From Celebration to War
The Beirut suburbs of Haret Hreik on the morning of August 14, 2006, a few hours after a cease-fire in the 2006 war. Copyright Ali Safa, 2006.
The exuberant nationwide Lebanese celebration of Israel’s 2000 withdrawal began to run out of steam within a couple of years, particularly outside the formerly occupied region. People still made the trek to the large village of al-Khiam, a couple of miles north of the Israeli town of Metulla, where they visited the infamous Israeli prison from the period of the occupation. The prison, formerly a French military barracks built during the League of Nations mandate in pre-independence Syria and Lebanon (1920–43), had been a thoroughly miserable place to be jailed. Until Israel bombed it during the summer of 2006, it was preserved more or less as it was on May 24, 2000, the day of the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, when the guards—members of the Israeli-funded proxy militia—fled and neighboring villagers forced the cells open. Visitors would come to gawk at the poorly lit, cramped cells, the frayed toothbrushes, improvised eating utensils, a “dispensary” that seemed more a janitor’s closet than a medical facility, and a metal utility pole to which inmates were occasionally tied and beaten with electric cables (on two occasions to death). After leaving al-Khiam, visitors might make their way to the much-bombed, ruined, but still awesome crusader fortress, Chateau de Beaufort, with its sweeping vistas of the Galilee, or to a memorial cemetery for the victims of the shelling of Qana in 1996. En route, Hezbollah flags were common, interspersed with billboards honoring martyrs and schematics recounting resistance operations. Voyeuristic sightseeing aside, many Lebanese wanted to “live and let live,” as one founding member of Hezbollah said to this author in May 2000. Israel was gone, and most Lebanese had no desire to fight other people’s battles. For five consecutive years, on May 25, the government sponsored an annual commemoration of the liberation of the South, but that stopped in 2006, as if Lebanon’s political elites had decided it was time to move on.
In the summer of 2000, before the second Palestinian intifadah erupted in September, and before Hezbollah began its campaign against the few remaining Israeli forces in the Shebaa Farms area of the occupied Golan Heights. Hasan Nasrallah was a regional, even international celebrity. He was rewarded by a visit from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. His ordering of the operation that led to the capture, in October, of three Israeli soldiers in the Shebaa area possessed a clear logic; like Israel, which had earlier captured Shiʿi fighters in the South as bargaining chips, Hezbollah now had bargaining chips of its own. The chips were exploited to full effect when, with German help, a deal was reached, in January 2004, to give up the bodies of the three captured soldiers (who were either dead when captured, or succumbed to their wounds) and to return an Israeli reserve lieutenant colonel reputedly lured to Beirut under murky, apparently illicit circumstances. In an Israeli procedure clothed in secrecy, the officer was charged with unspecified crimes and agreed to a plea bargain by which he was sentenced to the time that he was held in captivity by Hezbollah.1 In exchange for the Israeli captives who were released, Israel freed 423 prisoners, of whom 23 were Lebanese and the remainder Palestinians. The prisoner exchange was a moment of triumph, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, paid off a few months later in sweeping victories for Hezbollah in the 2004 municipal elections.
The occasional skirmish in Shebaa often obscured the fact that, as noted in chapter 4, for the six years following Israel’s exit from Lebanon in the spring of 2000, the border was more or less quiet. This confounded the predictions of many experts who had predicted that the Israeli exit would leave a vacuum that would likely be filled by mayhem. During these six years of relative stability, nine Israeli soldiers were killed in the Shebaa Farms area. Another eight Israeli soldiers were killed along the “Blue Line” demarcated by the UN after Israel’s withdrawal (some on Lebanese soil and others on Israeli soil). A total of seventeen Israeli soldiers were lost during the six-year period compared to about twenty-five per year during the occupation. As far as Israeli civilian casualties were concerned, during this entire sixyear period, there was only one Israeli civilian fatality, a teenaged boy who was killed by an anti-aircraft round fired by Hezbollah. (There was also an operation in 2002 involving two Palestinian fighters who managed to cross the border and ambush and kill six Israelis—five civilians and a soldier. Even though Hezbollah was not directly involved, it is difficult to imagine anyone crossing the border without some level of Hezbollah cooperation. If these are counted, the total Israeli civilian deaths were six, or one per year.) Lebanese and Palestinian civilian deaths during this same period included a shepherd killed by Israeli gunfire, and a preponderance of deaths caused by landmines and cluster bombs left as a legacy of Israel’s operations and attacks.
As the euphoria of the Israeli withdrawal began to fade, so did the adulation for Hezbollah. Critics arose who argued that the organization’s periodic attacks on Israel, even if confined to the Shebaa Farms area, were reckless and unjustified. In one of his many outspoken newspaper articles, Gibran Tueni, the publisher of Lebanon’s leading newspaper and a widely read critic of both Syria and Hezbollah, asked: “Who authorized Nasrallah to represent all the Lebanese, to make decisions for them and to embroil them in something they don’t want to be embroiled in? Did Nasrallah appoint himself secretary general of all the Lebanese and the whole Arab world?” (an-Nahar, May 5, 2003). Tueni was only one of many who accused Nasrallah of being intoxicated with his own fame.
