authorities issued an arrest warrant for Hezbollah operative Imad Mughniyah, who directed the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in 1985 and was believed to have regularly collaborated with Iran in acts of terrorism.
The second attack, in 1994, was the result of a bombladen van driven into the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina in Buenos Aires, killing eighty-five people, most of them Jews. The suicide bomber was allegedly Hezbollah member Ibrahim Hussein Berro, but Hezbollah claims that he died later in southern Lebanon in a resistance operation. The former Iranian ambassador to Argentina Hade Soleimanpour was later briefly arrested in Britain but was released for lack of evidence. Then, in November 2006, warrants were issued for the arrest of former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani and eight other former Iranian officials, including the ex-foreign minister Ali-Akbar Velayati.
Occupation in Southern Lebanon
Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon spanned more than two decades and rendered Hezbollah’s ideology persuasive to many Shiʿa in the region. Israel’s military involvement in the South began in 1978 with its “Litani Operation,” intended to push Palestinian guerrillas north of the Litani River. The invasion left important pockets of armed Palestinian strength intact, but it provided a context for creating a border “security zone” under the nominal control of a proxy militia led initially by the volatile, renegade Lebanese army major Saʿad Haddad. Despite the terms of UN Security Resolution 425, passed in 1978 with heavy U.S. support and calling for the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the restoraion of Lebanese sovereignty, Israel sustained this security zone for the next twenty-two years until unilaterally withdrawing in 2000. By that time Hezbollah had, indisputably, become both Israel’s nemesis and a central fixture among Shiʿa in southern Lebanon.
Within months of Israel’s June 1982 invasion, when it became clear that Israel had no intention of disengaging from Lebanon anytime soon, a variety of groups across the political spectrum began to organize attacks against the Israeli occupation forces. These included factions of the Baʿth and Communist parties, Nasserist organizations, and other secular nationalist groups. By the 1990s, however, Hezbollah was carrying out most of the attacks, each appearing to have been characterized by careful planning and well-practiced professionalism. Its first post-invasion operation, and one of its deadliest, was mounted in November 1982, in the southern city of Tyre. Hezbollah member Shaikh Ahmad Qasir drove a bomb-laden car into an Israeli headquarters and intelligence center. At least seventy-five Israeli officials and soldiers were killed, along with fourteen Arab prisoners. The attack was so unexpected that Israel did not even know initially how it had happened and for years persisted in saying that the explosion was caused by a “gas leakage.”1
The Tyre attack, in fact, was one of twelve “self-martyrdom missions” (in Hezbollah parlance) mounted by Hezbollah members. This was less than one-third of all the suicide attacks. The other suicide missions were launched by Amal and various secular nationalist groups all intent on ending Israel’s occupation. This distribution of suicide missions between secular and Islamist-leaning groups illustrates that the tactic of mounting suicide attacks was motivated more often by nationalist and patriotic impulses than by religious inspiration.
The turning point in the resistance was the 1983 al-Nabatiya incident described in the previous chapter, when an Israeli army patrol blundered into the middle of the town during a mass procession on ʿAshura and opened fire in an attempt to disperse the crowd. From that time on there would be no fence sitting. By 1984 the pace of attacks was so intense that an Israeli soldier was dying every third day.
In 1985 Israel hunkered down in an enlarged border zone comprising some 10 percent of all Lebanese territory which the Israelis referred to by the euphemism “security zone.” Israel asserted that it would abide by UN Resolution 425, calling for unconditional Israeli withdrawal only after the security situation improved. In reality, this was an insecurity zone that became an argument for continuing occupation. If the situation in the South quieted, as it did periodically, Israeli officials held up the zone as a success that could not be safely terminated. When the situation became hotter, the zone became a necessity. Effectively the zone was an impetus to violence.
Hezbollah officials, meanwhile, frequently claimed that, without effective Shiʿi resistance to the occupation, Israel would have little incentive to consider withdrawing—a view widely shared in Lebanon. The converse proposition—that a cessation of resistance activities would induce Israel to withdraw—was often dismissed as laughably improbable, and not just by members of Hezbollah.
