Beware of Small States

Born and raised in those conditions of poverty, social upheaval, war, violence and displacement that were the common lot of countless Shiites at the time, he gave early sign of very uncommon personal qualities. Eldest of the nine children of a fruit and vegetable seller in Maslakh-Karantina, the small, sea-front, mainly Shiite slum in East Beirut, he quickly developed a passion for learning and religion; while his younger brothers helped their father in his stall, he would walk to the city centre in search of second-hand books, or read and pray in such mosques as he could get to from this Christian side of town. When Maslakh-Karantina was overrun by the Phalangists in the first major massacre of the civil war,³ the Nasrallahs relocated in Bazourieh, the family village in the South. There, continuing his education at a state school in Tyre, he was drawn into politics, and, precocious youth that he was, quickly found himself head of the local Amal branch at a mere fifteen years of age. A year later he arrived, penniless, in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq. Taken in hand by a fellow student, none other than Abbas Musawi himself, who had preceded him there, he was admitted to the seminary of the illustrious theologian Ayatollah Baqr Sadr, who, upon deeper acquaintance with his brilliant new pupil, discerned future ‘greatness’ in him, saying: ‘I scent in you the aroma of leadership; you are one of the Ansar [followers] of the Mahdi ...‘⁴ Under the guidance of Sadr, himself a pioneering theorist of ‘Islamic government’, Nasrallah was profoundly influenced by the very similar teachings of Khomeini, whom he later described as ‘the greatest, most dignified and undisputed personality of the twentieth century’. In 1978, Saddam began a ferocious campaign of repression against Shiite Islamists, in the course of which Sadr, who had declared himself a supporter of the Islamic Revolution, was hanged, after being forced to witness the rape and murder of his sister Bint Huda. Dozens of Lebanese seminarists were expelled from Iraq; Nasrallah also returned home, resuming his religious studies and his political activities with Amal. After his 1982 defection to the nascent Hizbullah, he rapidly ascended its hierarchy, impressing all with his personality, intelligence and organizational skills. And now, installed at the head of it, he set about turning the party from a small, secretive band of zealots, principally known for the kidnapping of foreigners and the suicide bombings of Western and Israeli targets, into the doubly effective powerhouse it is today - both the most influential political player in Lebanon and probably the most proficient guerilla organization in the world.⁵

Among the first, outward signs of a new, more tolerant Hizbullah that Nasrallah brought with him was an easing of those fiercely puritanical social and cultural observances which, in the early years, had alienated many who, while otherwise well disposed towards the organization, had no desire to live under a Khomeini-style Islamic government. Nasrallah was also the moving spirit behind the Infitah, or ‘opening up’,⁶ to the Lebanese political system and society at large, and the ‘dialogue’ with others, which now began in earnest, softening the party’s menacing image and persuading many that only where Israel was concerned was it truly radical or extreme.⁷ ‘We fight on mountain-tops and in the valleys‘, he said, ‘but live in this community and are part of it’; the party’s jihadist mission embraced ‘a civilized social programme that [went] beyond the mere carrying of a gun’.⁸ With some 200,000 members, it became the country’s largest political organization, combining the features of both a ‘mass party’ and a party of elite, highly disciplined ‘cadres’.⁹ In the first post-war elections, it won eight seats and, with the cooperation of four Islamist allies, headed the largest single bloc in parliament; it would have fared even better in this and subsequent polls had it not been for Syria’s determination that it should not eclipse its principal Shiite ally, Amal, and Syria’s insistence that it run on joint electoral lists with it.¹⁰ Municipal elections were a truer test of popularity, and in 1998, in the first of these to be held for thirty-five years, it won overwhelming victories in the Dahiya and other important areas of the country, not to mention very significant ones elsewhere.^II

Although Hizbullah was a prime beneficiary of Syrian hegemony, its deputies represented, in their domestic socio-economic agenda at least, what amounted to the ‘only opposition’ in parliament.¹² Politicians across the confessional spectrum gave them high marks for seriousness, professionalism and flexibility.¹³ They inveighed against clientelism and corruption, withheld votes of confidence from successive governments, rejected budgets and, in the words of a former - and, of course, Sunni - prime minister, conducted themselves in a ‘morally upright’ manner that ‘distinguished [Hizbullah] from other parties’.¹⁴ All the while, however, it shunned a deeper political engagement - such as taking ministerial positions - in order to avoid the ‘bazaar’ of compromises and quid pro quos to which that would risk exposing it.¹⁵

Rafiq Hariri was the personification of Hong Kong. The ambitious youth of humble Sidon origins, whose spectacular career as a contractor in the Saudi Arabia of the great oil boom years had made of him one of the world’s wealthiest men, became prime minister in 1992; and, in or out of office, he dominated the country’s political and economic life thereafter. Architect of Lebanon’s post-war reconstruction, he dreamt of the special place, reminiscent of its pre-war glory, which the country would regain in the much-touted ‘new Middle East’ of peace, prosperity and economic integration now widely deemed - with the Madrid peace conference, Oslo, and the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty - to be all but inevitably at hand.

