CHAPTER NINE

The Civil War Closes

Hizbullah rises: 1985-1992

THE LAND OF HOBBESIAN CHAOS

Apart from its own behaviour, nothing more aided the growth of this genie of Israel’s creation than the conditions which, with the failure of Pax Americana, Pax Israelica, or a condominium of the two, ‘the Zionists’ and ‘the imperialists’ had left behind in Lebanon itself. These were conditions of breakdown and fragmentation, yet more extreme, more indecipherably complex, than any which even that hapless land, during a full ten years of civil war, had ever experienced before.

For there was to be no Pax Syriana either. True, President Asad had prevailed against his main external rivals in this, his all-important, Lebanese backyard. True, too, his regional friend and ally, the Ayatollah’s Iran, was in there at his side. But he was still unable to prevail over the Lebanese themselves. There was an almost unanimous, if in many quarters very grudging, Lebanese acceptance that only Syria could now put the sectarian state together again. Yet it turned out that Syria simply couldn’t. Lebanon became Asad’s maddening Rubik’s cube; no matter how hard he tried, one last piece of the puzzle would always stubbornly refuse to fall into place, even when it seemed that success was finally within grasp.¹ It became the reductio ad absurdum, in violent and barbarous form, of that politics-by-religion of which it was the archetypal expression, a bellum omnium contra omnes that would have done justice to Thomas Hobbes himself. The ‘every man against every man’, in this unique, contemporary vindication of the philosopher’s treatise on the ‘natural’ condition of mankind, were the militias, gangs and politico-military factions, perhaps as many as 150 in all, among which the residual state itself was now reduced to but one of them, and by no means the strongest. They were the ten mini-states, or ‘cantons’, confessionally homogeneous or mixed, into which a country of a mere 10,000 square kilometres now broke down, all served by their own illegal or semi-legal ports, some eighteen of them, which had sprung into being along a coastline of a mere 200 kilometres in length, all usurping tax-collecting and other functions of the state, all supposedly defending their own ‘subjects’ against the others, and all demanding tribute and protection money in return for that service.² And finally they were a traditionally anarchic, laissez-faire economy which warlords and their cronies had turned into an all-embracing criminal one, securing a controlling interest in already existing, bona fide businesses, state-owned or private, or in new ones which engaged in the systematic spoliation of the state, the smuggling of arms, drugs and contraband of every kind, and - one particular East Mediterranean speciality - highly organized piracy on the high seas.

The fighting went on and on. But less and less, now, did it serve any discernible military or strategic purpose; it was more and more the institutional, the pathological, activity of a self-perpetuating warrior caste divorced from the society, and its conflicting causes, which had spawned it. ‘They shoot’, said former prime minister Salim al-Hoss, ‘to show that they are there.’³ This fighting went on across the original, so-called ‘traditional’ demarcation lines, separating Christian East from Muslim West Beirut, which had barely changed since the war began. There were the massive artillery duels, fought with the ever bigger weapons - medium and heavy mortars, 155-mm field guns, Grad and Katyusha multiple rocket launchers, US-built Super Sherman tanks and their Soviet-built T-54 counterparts - which the rival militias had now acquired; and of course there were the car-bombs, always the car-bombs, which, deliberately targeting the most crowded places, brought sudden death in perhaps its most feared, most diabolical and cruelly random form. This was a kind of warfare which, it was mathematically calculated, required on average the firing of about 275 shells to kill just one person, and in which, out of every twenty it did kill, nineteen were civilians and only one a combatant; and that was not to mention the so-called ‘macabre discoveries’, the dead and decomposing bodies of previously missing persons, usually civilian too, which turned up almost every day in wells, waste ground or deserted alleyways across the land.

In the eighties a whole new, even crazier layer of subsidiary ‘fronts’ and ‘axes’ was added to already existing ones, especially, but by no means only, on the Muslim side, where former allies, Shiites, Sunnis, Druzes and Palestinians, now turned in varying combinations against each other. But even then the ultimate absurdity was yet to come. That was when the sects, or at least the dominant ones, having achieved self-rule inside their respective cantons, began to fight against themselves. These intra-sectarian battles - mainly Christians versus Christians, and Shiites versus Shiites — were some of the bloodiest of the whole war. On one level, they were just a struggle for supremacy between rival militias of the same community. But, on another, they were aided and abetted by Syria in its everlasting quest to bring the whole country under its thumb. And, in the case of the Shiites, Iran had a hand in them too, less as Syria’s friend than its competitor, and champion of its own, and very different, vision of Lebanon’s future.

THE GENERAL’S ‘WAR OF LIBERATION’

The five-year period of Hobbesian chaos only came to an end, in the early nineties, with the end of the civil war itself. That historic development grew, like so many others before it, out of a combination of internal and external factors. Internally, the Maronites, who still boasted the strongest of the country’s quasi-independent ‘cantons’, were key. Fifteen years of bloodshed had done nothing to alleviate the country’s sectarian animosities; in fact, it had only made them worse. But, by now, one thing every community did have in common was a popular distaste for militias, its own as well as everyone else’s. The Maronites had spawned the first, and most militantly sectarian; they now inflicted on themselves the most calamitous consequences of this, their own creation. In 1988, when President Amin Gemayel’s six-year term expired, the Lebanese parliament - or its seventy-three surviving members, out of an original ninety-nine - and the outside powers which traditionally influenced its choice, could not agree on his successor. The official state authority - or what was left of it - fell literally apart. For the first time since the war began, there were now two governments, two rival claimants to ‘legitimacy’. The army commander, General Michel Aoun, appointed by the outgoing president as ‘prime minister’ of a provisional military council, moved into the presidential palace at Baabda, in Christian East Beirut. He was not, of course, the president, but, in the eyes of a large and fervent following, overwhelmingly Christian but including a fair number of Muslims too, he effectively had the popular mandate to be one; and he withheld recognition from the two candidates - the first having been promptly assassinated - whom parliament eventually did elect. In Muslim West Beirut, a rival administration, headed by the existing prime minister, Salim al-Hoss, continued to function, and appointed a rival army commander.

THE MARONITE COMMUNITY BLOWS ITSELF APART IN STYLE

Practically speaking, Aoun’s writ did not run very far - not even, in fact, inside that 20 per cent of Lebanese territory that fell within the ‘mini-state’ of Marounistan. There the ‘Lebanese Forces’ militia, commanded by Bashir Gemayel’s successor, Samir Geagea, held pre-eminent sway. It led an uneasy co-existence with the army, or that very substantial, Marounistan-based part of it which Aoun controlled. They did manage actively to combine when, from time to time, the Maronite heartland came under Syrian attack. But their aims and outlook were different. Geagea and his militia were narrowly sectarian, and looked on Marounistan, essentially their creation, as a would-be definitive political entity. Aoun - a staunch Maronite no doubt, but a supra-sectarian Lebanese nationalist too - wanted to use the army, the country’s only ‘legitimate’ military institution and, compared with the militias, a respected one, to establish Greater Lebanon, sovereign and independent, once again. For that the Syrians - and the Israelis - had to go; and in 1989 he began a ‘war of liberation’ against the former, the more immediately oppressive of the two. It was a forlorn enterprise, whose principal feature was six more months of cross-city artillery duels, perhaps the heaviest Beirut had ever experienced. It did him little good with the Muslims he wanted to ‘liberate’. But — as if that were not enough - it was interspersed with the far bloodier, full-scale war he also had to wage to wrest control of Marounistan from the ‘Lebanese Forces’. About 20 per cent of his troops were Muslim, but essentially this was an intra-Christian contest, Maronite versus Maronite. It was the civil war’s last great paroxysm of futile, demented, self-destroying violence. Its protagonists were the two most powerful military institutions in the country; some 16,000 men of ‘Aoun’s army’, with most of the tanks and heavy artillery America had supplied during its brief, disastrous presence in the country, were pitted against the 10,000 men of the oldest, largest, best organized, Israeli-assisted militia, with an artillery strength not significantly inferior to its adversary’s.⁴ In addition, thanks to Iraqi supplies to both sides, supposed to have been used against Syria not each other, Marounistan’s weapons stocks were at an all-time high. ‘The Maronite community’, wrote Lebanon scholar William Harris, ‘could thus blow itself apart in style’.⁵ And so it proceeded to do, the brother-enemies bludgeoning each other into profitless stalemate within the narrow, built-up confines of East Beirut and the densely populated hills to the north and east of it. The price, in casualties, physical destruction, economic loss and the large-scale emigration of a disgusted populace was very high. It was also psychologically devastating, bending this most stiff-necked of communities into benumbed acceptance of the settlement which greater states of the region - and beyond - at last had in store for their small, sectarian, and infinitely troublesome ‘sister-state’ of Lebanon.