Another sign of discord involving Hezbollah at this time (2003) occurred when Nayif Krayem, the well-known director of the party’s television station al-Manar, was dismissed from his post because he seemed to be loyal to Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, whose moral influence Hezbollah had come to distrust. All this arose indirectly from Hezbollah’s criticism of flagellation and similar religious practices in the ʿAshura commemorations, as discussed in chapter 4. Indeed, Hezbollah’s position is complementary to that of many senior mujtahids who argue that these rituals detract from Islam and divert people from appropriately contemplating the Muharram tragedy. Before his dismissal, Krayem wrote an article making the same points, using quotations from the revered Iranian Ayatollah Mortaza Mutaharri as support. The reason for his dismissal was not his citation of Mutaharri but the suspicion that he was using the citations as a smoke screen to obscure his debt to the ideas of Fadlallah, who, as previously seen in chapter 5, is the most influential Shiʿi thinker and cleric in Lebanon. Krayem categorically denied the charges in an extraordinary series of newspaper articles in the Arabic press. Although frequently and incorrectly described in the West as Hezbollah’s “spiritual guide,” Fadlallah’s relationship with Hezbollah, although civil, is often strained and tense. Krayem’s 2003 firing should be understood to reflect not only the party leadership’s distrust of Fadlallah’s moral influence but their overall siege mentality following a couple of years of basking in adulation after the Israeli withdrawal.
As the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq loomed in early 2003, Hezbollah wanted to step out of the crosshairs. The party cooled its rhetoric, its episodic taunts along the border with Israel, and its strikes at Israeli army positions in the Shebaa region. Although many Lebanese Shiʿa adored him, Nasrallah won few plaudits from Iraqi co-religionists when he argued against toppling Saddam Hussein and his regime, and instead urged the Iraqis to convene a national reconciliation conference, with elections and the formation of a new government. There was no rush among Iraqi Shiʿa and Kurds to embrace Nasrallah’s unsolicited proposal; the plan only evoked their criticism, as they viewed the suggestion as laughable that the Iraqi Baathist regime would conciliate itself out of existence. In the United States, meanwhile, the spring of its Iraq invasion in 2003 was a period of unfettered optimism not yet undermined by the Bush administration’s miscalculations or the nightmare of violence that haunts Iraq still. Nasrallah’s trenchant assessment proved prescient: “We tell the United States, don’t expect that the people of this region will welcome you with roses and jasmine. The people of this region will welcome you with rifles, blood, and martyrdom operations. We are not afraid of the American invaders, and we will keep saying ‘death to America’” (al-Intiqad, March 14, 2003). Such prophetic statements did nothing to diminish U.S. hostility toward Hezbollah.
Nasrallah had his own, self-interested reasons to oppose the Americans. This became clear during the first weeks after the Iraq invasion, when the euphoria of a quick succession of victories led to speculation, in and around the Bush administration, about further, immanent military action to snatch the “low-hanging fruit” elsewhere in the region to exploit America’s apparent strategic momentum. The threatening chatter, which received lively play in the Beirut media, referred most commonly to toppling the government in Syria, attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the rather fanciful notion that the U.S. might sponsor an opposition uprising in Iran to topple the Islamic regime.
The Changing Social Tapestry in Post–Civil War Lebanon
Over the past few decades the social tapestry in Lebanon has changed in ways that help explain why sectarianism has kept a stubborn grip on the country, why Hezbollah has succeeded so well in mobilizing support, and why inter-confessional cooperation is more elusive today than it was a few decades ago. The key changes were a result of Lebanon’s terrible civil war, which claimed nearly 150,000 lives, or nearly 5 percent of the country’s population.
It is commonly assumed that the fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon, ending in 1990, was a conflict only between Christians and Muslims. There is some truth to this, for the main line of battle, especially in the first years of the conflict, divided the politically dominant Christian Maronite community and the mainly Muslim Palestinian resistance movement, which saw Lebanon as a battleground in their war to wrest a homeland from Israel. However, this notion obscures much more complex patterns of belligerence involving many different sectarian groups at odds over the Palestinian cause. Many Lebanese Christians, especially the Greek Orthodox who accounted for about 10 percent of the population during the civil war, tended to be much more sympathetic than the Maronites to the Palestinians. The non-Arab Armenian community, which is wholly Christian, mostly stayed out of the civil war, with notable exceptions of Armenian groups fighting on both sides. The main pro-Palestinian grouping of Lebanese during the civil war was the Lebanese National Movement, an admixture of Arab nationalists, communists in several flavors, and various sectarian militias, notably from the Druze community, which accounted for about 7 percent of the total population. Most of the Shiʿa backed the Palestinian militias, but smaller yet not insignificant numbers joined the Maronite militias. Later in the war, especially in the 1980s, groups with a distinctly Shiʿi sectarian orientation—particularly Amal and Hezbollah—emerged as significant players. As already noted, Amal opposed the Palestinian guerrillas and Hezbollah supported them.
Most Lebanese and others who witnessed the civil war agree that taʾifiyya (sectarianism, or “confessionalism”) became more pronounced after the civil war than during the war. At least four factors may explain this heightened sectarianism, which have been analyzed incisively by the Lebanese sociologist Salim Nasr (S. Nasr 2003).
For one, the outbreak of intercommunal violence at the start of the civil war forced a significant displacement of people that transformed the previous, socially heterogeneous communities into more segmented patterns of living. An unfortunate example is the well-known shopping district in West Beirut, al-Hamra, where Christians and Muslims had lived closely together in adjacent apartments before the civil war, but today the Christian population has shrunk and Hamra is now predominantly Sunni Muslim. Some observers claim that the ambience of the once cosmopolitan Hamra has suffered as a result of this change. A short visit to Hamra will confirm this impression: If you stand, at ten or eleven in the evening, outside a movie theater that was once packed with patrons, today you will see only a handful of movie-goers trickle into the street when the movie ends.