Neighboring Syria viewed the southern Lebanon situation as a fundamental strategic concern. To the extent that Israel held sway in the area, Syria’s Lebanese flank was further exposed to an Israeli attack. Equally important, Syria insisted on firmly linking the fate of the South with that of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. When the Lebanese government tried to break that linkage in 1983, in the course of peace negotiations brokered by U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, Damascus sabotaged the draft agreement. The May 17 agreement of 1983 would have ceded southern Lebanon to de-facto Israeli control in return for a formal Israeli military withdrawal. But the agreement contained a secret U.S.-Israeli provision in which the U.S. promised that the agreement would not be implemented without Syrian assent, which was not forthcoming. As Syria tightened its power grip in Lebanon, Lebanese officials repeatedly emphasized that the South was captive to Israeli-Syrian negotiations. A decade later, in 1993, when the Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri tried to break the linkage, he was quickly yanked back in line. Hezbollah, meanwhile, backed Syria’s contention that the prospect of a separate Lebanese deal with Israel was the route of weakness and would subordinate Lebanon to Israeli interests.
Hezbollah developed its own relations with various Palestinian groups, based in Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere. Fostering these ties was Israel’s expulsion of four hundred alleged Palestinian militants to southern Lebanon in 1992. The Lebanese government forced the expelled Palestinians to stay in a contained area in the South that became, as many Palestinians later called it, “Hezbollah University,” where Hezbollah indoctrinated its “students” in its perspective on resistance. Although many of the Palestinians were eventually allowed to return home, the ties built during that period have been largely sustained at Israel’s cost.
Generally the Lebanese strongly resist the tawtin, or “naturalization,” of its resident population of nearly four hundred thousand registered Palestinian refugees (although UN officials believe the actual number to be over 200,000, since many Palestinians have left for economic reasons). The Lebanese fear that integrating these refugees would destabilize Lebanon’s delicate political balance, and they also bitterly recollect the Palestinian state-within-a-state that existed for more than a decade (until Israel’s 1982 invasion). Most of the refugees have roots in Haifa and the villages of the Galilee, areas that are now very much part of the state of Israel. Although their camps were nominally disarmed in 1991, significant arms caches remain, and camps like ʿAin al-Hilwah, near Saida, are strongholds that the Lebanese army skirts. A number of armed Palestinian factions reportedly maintain cooperative relations with Hezbollah.
The civil war came to a close in Lebanon by the early 1990s, when all the militias, except Hezbollah, agreed to disband in accordance with the 1989 Ta’if accord. Hezbollah, which signed on to the accord only after the Iranian government gave its blessing, justified the maintenance of its armed forces by calling them “Islamic resistance” groups, not militias, committed to ending Israel’s occupation. The forces were said to be needed to defend the country against the Israel-sponsored SLA (South Lebanon Army). This position enjoyed wide, though not unanimous, support in Lebanon, where the Israeli occupation was seen as an impediment to the country’s recovery.
The “Rules of the Game”
Practical “rules of the game” emerged, during the 1990s, between Hezbollah-led resistance forces versus the Israelis and their proxy, the SLA. Israel would not attack civilian targets in Lebanon, and the resistance would focus its actions on the Security Zone (Sobelman 2004). This modus vivendi was clearly articulated in an oral agreement in 1993, following Israel’s “Operation Accountability,” launched in July of that year. The 1993 agreement led to a temporary reduction in the intensity of violence and reprisal. But in 1996, after Hezbollah fired katyusha rockets into Israel in retaliation for the killing of Lebanese civilians, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) again launched a major campaign into Lebanon. “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” initiated in April of that year, was intended to undermine popular support for Hezbollah among the Lebanese, as well as to prompt Syria to rein in the organization. The strategy failed, largely as a result of the horrible slaughter at Qana, an ancient village some locals like to claim as the town cited in the Bible where Jesus turned water to wine (John 2:1–11). (In fact, the actual site is probably Cana in the Galilee.) At the UN base in Qana—a protected zone in international law—civilians sought refuge from IDF air and ground attacks. But rather than finding safety, 106 civilians were killed by Israeli artillery. Authoritative reports by the UN and Amnesty International challenged Israeli claims that the shelling of the UN base was unintentional, and these findings are well known in Lebanon.2 However, the report of the UN Secretary-General’s military adviser demonstrated that the Israeli shelling of the UNIFIL site was not accidental, and the thirteen shells that fell on the compound had exploded where they had been aimed.
No incident in recent memory has inspired more hatred for the Jewish state than the Qana attack. Close to the UN base, a memorial cemetery has been created where the victims are buried, and the site has become a popular memorial for many Lebanese to visit. Among middle-class professionals in al-dahiya trips to Qana, usually with children in tow, are now common and have taken on the aspects of ritual. The site is festooned with banners (most in Arabic) accusing Israel of terrorism and genocide, and invoking sayings by some of the central figures in Shiʿism such as Imam Hussein. Many of the banners emphasize the loss of innocent blood and demand vengeance. One sign reads: “Qana is the Karbala [the site of Hussein’s martyrdom in the year 680 c.e.; see chapter 3] of the twentieth century; it is a land made holy by the Lord Jesus and contaminated by the Zionist Satan (enemy of God).”