THE ‘POISONED CHALICE’ OF A CEASEFIRE

The first of those external developments destined to impinge on the country at this time was the end of the Iraq — Iran War. In July 1988 a mournful, almost broken Khomeini announced that he had drunk from the ‘poisoned chalice’ of a ceasefire. In the six years since they had driven the Iraqi army from Iranian soil, his ‘combatants of Islam’ had been hurling themselves, at dreadful cost, in wave after human wave against Iraq’s steadily improving defences. But all in vain. And now, suffering serious military reverses, the Islamic Republic no longer had the will and resources to go on. The ‘godless’ Baath had survived; no second Islamic Republic would arise in their place. This, and the demise of the Ayatollah himself a year later, dealt a heavy blow to the puritanical passion and expansionist fervour of the Revolution. It brought changes in Tehran. However, even though Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the patron of Hizbullah, soon lost his job as interior minister, these changes did not break the power and influence of the Khomeinist zealots. They merely weakened them, reducing them, by and large, to the status of a competing wing, or tendency, within the system as a whole. They became more or less endemically at odds with its other wing, their newly emergent, relatively moderate - albeit still devoutly Islamist — rivals, subsequently to be broadly speaking identified as ‘reformists’. They coalesced around the first post-Khomeini president, the powerful cleric Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, who, though a founding father of the Revolution, now wanted to improve relations with the outside world, and to concentrate on post-war reconstruction and economic development.

THE ‘SECOND REPUBLIC’ OF LEBANON

Then there came the ‘Taif Agreement’. That was the name given to the document on whose basis the post-war, ‘second Republic’ of Lebanon was to arise. In October 1989, with the blessing of the US, and chiefly inspired by Saudi Arabia, the Arab League managed to assemble fifty-eight of the country’s deputies in Taif, a Saudi mountain resort, where, after three weeks of munificent hospitality and vigorous arm-twisting, they approved a Charter of National Reconciliation. This was the final version of a long line of earlier, abortive proposals for amending those two founding texts of the sectarian state, the unwritten National Pact and the original, 1926 constitution itself. Like all of them it aimed at a fairer balance of power between the communities, premised mainly on a reduction in the Maronites’ paramountcy vis à vis all the others. On the question of Lebanon’s basic identity, it anchored the country more firmly in its Arab environment, with the formulation ‘Arab in belonging’ replacing the ‘Arab in character’ of the National Pact; but at the same time, chiefly in deference to the Maronites, it stressed that Lebanon was the ‘final homeland for all its citizens’ — implying that it would never be subject to amalgamation into some larger Arab entity. Like the original constitution, it did postulate the abolition of political sectarianism as a final goal, but in the meantime, with its formal endorsement of modifications in existing practice, it effectively reinforced it for the foreseeable future. Under these modifications, the presidency continued to be reserved for a Maronite, the premiership for a Sunni and the speakership of parliament for a Shiite. But the powers of the first were curtailed in favour of the prime minister and his cabinet, the speaker and his assembly. And in place of the existing six-to-five ratio in favour of the Christians, parliamentary seats were to be shared equally between them and the Muslims (and Druzes). Among its immediate, operational provisions, Taif also called for the ‘dissolution of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias’.

The agreement required outside persuasion or coercion for its implementation. That, too, was now more realistically available than it had ever been before. On the eve of the Soviet Union’s final collapse, President Asad had become acutely aware that his traditional superpower patron was neither willing nor able to furnish the kind of diplomatic support and military hardware on which he had formerly counted. He began adjusting himself to the realities of a Middle East that would soon fall under the more or less exclusive sway of the world’s one and only superpower.⁶ The heresy of the Camp David ‘separate peace’ forgotten, he restored relations with Egypt, chief bulwark of Pax Americana in the region. And the US reciprocated in the one arena, Lebanon, where Asad chiefly desired it.

In 1976, at the outset of the civil war, it had given the green light for Syria’s original military foray into Lebanon, at the Palestinians’ expense; in 1983, deeming it a Soviet-backed, ‘radical’ Arab state, it had sought to expel it; now, in another volte-face, it saw it once again as the convenient, local stabilizer of its turbulent, diminutive neighbour. Lebanon was a never-ending nuisance, Aoun an irresponsible trouble-maker; furthermore, despite his dalliance with them, Asad could perhaps be trusted to rein in the new, Islamist forms of ‘radicalism’ of which it had become a hotbed. After Aoun, therefore, Hizbullah was the US’s main target.⁷ Thanks to strong American pressures on its behalf, Syria was the great beneficiary of Taif, which decreed that its ‘forces — be they thanked - shall assist’ the new Republic to ‘spread [its] sovereignty’ over the whole country.

THE MANIACAL FOLLY OF SADDAM HUSSEIN

Only General Aoun now stood in Asad’s path. With the mountainous terrain as his ally, his defences were formidable; and vast throngs of supporters formed a protective ring around his palace. There could have been a frightful massacre had Asad gone in straight away. The Americans would not give him the ‘cover’ he needed. And they still withheld it even after the self-inflicted calamity of intra-Maronite civil war. In the end it was the maniacal ambition of his arch-enemy in Baghdad, who, having plotted, via Lebanon, to bring Asad down, now furnished him with the undreamt-of opportunity to consummate his triumph there.⁸ Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, on 3 August 1990, transformed the Middle East. Suddenly the object of the most flattering Western attentions, Asad offered himself as a symbolically invaluable - because formerly anti-American, pan-Arab nationalist - partner in the American-led, Western-Arab coalition to liberate Kuwait. Could revenge come gratifyingly sweeter than this - to help defeat or unseat the other Baathist idol, who, with his reckless folly, had briefly established himself as the great new pan-Arab champion, heir to Nasser and potential latter-day Saladin, in the eyes of his most gullible, notably Palestinian, admirers? In return, Asad won carte blanche to clinch matters in Lebanon as he saw fit. At dawn on 13 October Syrian bombers struck the presidential palace; the Americans had secured a waiver of the Israelis’ prohibition on any Syrian intrusion into Lebanese airspace - a ‘right’ which, since 1976, they had reserved exclusively for themselves. Syrian armour and infantry then invaded the Maronite heartland, with the ‘Lebanese Forces’, Aoun’s one-time, if reluctant, partners in the ‘war of liberation’, giving them artillery support.⁹ On the key, Souq al-Gharb front, the army, much weakened though it now was, killed about 400 Syrian soldiers before being overrun. Realizing that further resistance was hopeless, Aoun ordered his men to cease fire and took refuge in the French embassy. Surviving Syrian soldiers took murderous revenge on a lot of people and looted the presidential palace of the ‘sister-state’ that Asad was poised, at last, to bring entirely within his grasp.¹⁰

PAX SYRIANA AT LAST

He lost no time in doing so. And by now, in their profound war-weariness, the Lebanese yielded with little ado to the only external power that could end a nightmare they were seemingly incapable of ending themselves. But if Syria was indispensable it quickly made itself bitterly resented too. Asad barely found it necessary to observe even the outward forms of a sovereign Lebanon which, in substance, he subverted utterly. Of the thirty ministers in the first, post-war government, a good twenty-seven qualified as ‘pro-Syrian’; the Maronites, one-time masters, were especially reduced and humiliated. Among the seven former warlords in its ranks was the renegade of renegades himself, none other than Eli Hobeika, the one-time Israeli agent — and ‘hero’ of Sabra and Shatila — now well on the way to becoming an all-out Syrian one. A year later, the Syrians and their local henchmen so blatantly rigged the first post-war general election, turning an already very pliant parliament into an ostensibly freely chosen and therefore fully ‘legitimate’ one, that the great majority of Christians decided to boycott them altogether. And they were not alone in ‘mourning the death’ of that virtue, democracy, in the practice of which, however inadequately, the sectarian state embodied a signal contrast with almost all its neighbours.¹¹

But Asad went much further than that. With a Treaty of Brotherhood, Co-operation and Co-ordination, and the ‘unity of destiny’ which it prescribed, he spread his tentacles deep into the fabric of authority and decision-making in the ‘second Republic’. His basic interests were strategic and diplomatic, and he turned Lebanon’s foreign policy into an integral extension of his own. But, as if to ensure that his turbulent new dependency would never again slip from his grasp, he brought to it the methods of repression and control tried and tested in Syria itself. He created a ‘joint security regime’, eventually headed, on the Lebanese side, by one Jamil Sayyid whom the Syrian ‘pro-consul’ in the country, General Ghazi Kenaan, called ‘my eye and my ear’.¹² In fact, Syria’s dominion was in its way so successful, so pervasive, and - through corruption - so profitable for members of the Baathist elite that ministers would travel to Damascus to seek guidance not only on such matters as the appointment of some high-ranking civil servant, but on parcelling out the market for, say, that latest milch cow of Middle Eastern crony capitalism, franchises for mobile telephones.

With the help, and sometimes under the control, of the Syrian army, the new regime proceeded with its first main task: the dissolution of the militias. One by one, the three main Lebanese ones - Maronite, Druze and the Shiites’ Amal — and a host of lesser ones publicly yielded up some, at least, of their heavier weapons, and closed down their headquarters, barracks and training camps. Only the non-Lebanese offered any violence; sixty people, mainly Palestinian, died when the army took on Arafat’s last great autonomous military stronghold in the country, centred around the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Sidon. There was, however, one key militia which, in theory, the government was supposed to deal with at the end of the process, but which, in practice, it was probably never really intended, mainly for Syrian and Iranian reasons, that it ever would - Hizbullah.