Second, sectarianism has been abetted by growing economic difficulties, income inequality, and immense corruption, estimated by a UN-commissioned study, in the 1990s, to exceed $1.5 billion a year (Daily Star, January 20, 2001). Even before the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006, the country’s national debt stood at $40 billion—the highest per capita national debt in the world—which had been created by massive public spending on infrastructure damaged during the civil conflicts and the Israeli invasion. (Much of the rebuilt infrastructure was destroyed by Israeli bombs in the summer of 2006, which will only add to the national debt problem.) The huge debt constrains the ability of the state to intervene in the economy and inhibits private sector investment, severely limiting economic opportunities. This has resulted in a shrinking middle class, increased flight of Lebanese with the financial means to emigrate (largely Christians, who have comparatively easier access to visas to the West), and growing dependence of the remaining population on the patronage dispensed by the new sectarian political bosses (zuʿama), such as Amal leader Nabih Berri, who gained immense power and personal wealth by dispensing largesse, jobs, and political favors.
A third cause of rising sectarianism concerns the revival of religious institutions and leaders, as illustrated by the strong influence of the Maronite Patriarch Mar Nasrallah Sfeir, the Sunni Grand Mufti Muhammad Rashid Qabbani, and the head of the Supreme Islamic Shiʿi Council Shaikh ʿAbd al-Amr Qabalan. Within sectarian organizations, clerics have come to predominate. In Hezbollah, for example, Muhammad Raʿd and Muhammad Fneish, the only two non-clerical members of the seven-member al-Shura (“consultation” body), the highest decision-making body in the party, were replaced by clerics in 2001. Raʿd and Fneish, perhaps not coincidentally, were known to be pragmatists who were skeptical of the organization’s belligerent risk-taking. (The only non-clerical member of al-Shura is now al-Hajj Hasan Khalil, a close adviser to Nasrallah.) Although this religious revival cannot be traced to any single factor, Syria’s domination of Lebanon’s political space cannot be underestimated as a key element. Syrian hegemony has stunted the growth of independent political personalities and, conversely, has fostered the promotion of pro-Syrian sycophants. A political environment with little opportunity for men and women of real stature to develop as political leaders attracts religious figures prepared to criticize widespread corruption and a generally compromised political system, and also advance a convincing normative model for a religiously rooted society.
A final reason concerns regional developments that have affected Sunni-Shiʿi relations throughout the Middle East and beyond. The political ascendancy of the majority Shiʿi community in Iraq in the wake of the American occupation has heightened the shared identity of Lebanese Shiʿa to their religious brethren in Iraq. The rise of violent Sunni movements, such as al-Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, which are virulently anti-Shiʿi and frequently deny that the Shiʿa qualify as Muslims, has encouraged Shiʿi Muslims across the Middle East and even in Pakistan to identify themselves more in sectarian than secular terms. Younger Shiʿa in the region are much less likely than their fathers and grandfathers were a generation or more ago to join secular parties of the ideological left or right.
Lebanon's Love-Hate Relationship with Rafiq al-Hariri, and His Assassination
When Rafiq al-Hariri was maneuvered out of office in 1998 after six years as Lebanon’s prime minister, many Lebanese were happy to see him go. They were equally happy to see him return as prime minister in 2000, however, when the Lebanese surprised even themselves by upsetting Syria’s plans for fraudulent elections that would install pro-Syrian officials. Disappointment with the government of Salim al-Huss, the Sunni politician who was prime minister from 1998 to 2000, was rampant, largely because it could not cope with the economic mess that al-Hariri had bequeathed. The transparent subservience of the al-Huss government toward Syria did not help either.
In the run-up to the 2000 national elections, al-Hariri’s shadow loomed very large. The publicity-shy general Ghazi Kanaan, then the Syrian pro-consul in Lebanon, dictated the redrawing of electoral districts in Beirut to facilitate simultaneous victories for Tamam Salaam, son of a former prime minister, Prime Minister al-Huss and for Rafiq al-Hariri. According to Syria’s master plan, the nineteen seats in Beirut would be divided between three pliant Sunni politicians in the capital. The smart money was betting that Najib Mikati from Tripoli, known for his close ties to Syria, would head the new government. The election confounded the game-plan. Al-Hariri proved to be a steamroller. He captured eighteen seats in Beirut and vanquished his two major Sunni opponents. The nineteenth seat was left open for a Shiʿi Muslim from Hezbollah. Al-Hariri himself won his Beirut constituency with more votes than any of the other Sunni candidates in Beirut.
Al-Hariri had been careful to cultivate good ties in Syria, including Vice President ʿAbdul Halim Khaddam, who long handled the Lebanon portfolio until Syrian leader Hafiz al-Asad passed it on to his son, Bashar. Press reports indicated a momentary warming with Bashar, to whom al-Hariri promised $400 million in foreign investment for Syria, but the rapprochement was not destined to last.
The ensuing four years, until al-Hariri’s resignation in October 2004, were marked by deadlock, political frustration, and mutual animosity between al-Hariri and Emile Lahoud, Lebanon’s president since 1998. Lahoud, who was widely understood to be Bashar al-Asad’s wakil (or “deputy”) and who did not hesitate to wield the considerable power of his Syrian patron, succeeded in usurping the prerogatives of his adversary. For instance, although the prime minister chairs cabinet meetings under the terms of the 1989 Ta’if accord, President Lahoud assumed the prerogative to do so. Lahoud often summarily dismissed al-Hariri’s agenda for cabinet meetings.