Unfortunately, however, continuing hostilities across the last militarily active frontier of the Arab-Israeli conflict, undermining business confidence and deterring investment, disturbed this alluring prospect. In 1993, tensions between the contradictory visions of Lebanon’s future grew so sharp that, even as Hizbullah was displaying formidable new prowess on the battlefield, the army was opening fire on pro-resistance demonstrators protesting the ‘treachery’ of Oslo¹⁸ in much the same way that it had done a quarter of a century before when the resistance was Palestinian, not Lebanese Shiite. On one occasion the army killed nine demonstrators, and earned Hariri’s defence minister that gravest of insults, to be denounced as Lebanon’s ‘Ariel Sharon’.¹⁹

In the event, ‘Hanoi’ never buried ‘Hong Kong’, but, in the uneasy co-existence between them, it generally secured the upper hand. Syria, with its dominion over official Lebanon, was a major reason for that. But Hizbullah’s own persuasions were very much part of it too. Within a month of Nasrallah’s assumption of the leadership, parliament was urging that the national territory be liberated ‘by all means’.²⁰ According to an opinion poll conducted before the first post-war elections, 62 per cent of the people, Christians and Muslims, said they were ready to cast their vote for representatives of the resistance, clearly distinguishing them - and their cause - from the wartime militias of recent evil memory. In later years Hizbullah’s armed struggle won it more parliamentary support than any of its rivals even among those whom that struggle most imperilled.²¹ In the circumstances the Lebanese state, in the person of Hariri, had little choice but to endorse the ‘legitimacy’ of the resistance, which, he said, could - and would - only come to an end with the end of the Israeli occupation itself.

‘Some people think’, said Timur Goksel, ‘that Nasrallah was really meant to have been a general, not an ayatollah.’²² Certain it is that, under this warrior-priest, Hizbullah developed military capabilities of a high order, severely exposing the vulnerabilities of a state which, unlike any other in the modern world, owed its very existence and survival to military force and its almost legendarily effective use of it. It embarrassed virtually all regular Arab armies and undermined the notion, deeply embedded in the Israeli psyche, that Arabs are inherently inferior in the arts of war. For the first time in their history Israelis faced a true guerilla enemy - an enemy, nonetheless, who in this period probably never numbered more than 1,500 fighters, of whom perhaps only 500 were full-time professionals.²³ The mujahideen still retained that religious fervour and self-sacrificing zeal which were the mainspring of their prowess. But the leadership now all but outlawed ‘martyrdom operations’ and gratuitously wasteful, Iranian-style ‘human wave’ assaults against well-defended positions. Instead, it married the undimmed martial ardour with greater military skills - with advanced weapons training, ingenious battlefield tactics, elaborate reconnaissance, staff work, the ability to innovate and learn from mistakes. In the old days, field security had been minimal, and every sheikh would involve himself in military affairs. Now Nasrallah ensured that they knew nothing of operations in advance. He also set up an autonomous military headquarters in the South. Accustomed to Palestinians whose security was so lax that - in Goksel’s sardonic judgement — ‘the only thing they didn’t do was put a big neon sign saying “here are our guns and ammunition”’,²⁴ the Israelis now faced a highly compact, invisible enemy force that was virtually impossible to penetrate.

Hizbullah’s objective was the classic guerilla one, to make the enemy ‘bleed slowly’.²⁵ And bleed, increasingly, it did. Operations steadily increased in number - from a mere 19 in 1990 to 187 in 1994 — as well as sophistication.²⁶ ‘Terrorists’, in earlier days and other arenas, they might have been, but in the Strip they fought clean - cleaner, at least, than their enemy. That looked better morally, of course; but it was in their political and diplomatic interest as well. They confined themselves to strictly ‘legitimate’, military targets - Israeli soldiers and their South Lebanese Army accessories - in occupied territory. Nasrallah spelled it out from the outset: if Israel hit civilian targets in Lebanon, Hizbullah would seek to hit them in Israel, with the Katyushas that were its only means of doing so.²⁷

Such became the ‘rules of the game’ in warfare South Lebanese style. The Israelis themselves were the first to call them that - and yet the first, almost always, to break them.²⁸ When, in retaliation for the small but steady toll of military lives, they attacked what they called ‘Hizbullah targets’ north of the ‘security zone’ they were actually attacking civilians in their villages, usually with bombing and shelling, occasionally in ground incursions.²⁹ Their purpose, said Israeli military commentators, was ‘educational’ — teaching the Lebanese about the worse-to-come if they did not get the ‘terrorists’ in their midst to desist.³⁰