As CNN broadcast horrific pictures of mangled and burned civilians in the wake of this massacre, the then U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher succeeded in persuading all sides to abide once again by the same rules that had been in place since 1993. This time, however, the agreement was committed to an unsigned piece of paper. A noteworthy point is that in the course of negotiations Israel never challenged the right of Hezbollah to attack its soldiers in Lebanon, thus tacitly conceding that the IDF was an occupation force in the country. The April understanding brokered by Secretary Christopher specified that armed groups would not launch attacks against Israeli territory; Israel and its allies would not bombard civilians or civilian targets; both sides would commit themselves to avoid attacking civilians and launching attacks from civilian areas; and nothing in the agreement would prevent the right to self-defense. The agreement also provided for a monitoring group of the United States, France, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel to oversee the implementation of the agreement and to receive complaints of violations. The group would operate on the basis of unanimity and be based at Naqura, a southern coastal village and the site of an old customs house now used as the UNIFIL headquarters. From 1996 to 2000 the group operated as an effective mechanism for policing and reinforcing the rules of the game. UNIFIL has also functioned throughout its existence (from 1978 to the present) as a useful backchannel conduit for indirect communications between the belligerents.
One measure of the importance of the accepted rules was that both Israel and Hezbollah apologized for actions that fell outside the rules, as in November 1998, when Hezbollah apologized for a katyusha firing which it not only had not authorized but which it condemned. Israel has occasionally acted with marked restraint after suffering major casualties, on the argument that a given Hezbollah attack was permitted by the rules. It also bears emphasizing that Hezbollah resistance operations were mainly targeted against Israeli soldiers and the allied Lebanese militia, not against civilians. This is an important difference between Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. Whereas Hamas has intentionally targeted Israeli civilians, not least in suicide bombings, Hezbollah usually did not do so over the course of Israel’s long occupation in Lebanon. Though shocking, perhaps, to many Western observers, the twelve suicide attacks launched by Hezbollah were all targeted against the occupation force and its allies, all legitimate resistance targets.
This is not to say that both sides always played by the “rules of the game.” Both sides periodically disregarded timehonored principles of noncombatant immunity and proportionality. Resistance attacks on Israeli soldiers sometimes sparked indiscriminate Israeli reprisals that led to civilian deaths, especially after several Israeli soldiers had been killed. Hezbollah proved adept at moving within the rule box, which no doubt frustrated Israeli soldiers. The IDF, on a day-to-day basis, often adopted a policy of shoot first and ask questions later, which made daily life more than a bit risky for those living in the shadow of the Security Zone. Thus civilians were regularly killed “by accident” and in greater cumulative numbers than either members of the resistance, the IDF, or the SLA. In all, more than five hundred Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were killed in southern Lebanon from the time of the 1982 invasion to the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, or more than thirty times the number of Israeli civilian fatalities during this time. Human Rights Watch has carefully analyzed the deadly civilian toll (see, for example, Hilterman 1996).
The logic of Israel’s “iron fist” was to punish Lebanese civilians disproportionately for the inability of the IDF to prevent attacks on its own soldiers and for retaliatory firing of katyusha rockets at Israel. Support for the resistance would wither, Israeli strategists thought, if they placed an awesome burden on the Lebanese, as, for example, when several hundred thousand people were roused from their homes and given a few hours to flee on threat of bombardment in April 1996. This proved to be a miscalculation, as many Lebanese believed that less resistance would induce Israel not to leave but to stay in the South.
Although Israel is anathema in the ideology of Hezbollah, there have been some mechanisms for negotiation, often through UNIFIL and sometimes through European states. The rules of the game allowed for both sides to conduct periodic, indirect negotiations for the return of prisoners and bodies.3 Typically German negotiators have played an active role in the negotiations. Thus, in 1996, in return for the bodies of 2 IDF and 17 SLA soldiers, Israel released 45 detainees and the remains of 123 Lebanese. A similar exchange occurred in 1998, which was notable because one of the Lebanese bodies exchanged by Israel was that of Hadi Nasrallah, the son of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hasan Nasrallah. Hadi was killed in September 1997, in a raging battle with Israeli forces in southern Lebanon. (The elder Nasrallah’s stoic acceptance of his son’s death is often cited by party members as one of the reasons he is so highly esteemed.) The most sensational prisoner exchange was conducted as late as January 2004, when, in return for three bodies and one living retired lieutenant colonel who had been captured in Beirut, Israel released 23 Lebanese and 400 Palestinian prisoners. The Lebanese included Mustafa Dirani (captured in 1994) and Shaikh ʿAbdul Karim ʿUbayd (captured in 1989). These men had been held by Israel (in Camp 1391, one of the places Israeli officials do not talk about) as bargaining chips to gain information about Ron Arad, a long missing aviator who was captured alive in Lebanon, in 1986, but whose fate is now unknown.