According to the Lebanese constitution, presidents may not succeed themselves. Al-Hariri made no secret of his unhappiness with Syria’s plans to extend President Lahoud’s six-year term in 2004 for a further three years. Syrian president al-Asad reacted sharply, informing al-Hariri in a curt ten-minute meeting in Damascus, in August 2004, that opposing Lahoud’s extension would be considered tantamount to opposing the Syrian president. Accounts of this terse encounter began ricocheting around Beirut that same evening, when the former prime minister, Salim al-Huss, stated the bottom line succinctly when he met this author: “It is done.”
Syria’s engineering of Lahoud’s three-year extension as president was received with approval, resignation, or resentment depending on where one sat on the political spectrum. For Hezbollah, Lahoud is an ally and a guarantor that the “resistance” will not be forced to disarm. In many quarters, including among veteran politicians such al-Huss, the extension was merely another example of Syria’s controlling hand in Lebanese politics. In contrast, for many Christians and Druze, and certainly for al-Hariri and his allies, Syria’s diktat provoked resentment and a mood of opposition. By deploying its power so brazenly, Damascus overreached and provoked an international response. The U.S. and France acted in concert with UN Security Council Resolution 1559, passed with their joint sponsorship in September 2004, which called for the withdrawal of Syrian forces and the disarming of Hezbollah. Given al-Hariri’s close relationship with President Jacques Chirac, there was much speculation about al-Hariri’s role in crafting, or at least promoting, the resolution.
As a direct result of the extension of Lahoud, political opposition to Syrian political domination began to coalesce, particularly around Walid Jumblatt, leader of Lebanon’s two hundred thousand Druze. Jumblatt organized a series of opposition meetings in the fall of 2004 at Beirut’s fashionable Bristol Hotel. Prime Minister al-Hariri did not attend, but he was widely known to have sent friends and proxies. The October 2004 attempt on the life of Jumblatt ally Marwan Hamade, one of twenty-nine deputies who voted against the extension, was universally understood as a warning to al-Hariri in particular, and to the opposition in general.
The opposition’s defiance of Syria, in the face of Damascus’s warnings, gained momentum that autumn, and al-Hariri was widely understood to be the opposition’s de facto leader. He was feeling sufficiently confident in January 2005 to tell Rustum Ghazali, Syria’s pro-consul in Beirut from 2002 to 2005, that he would not accept any Syrianimposed candidates on his list in the elections scheduled for May 2005. Rustum replied icily, “You have to think about it, and we have to think about it” (New York Times, March 22, 2005).
Rafiq al-Hariri’s assassination by a car bomb explosion in Beirut, on February 14, 2005, should be understood in the context of his status as the focus of Lebanese opposition to Syrian authority. Although the assassins have not yet been conclusively identified and a UN investigation into the murder continues, there is little doubt that pro-Syrian political figures in Lebanon and their Syrian allies understood al-Hariri to be a serious threat to their political survival.
Syria, which held the political controls until its forces withdrew from Lebanon in April 2005, played a balance of power game in Lebanon and often promoted intra- and inter-sectarian divisions. The prospect of an organized coalition empowered to challenge Syrian authority would be ipso facto a hostile act toward Syria. Syria’s stakes in Lebanon extended well beyond security: Syrian officials were deeply enmeshed in networks of political corruption, smuggling, and crime, and were sensitive to developments that would jeopardize its Lebanese golden goose. In 2000 President Lahoud, abruptly called off an anti-corruption drive when it seemed to threaten Syria’s friends (Gambill 2006a). When Prime Minister al-Hariri, in August 1997, asked this author for an appraisal of developments in Lebanon, and I cited the rampant corruption, he replied, “Some of the people in my cabinet are criminals and should be in jail, but I can’t do anything about it.” His claim of impotence, although transparently self-serving, also reflected his inability to defy Syria.
The initial wave of demonstrations following the death of al-Hariri and twenty-two others traveling in his entourage was met with celebratory chest-thumping and self-congratulation in Washington, where government officials anticipated the definitive overthrow of Syrian influence by a pro-American, democratic “Cedar Revolution.” But within a few weeks the situation in Lebanon became much more complex when Hezbollah regained the initiative. Hezbollah expressed gratitude to Syria with a massive demonstration of Shiʿi Muslims in Beirut on March 8, 2005, attended by some four hundred thousand people, according to journalists’ estimates. Clearly many Lebanese do not object to Syrian hegemony. Indeed, Syria’s influence over the country remains pervasive through its strategic coordination with Hezbollah and a coterie of pliant allies, including President Lahoud, Speaker Nabih Berri, and other major political figures such as former prime minister ʿUmar Karami from Tripoli, in northern Lebanon where pro-Syrian sentiment is notable.
In response to the Hezbollah demonstration, and to mark the one-month anniversary of al-Hariri’s assassination, the Cedar Revolutionaries organized a massive rally of their own in central Beirut, on March 14, attended by as many as a million people, according to widely shared estimates—incredibly, a full quarter of the country’s population. Although the rally centered on Martyr’s Square, where the Ottoman governor had hanged Lebanese nationalists nearly ninety years before, the city spilled over with the sea of demonstrators. There had not been a rally of similar scale in the Middle East since four million Egyptians turned out to bury their national singer, Umm Kulthoum, in 1975 (al-Ahram, February 6, 1975, 1). But that massive public gathering was in a country with ten times the population of today’s Lebanon. The month of dueling mass demonstrations ended with mutual recognition that neither side would prevail and that a compromise was necessary.