But Hizbullah did not desist, and that worse-to-come eventually materialized in the shape of two onslaughts which, the Israelis hoped, were to finish it off altogether. Despite all the furore on the subject, Operation Accountability — July 1993 — and Operation Grapes of Wrath - April 1996 — did not come about because of Hizbullah’s Katyushas, and the pain they inflicted on Israeli civilians. For these obsolete and inaccurate projectiles rarely killed anyone; and the casualty ratio in this field remained pretty much what it always had been — about thirty dead Lebanese to one dead Israeli a year.³¹ They came about because Hizbullah simply got too good at what it was doing within the ‘rules’ — that is to say, as Goksel put it, ‘killing too many Israeli soldiers in too short a space of time’.³² The onslaughts did not take the form of large-scale ground invasions, as they had of old; instead, they were so-called ‘stand-off’ operations, a merciless pounding from afar. Their purpose was two-fold: militarily to smash the guerillas themselves, their bases and their personnel; politically to persuade the Lebanese state and people, by punishing them too, to turn against Hizbullah, and then to make a final peace with Israel independently of Syria. They were the characteristic recourse of a highly developed military machine which, to minimize casualties, had wherever possible abandoned the face-to-face combat of its highly motivated early years - a machine which, perhaps largely unbeknown to itself, had also undergone a steady erosion of real battlefield valour and competence. For, increasingly, the only form of warfare that it ever engaged in was the colonial-style repression and brutalization of a subject people, and this had been reducing its average conscript soldier ‘from a crack fighter to a flak-jacketed bully with few military skills beyond the stamina to chase Palestinian children down alleyways’.³³

On the face of it, it might not have looked like that. Indeed, said military historian Martin van Creveld, ‘to the initiate, it was nothing short of awe-inspiring’. On the ground, artillery radar and laser range-finders fed coordinates to the computers that now equipped every big gun, theoretically enabling them to locate Katyusha sites even as the rockets they had fired were still in the air and to shift from one target to the next in seconds. At sea, missile boats shelled the coastal highway. Overhead were the all-seeing drones, and helicopters that could, at will, direct their missiles through a particular window of a particular high-rise apartment of a densely populated city. All told, it was more stunningly sophisticated even than the Desert Storm on which it had been modelled, and especially, perhaps, because it went on, uninterrupted, twenty-four hours on twenty-four.³⁴ But, in practical terms, it achieved virtually nothing.

With the launch of Operation Accountability Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin denied that he was making war on Lebanon. He was only trying to ‘push [its] inhabitants’ to act against the Hizbullah in their midst, to ‘force’ the Shiites to ‘flee northwards’, thereby inducing them to ‘pressure [their] government to extirpate [it] from their villages’.³⁵ But what kind of non-war could this have been in which an army command looked forward to ‘transforming fifty-four villages on the edge of the security zone into a field of ruins’³⁶ or in which, half-way through it, an artillery officer announced that ‘we have now reached the stage of bombarding the internal fabric of villages, wrecking their infrastructure, destroying them and the homes of the activists’?³⁷ In the seven-day campaign, some seventy villages were indeed destroyed or severely damaged, not to mention the roads, bridges, water systems and electricity networks that served them.³⁸ One hundred and forty Lebanese civilians died - compared with two Israelis - and more than 350,000 fled to Beirut.³⁹ On the other hand, only nine Hizbullahis were killed - and their Katyushas kept coming till the end.⁴⁰

If turning government and people against the ‘terrorists’ had worked in Palestinian times, it did not do so now. There was some grumbling, even a small demonstration or two, about the firing of Katyushas from the vicinity of villages. And a few politicians did call for Hizbullah’s disarming. By and large, however, the Israeli blitz, and Hizbullah’s response to it, generated patriotic feelings and a level of national unity spanning the confessional divide unseen since at least before the civil war. As for the government, it said it ‘couldn’t stop legitimate acts of national resistance from Lebanese soil’; nor was it the Lebanese army’s job to ‘guard Israel’s frontiers’.⁴¹

Far from breaking Hizbullah, then, the Israelis fetched up reinforcing it, militarily, politically and diplomatically. At first, with characteristic partisanship, President Clinton’s administration blamed it for the violence, and barely disguised its approval of what, in its book, was Israel’s legitimate response. But before very long, with its protégé manifestly floundering, it had to change its tune entirely, seek a ceasefire and go cap in hand to Damascus to get it. And the ceasefire agreement itself was just about everything that Hizbullah could have wished for, corroborating as it did the existing ‘rules of the game’ that outlawed all attacks on civilians. Though unwritten and unsigned, it meant, in effect, that Israel and America had now implicitly acquiesced in Hizbullah’s right to go on attacking Israeli soldiers in the Strip.⁴² And within three weeks of the ceasefire it killed nine of them in a single day - two more than had provoked the whole operation in the first place.⁴³