THE END OF THE WAR AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MILITIAS — EXCEPT FOR HIZBULLAH

With Taif and Pax Syriana, it became steadily clearer that, of all the non-state actors on the Lebanese stage, the one which hardly even existed till at least half-way through the war had, by the end of it, established itself as the most formidable of them - and in a class quite its own. In his study of Hizbullah, Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh contended that it was not very useful to speculate whether it was an inherently extremist and primarily military organization, or a moderate and primarily political one, or about its possible, eventual gravitation from the first condition to the second. As a jihadist movement, it was constitutionally bound to strive for the establishment of an ‘Islamic order’ and for the ‘liberation of Jerusalem’. It was more persuasive to argue that in pursuit of these unchanging goals it would always navigate between two modes of action: ‘militancy and armed jihad’ on the one hand and ‘gradualist-pragmatic and unarmed means ... within the confines of legality’ on the other. The more favourable the circumstances, the more likely it was to adopt the first course, the less favourable the second.¹³ It hardly needs to be said that they could never have been more favourable than they were during Lebanon’s period of Hobbesian chaos, along with the general rise of Islamism and the all-out support - ideological, political, technical and financial - of the world’s only Islamist power, Iran, that came with it. The ‘militancy and armed jihad’ expressed itself in four main fields - the ‘Islamic resistance’ to the Israeli occupier of Lebanon, hostage-taking directed at ‘global arrogance’ or the ‘imperialist’ West, the consolidation, involving much violence, of its own power, and the construction of an embryonic ‘Islamic order’.

THE ISLAMIC RESISTANCE

Hizbullah’s rival, Amal, was still Israel’s main tormentor in the South when, in 1984, it established an ‘Islamic resistance’ entirely separate from the ‘national resistance’ to which most other groups, secular or sectarian, had hitherto belonged. Organizationally, as well as ideologically, it was dedicated to armed struggle above all else. ‘We don’t have a military agency separate from the other parts of our body,’ its Open Letter explained, ‘and each of us is a combat soldier when the call of jihad requires it.’ The fighting apparatus was the core; other institutions, political and social, that developed later were integral, but subsidiary, to it. Fighting the Zionists, Hizbullah’s initial raison d‘être, would always constitute its ‘priority of priorities’. Or, as Amal Saad-Ghorayeb puts it in her exhaustive study of the organization’s political outlook and ideas, it would be ‘the very backbone of its intellectual structure, the one pillar of [its] political thought that [was] not amenable to any form of temporization or accommodation to reality, not only on account of the party’s inbred abomination of Zionism, but also by virtue of the pure logic of armed resistance, as opposed to non-violent means of confrontation’.¹⁴ Armed struggle was the only way to deal with Israel. All forms of accommodation with it - negotiation or mediation, ceasefires or truces, let alone fully-fledged peace treaties - were ‘treason against Islam, Muslims and the Arabs’.¹⁵ In any case, what had Arab diplomacy ever achieved? ’Even in the heyday of Arab unity’ it had not liberated ‘a single inch of Palestinian land by means of negotiation’.¹⁶ For Hizbullah, as for Khomeini, there was nothing like the anti-Zionist resistance, or the so-called ‘Jerusalem liberation culture’, to unite all Muslims in a common cause. ‘Jerusalem day’ — a Khomeinist innovation - commanded an emotional appeal among Sunni movements that otherwise took no interest in Shiism.¹⁷

On the day that, evacuating Sidon in February 1985, Israel began its three-phase pull-back to the south, Hizbullah made its very public debut. Parading through the city in hundreds of trucks and buses, young men in jeans and fatigues, chanting ‘God is Great’ and raising rifles rhythmically aloft, took temporary control of this predominantly Sunni city.¹⁸ While the ‘national resistance’ favoured a respite, arguing that if the Israelis were not attacked in their newly created ‘security zone’, the newly liberated areas would not be subjected to air and artillery bombardment in retaliation, the Hizbullahis craved action, with some of them immediately seeking ways to infiltrate across the Litani river.¹⁹

‘THEY JUST WALKED INTO THE LINE OF FIRE AND WERE CUT DOWN VERY BADLY’

To begin with they were much less proficient in their general guerilla activities than they were in their still continuing, occasional suicide operations. They engaged in the usual gamut of smaller-scale operations inherited from the Shiite uprising. But, already, they were also achieving some more audacious successes; an early one - and portent of things to come - was the abduction of two Israeli soldiers. And already they were inflicting a small but steady toll of casualties - one or two fatalities a month - on the Israelis, and a much greater one on the SLA who, as ‘sandbags’ for their patrons, were more exposed. Sometimes they would attempt larger, altogether more sophisticated exploits. Within a year of the pull-back came first reports of surprise attacks on SLA positions employing scores of men who advanced under covering mortar fire.²⁰ But at this stage the self-sacrificial ardour still outstripped the military skills and wisdom. ‘They just walked into the line of fire and were cut down very badly‘, said Timur Goksel, or ‘Mr UNIFIL‘, as the peacekeepers’ long-serving official spokesman came to be known; it was ‘just like watching Iranian assaults against the Iraqis’.²¹ Once they lost twenty-four men in a single operation. They were also forfeiting popular support through ill-considered acts which, as in the bad old Palestinian days, brought down Israeli reprisals on the heads of the local population. From time to time, they even fell into that other Palestinian habit of grossly exaggerating their achievements, such as ‘forty or fifty Israelis killed’ in a single operation near Merjayoun. On one occasion, they blamed ‘spies’ in UNIFIL for very heavy losses that were really of their own, reckless making.²² Nor did they balk at unprovoked aggression against the peacekeepers. If they singled out France’s UNIFIL contingent - three of whose men were blown up while out jogging in the peaceable village of Jouwayya — that was in part because of French support for Iraq in a Gulf war now going less and less well for Iran. But it was also because, in the élan, exaltation and intense xenophobia of Hizbullah’s early years, they were already - in their own minds at least - on their way to the ‘liberation’ of Jerusalem. And since the peacekeepers were but an instrument of ‘global arrogance’ for the protection of Israel, they deemed themselves entitled to ‘deal with them exactly as we deal with the Zionist invasion forces’.²³

Back came the dismal cycle, the bloody tit-for-tat, of the ‘border wars’ of yesteryear. Hizbullah only went after military targets, and inside Lebanese territory at that. But for the Israelis, this, as ever, was ‘terrorism’. So back came the fulminations of the interventionists. Uri Lubrani, ‘co-ordinator’ of Israeli activities in Lebanon, brandished his ‘iron fist’ once more, even as Yitzhak Rabin, the defence minister, declared that, in order to ‘completely break’ this maddeningly resurgent resistance, still relatively ineffectual though it was, ‘we feel free to use every means, attack helicopters, aviation, artillery and tanks’.²⁴ And they did, along with occasional ground incursions to boot. Not surprisingly it was mainly Shiite villagers who died. And as a result of that, back too came the Katyushas. They were the only means by which Hizbullah could deliver an important message: if Lebanese civilians were targeted, Israeli ones, inside Israel proper, would be as well. In this domain, as in the strictly military one, it was a very uneven score. Once, in a ‘lucky’ shot, a single Katyusha did lightly wound ten people, but, in the first two years after the pull-back, not a single person died inside Israel.²⁵ It was, however, an imbalance that Hizbullah would in the fullness of time dramatically redress.

Steadily, the ‘Islamic resistance’ was emerging as the only really serious one. Not that, in these free-for-all, Hobbesian days, there weren’t others still in the field. Indeed, of all the ‘martyrdom operations’ carried out against the Israelis in the South, it accounted for only about a third, clearly demonstrating that nationalist or patriotic, as opposed to purely religious, exaltation had the power to inspire them too.²⁶ Three such non-Hizbullah ‘martyrs’ were women. The youth and beauty of one of them, a seventeen-year-old Sunni girl, Sanaa Muhaidily, of the very secular National Syrian Socialist Party, poignantly impressed itself on the whole Arab world. In the traditional video-taped farewell which she had recorded before killing herself and two Israeli soldiers, she asked her mother to treat her death as if it were her wedding day, to remember her as the Bride of the South, and to share in her own inexpressible joy, now planted as she was ‘in the earth of the South and irrigating and quenching her with my blood and love for her’.²⁷ Apart from Amal, still active from time to time, there were the Lebanese communists, small and mainly confined to the rugged foothills of Mount Hermon, as well as pro-Syrian organizations, like the NSSP or the Lebanese Baath party. Although the ‘martyrdom operations’ by member-organizations of the ‘national resistance’ were more numerous, they were less effective than those of its Islamic rival. A young communist blew himself up - but nobody else - on a donkey, after which the Israeli occupiers forbade farmers to ride to their fields on beasts of burden without express authorization from themselves.²⁸

A PALESTINIAN COMEBACK

Then there were the Palestinians. In the south, in that strategic no-man’s land between Israel’s military deployment and Syria‘s, they had made a remarkable comeback. According to Rabin, by 1987 they boasted a full 10,000 guerillas; and that meant, he said, that, with Hizbullah thrown in, there were now ‘more terrorists’ in the country than there had been, before Israel’s 1982 invasion, in the first place.²⁹ And they were actually carrying out far more operations - forays into the Strip and sometimes into Israel itself — than they ever had in the last days of the ‘Fakhani Republic’. The Israelis intercepted and killed no fewer than thirty such cross-border raiders in the first eight weeks of 1989.³⁰ Particularly disturbing for Rabin was ‘the growing cooperation between the PLO and the Hizbullah forces’.³¹ Deeply mistrustful, even paranoid, though Hizbullah was about others, and not least Palestinians, there was one organization - Ahmad Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP — GC) — with which, despite its strongly secular bent, it did appear to have a special relationship. In part, no doubt, that was because the Front had always been a protégé of Syria, and now, by extension, of Iran too. It was among the more active in the South; its most successful, and original, operation was the killing of six Israeli soldiers in a quasi-suicidal hang-glider attack on a barracks in Kiryat Shmona. Throughout this period there was no abatement in Israeli air-raids. Indeed, between 1985 and the end of the civil war, there were a good hundred of them or more, by helicopter or fighter-bomber; and, in spite of the growing menace of Hizbullah, they were mainly directed at the Palestinians, many hundreds of whom, largely refugees in their camps, were killed and wounded.