A wildcard player in this volatile game was the former commander-in-chief of the Lebanese army, General Michel Aoun, a Maronite who had been in exile in France since the early 1990s and returned to Lebanon in time for parliamentary elections scheduled for May 2005. Aoun showed a penchant for overplaying his hand; he had blundered badly in Lebanese politics in the late 1980s by failing to reach out to the Shiʿi, Sunni, and Druze communities, and instead launching terrible violence against his own citizens. He then recklessly challenged the Syrian Baathist regime in a “war of liberation” that had neither the support of key external or internal Lebanese players nor the means to succeed. In the process, Aoun alienated potential supporters in both Washington and his own country. Thus isolated, Aoun was forced into exile by Syria in 1990.
Aoun sustained a broad popular following in Lebanon during his exile years in France, especially among secular Christians but among the Muslim communities as well. He has been admired for his courage, honesty, and nationalism. When he returned to Lebanon, in May 2005, shortly before the scheduled parliamentary elections, established politicians viewed him with trepidation because his populist following was seen as a potential threat. Aoun joined Nabih Berri and Hezbollah in calling for a delay in the election in order to revise the electoral law, which had been designed by Syria to insure that friendly politicians would be elected and to minimize opportunities for independent candidates to emerge, especially in the Christian community. Although Aoun’s supporters comprised a significant proportion of the March 14 demonstration, and they certainly expected to see Aoun emerge as a major figure in any new government, it was all too clear that Aoun’s Christian rivals had no intention of inviting him to join the government and thereby improve his odds for becoming president in 2007. Aoun found allies instead within the pro-Syrian “March 8 Group” (so named after the Hezbollah-organized mass demonstration of Shiʿa on that date). They calculated that buying time might lead to splits in the rival “Cedar Revolution.” Under U.S. pressure, the elections were held as scheduled and were won by the anti-Syrian coalition. Ironically, the victors came to power by means of the very electoral system designed to preserve Syrian authority in Lebanon.
The May 2005 election produced three distinct blocs of votes. The Cedar Revolution, under the leadership of Saad al-Din al-Hariri, a son of the assassinated former prime minister, captured seventy-two seats, short of the two-thirds total needed to unseat the pro-Syrian president Lahoud. Amal and Hezbollah offered shared tickets and won thirtyfive seats, whereas Michel Aoun aligned with pro-Syrian Christians in the North and sustained his important populist base in the Christian heartland, winning twenty-one seats. Aoun, having reasoned that his prior opposition to Syrian influence in Lebanon had been overtaken by events, counted on his new pro-Syrian stance to help forge an alliance with Hezbollah. This was consummated in February 2006, when the Aoun faction and Hezbollah signed a political pact pledging to work together to fight against corruption and for electoral and economic reform. It is significant that Hezbollah won Aoun’s recognition as a legitimate party of national resistance, and held his support throughout the 2006 war and its aftermath. The new Hezbollah-Aoun coalition was in force in subsequent student elections in the universities, where Hezbollah supporters joined Aoun partisans to elect pro-Aoun candidates.
The UN investigation of al-Hariri’s killing remains a major preoccupation in Lebanon and a threat to the credibility and perhaps the survival of the Syrian regime, especially if President Bashar al-Asad is directly implicated. In August 2005, under orders from the first UN investigator Detlev Mehlis, four powerful heads of the Lebanese intelligence and state police organizations were arrested, including General Jamil al-Sayyid, previously a man of enormous power who headed al-Amn al-ʿAmm (the General Security Directorate), often said to be the most fearsome intelligence agent in the country. The investigation was digging into the very quick of Syrian influence in Lebanon. The dangers to Lebanese who pointed fingers at Syria were real and potentially lethal as underlined by a series of explosions, assassinations, and attempted assassinations all targeting anti-Syrian personalities who had accused Syria of complicity in al-Hariri’s murder. Following the killing of former prime minister al-Hariri, three leading public figures were blown up, including George Hawi, an aged leader of the Communist Party; Samir Kassir, a respected an-Nahar columnist; and Gibran Tueni, the an-Nahar publisher whose own columns passionately criticized Syria and Hezbollah. Tueni was killed by a massive car bomb, only hours after he returned to Beirut from his Paris home.
Hezbollah, which holds two cabinet posts in the government, has attempted to constrain the investigation by insisting that the Lebanese government maintain strict control of any tribunals operating in conjunction with it. When a majority of the Lebanese parliament passed a motion, in December 2005, to authorize a mixed Lebanon-international tribunal, Hezbollah and Amal walked out of the cabinet, accused the body of being a “tyranny of the majority,” and insisted that all future action regarding the al-Hariri investigation proceed according to strict consensus. Hezbollah’s tactic froze the government for two months, until it was persuaded to return to the cabinet by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. In return for Hezbollah’s renewed participation in the government, Siniora agreed never to refer to the organization as a “militia” but only as a “national resistance group,” thus effectively removing Hezbollah from being subjected to UN Security Council Resolution 1559, calling for the withdrawal of Syrian forces and the disarming of all militias in the country.