Perched on a gaunt, treeless height, the Israeli position at Dabshe had long tormented the citizens of Nabatiyah and nearby villages. One day in October 1994, for reasons locals could only guess at, it opened up with tank fire on a Nabatiyah suburb. When eight terrified members of the Atwa and Basal families gathered together under a single roof, it first struck with four conventional shells. But it was the fifth that took the toll. This was filled with a thousand ‘nails’, straight ones that penetrated deep into concrete walls and bent ones that bounced off them. ‘Look,’ said Ali Basal, pointing to a funerary photo-montage, ‘this was my brother, this my brother-in-law, this my cousin, and this my fourteen-year-old son.’⁴⁵ Before dawn, a week later, some twenty mujahideen with rifles, machine guns, rocket-launchers - and a video - crept up Dabshe’s perilously exposed western slope and, at 8.30 am, in broad daylight, they assaulted the fortress on top, manned by a unit of the elite Givati Regiment and equipped with Merkava tanks, armoured cars and sophisticated automatic firing devices. Of the four soldiers on west-side sentry duty, three fled or cowered beneath the ramparts and a fourth, under sniper fire, could do nothing. The other seventy just sat in their bunkers. The assailants walked to the post, hurled grenades into it and hoisted the Hizbullah flag above it.

The extraordinary exploit which the video recorded became a sensation on television, Israeli and Arab, throughout the region. By sheer luck, only one Israeli was killed. As for the Hizbullahis, they simply withdrew at will, without a single casualty. An Israeli soldier confessed what an eerie experience it had been for him. ‘We had always said, “let them come.”⁴⁶ And we never thought they would dare. But there was the flag.’ That was the Israeli version. According to Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, Hizbullah chief for the South, the true one was even more shocking. ‘Our men’, he said, ‘saw tens of soldiers fleeing into the woods on the other side, and we destroyed at least one Merkava tank.’⁴⁷ It shook the whole of Israel. What the video really exposed, said Yoav Gilber, a historian, was that the spirit of sacrifice which had carried Israel through five wars was crumbling, that ‘a system of norms’ had taken over ‘where it’s every man for himself - and don’t worry about the masses and don’t be a sucker’.⁴⁸ The Jerusalem Post called the Hizbullahis’ video ‘the most effective recruiting film they could ever dream of’. ‘Yes,’ said Sheikh Kaouk, ‘we always get volunteers after successful operations, but we can hardly count them this time.’⁴⁹

Hizbullah’s camouflaged cameramen accompanied the mujahideen on even the most audacious of operations, and, wherever possible, got their electrifying, on-site footage back to Beirut, often across miles of ‘enemy’ territory, in time for peak-hour news bulletins on Hizbullah television station. Al-Manar, ‘the Lighthouse’, soon became one of the most popular in an Arab world that was thrilled and astonished at the spectacle of a little band of freelance fighters inflicting such pain on an Israeli army at whose hands its regular Arab counterparts had suffered little but serial defeat and humiliation. For the opposite reason, Israelis became compulsive watchers too; as their toll of dead and injured steadily mounted al-Manar sought to taunt and demoralize them with its famous Hebrew- and Arabic-language programme, ‘Who’s Next?’, a continuously updated photo gallery of the latest Israeli casualties which always ended with a blank space and a large question mark over an anonymous silhouette.⁵⁰

For decades Iran had been the mainstay of the ‘alliance of the periphery’, the Israeli strategy of seeking to corral a hostile Arab ‘centre’ inside a ring of Israel-friendly, non-Arab states on its fringes.⁵¹ The strategy suffered a grievous blow with the advent of the Islamic Revolution, and its espousal of ferocious anti-Zionism as a basic tenet of its foreign policy. But for all the animosity, the vehement rhetoric and the maxim, inculcated into schoolchildren and endorsed by a majority vote in parliament, that Israel should be ‘erased’ from existence⁵² - for all that, the Israelis stubbornly persuaded themselves that Iran under the mullahs still set store by the utilitarian relationship inherited from the Shah which, publicly, it indignantly disowned. And anyway, even if it did not, this extreme Islamist theocracy to which its former ally had fallen prey was surely a temporary aberration; ancient nation-state that it was, it would surely rediscover where its real, and perennial, geopolitical self-interest lay. So tenaciously did Israelis cling to the ‘periphery’ doctrine that they — and their neoconservative friends in the US - actually lobbied successive US administrations not to pay attention to the annihilationist rhetoric which, of all things, seemed most poisonously to discredit it.⁵³ It was out of this diehard mind-set that the ‘arms-for-hostages’ scandal had grown. The first of the secret weapons deliveries had come from Israel itself. But in persuading the Americans to join in, its objective had not been to win freedom for American hostages; it had been to lure the aberrant Iran back into the strategic partnership of old.⁵⁴ For Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Iran was still Israel’s ‘natural ally’, even its ‘best friend’, towards which it ‘[didn’t] intend to change [its] position ... because Khomeini’s regime [wouldn‘t] last for ever’.⁵⁵