The 2000 Israeli Withdrawal
In 1999 the retired chief of staff General Ehud Barak was elected prime minister of Israel. One of his campaign promises was that he would withdraw from Lebanon within twelve months of assuming office, either in conjunction with bilateral negotiations with Syria or unilaterally, with the former the obvious preference. After several months of preparatory discussion between Israel and Syria in March 2000, President William Clinton flew to Geneva to meet with the Syrian president Hafez al-Asad, and, to the utter surprise of al-Asad and multitudes of Lebanese and Syrians, the negotiations failed. Barak refused (to Clinton’s apparent annoyance) to release a pocket of Syrian land abutting Lake Tiberias, and the Syrians found this unacceptable. Al-Asad told Clinton, “I used to swim in that lake as a boy,” and he insisted that all occupied Syrian land be returned. Israel then began focusing on unilateral withdrawal.
After the abortive Geneva meeting, the run-up to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal began. Confusion abounded In Beirut and Damascus, with dire warnings of widespread chaos in Lebanon, including the slaughter of collaborators and bloody vendettas. Hasan Nasrallah’s statements stood out for their clear analysis and calm assurances of Hezbollah’s careful preparations for the aftermath of withdrawal. He emphasized that there would be no retaliatory killings or revenge attacks. In contrast, many other officials seemed like actors confused about their lines and unsure of their parts, so disconcerting and unwelcome was a voluntary Israeli exit.
Hezbollah maintained a position of calculated and coy ambiguity concerning the Israeli withdrawal. Although it was widely believed in Lebanon that the violence against the Jewish state would stop after the Israeli withdrawal, Hezbollah avoided saying so directly. Muhammad Raʿd, the unflappable and very popular Hezbollah leader (and schoolteacher) from al-Nabatiya, who has been elected four times to the Lebanese parliament on the party’s ticket, argued, in a 1996 interview with the author, that ambiguity increased Lebanese anxiety and the fear of Israel.
The withdrawal finally came on May 24, 2000. It was a time of extraordinary celebration in Lebanon, most especially in the South, and displaced residents immediately flooded into the South to repossess their liberated homes and villages. At the prison of al-Khiam, a horrendous detention center run by the SLA in close collaboration with Israel and the site of much mistreatment, even torture, people were literally tearing down prison doors with their bare hands to free the prisoners. In the rest of the countryside, apart from a few incidents that mainly involved beatings of collaborators—not even serious injuries, much less deaths—there was a remarkable degree of calm. Very little associated violence occurred, and certainly none of the revenge killings so widely anticipated. Many of the SLA people fled to Israel with their families. Those who remained were tried for collaboration and, typically, given sentences of four or five years, and in some cases advised not to return to their villages for a time. Overall, that time will be remembered as a remarkably orderly and humane period, especially when measured against the history of internecine violence that scarred Lebanon for much of the preceding few decades.
The summer following Israel’s withdrawal, a serious debate arose within Hezbollah about whether to focus on Lebanese politics and themes, such as corruption, or to maintain the resistance posture both in Lebanon and the Middle East. After internal party discussions settled on the latter strategy, Nasrallah consulted with the Iranian rahbar (or leader) Ayatollah ʿAli Khamenei, who gave his blessing to continue the resistance, especially in the Israeli-Palestinian theater. Hezbollah found a clever pretext to continue paramilitary operations against Israel by attacking Israeli patrols on farmland adjoining the village of Shebaa, a disputed territory in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights (called “Har Dov” Mount David by Israelis) that Lebanon claims as its own. Israeli military presence there allowed Hezbollah to maintain a military posture on the pretext that the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon had not been complete.
During the period between the Israeli withdrawal of May 2000 and the explosion of war in July 2006 (examined in chapter 6) one Israeli civilian was killed by Hezbollah weapons, and five more were killed in a Palestinian operation that may have had Hezbollah’s help. Nine Israeli soldiers died in Hezbollah attacks in the contested farms area, and eight others were killed in six clashes along the “Blue Line” demarcated by the UN after Israel’s withdrawal. Some of the attacks were in retaliation for Israeli-caused deaths in Lebanon. At least twenty-one Israeli soldiers were also wounded. The total of seventeen Israeli soldiers killed during a six-year period contrasted to an average of twenty-five Israeli soldiers who died annually during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, according to Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon.