Most of the Palestinians operating out of Lebanon belonged, of course, to the old, secular-nationalist tradition. And while their revival was gratifying to Iran and its Lebanese protégé, far more so was what now came to pass in Palestine itself. For the Iranian leadership, it was a vindication of the central importance they gave to the Palestinian cause, and its potential for unifying Muslims everywhere. On 8 December 1987, an Israeli truck ran into, and killed, four day-labourers queuing at a road-block on their way home to Gaza from Israel. It was the spark that triggered the Palestinians’ first Intifada, the spontaneous, mass uprising of an oppressed and colonized people. The ‘uprising of stones’, as it was called, was essentially non-violent, or at least unarmed. But it was met by a surfeit of arms and by Rabin’s policy of ‘force, might and beatings’, a policy that led, and was intended to lead, to breaking the bones, deliberately and systematically, of bound and shackled men.³²

IRAN, HIZBULLAH — AND THE FIRST PALESTINIAN INTIFADA

This was a ‘gift from heaven’ for Palestinian Islamists, and, more specifically, for the Palestinian branch of the region-wide Muslim Brotherhood movement.³³ Like their counterparts everywhere, they had long presented themselves as a new, clean, dynamic force for political and social change. But, in their case, there was an additional dimension: the harnessing of religion, as an ideology and a frame for action, to the national struggle. With an underground organization already in place and the PLO increasingly discredited, they were ideally placed to propel the Intifada into the more violent courses it eventually took. Under their leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, wheelchair-bound, half blind and deaf, they formed a militant, initially clandestine, sub-group called Hamas, acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, whose meaning in Arabic is ‘Zeal’. In its founding charter, they called - as Arafat once had - for the liberation of the whole of Palestine, because Palestine was ‘an Islamic waqf [‘endowment’] property consecrated to the generations of Muslims till the Day of Judgement’. Though Sunnis, they obviously had much in common with Khomeini’s Shiite brand of revolutionary Islam. Indeed, both the 1979 Revolution and the rise of Hizbullah had done much to inspire them. One small, extremist offshoot of the Muslim Brothers, Islamic Jihad, which was particularly drawn to Khomeinism, had already resorted to ‘armed struggle’ and earned instant popularity for doing so. When, in 1988, its leader, Fathi Shiqaqi, was deported to Lebanon, Iran established contact with him and his followers both directly and - of course - via Hizbullah.

As soon as the fully-fledged Intifada, a surprise to almost everyone, finally did break out, Iran rallied strongly to it. It convened a series of conferences and ‘seminars’ to discuss ways and means of strengthening this ‘Islamic revolution’ in Palestine, even at one of them proposing the creation of a ‘Muslim army’ to intervene on its behalf.³⁴ It regarded support for the Palestinians as a natural extension of its support for Hizbullah, as an even better opportunity to pose, in an ecumenical, pan-Islamic spirit, as the champion of a cause that was not a ‘monopoly of the Arabs and Palestinians’.³⁵ It ostentatiously joined forces with Palestinian Islamists in order to subvert the ‘peace process’, which, via the Madrid peace conference, the US was now promoting with fresh vigour. Obviously, that also meant fierce opposition to Arafat’s efforts to insert himself into these ‘evil schemes’³⁶ So it was that the PLO leader, who had once moved heaven and earth to be the first world leader to congratulate Khomeini on his Islamic Revolution, now became one of its bitterest foes. In October 1992, a Hamas delegation arrived in Iran and held lengthy meetings with its senior leadership. The reported outcome was Tehran’s promise of $30 million in annual aid and sponsorship of military training for Hamas militants both in Iran itself and in Hizbullah and PFLP — GC camps in Lebanon. Hamas was invited to open an office in Tehran that both parties subsequently referred to as an ‘embassy’. It was even said that Iran was going to ‘recognize’ Hamas as ‘the sole representative of the Palestinian people’. Though denied by Hamas, that, and much else besides, was already more than enough for Arafat, who, deeply troubled by the Islamists’ inroads into the PLO’s standing in the occupied territories, vehemently denounced Iran’s ‘open interference in Palestinian internal affairs’.³⁷

Naturally, both Iran and Hizbullah were deeply worried about Taif; the renascent Middle East peace process; America’s growing ascendancy in the region; Syria’s active participation, or connivance, in all these developments and the favour these earned it in American eyes. Hizbullah called Taif ‘an American plot’, and Iran - or its weakened, but still far from defeated, Khomeinist zealots - saw it as a fundamental challenge to their whole investment in Lebanon, the only place in the whole Middle East where, after Saddam’s survival in the Gulf War, they could be said to have secured a solid, ‘revolutionary’ foothold. They liked almost nothing about Taif, but least of all its provision for the dissolution of the militias. If that were to apply to Hizbullah, and in principle it was clearly intended to do so, it would put an end to its ‘Islamic resistance’ at the very moment when a very similar one was emerging in Palestine itself. Taif placed a huge strain on Iran’s strategic partnership with Syria, so much so, in fact, that for a while the Iranian foreign minister made the Iranian embassy in Damascus his headquarters in a campaign to oppose it, while Ali Akbar Mohtashemi went to Lebanon to fortify the organization he had helped to found against any compromise with ‘global arrogance’ and its local allies.

HIZBULLAH WAGES SYRIA’S PROXY WAR

But, in one key respect, Hizbullah was to be spared the effects of Taif. Its militia would not merely be preserved, but go from strength to strength. In the end, it was not just pressure on Syria, but Syria of its own volition, that ensured an outcome quite at odds with what, in support of Lebanese sovereignty, it had pledged to do under Taif. Though wedded to a peaceful settlement, President Asad had simply had too much experience of America’s wayward, Israeli-influenced ways, too little confidence in its will or ability to secure the Golan’s return. So whatever might have been his original intention, and however much he disliked Hizbullah, he was not going to yield up for nothing in return the services which, even as it pursued its own, high-minded jihadist struggle, Hizbullah could render Syria in the process. He had lost so many important cards in his steadily eroding strategic hand that his great new windfall - internationally accepted suzerainty over Lebanon and the formidable, freelance fighting force which came with it - amounted to the most timely and felicitous of trumps.

Together the Lebanese state and Hizbullah, the non-state actor with which it was frequently at odds, willy-nilly became integral parts of Syria’s ‘two-track’ peace-seeking diplomacy. Thanks to its control of its neighbour’s foreign policy, formalized as ‘total coordination’ in 1993,³⁸ it made sure that Lebanon never entered into a separate peace with Israel - as Egypt had done in 1979 and Jordan would soon be doing too - despite all the hankerings Lebanon actually harboured in that regard. Ever since the Syrian-Israeli ‘disengagement’ agreement negotiated by Henry Kissinger in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Golan Heights had been among the quietest of Arab-Israeli frontiers. One thing the Baathists would very rarely permit their army, let alone any would-be, home-grown, Syrian version of Hizbullah, to do was risk a fight, or just a skirmish, with the Jewish state - of which, nonetheless, they proclaimed themselves to be the last, serious and truly steadfast adversary. By contrast, they very deliberately kept the Lebanese — Israeli frontier, long the only militarily active one, in a state of continuous effervescence. Israel had always thwarted the Lebanese army’s advance to the South. Although, under Taif, Syria was supposed in theory to help it get there now, in practice it connived with Israel in continuing to keep it out. That left the South, where all Lebanon’s troubles had begun, as the last preserve of externally supported militias - Hizbullah on the one hand, the South Lebanese Army on the other - and, in consequence, as the very place from which those troubles were liable to erupt again. And so, indeed, they were to do.