Setting the Stage for War
In the months before the summer of 2006 Beirut was preparing for a record summer tourist business. Unlike other popular Mediterranean destinations that feature package tours at cut-rate prices, Beirut’s hotel owners have generally been unwilling to offer bargains to “low-end” customers, instead targeting the more affluent tourists. After the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks in 2001, the industry had great success attracting well-to-do Arab customers who were put off by heightened border security at American and other Western destinations. Beirut became a convenient and more culturally familiar playground. Wealthy visitors flocked to villas with signature red-tile roofs, apartments, hotels, and inns in mountainous villages, less than an hour from Beirut, and came down to the capitol city to dine and play. Clearly Lebanon had recovered from the stigma of civil war and was back as a high-end tourist destination. Lebanese officials and politicians wanted to keep it that way, and Hezbollah insisted, publicly and repeatedly, that it would do nothing to jeopardize the bountiful summer trade.
Many of these same politicians were urging Hezbollah to disarm, especially after Syria pulled out its troops in April 2005. The group steadfastly refused, arguing that its armed wing was needed more than ever as the only credible force available to defend the country against an Israeli invasion. Hezbollah’s position retains strong support in the South, but there are many detractors in the country as well. In the weeks before the outbreak of open hostilities with Israel in the summer of 2006, popular skepticism of Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm turned to mockery, most notably in the June 1, 2006, television broadcast of a comedy program, where an actor in the role of a sayyid (a descendant of the prophet Muhammad), and looking very much like a younger Hasan Nasrallah, held forth on a variety of preposterous reasons why Hezbollah would not give up its weapons. Within hours, tens of thousands of Hezbollah sympathizers demonstrated around the country to protest the disrespect implied for Sayyid Hasan. The incident clearly revealed the exposed nerves of the Shiʿi community, where memories of marginalization and second-class citizenship remain vivid. Nasrallah, for his part, did not hide his pique. The incident whetted Hezbollah’s appetite for a dramatic coup de théâtre directed at its arch enemy that would allow the organization to reclaim its honor and make its militia appear all the more essential.
On the Israeli side, the desire within the country’s political and military leadership to have it out with Hezbollah increased markedly in 2005 and early 2006. Israeli officials have endured Hezbollah’s taunting ever since their unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, and have found Nasrallah’s May 2000 comparison of Israel with a fragile “spider’s web” especially grating. The last straw for Israeli officials seems to have been a series of secretly monitored communications between Hezbollah and Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, in the spring and early summer of 2006. In these exchanges the Hezbollah leadership urged the Palestinians to hang tough in negotiations with Israel over the return of an Israeli soldier captured in June 2006. In these same exchanges Nasrallah referred to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz as weak (Hersh 2006, 30). When these communications came to light within Israeli leadership circles, along with reports by respected analysts that Hezbollah was developing a “firststrike” capacity to unleash massive, preemptive rocket attacks on Israel (Gambill 2006b, 2), the Israelis were less inclined to respect the rules of the game with Hezbollah that had been respected after the 2000 withdrawal. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh refers to a meeting in the early summer of 2006 in Washington in which U.S. and Israeli officials made plans for a crushing attack on Hezbollah (Hersh 2006). It is unclear how much operational coordination took place at this meeting, if any, but there is little doubt that officials on both sides found the prospect of inflicting a devastating blow on Hezbollah very appetizing.
Tensions between Israel and Hezbollah had, in fact, been growing for months before the start of large-scale hostilities on July 12, 2006. In November 2005 Hezbollah tried to capture several Israeli soldiers in the border village of Ghajar, which sits astride the Lebanese border with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The operation, thwarted by the Israeli army, represented Hezbollah’s attempt to redeem its waʿd alsadiq (“faithful promise”) to secure the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, including Samir Kuntar, one of the terrorists responsible for a 1979 attack in Nahariya, Israel, that killed four members of an Israeli family. Israel has steadfastly refused to release him.
In late May 2006 Hezbollah fired on an Israeli border post, wounding an Israeli soldier. A typical response to such an incident—according to the “rules of the game” developed between the two sides over the years since the Israeli withdrawal of 2000—would have the Israeli army shelling a few Hezbollah positions and command and control centers. In this instance, however, Israel opted for a more robust response, shelling twenty Hezbollah positions along the border and destroying many of them. Hezbollah responded by upping the ante still further by launching eight Katyusha rockets at Safad, the location of the Israeli army’s northern headquarters. Five of these notoriously inaccurate rockets actually hit an antennae farm near the headquarters and sent a clear reminder to Israel of the nature of Hezbollah’s arsenal, which was reported to include at least twelve thousand rockets—mostly short-range Katyushas but also various longer-range rockets, notably the Iranian-supplied Zelzal-2 with a range of up to 210 kilometers. Both sides were clearly itching for a fight.
The Start of Hostilities, July 2006
Hezbollah’s dramatic operation of July 12, 2006, was yet another attempt to deliver on its waʿd al-sadiq, but launching the attack on Israeli soil was also intended to demonstrate the organization’s formidable offensive abilities and its tenacity, while at the same time appealing to Lebanese critics of the organization who had been calling on it to disarm. From a tactical standpoint, the operation was a stunning success. Hezbollah militants ambushed a motorized Israeli patrol in an unpopulated area of northern Israel on its border with Lebanon, capturing two Israeli soldiers and killing three others. After the Israeli Defense Forces pursued the militants into Lebanon on a rescue mission, five more soldiers were killed and a state-of-the-art Merkava tank destroyed.
Hezbollah’s leadership group had clearly stretched the rules of the game by conducting the daring raid on Israeli soil. Although it anticipated Israeli retaliation, the leadership expected to be able to ride it out. Initially Hezbollah’s goal seemed to have been achieved to perfection. The response to Hezbollah’s al-waʿd al-madhkur (“promise remembered”) in al-dahiya of Beirut was jubilant. But as Hezbollah’s Lebanese critics would soon point out, and as Nasrallah himself would later admit, Hezbollah had made a major miscalculation.