Harassing fire, aggressive patrolling, and heated rhetoric by both sides marked the entire period. On the Lebanese side of the border billboards facing Israel exhibited slogans in Hebrew, stating, for example, “If you come back, we’ll come back.” Hezbollah delighted in sponsoring cross-border taunting and stone throwing at Israeli military positions. In fact, piles of rocks were conveniently available adjacent to the Fatima gate, through which Israel had often entered Lebanon.
Generally, however, this six-year period was a relatively quiet, peaceful time by historical standards, and this was frequently commented on by Israeli officials prior to the summer of 2006. The more serious clashes tended to occur in the Shebaa area of the occupied Golan Heights. This period is important to consider because it indicated that maintaining stability across this hostile border is neither impossible nor infeasible. Indeed, the rules of the game were well understood by both Israel and its Hezbollah foe.
In October 2000 Hezbollah launched an operation in the Shebaa Farms area that led to the ambush and capture of three Israeli soldiers. The captives all died, either on the spot or later from their wounds, their bodies only returned in the January 2004 exchange. After that operation Israel resumed the routine violations of Lebanese airspace and territorial waters that it had ceased in May or June 2000, when it was seeking UN certification of its withdrawal under the terms of Security Council Resolution 425. From October 2000 on, Israeli war planes regularly flew over Lebanese territory, with sonic booms over Beirut, intelligence collecting drones, and similar incursions. In time, Hezbollah began firing anti-aircraft weapons at Israeli planes violating Lebanese airspace, but as they were firing southward, in the direction the planes were coming from, the spent ammunition rounds would land in Israel. Hezbollah also began firing Katyusha rockets, mostly into the occupied Golan Heights, with a few episodes of Katyusha firings into Israel proper as well. Although several dozen incidents occurred over the last six years, in almost every case, according to Israeli sources, the culprits were Palestinian fedayeen, not Hezbollah.
The periodic episodes of violence during this period occurred in the Shebaa Farms area, Israeli-occupied territory. The rules were so well established, in fact, that officials on both sides were periodically quoted as saying that such and such a military action was within the “rules of the game.”
Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon was followed closely by the eruption of the second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in September 2000. That Intifada movement clearly was partially inspired by Hezbollah’s stunning success. In 2000 and 2001 Hezbollah flags flew in many Palestinian camps in the West Bank and Gaza, and Hezbollah played a role in training anti-Israeli Palestinians and a minor role in supplying them. The major exception were the arms that Iran shipped on the Karine-A, which included a Hezbollah crewman and was intercepted by Israel in January 2002 (the incident apparently encouraged George Bush to pin the “axis-of-evil” label on Iran). Otherwise, Nasrallah carefully stressed that the job of liberating Palestine belonged to the Palestinians, just as the job of liberating the Golan Heights belonged to Syria. Even so, the level of incitement from Hezbollah was very high. The Hezbollah television station, al-Manar (“the Lighthouse”), beamed terrestrial and satellite propaganda to many avid Palestinian viewers. The number of viewers had peaked in 2001, and dropped in 2003 to 8 percent, compared to an audience of more than 50 percent for the CNN-clone al-Jazeerah. Al-Manar was the sixth most popular satellite station in the Arab world, trailing far behind al-Arabiya as well as al-Jazeerah, according to a January 2006 poll by the U.S. firm Zogby International.
In Lebanon, meanwhile, the Hezbollah leadership was unanimously persuaded, as were most of the supporters, that its demonstrated military prowess and accumulating military arsenal provided by Iran and Syria was successfully deterring Israel from invading Lebanon again, or from bombarding Lebanon as it had done so often in the past. In July 2006, however, Hezbollah was to discover that its deterrent shield was not as intimidating as it imagined.
1 For an official Israeli report of the incident, see http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Foreign%20Relations/Israels%20Foreign%20Relations%20since%201947/1982-1984.
2 The UN report was prepared by Major General Franklin van Kappen, a Dutch officer serving on the staff of Secretary General Butrous Butrous Ghali. See Security Council document S/1996/137, May 7, 1996. See also Amnesty International, “Unlawful Killings during Operation ‘Grapes of Wrath,’” July 1996, http://www.amnesty.org/library/Index/engMDE150421996 (accessed October 21, 2006); and Human Rights Watch, “Israel/Lebanon: ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’: The Civilian Victims” (September 1997).
3 A typical statement of Hezbollah’s position on Israel is provided by ʿAbdallah Qasir, a former member of parliament: “Direct negotiations are impossible because we do not recognize the existence of the State of Israel” (Al-Zaman, May 29, 2002).