As long as Israel stayed in the Golan, it could expect to enjoy no peace or security in Lebanon. And it did not. For Asad, it was a very convenient, low-cost ‘proxy war’. Whenever, in response to the constant, low-level violence against it, Israel raised the stakes with periodic bouts of massive retaliation, it was sister-Lebanon, not Syria, that paid the price. In pursuit of this self-serving policy, Asad was ready to accept, and in the end actually to promote, the complete ‘Islamicization’ of what had formerly been the multi-party, largely secular resistance. He actively thwarted guerilla operations by organizations, such as the communists, to which in principle his ruling Baathists were historically and ideologically closest; and in due course even their most loyal accomplices, such as the Lebanese Baath or the National Syrian Socialist Party, all but left the field to Hizbullah. Thus was an overtly secular-modernist, but decadent and cynically pragmatic, regime cashing in on a non-state actor’s operational efficiency, born of a high religious zeal which few, and certainly not itself, could match. At the same time it was throwing a well-rewarded sop to the strategic partner, Iran, with which, at bottom, it had little more in common than it did with Hizbullah itself. The upshot of all this was that if, with the coming of Taif, Hizbullah was obliged, in certain fields, to go into what Ahmad Hamzeh called its ‘pragmatic-gradualist mode‘, resistance was not one of them. And resistance, of course, was Hizbullah’s very raison d’être.

THE HUNT FOR WESTERNERS

In the mid-eighties Lebanon became notorious for the kidnapping of foreigners. Nothing could have more starkly illustrated the xenophobic travesty of itself into which the one-time ‘jewel of the Levant’, renowned for its cosmopolitanism and conviviality, had fallen. Hizbullah was perhaps not the only or even primary culprit, but whatever part it did play in it, hostage-taking represented - in Ahmad Hamzeh’s formula - the second main field in which, profiting from favourable circumstances, it had gone into ‘militant and armed jihadist’ mode. Emotionally, the phenomenon grew out of the Shiite militants’ anger towards the West, America in particular; practically, it was an extreme, and cruel, application of Hizbullah’s declared ambition to expunge America from Lebanon. It had already been working on that militarily, politically, culturally; now it was going after its enemy’s very citizens too. On the one hand, kidnapping foreigners was very local and obscure. On the other, its repercussions, regional and international, were extraordinary. In 1986, it yielded ‘Irangate’, that great scandal of the Reagan Administration, involving the biggest single (if short-lived) drop in the approval ratings of any president in history, the trial and conviction (subsequently overturned on technical grounds) of two top officials on multiple felony charges and the indictment, for lesser offences, of six others (subsequently pardoned). In 1989, when a lone American citizen came under threat of imminent ‘execution’, Reagan’s successor, George Bush senior, ordered the Sixth Fleet to battle stations in the East Mediterranean.

The taking of hostages, Lebanese by Lebanese, had been common practice since the beginning of the civil war. But the first foreign hostages were Iranian. When, in the immediate aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion, Ahmad Motevasselian, commander of the advance guard that Iran had already dispatched to Syria and Lebanon, learned that President Asad did not want the further 40,000 troops that it also offered him, he volunteered for another mission instead: to go to Beirut under diplomatic cover to destroy sensitive documents in the Iranian embassy, then surrounded by Israelis and Phalangists. But the hero of Khorramshahr and his three companions were kidnapped by Christian militiamen on the way. Their fate was never determined; but they were probably killed on the orders of Phalangist intelligence chief Eli Hobeika.³⁹ Two weeks later, in obvious retaliation, David Dodge, acting president of the American University of Beirut, was seized on campus, eventually fetching up in Tehran’s notorious Evin gaol, where his interrogators never ceased to ask him about them.⁴⁰ President Asad, furious at his ally for having smuggled Dodge through his territory, personally secured his discreet release.

Hizbullah has always vehemently denied involvement in hostage-taking. ‘There was an organization other than Hizbullah called Islamic Jihad’, said Hassan Nasrallah, ‘they carried out the operations against the US Marines and the French, and kidnapped the Western hostages. It [was] independent from the party. It is absolutely incorrect that the Islamic Jihad [was] a cover name for Hizbullah.’⁴¹ Whether a real, autonomous body or little more than a name, Islamic Jihad was undoubtedly the backbone of the whole campaign. It was closely associated with Imad Mughniyah, the man who in most accounts emerges as the single, outstanding mastermind behind this anti-Western ‘reign of terror’ in all its characteristic aspects, the suicidal car- or truck-bombing, the aerial hijack or the more professionally executed type of individual kidnapping. Once a member of Fatah’s elite security apparatus, Force 17, he then moved in a similar capacity to Hizbullah, but is believed, in his major operations, to have worked very closely with Iran and the Revolutionary Guards. In fact, for Ghazi Kenaan, Syria’s military intelligence chief in Lebanon, he was nothing but one of Iran’s ’hunting dogs’.⁴² On paper at least, there was a plethora of secondary kidnapping organizations, seventeen at least if one includes those which surfaced for a single operation never to be heard of again. Judging by their high-sounding religious names, the majority fell within the Iranian-inspired, Islamist trend. But in due course it became clear, not least from the experiences of the hostages themselves, that these were little more than fictional adjuncts of Islamic Jihad. A minority were more secular-nationalist than religious; if they owed allegiance to any anyone it was to Colonel Gadafi’s Libya, then as fiercely at odds in its own way with America as the Khomeinists were in theirs. Some, often without a name at all, were just criminal gangs, making a business of grabbing Westerners and ’selling’ them to the highest bidder among politically motivated ‘buyers’, religious, nationalist - or, not infrequently, that most notorious impresario of Palestinian terror, Abu Nidal.

The hunt for Westerners began in earnest in 1984. In all, over a seven-year period, eighty-seven were taken. Most - seventeen Americans, fifteen French and fourteen British - came from the three states which, with their continuing history of political interference in the Middle East, were deemed most representative of ‘global arrogance’. Though there were kidnappees from a dozen other states, these were the highest-value merchandise in the hostage bazaar. A few of them were, or were considered by their captors to be, military or intelligence personnel; and so, easily branded as ‘agents’ and ‘spies’, they ended up being killed as well as kidnapped. The vast majority, however, were ordinary citizens doing more or less ordinary jobs. Of these, some had spent much of their lives in Lebanon and developed a deep attachment to the country; some were married to Lebanese; some were overtly sympathetic to the Arab, and more particularly the Palestinian, cause and actively expounded it to a Western world still mainly, if decreasingly, sympathetic to Israel’s.

‘THAT RAG IN BEIRUT’

Little did their ‘innocence’ avail them. In their captivity, lasting anything up to seven years, they were held in variable but often appalling conditions; shackled, blindfolded; moved around in the boots of cars, or boxes strapped beneath lorries; tortured, beaten and humiliated. But most, in the end, were released, that being the intended consummation of the purpose - to serve as bargaining counters - for which they had been abducted in the first place. Initially, the kidnappers may have acted mainly on their own initiative. Their principal demand was the release of seventeen Shiite militants, a few of them Lebanese, under sentence of death in Kuwait for their part in the bombings which, back in 1983, had struck the American and French embassies soon after those far deadlier ones against American and French barracks in Beirut. But, with the involvement of Iran, their activities took on an entirely new dimension, with ‘Irangate’ as the climax.

In that extraordinary affair, the US sent Iran five or six deliveries of over-priced, black-market arms - including thousands of TOW anti-tank missiles and spare parts for Iran’s Hawk anti-aircraft missile batteries - in return for the phased release of three American hostages in Beirut.⁴³ The proceeds helped finance the Reagan Administration’s secret and illegal sponsorship of the right-wing Contra insurgency against the elected government of Nicaragua.

The scandal was first broken by an obscure, Syrian-backed Lebanese weekly called al-Shira‘a. It disclosed that, in the most picaresque twist of a picaresque tale, Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s former National Security Adviser, and three other high officials had secretly flown to Iran with another consignment of arms aboard their plane. Reagan promptly denounced ‘that rag in Beirut’. But a few days later Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, then speaker of the Iranian parliament, confirmed everything it had said - and added some piquant details of his own, such as the fact that, as well as weapons, Reagan’s cloak-and-dagger emissaries had brought a bible inscribed by the president himself, two Colt pistols and a cake in the shape of a key.

So here, after telling everyone else not to do business with ‘terrorist-sponsoring’ states - here was the United States itself doing precisely that, and doing it, moreover, with what, in its own book, was the very worst of them. Here it was, a supporter of, and purveyor of intelligence and technical assistance to, Iraq in the Gulf War, supplying badly needed weaponry to the other side. For the so-called ‘moderate,’ pro-Western Arab states, Iran, in its ambition to establish the ‘Islamic Republic of Iraq‘, had become no less a peril than Israel itself, a threat to the whole existing Arab order in fact. Yet even as America did nothing to help them vis à vis the old adversary - for how, it asked, could they expect Israel to enter into negotiations with a ‘terrorist’ organization like the PLO? - here it now was, helping the new one to bring about the very catastrophe they feared. Furthermore, America’s ‘folly and duplicity’⁴⁴ — as they called it - did not even work. For even as the arms were being delivered, and the hostages released, Islamic Jihad set about kidnapping three more Americans to take their place.