But last it did. And by the early 1990s, it seemed to dawn on Israeli leaders that the ‘periphery’ — in its Iranian, Shiite guise - now posed a greater threat than the Arab, predominantly Sunni ‘centre’. The periphery was militant, purposeful and increasingly powerful, the centre was weak, decadent, divided, and, with a realism born of exhaustion and defeat, some of its key components - Egypt, Jordan, the PLO - had already made formal peace with Israel, or were striving to do so. Then, with two great events - the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rout of Iraq by the American-led Western/Arab coalition in the war to liberate Kuwait - the common threats which had once obliged Iran and Israel to collaborate all of a sudden ceased to exist. With Russia as a new friend, with Iraq virtually hors de combat, Iran was free to develop a regional role commensurate with its natural weight, and to do so at Israel’s expense. So it was that these former partners, the two most powerful states in the region, found themselves locked into a vicious struggle for strategic dominance over it.⁵⁶ In Israel, Rabin and Shimon Peres, once the most fervent advocates of the ‘periphery alliance‘, were now the most fiercely opposed to it. They took to demonizing Iran and Islamism as the great new peril with an even greater passion than once they had the Soviet Union and communism.⁵⁷ Iran, said Rabin, wanted to become ‘the leading power in the region’. Although that was precisely what Israel itself had been striving for ever since it came into being, such ambitions, when harboured by Iran, were the ‘megalomaniac tendencies’ of an ‘insane’ regime. Technological progress, in the form of long-range missiles, conferred on Iran an ‘over-the-horizon’ military capability which dealt a further, radical blow to the ‘periphery’ doctrine. Worse still, Iran was trying to do what Israel had long since done itself — develop nuclear weapons that would make it, said Peres, ‘more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess [them]’.⁵⁸

But perhaps what worried Israel most of all was the possibility that, in this new, unipolar, post-Soviet world, it would lose its strategic utility in America’s eyes, that even the Islamic Republic itself might gain favour at its expense. Rafsanjani and the moderate ‘reformists’ were making every effort to interest the Americans in an historic reconciliation, repeatedly signalling that in return for US acceptance of the Islamic Republic, of its legitimacy and its inherent right to play a major role in the region’s affairs, it would renounce or seriously modify the anti-American, anti-Zionist rhetoric and behaviour of its earlier, full-blooded ‘revolutionary’ years. Small wonder, then, that Israel strenuously opposed a US-Iranian ‘dialogue’ of any kind - because, as Ephraim Sneh, a Labour Party hawk, bluntly put it, ‘the interests of the US did not coincide with ours‘,⁵⁹ and that the ‘friends of Israel’ in the US strove to sabotage one.

And they succeeded. ‘It is scarcely possible’, James Schlesinger, who had held cabinet-level positions in a number of US administrations, wrote at the time, ‘to overstate the influence of Israel’s supporters on our policies in the Middle East.’ And it was with perfect objectivity that an exultant Steve Grossman, the chairman of AIPAC (the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee), described President Clinton’s as ‘the most pro-Israeli in the history of this country’.⁶⁰ Far from responding to the Iranian reformists’ overtures, even though Clinton himself was deeply interested in them, it adopted just about everything that Israel, the Lobby, the neoconservatives and Congress prescribed for it. No matter that the so-called ‘dual containment’ policy, designed to produce ‘dramatic changes in Iran’s behaviour‘, was in origin an Israeli proposal pure and simple, no matter that many officials privately conceded that it was a thoroughly ‘nutty idea’, Martin Indyk, the former pro-Israeli lobbyist, now Special Assistant for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council, solemnly promulgated it in an address to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the leading pro-Israeli think tank which he himself had helped found. Then there was the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, passed by a House vote of 415-0, which Clinton signed into law, even though for ‘much of the executive branch “hatred” was too mild a word’ to describe what they thought about it.⁶¹ For the Administration, Iran was an ‘outlaw state‘, ‘public enemy number one’; for congressmen such as Newt Gingrich it was nothing less than ‘a permanent, long-term threat to civilized life on this planet, a terrorist state, committed to defeating the West anyway it [could]’.⁶²

Such boundless hostility produced quite the opposite effect from what, ostensibly at least, was intended; it shackled the Iranian ‘reformists’, and freed their militant rivals to seek punishment and revenge on America in the arena - the Middle East ‘peace process’ — where they were best placed to do so. That in turn generated yet more hostility from the United States, whose secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was moved to declare that ‘wherever you look, you find the evil hand of Iran ... projecting terror and extremism across the Middle East and beyond‘, sponsoring ’subversive’ organizations like Hizbullah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad - and, according to him, promoting the series of Palestinian suicide bombings which, more than anything else, had led to Operation Grapes of Wrath.