By July 13 Israel began its retaliatory offensive against Hezbollah, and it soon became clear that the assault went well beyond what Nasrallah and company anticipated. Within a day Lebanon was blockaded from the sea, and the Beirut airport was hit, effectively closing it. Shortly after Nasrallah’s offices were bombed on July 14, Hezbollah released a recorded statement from Nasrallah that was far from conciliatory: “You wanted an open war, and we are heading for an open war. We are ready for it.” (Nasrallah invited listeners to look to the sea, and with perfect theatrical timing an explosion on the horizon rocked the INS Hanit, an Israeli naval vessel that was hit by an Iranian-produced C-802 Noor guided missile. The ship was disabled and four of its sailors killed. This was an early hint that Hezbollah might have been better prepared than Israel presumed.
With the initial outbreak of open hostilities, Israel enjoyed broad international support and Hezbollah attracted widespread international condemnation for violating Israeli territory and snatching the soldiers. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon six years earlier allowed it some moral superiority on this score. Strong U.S. support was, of course, expected and instantly evident. Less predictable was the quick disapproval of Hezbollah’s action voiced by key Arab states, including Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government criticized Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” (al-Watan, July 14, 2006), and Jordan, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates followed suit. This coalition between the Americans and the Arab states was held together by convergent interests. The Sunni Arab governments were understandably apprehensive about the rising profile of the Shiʿite power Iran in the Arab world, the emergence of a Shiʿi-dominated government in American-occupied Iraq, and the influence of Hezbollah in Lebanon. All these forces might well inspire domestic opposition forces in their own countries, especially as Hezbollah gained enthusiastic support even among the vast Sunni population of the Arab world. In the same vein, America and its Israeli ally wished to declaw Hezbollah and indeed deal a humiliating blow to an Iranian ally in Lebanon that might inspire hostile groups in Iraq.
In his first long interview after the outbreak of hostilities, on al-Jazeera television on July 21, 2006, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah referred to the widely broadcast Arab disapproval as a “surprise,” and he subtly alluded to his failure to anticipate the scale of the Israeli response. As Nasrallah said, “The Israeli reaction to the capture could have been harsh but limited, were it not for the international and Arab cover.”
Prosecuting the War
Israel’s war plan depended heavily on its air power and on artillery bombardment from northern Israel into Lebanon. Its military objectives were to isolate the battlefield by cutting off routes of re-supply for Hezbollah, striking Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal (especially its long-range rockets capable of striking far into Israel), hitting Hezbollah’s command and control, and media instruments (such as the television station al-Manar), and creating a “killing box” in southern Lebanon where Hezbollah could be destroyed in detail by bombing and shelling. These objectives allowed for Israeli strikes on roads, bridges, seaports, and airports throughout Lebanon, as well as on the densely populated al-dahiya, where many of Hezbollah command and control centers were thought to be located. Israel also struck al-Manar television repeatedly throughout the war, but except for an interruption of several minutes, the station never went off the air. On July 15 Israeli bombs targeted the home of Ayatollah Fadlallah, destroying it. The bombing of this home surprised Lebanese analysts, as Fadlallah’s relations with Nasrallah were known to be tense as a result of Fadlallah’s criticism of Hezbollah’s periodic political inflexibility.
Within days of the start of the Israeli military response, hundreds of targets had been struck across southern Lebanon, around Beirut, in the Beqaa valley, and even in northern Lebanon. The population of the South and al-dahiya was forced to flee en masse to relative safety wherever it could be found, often in schools or parking garages, if not with friends and relatives. Israel’s plan in establishing its “killing box” in the South was clearly to force out all civilians. To that end Israel not only struck gasoline stations and possible militia positions, but it also hit food stores, as though to ensure that the civilians could not endure a siege. Hezbollah responded by firing rockets at Israel, usually at least one hundred and fifty rockets a day, but two hundred and fifty rockets on the last day of the war. In an unprecedented response, on July 16, Hezbollah struck the city of Haifa, home to nearly 275,000 people with longer-range rockets provided by Syria and Iran. Eight people died in the first attack on Israel’s third largest city. Hezbollah’s Zelzal-2 rockets could strike Tel Aviv, although none were fired, and the Israeli army claims to have destroyed most of them in the first days of the war. The advantage of the short-range Katyusha is that it can be fired in about a minute, far quicker than Israeli detection equipment can find it, whereas the larger rockets require a more elaborate launcher and much more time. Facing an enemy with complete air superiority and plenty of detection capability, the larger rockets are harder to fire successfully.
The day after Haifa was hit by rocket fire, Prime Minister Olmert addressed the Knesset and stated his goals as the return of the two captured soldiers, a complete cease-fire, meaning the end of Hezbollah’s presence close to Israel’s border with Lebanon; the deployment of the Lebanese army in the South; and the expulsion of Hezbollah from the South. He emphasized his determination to see to the elimination of Hezbollah as a military force and to the dismantling of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias, as required by UN Security Council Resolution 1559. At the United Nations, Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman, a frequent guest on American television news programs, echoed his prime minister’s sentiments by repeatedly referring to Hezbollah as a cancer that would have to be cut out. The Israelis certainly have no monopoly on this sort of language; Hezbollah propaganda routinely refers to Israel as a cancer (Qassem 2005, 15). What Gillerman and his prime minister revealed in their comments was the common expectation that Hezbollah somehow could be expunged from Lebanon. The Israelis were eager to persuade a credulous White House that this was entirely realistic. In confidential discussions with the White House, Israel promised President Bush a “quick and decisive” result (author’s private sources) and reportedly told Condoleezza Rice: “You did it in about 70 days [in Kosovo], but we need half of that—35 days” (Hersh 2006, 31).