Of at least ten Westerners who died in captivity, four were ‘executed’, and three plain murdered. The first victim, William Buckley, was the CIA station chief in Beirut, who, taking no special precautions, was abducted as he walked from home to the US embassy. Evidently, Islamic Jihad knew exactly who he was; that was a secret gleaned from that seminal hostage drama, when, in 1979, Khomeinist students stormed the US embassy in Tehran, held fifty-two diplomats for 444 days - and, with infinite patience, pieced together all the documents which they had managed to shred before the takeover. Islamic Jihad apparently also believed that he was the effective controller of Gemayel’s Phalangist-dominated regime.⁴⁵ He died after being severely tortured; his kidnappers announced that he had been ‘executed’.⁴⁶ Another who perished similarly - after once having been bizarrely permitted to visit his Syrian wife - was the French orientalist Michel Seurat. An Islamic Jihad sub-group, called the Organization of the Oppressed of the Earth, abducted Colonel William Higgins, the American deputy commander of the UN Truce Supervision Organization in south Lebanon, and a year later ‘executed’ him, apparently by hanging, in reprisal for Israel’s helicopter-borne kidnapping of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, the Hizbullah chief in the South. Two British academics, Leigh Douglas and Philip Padfield, and an American librarian, Peter Kilburn, were dispatched, a bullet to the head, by the Arab Revolutionary Cells, in straightforward revenge for America’s ’anti-terrorist’ air-raid, launched from bases in Britain, on Libya in 1986. The Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims, probably an Abu Nidal front, said it had hanged British journalist Alec Collett for the same reason.⁴⁷

‘EXECUTING’ THE JEWS

Perhaps the most poignant victims of the anti-Western terror were not Westerners at all, even if, in the minds of their tormentors, they were closely associated with them. They were Lebanese Jews. A community of something like 10,000 in 1948, at the time of Israel’s creation, they had, like the rest of Arab Jewry, emigrated in large numbers since. The process had accelerated with the outbreak of the civil war, so that by the mid-eighties those, by now reduced to a few score, who chose to remain were taking as great a risk as any Westerner, as well as displaying a greater - because far more perilous - loyalty to their native Lebanon than its Muslims or Christians. Clearly, there were divisions of labour within the kidnapping fraternity, and to the Organization of the Oppressed of the Earth fell responsibility for dealing with the Jews. It acquired a stock of them over time, eleven in all. One of its ‘policies’ was that whenever Shiite civilians died at Israeli hands in the South, a Jewish hostage would die too. And so, one by one, they did, including Isaac Sassoon, the head of the Jewish Council whom the Oppressed of the Earth described as the ’chief Mossad agent’ in Lebanon.⁴⁸ Another was Elie Hallak, known as the ‘doctor of the poor’ for the way he ministered to the homeless squatters, mainly Shiites, who had settled in and around Beirut’s old, now desolate and war-ravaged Jewish quarter of Wadi Abu Jamil. His kidnappers even used him to treat Michel Seurat. As Hallak told the dying Frenchman and his three compatriots, he knew that he himself was doomed, because, unlike them, he was never blindfolded in his captors’ presence. Sure enough, shortly after Seurat’s death, his possessions were brought to the surviving hostages’ cell. And two months after that they heard on the radio what they had already surmised: that the Oppressed of the Earth had ‘executed’ him too.⁴⁹

Few of those best placed to know could take Hizbullah’s claims to non-involvement seriously, certainly not Giandomenico Picco, the UN emissary who took on the dangerous task of negotiating the hostages’ release. Hizbullah was the ‘political force behind the whole crisis’: there was ‘no doubt in [his] mind’ about that.⁵⁰ The kidnappers mouthed essentially the same ideology as Hizbullah.⁵¹ They came from Hizbullah’s social and cultural milieu, and operated in its geopolitical space, mainly the Dablya and the Beqa’a Valley; if it had really disapproved of them, it had every means of stopping them. But it did not; on the contrary, it provided them with cover and protection.⁵² Even if the party condemned hostage-taking in principle, it was not prepared to do so in practice.⁵³ Even if the mujahideen were misguided in method, it said, they were ‘honest’ in purpose.⁵⁴ There were ‘extenuating’ circumstances; and when those - above all the overwhelming Western/ Israeli onslaught against the Shiite community - were taken into account, hostage-taking could be seen as a form of ‘self-defence’, which Hizbullah fully ‘understood’. Besides, why should it ‘serve [America] politically’ by condemning kidnapping when Americans themselves ‘don’t condemn Israel’s acts against our people’.⁵⁵ In 2008, Hizbullah adopted Imad Mughniyah, blown up by a car-bomb in the heart of Damascus, as the latest and perhaps most illustrious of its ‘martyrs’. For twenty years mystery had surrounded the role and whereabouts of this legendary, central figure of the hostage-taking era. And his beatification was all the more remarkable - and telling - in that this murkier aspect of its early life was one which, in its maturity, Hizbullah had become distinctly keen to put behind it, with party officials going so far as to flatly deny that he had ever held a position in the party, or that they had ever even known anyone by that name.⁵⁶

‘CLOSING THE HOSTAGE FILE’

Perhaps the single most convincing argument Hizbullah might have adduced in its own defence was precisely the one it never did - or very likely never could, so little short of blasphemous, even if true, it would have seemed. This was that the Islamic Republic had always been the real instigator, and beneficiary, of the whole unsavoury business. If that hadn’t been clear at its outset, it became abundantly so in its denouement. For, patently, it only came to an end when Iran decided that it should. The first post-Khomeini president, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, immediately signalled that his government would use its ‘influence’ to secure the hostages’ freedom. And it did - though not without a rearguard action from the unregenerate Khomeinist zealots. Thus it was that Lebanon, normally the battleground for conflicts between states, now became so for one within a single state. For no sooner did Rafsanjani and the ‘reformists’ let it be known that their patient efforts ‘to close the hostage file’ were about to bear fruit than the zealots cried havoc at their would-be sell-out to ‘global arrogance’; Ali Akbar Mohtashemi (though he was later to join the ‘reformist’ camp himself) likened the release of such ‘spies and agents’ to the release of ‘hungry wolves‘, and proclaimed, from Khomeini’s graveside, that ‘our dearly beloved Imam’, to whose ‘sacred breath’ Hizbullah owed its very existence, would never have countenanced such a disgrace.⁵⁷ The zealots lost this particular contest; Picco escorted the last two hostages to freedom in June 1992. But that did not seriously undermine Iranian support for their protégé, which mainly came, in any case, from a quarter which generally favoured the zealots over the ‘reformists’; that is to say, from the largely unelected, unaccountable, arch-conservative clerics, from the ‘sacred’, as opposed to the ‘popular’, institutions of the ‘divine-political’ system and their loyalist instruments, the Revolutionary Guards and the intelligence.⁵⁸ And it did not undermine Hizbullah itself, whose ‘militant and armed jihadist mode’ had fared rather better in its third, and more important, domain: the forceful seizure of power.

SHIITE VERSUS SHIITE

In the era of cantons and sectarian militias, every non-state actor sought maximum sway for itself at the expense of every other. Hizbullah came into being principally to confront external adversaries. But, unable to do that without a local power base of its own, it inevitably found itself in confrontation with internal ones too. The external struggle, against the ‘Zionists’ and ‘imperialists’, was jihad, the internal one, against other Lebanese, was the outcome of fitna, variously rendered into English as strife, sedition or riot.⁵⁹ It proved as adept and resolute in the second as it already was in the first.

During its extraordinary ascension, from the next-to-nothing it had been before the ‘scuffle of camels’ to the country’s most formidable and only surviving militia, Hizbullah clashed with various quarters, be it what it called its ‘basic enemies’ and instruments of ‘global arrogance’, such as the Phalange or Amin Gemayel’s Phalangist-dominated regime, or what it sometimes called its ‘friends’,⁶⁰ anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist, yet secular, nationalist rivals such as the communists or the National Syrian Socialist Party. But, ironically, those with whom it had to do really serious and prolonged battle in order to survive and prosper, were those to whom it was closest.

Internally, that meant other Shiites, in the shape of the rival militia, Amal, from which Hizbullah originally stemmed. The fratricidal conflict to which this led had its parallel in the roughly simultaneous intra-Maronite one, and, if rather different in technique, it was no less murderous in effect. Thousands died. In 1984, Amal had reigned supreme; by the end of the intra-Shiite war, coterminous with the end of the fifteen-year civil war as a whole, Hizbullah had supplanted it as the dominant Shiite power.

Externally, Hizbullah’s chief adversary was Syria. In his unremitting struggle to impose his Pax Syriana, President Asad where possible evaded direct, physical force in favour of remote control through local surrogates. After the Israeli invasion, and the upsurge of the Shiites, Amal became the most important of these. While Asad much appreciated Hizbullah’s external jihad, he had a very different view of its internal empowerment, not only because this new actor on the Lebanese stage posed a direct challenge to Amal, but also because it displayed an alarming ability to win hearts and minds in a way that his chosen vessel did not, it had a vision of Lebanon’s destiny utterly at odds with his own, and it drew enormous sustenance from Iran, which, though Syria’s ally, was increasingly its bitter rival too. For after 1985, by which time the two had basically achieved the initial, joint goals of their alliance - the defeat and humbling of Israel and America in Lebanon - all their latent divergences came to the fore. And it was this struggle between their respective Shiite protégés that put their own relationship to its greatest test.