Hamas had responded with a vengeance. Then, in early 1996, after the assassination of its ‘master-bomber’, it had gone on a second rampage, with four suicide operations killing sixty people in the space of a week. Things had got so bad that President Clinton, and leaders from twenty-seven, mainly Arab countries had come together at a so-called ‘peace-makers’ conference’ in Sharm al-Sheikh. It amounted to a demonstration of solidarity with Israel in its ‘war on terror’. Unable to strike too hard against the Palestinians for fear of totally disrupting the ‘peace process’, the prime minister, Shimon Peres, interpreted Sharm al-Sheikh as a green light to go after Hizbullah as a surrogate in their stead.⁶⁵ And no sooner had Hizbullah furnished a pretext of its own - with the killing of six soldiers in an escalation that ended up, once more, with the familiar ‘rockets on Kiryat Shmona’⁶⁶ - than he duly did so, with across-the-board support from an Israeli public craving retribution of any kind.

It was another, grislier fiasco than Accountability, another attempt at ‘linkage politics of the cruellest kind’⁶⁷ - the object, this time, being to get the southerners to pressure their own government to pressure Syria‘s, which would then pressure Hizbullah to submit to the entirely new ‘rules of the game’ which Israel intended to impose, effectively neutralizing it. In other words, after having pulverized Hizbullah itself, it was expecting its foremost Arab adversary - and Iran’s ally - to finish the job, subduing what might be left of the organization on its behalf. This time, the villagers were given two hours’ notice to flee for their lives; ‘he who forewarns is excused’, said the SLA, meaning that neither Israel nor itself could be held responsible for what befell them should they stay put. Within minutes the first of some 500,000 refugees⁶⁷ ⁶⁸ were jamming the coastal road to Beirut, in a state of shock and disbelief at this, their fourth such mass evacuation since 1978.⁶⁹ But this time it was not only Shiites the Israelis targeted. Just four months after the Lebanese government, at a cost of a billion dollars, had completed the post-war reconstruction of the country’s electricity grid they were trying to knock it out again with the bombing of Beirut’s three power stations. That amounted to punishment of the whole population.

Once again - and overwhelmingly - it was Lebanese civilians who bore the brunt; 165 died, compared with not one Israeli, military or civilian.⁷² Two-thirds of them fell victim to the great atrocity, amply preceded by lesser ones, that forced Grapes of Wrath to a close. That was the carnage in the village of Qana - the self-same biblical Qana where, it is said, Christ performed the first of his miracles, the conversion of water into wine. On the campaign’s eighth day, thirteen 155-mm, anti-personnel howitzer shells struck the local UNIFIL compound, manned by a battalion of Fijians, killing 102 people, half of them children, who were buried in only eighty-three coffins, because nineteen of them had been blown into so many pieces that they could not be put together again.⁷³ The gunners knew precisely what they were hitting, and they knew, too, that several hundred Lebanese civilians had taken refuge there. They knew because UNIFIL had told them so, and because of the drone which was directly overhead at the time. This was a fact which they had at first denied - claiming that the drone had been on ‘another mission’ altogether- but then admitted when confronted with the incontrovertible, photographic evidence that it had not.⁷⁴ That they not only knew what they were hitting, but that they hit it on purpose, was the verdict of Amnesty International,⁷⁵ of UN observers on the spot,⁷⁶ and - as near as dammit - of the special inquiry, conducted by Dutch general Frank Van Kappen, military adviser to UN Secretary-General Boutros Ghali, who concluded that ‘while the possibility cannot be ruled out completely, it is unlikely that the shelling of the UN was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors’.⁷⁷

Once again, the reprisals thus deliberately inflicted on them failed to turn the people against the ‘terrorists’ in their midst. On the contrary, Qana, two-thirds Muslim, one-third Christian, became the tragic symbol of ‘national unity’ restored. Most Lebanese now supported the ‘Islamic resistance’ as never before. Christians as well as Muslims inundated the country’s numerous 24-hour chat shows with enquiries about the location of Hizbullah’s recruitment centres - or how many Katyushas it had fired at Israel that day, and where they could send money to buy more of them. A wealthy Christian woman who had donated $15,000 for the purpose went on air to say that she had only done so on condition that her Katyushas be expressly directed at Israeli civilians - to let them know that ‘our people in the South’ had as much right to a safe life as they. Once, two of Hizbullah’s top press officials were visiting a media centre in Ashrafiyah, the heart of Christian Beirut, and, as they got out of their car, an old man, spotting them from across the street, began shouting:

‘Hizbullah, Hizbullah, we are all Hizbullah. We are all behind you. God be with you, you have made us proud.’