Israeli efforts to excise the “cancer” of Hezbollah proved as deadly as misapplied chemotherapy for a cancer patient. The turning point might have been the Israeli bombing of Qana on July 30, killing twenty-eight civilians. After this tragedy, support for Israel’s campaign in the Arab capitals melted under the heat of public outrage and demonstration. For instance, in Egypt, scores of demonstrations erupted around the country in late July and August. Although none of them were massive—the largest involved eight thousand demonstrators—the widespread underlying anger and foment in response to the July war shook the Mubarak regime and prompted a reversal of tone.
Hezbollah proved more resilient than the Israeli analysts had predicted. Israeli Brigadier General Guy Zur, commander of the 162d Armored Division that fought in Lebanon, described Hezbollah as “by far the greatest guerrilla group in the world” (USA Today, September 14, 2006). After more than a month of Israeli bombardment, Hezbollah emerged with its support intact, if not bolstered, in the Shiʿi community. Its impressive and rapid response to the needs of those whose homes and lives were ravaged—mostly but not all Shiʿi Muslims—further consolidated Hezbollah’s impressive base of support. Its fighters left IOUs for items taken from shops during the war. One shopkeeper from Debin, a small village in the South, reported receiving $1,000 for redeemed IOUs (Leenders 2006, 46). More important, Hezbollah paid $10,000 to $12,000 to anyone losing their home. As many as fifteen thousand homeless families received the grants. Affiliated architects and engineers planned the construction of new homes, doctors dispensed free medicine, and about twenty-five thousand free meals were distributed daily in the weeks following the cease-fire.
By the time a UN- and Lebanon-brokered cease-fire was finally in place in mid-August 2006, Israel and the United States were forced to dramatically scale back their demands and expectations for the war’s outcome. Indeed, a “sevenpoint plan” promulgated by the Lebanese government, preserving the sovereign prerogatives of Lebanon, would decisively shape the cease-fire. The centerpiece for the ending of the war was the decision in UN Security Council Resolution 1701 to enhance an existing peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, the UNIFIL, which was first created in 1978 to oversee an Israeli withdrawal, after its Litani Operation. With heavy European involvement, the UN force would become UNIFIL on steroids, or so the architects of Resolution 1701 hoped. In practice, however, the force is explicitly prohibited from taking any action to disarm Hezbollah without Lebanese government approval—and this is highly unlikely to be forthcoming.
Outsiders often forget that the Lebanese have suffered tremendously under Israeli attacks for three decades, and so one of UNIFIL’s key tasks is to insure that Lebanese civilians are permitted to peacefully return to and rebuild their devastated villages. Given Hezbollah’s broad base of support, and the fact that its Lebanese supporters see no other force that can thwart Israel should it decide to re-ignite the war, it is completely unrealistic that the new international contingents will succeed either in disarming Hezbollah or in diminishing its appeal. If UNIFIL is going to succeed, it will need the cooperation—not the animosity—of Hezbollah. For its part, Hezbollah has formally declared its agreement, with the provision that any of its members who are found carrying arms may be detained and disarmed. In effect, what is being pursued is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The major question is whether UNIFIL-plus will operate not only competently but fairly. The key to restoring stability to southern Lebanon is not only to see Hezbollah stand down but also for the new force to avoid being seen as an instrument of Israeli influence or occupation.
UN Resolution 1701 also provides for the deployment of the Lebanese army in force to the South, as Israel demanded, but the army has been deployed, as several of its generals noted, to work bi-taʿawun maʿ al-muqawama (in cooperation with “the resistance,” meaning Hezbollah). This is not surprising, as about half the rank and file of the Lebanese army are Shiʿi Muslims and the resistance is popular with the army.
The war that broke out between Israel and Hezbollah during the summer of 2006 lasted thirty-four days. During this time half the population of northern Israel was displaced (approximately 500,000 people) and southern Lebanon was largely emptied of its civilian population—900,000 people were evacuated, or nearly one-quarter of Lebanon’s population. By the war’s end, 43 Israeli and 1,109 Lebanese civilians had been killed. The military casualties included 118 Israeli and 28 Lebanese soldiers, and roughly 200 Hezbollah fighters. Israel claims to have killed as many as 500 Hezbollah militants in July and August of 2006, but independent and reliable sources judge this number to be too high. Material losses were considerable, totaling approximately $500 million in Israel and about $4 billion in Lebanon, which saw the undoing of fifteen years of post–civil war reconstruction. About 900 factories were hit and 15,000 homes severely damaged or destroyed.2
Both sides paid a heavy price for the war, with Lebanon paying the heaviest by far. But it was a war without an unequivocal winner. Both Israel and Hezbollah went to war to bolster their credibility and perceived ability to deter enemies, yet in neither case did they fully succeed. Each side seriously misread its adversary. After the war of arms ended, the war of words began, as each side struggled to persuade friend and foe alike of their victory, revealing the fragility of the claims of both sides.
1 For some details surrounding this intriguing episode, see the Jerusalem Post, October 23, 2003; and http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=66727.