THE WAR OF THE CAMPS

The struggle arose gradually, a consequence, to begin with, of one of those innumerable ‘side-wars’ that the Hobbesian chaos threw up. A particularly serious one, however, it pitted Amal against the Palestinians in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila and Bourj al-Brajneh. For both Amal and its Syrian patron the greatest threat to their grip on Muslim West Beirut was the comeback that Arafat was staging there. By 1985, several hundred of his guerillas had re-infiltrated the camps. His purpose was much less to fight Israel than it was to re-establish himself as a political force in the domestic Lebanese arena. Amal sought to subjugate the camps, even remove them, once and for all.⁶¹ It thought this would be a walk-over, but it turned into a grim, two-year struggle, replete with Lebanon’s familiar brutalities. Amal used its Syrian-supplied T-54 tanks to fire at almost point-blank range into the densely packed dwellings.⁶² In a third and final, five-month siege, it brought the inhabitants to the brink of famine, amid rumours of a resort to cannibalism in Bourj al-Brajneh.

Though the so-called ‘war of the camps’ was humanly terrible for the Palestinians, it was disastrous for Amal. It failed militarily, sustained very heavy casualties, and generally demonstrated a shambolic incompetence. It also earned itself huge opprobrium in Lebanon and the Arab world at large, seen as it was to be trying to ‘finish off‘, in implicit collaboration with both Israel and Syria, what in earlier such sieges - Tal al-Za’atar 1976, Sabra and Shatila 1982 — the Phalangists, with similar complicities, had begun.

Contributing to its failure was the opposition of other militias, its former Sunni, Druze and leftist allies, and even the Phalangists, who, in a bizarre volte-face wholly characteristic of Lebanese sects and tribes at war, now helped the Palestinians return to Beirut through the illegal Maronite port of Junieh.⁶³ Most serious, however, was the outright hostility of Iran and its Hizbullah protégé, likewise assisted by the Phalangists. Iran denounced these Syrian and Shiite ‘traitors to Islam’ who thus served ‘imperialist-Zionist’ aspirations to ‘annihilate’ the Palestinians.⁶⁴ Hizbullah smuggled in food and arms to the camps.⁶⁵ Many Amal fighters deserted to its ranks.

The ‘war of the camps’ came to an end in early 1987 when Asad, almost at his wits’ end, sent 7,000 troops back into West Beirut to save his Amal protégé from total collapse.⁶⁶ But, in the process, what had been merely a proxy conflict between Hizbullah on the one hand, Amal and himself on the other, now turned into a direct one. The Syrian army shot or stabbed to death twenty-three bound and defenceless young Hizbullahis, including five women, who had peaceably surrendered in a West Beirut barracks; it then went around tearing down portraits of Khomeini. ‘Hideous and inexcusable crime,’ screamed Tehran, and warned that it could make Syria’s position untenable in West Beirut - a threat which prompted Asad to assure his ally that he had no intention of invading the Dahiya, by now a well-established Hizbullah redoubt.⁶⁷

HIZBULLAH VERSUS AMAL

It was only a matter of time before the fitna erupted into full-scale war. The almost certainly Iranian-inspired kidnapping of Colonel Higgins, a dire provocation to both Amal and Syria, set it off. In the decisive battles of April and May 1988, Amal first attacked Hizbullah in the Nabatiyah and Jezzin areas; after three days of fighting in which fifty died, it captured Siddiqin, Hizbullah’s last stronghold in the South, and drove out the Revolutionary Guards from their positions in Jibsheet and Sharqiyah.⁶⁸ Next, the Israelis launched an unusually bold ground offensive against the village of Meidoun, a Hizbullah stronghold, in the southern Beqa‘a, slaying forty.⁶⁹ For the embattled and increasingly paranoid jihadists this meant that the Israelis were in on the fitna. Then, three days after that, Amal launched an all-out assault on the Dahiya, Hizbullah’s last real autonomous bastion. Amal, and Syria behind it, calculated that, demoralized and reeling from earlier blows, it would easily succumb. But they were as wrong as they had been about the Palestinians. Realizing all too well that its survival was at stake,⁷⁰ Hizbullah rallied in extremis and entirely turned the tables on its adversaries. It brought in reinforcements from the Beqa’a; these included a large contingent of Revolutionary Guards. Together they slipped into the capital courtesy of the Druzes and their illegal port of Khalde, which, in the crazy, microscopic geopolitics of the times, lay cheek by jowl with the illegal, Amal-controlled Shiite port of Ouzai.⁷¹ It mounted a well-planned counter-offensive, driving Amal’s ill-disciplined troops out of 80 per cent of the Dahiya in six days. It then rejected the ceasefire upon ceasefire which Syria and Iran, collaborating even as they quarrelled, sought to install. It would not even consider one without the right to return to the South, which Amal’s top Southern leader, Daoud Daoud, had vowed to retain as its exclusive preserve even ‘at the price of a thousand martyrs’.⁷²

After three weeks of some of the bloodiest fighting of the civil war, with 300 dead, over 1,000 wounded and 400,000 fleeing the suburbs, Hizbullah was on the point of inflicting complete defeat on Amal. Asad stepped in, a second time, to avert that. Even as Amal leader Nabih Berri⁷³ rushed to Damascus to beg Asad for full-scale Syrian intervention to crush Hizbullah - a course which he was evidently seriously contemplating - Asad himself invited Hizbullah’s leaders to his summer palace in Latakia for a first ever meeting between them. There it was agreed that while 3,500 Syrian troops would enter the Dahiya, Hizbullah would retain all its military gains there intact. It was also agreed, implicitly, that it could resume its jihad in the South.⁷⁴ Asad praised the organization as the ‘true Islam’ in Lebanon.⁷⁵ Berri announced the dissolution of his militia in Beirut.

It was a basic turning point, whose consequences persist to this day. Making a virtue of necessity, Asad had decided that, instead of breaking Hizbullah, he would turn it into an instrument for his own ends, externally vis à vis Israel, America and the pro-Western ‘moderate’ Arab regimes, internally as another surrogate, supplementary to Amal itself, which he could co-opt in his everlasting, divide-and-rule manipulation of the uncontrollable Lebanese.⁷⁶ It was consolidated six months later by the ‘Damascus agreement’, Iranian-brokered, under which the warring militias were to set up a joint ‘operations room’ for resistance activities against the common Israeli enemy.⁷⁷ However, this formula, essentially a face-saving one for Amal, was not good enough for Hizbullah. So the intra-Shiite war continued; moving relentlessly from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, it eventually inflicted more casualties - if less destruction — than the Israelis had themselves. From the hills above Sidon to the villages around Nabatiyah, from clash to truce to further clash, Hizbullah remorselessly eroded Amal’s sphere of influence in the South. In November 1990, yet another, and final, ceasefire consecrated the permanent, post-civil war supremacy of the Islamists both there and in Beirut.⁷⁸

The Amal-Hizbullah settlement was also, in effect, a settlement between their respective sponsors. Often enough, their improbable alliance had seemed about to collapse.⁷⁹ Yet, clearly resolved that it should not, neither Iran nor Syria had ever despaired of finding a median way. In the end, far from weakening it, the supreme test actually tempered, refined and consolidated it into one of the strongest of Middle East axes which, try as they might, its adversaries were never able to prise apart.⁸⁰ Asad impressed on the mullahs that, in his Lebanese backyard, his interests must always take precedence over theirs, but, once that was understood, he greatly valued their support, both inside Lebanon and outside it, and not least against Saddam Hussein, the original begetter of their alliance, who, in the hubris of ‘victory’ in the Gulf War, now posed a greater threat than ever.⁸¹ For their part, the mullahs, acknowledging that without him they would never have made the important inroads into Lebanon they already had, were ready to set limits on their ‘revolutionary’ ambitions there. The settlement left Hizbullah free to pursue the first of those two basic purposes for which it had come into being, the ‘Islamic resistance’ - albeit at the price, not of altogether forsaking the second, the building of an ‘Islamic order’, but of at least deferring it to another day.