‘Part of me [confided one of them later] initially panicked at his public shouts of the word Hizbullah in the middle of this Christian quarter [but] another part was filled with emotion when I saw the other pedestrians and shoppers look at us with smiles of acknowledgement and acceptance. I knew then that we had come a long way as a group, and, more importantly, as a people; so I waved back to the old man and carried on with my journey.’⁷⁸

There was also a very much stronger reaction from the Arab world which, predominantly orthodox Sunni though it was, took pride in the anti-Israeli exploits of the Iranian-backed, Shiite militia. But where, oh where, were these Arabs, lamented the Lebanese, especially their Shiites? - just like the Palestinians before them. For once again here was little Lebanon, eternal battleground, eternal victim, fighting and suffering in their stead. In fact, the Arab ‘street’ was boiling; and Arab governments, especially those so-called ‘moderate’, pro-Western ones, were deeply embarrassed at their own impotence, as well as their identification, in the popular mind, with Israel’s incorrigible US patron. If Israelis thought that Iran and its protégés were ‘mad’, nothing since Sabra and Shatila had done more than Qana to persuade the Arabs that Zionism was ‘evil incarnate’.⁷⁹ How long could it be before the ‘street’, here, there - or even everywhere - finally erupted, either exacting action from Arab governments, or bringing about their downfall? That was the question asked - at least implicitly - by no less a personage than Sheikh Salim bin Hamid, imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca and member of Saudi Arabia’s Consultative Council, and on no less solemn an occasion than his address to the multitudes assembled for the Haj, or annual pilgrimage. ‘How long the silence of the people, how long the subjugation of the oppressed?’ The words could almost have come from Khomeini himself, rather than this arch-conservative primate of the Sunni Arab establishment.⁸⁰

Once again, America lent Israel its full and automatic support. Hizbullah, it asserted, had started it, and Israel had been ‘compelled to respond’. And when that response got going, it sought to ensure it all the ’running time’ it needed to finish what it had begun.⁸¹ It almost went without saying that even Qana was entirely Hizbullah’s doing too. Israel claimed that the organization had been using civilians as a cover for military activities, or, worse still, ‘hiding in the middle of the population, hoping that we will hit them’,⁸² and the US — ‘having no reason to believe that Israel [was] not telling the truth’ - effectively endorsed the claim. It was ‘a despicable, an evil thing’ that Hizbullah had done, opined Nicholas Burns, State Department spokesman. Madeleine Albright, US ambassador to the UN, said that the ‘measures’ that Israel had taken at Qana were a ‘direct consequence’ of Hizbullah’s actions. As for President Clinton, he was categoric: ‘make no mistake about it’, he told a wildly applauding audience at the annual conference of AIPAC, flagship of the Lobby, the ‘deliberate tactic of Hizbullah’ was indeed responsible for Israel’s ‘tragic misfiring, in the legitimate exercise of its right to self defence’.⁸³ Both countries gave short shrift to the UN report. ‘One can have no confidence in the UN’, said Peres; anyway, he added, ‘what the goyim say doesn’t matter, it only matters what the Jews do.‘⁸⁴ Both exerted extreme pressure on the Secretary-General — an Egyptian - not to publish the report, and when he did the State Department accused him of manipulating its conclusions to win Arab support in his bid for re-election for a second term.⁸⁵ No American newspaper saw fit to mention the interview which the radical Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha’ir conducted with the gunners who had fired the fatal shells:

The commander ... told us that we were firing well and we should keep it up, and that Arabs, you know ... there are millions of them ... Even ‘S’ said they were just a bunch of Arabushim [derogatory Hebrew word for Arabs]. How many Arabs are there, and how many Jews? A few Arabushim die - there’s no harm in that.⁸⁶

Once again, the US had to come to Israel’s rescue. It is true that when, in the build-up to Grapes of Wrath, it had told Israel to ‘go ahead in Lebanon’, it had also advised it that ‘if things go wrong don’t come running to us’.⁸⁷ But that caveat went out of the window as soon as things actually, and so very foreseeably, did. This was a presidential election year, and the Clinton camp was worried about the punishment which the ‘friends of Israel’ could have inflicted on it at the polls. So it was not just the protégé that ‘came running’ to the patron, the patron itself went running on its protege’s behalf. The place to which it ran was the same as before - Damascus - but the humiliation was greater.

