AFTER THE ISRAELI INVASION OF Lebanon in 1982, I’d go to Beirut three or four times a year. I’d head there too when I’d been working in the south of that trammelled land, usually when I had reports to get out. Or it might have been the wish to quaff a few beers with friends like Claude, Fadi, Rocky and the rest.
For peace of mind, I’d try to link up with an IDF convoy going in that direction, since these were times when Islamic Jihad movements were abducting Westerners. Their numbers included British journalist John McCarthy and Terry Waite, the peripatetic envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Moving about with the IDF was the sensible thing to do.
Coming in from Israel, I’d usually pass through the Rosh Haniqra border post and follow the coastal road north to Tyre. From there it was a short hop to Sidon and then along the highway to the outskirts of Beirut. Occasionally, the Israeli Navy would open up on cars travelling that way, so it could be hairy and there were lots of road accidents. We’d joke that if the snipers didn’t get us, then some lunatic behind a wheel would.
In Sidon we’d seek out our contacts and ask to be shown the latest bit of Fatah or fundamentalist mischief; perhaps where a roadside bomb had been laid and detonated from a nearby orchard (as so often happened); or where a mine had been planted, though that was usually done on gravel roads; or maybe somebody had thrown a grenade at a patrol from a high point overlooking the route.
There would be much commotion about follow-ups or possibly a roadblock afterwards, but few of the perpetrators were caught. They’d be gone in a moment after doing their thing though, even then, ambushes would sometimes be laid by some of the bolder Jihadis.
It was interesting to see how the Israelis coped. By then the war had swung full circle, from hands-on electronic warfare to weapons-in-your-hands. Although there were always casualties, the majority were Arabs. Many more Lebanese were killed by Israeli Air Force bombs or rockets – or by Israeli snipers – than members of the IDF.
Even so, the number of young Israeli men who died in that war mounted steadily. Then, one day, the Knesset decided to withdraw them all. However, not before about 800 or so IDF soldiers had been killed and something like five times that number were wounded, of whom another 500 – as this kind of statistic goes in modern war – would be permanently maimed.
Meanwhile, there were many incidents that accentuated the trauma of what was taking place just beyond the frontier line in the north, quite a few involving dissenters. Hersh Goodman, defence correspondent of the Jerusalem Post at the time, suggested that among the biggest doubters were brigadier generals who refused to serve in Lebanon, as well as pilots who returned to base with their bomb loads undropped.
Even more revealing, a nation is in serious trouble when, no matter what else was going on in Israel or the rest of the world at the time, all nightly broadcasts began with the funeral services of the latest combat deaths in Lebanon.
It was strictly a personal choice, but for me the most interesting route to Beirut was not the direct road north, but by way of the fundamentalist stronghold of Nabatiya. I’d usually get there through the foothills that separate the coast from the interior after entering Lebanon at Metullah.
To most journalists, Nabatiya was bad news. It wasn’t a big town, perhaps a little larger than Marj’Ayoun, the Christian stronghold in South Lebanon, and a lot more compact. Like Maarakeh, another strategic Shi’ite centre – which, like others, had its own command centre or Husseiniyeh – it was certainly big enough to keep the IDF from ‘sanitizing’ it militarily. They could always surround these settlements easily enough, systematically go through the various compounds and houses and arrest all the men and boys, but the leaders will always have planned a way out, sometimes using tunnels that led into the hills.