ISLAMIC STATE WITHIN THE STATE

For Hizbullah, an ‘Islamic order’ meant an ‘Islamic state’, ‘the only right system for mankind‘⁸² which it was a religious duty to establish wherever the possibility to do so arose, and, in its own and its Iranian patron’s judgement, it arose in that primordial chaos for which Lebanon was now an international byword. In its Open Letter⁸³ it called on all citizens, of all faiths, to work for a society ‘ruled by Islam and its just leadership’. The Christians should ‘join Islam’ because in it lay their ‘salvation ... in this world and the next’. As for those who already belonged to it ‘denominationally’, they should start to observe it ‘practically’; although their misguided, secular ‘ideas’ did not ‘stem from Islam‘, their ‘motives’ were ‘fundamentally Islamic’ in that they were inspired by ‘opposition to tyranny and oppression’, and they would ‘inevitably revert to their essence’ once it became clear that ‘revolutionary Islam [was] the force leading the struggle’.⁸⁴ In Tehran, the Khomeinist leadership wanted to cash in on the large investment it had already made in Lebanon, to profit from the vacuum left by America and Israel’s retreat and the impotence of their surviving client regime; its continuing failure to install an ‘Islamic Republic of Iraq’ seemed only to increase its determination to install one in Lebanon instead.⁸⁵ In early 1986, at a conclave in Tehran, Lebanese clerics, in consultation with their Iranian counterparts, were reported to have secretly drawn up the constitution of an ‘Islamic state’ in which they would enjoy a paramount authority limited only by local autonomy for ‘minorities’.⁸⁶ No other militia, not even the Maronite ‘Lebanese Forces’, envisaged a Lebanon-to-be so radically different from the old. Like others, Hizbullah carved out ‘cantons’ in its own areas - Baalbek, the Dahiya and a part of the South - but when it encroached on what was left of state authority it did not, like others, do so merely, or ostensibly, as a temporary necessity until the state returned, but as a preparation for God’s ‘just rule’. The basic functions it appropriated were destined, in principle, to become permanent.

THE CIA’S REVENGE

In this spirit, it imposed its version of the Shari‘a, or Islamic law, and entrusted its application to a judiciary whose members, from a high court down, were appointed, or advised, by itself. The high court had jurisdiction over espionage, treason and crimes against the party and its members. Its most important and - in this history - its most pertinent case arose out of the car-bomb which, in March 1985, had exploded outside the home of Sayyed Hussein Fadlallah. This act of large-scale terror was apparently the CIA’s revenge for the truck-bombings of the American and French barracks three years before. The choice of target was inspired by the belief — a then prevalent but apparently never very accurate one - that Fadlallah was Hizbullah’s ‘spiritual guide‘, had an operational role in its leadership, or had even blessed the two suicide bombers who had carried them out.⁸⁷ It was the handiwork of Lebanese proxies, reportedly in collaboration with Saudi Arabia, whose ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, paid CIA Director George Casey in person a top-secret $3,000,000 for his services.⁸⁸ Fadlallah himself escaped unscathed, but eighty-five others, including children and pregnant women, were killed and nearly two hundred wounded. After investigations by Hizbullah’s security apparatus, eleven people confessed that they had done it on the CIA’s behalf. The high court sentenced them to death. One of them was the daughter of an acquaintance of Fadlallah. The girl’s father reportedly pleaded with him to spare her life and accept ‘blood money’ instead. Fadlallah, however, would not or could not prevent the bukm Allah — the verdict of God — which, once pronounced, was final.⁸⁹

With the laws of the Islamic Republic came its mores too, fanning out from Baalbek, cradle of Hizbullah, to embrace the whole of its expanding demesne. In the newly liberated South, there was no more card-playing and beer in sea-front cafés — a favourite local pastime - and no more female swimmers on the long sandy beaches. Even the men now had to wear shorts that reached down past their knees.⁹⁰ In Beirut, the Kulturkampf spilled out of the Dahiya into the city’s traditionally liberal, multi-sectarian heart, where Western ‘decadence’ still persisted, with the harassment of insufficiently covered women or the intimidation of shops and restaurants where alcohol was served. The targeting of Western seats of learning such as the American University, ten of whose Western staff and students were kidnapped, was of a piece with this campaign.⁹¹

WELFARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

In another key arena, the socio-economic one, Hizbullah quickly developed a quasi-statist role. Most of the country’s leading parties and militias went in for community services, but Hizbullah’s surpassed them all in their efficiency, scope and continuous expansion. Welfare and social justice, in the face of the corrupt and negligent state, has been a preoccupation of Islamists in whatever country they arose. But in Hizbullah’s case, they grew out of, and were reinforced by, its primary, jihadist role, and the need it engendered to provide assistance for the families of mujahideen and ‘martyrs’. It had one great advantage over everyone else. Whereas others had to raise money from mainly domestic sources, and incurred much resentment in doing so, Hizbullah enjoyed regular, guaranteed subventions from an external patron, Iran. One informed estimate put them at about $140 million a year,⁹² a very useful sum at a time when the national currency, which once stood at some two lira to the dollar, had gone into free fall, fetching up, at one point, as low as 2,500 to the dollar, with disastrous effects on the living standards of the already poor, Shiites in particular. Amal, in its jealousy, called its rival the ‘petro-party’. But the taunt, while perhaps true in a narrow sense, was specious in a larger one. For Hizbullah had another, altogether more meritorious advantage. While other parties and militias were often taxed with corruption, racketeering and self-enrichment, Hizbullah never was. On the contrary, its discipline, integrity and dedication ‘generated feelings akin to awe among many Lebanese, Christians and Muslims alike’.⁹³ It set up the Mu‘assasah Jihad al-Bina, or Jihad for Construction Foundation, inspired by an Iranian organization of the same name, and together with other institutions, such as the Martyrs’ Foundation, virtually an arm of Iran too,⁹⁴ it engaged in a vast range of public services and infrastructural projects - from which Christians and Sunnis, not just Shiites, often benefited - such as hospitals and schools, cut-price supermarkets and pharmacies, low-cost housing, land reclamation and irrigation. It even opened Lebanon’s first employment bureau.⁹⁵ In the Dahiya, where the absence of the state was at its most flagrant, Jihad al-Bina assumed responsibility for most of the water supply, electricity, refuse collection, sewage disposal and general maintenance - services that were so long prolonged into the post-war period that Hizbullah was widely credited with helping the Lebanese state avert a ‘social catastrophe’ there. All these activities were held to be an Islamic imperative and Hizbullah would have gone ahead with them ‘whether Lebanon [was] an Islamic state or not’; but at the same time it was well aware that the better it performed them the more public favour the idea of Islamic statehood would garner.⁹⁶

THE ‘LEBANONIZATION’ OF HIZBULLAH

Statehood, however, was not to be. Hizbullah in due course acknowledged its sheer impracticality in any foreseeable circumstances. That was a deferment of ideals which it did not accomplish without resistance from the usual, hard-line quarters. In 1989, as Taif and a general Lebanese settlement loomed, a conference in Tehran defiantly asserted that ‘Muslim warriors and patriotic forces in Lebanon did not shed their blood to see confirmed again the old, unjust rule of one sect over the others.’ Then, at a Hizbullah conclave, likewise in Tehran, Sheikh Subhi al-Tufayli, its secretary-general, insisted on perpetual jihad against all who stood in the ‘Islamic order’s’ path. But he was opposed by a majority of the party cadres, who argued that while the goal of a Shari‘a-based society remained immutably the same, the means of achieving it should be flexible; the time had come to supplement the militant mode with the ‘gradualist-pragmatic’ one.⁹⁷ After all, as the Koran had famously laid down and even Hizbullah’s own Open Letter had - sotto voce — conceded, ‘there is no compulsion in religion’. And there would have to have been an awful lot of that in a country where Christians, Druzes or Sunni Muslims combined still far outnumbered the Shiites, rapidly multiplying though they might be, and where, according to one survey, only 13 per cent of these themselves were in favour of it.⁹⁸ An Islamic state established by force would not merely have been inherently unjust, it would no longer have been Islamic.⁹⁹

Indeed, any attempt, in such conditions, to establish one would have led to the Islamically abhorrent condition of fawda, anarchy; it would also have deeply antagonized Syria. And those two circumstances would in turn have collided with Hizbullah’s other main purpose - jihad and the ‘liberation of Jerusalem’. In any case, in Hizbullah’s view, Zionism represented a far greater ‘injustice’ than a Lebanon still perversely wedded to its secularism.¹⁰⁰ On both ideological and pragmatic grounds, therefore, the struggle for an ‘Islamic order’ had to give way to ‘Islamic resistance’.

So, instead of seeking to overthrow the system, however rotten it might be, Hizbullah resolved to work and advance its cause within it. This did not mean that, doctrinally, it approved of it, of its institutionalized sectarianism, or the Western-style democracy on which it was modelled. It simply meant that, for the foreseeable future, it would seek the ‘possible justice’ that was attainable through it, rather than the ‘absolute justice’ of an ‘Islamic state’ that was not.¹⁰¹ It also, as earlier noted, hoped to win the support of the majority of the Lebanese people for its jihad on what amounted to nationalist, or patriotic, as well as Islamic grounds.¹⁰² Since to join or not to join the system divided Hizbullah itself, and since this fundamental question required one of those strategic decisions which only the Wali himself could take, it was Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, who finally clinched the matter. Asked whether Hizbullah should participate in the first, post-war parliamentary elections in 1992, he decreed that it should; it would thereby ‘combine jihad with political activities’.¹⁰³ Although, with this critical step, perhaps even watershed, in its history, Hizbullah became a conventional political party, with a conventional domestic agenda, it remained the militia, with an external, visionary, Islamist agenda, that it already was. And although, as it was said at the time, it had thus ‘Lebanonized’ itself, in its wider, trans-national allegiances it remained in a very real sense Iranian and even Syrian too. Thus were born ambiguities, and potentially explosive contradictions, that would never go away.