Just as they had after Accountability, Hizbullah wasted no time in killing more Israeli soldiers - nine, in fact - within the refined and reimposed ‘rules’ that had provoked the whole operation in the first place.⁸⁹ And from then on it went from strength to strength, soon tripling the number of its operations, from an average of about 200 a year before 1996 to 1,000 a year thereafter, peaking at 1,500 in 1999-2000.⁹⁰ Perhaps more telling still was the dramatic decline of Hizbullah’s casualties in relation to those of its enemy. According to its own calculations, it lost 1,248 men in action against Israel and the SLA between the 1982 invasion and 1999.⁹¹ The Israelis put their own losses, for the period between their 1985 pull-back and mid-1999, at 332 (though that figure included 70 in a single helicopter crash).⁹² However, the SLA’s losses, at an estimated 1,050 for 1982-2000, were much higher than the Israelis’. So when these were taken into account the total for both sides was not that far apart. Had it gone on, the Israel/SLA toll would certainly have overtaken Hizbullah’s. For, by 1997, in place of the five- or even ten-to-one casualty rate of earlier years, it had almost achieved parity; it lost 60 men in combat, compared with 39 Israelis - the highest figure ever - and 25 SLA.⁹³ The following year, it killed more of its enemies - 24 Israelis, 33 SLA - than the 38 of its own it lost.⁹⁴

Hizbullah also continued to grow in organizational and technical prowess, outsmarting its enemies’ defensive innovations with ingenious, offensive ones of its own. Thus, though its simplest weapon, the road-side ‘improvised explosive device’, remained the most consistently effective, it only did so because of its ability to develop new ways of using it, such as the Claymore disguised as a rock. The Claymore was a jumping mine of American origin. In the ‘improved’ Hizbullah version, it catapulted an exploding capsule of ball-bearings lethal within a range of fifty metres. The ‘rock’ was a fibreglass imitation costing fifteen dollars in any Beirut garden centre. Hizbullah guerillas would also put explosives amid the branches of trees instead of on the ground where their targets normally looked for them; or place an ancient T-55 tank in a cave, and fire it from time to time without risk of detection because it did not show up on Israeli heat sensors; or use shepherds and their flocks in sophisticated diversionary manoeuvres.⁹⁵ But after Grapes of Wrath Iran supplied them with a whole new category of advanced weaponry, wire-guided anti-tank missiles, first the Russian-made Saggers and then the even better American TOWs; the latter came from stocks which Israel itself had supplied to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair. Faced with this new threat, the Israelis withdrew their inadequately armoured Centurions and M6os - only to learn, with the death of seven soldiers in quick succession in November 1998, that even their very own, ultra-modern Merkava, pride of their military industries, was by no means invulnerable either.⁹⁶

Partly, it was the sabre-rattling which, in the thinking of its leaders, Israel’s unfamiliar plight required. For here it was, about to do what it had never done before - relinquish Arab territory it had conquered and occupied for nothing in return. It was the doctrine of interventionism, of military force for political ends, finally brought to nought in the place where twenty years before, with Begin, Sharon and Peace in Galilee, it had been supposed to achieve its apotheosis. ‘I don’t’, said Barak, ‘advise anyone to test us when we draw back and are sitting on the border.‘⁹⁸ But how could he be sure that the Lebanese, in their exhilaration, would heed that advice? Clearly, before it left, Israel had to give them a very practical demonstration of what it would do to them if, after it had, ‘peace in Galilee’ still did not prevail, or ‘rockets on Kiryat Shmona’ cease.

Such were the motives behind the assault on civilian, ‘infrastructural’ targets, outlawed by the 1996 ‘understandings’, which Israel now resumed. Naturally, there was an official - and more respectable - pretext too, namely that, in violation of the ‘rules’, Hizbullah’s attacks on Israel’s soldiers in the Strip had originated in ‘populated’ areas. But even though Israel’s leading military correspondent, Zeev Schiff, not to mention UNIFIL, pronounced this completely unfounded, the US lent it credence. All that the Israelis were doing, said Madeleine Albright, now Secretary of State, was sending ‘a very strong signal about the fact that they [didn’t] want this escalation’ that Hizbullah was so ‘egregiously’ forcing on them.⁹⁹ In the first of three such ‘signals’ - another blitz on a key Beirut power station and sundry other targets - Israeli planes killed twice as many Lebanese civilians, half of them firefighters, as Hizbullah had killed Israeli soldiers to provoke it; they also did tens of millions of dollars’ worth of damage, and plunged the capital back into the semi-darkness of the civil war. But this, and the two more that followed, did nothing to deter a Hizbullah now more than ever determined that, if Israel was going to withdraw, then it should do so ‘in catastrophic conditions, under fire ... unconditionally, defeated and humiliated’.¹⁰⁰ Towards the end, Hizbullah stopped retaliating against civilians altogether, leaving such repugnant practices to the Israelis alone. Instead of ‘more Katyushas on Kiryat Shmona’, it killed more soldiers in the Strip, including an Israeli general and the second-in-command of the SLA. It was this ability of the ‘terrorists’ to strike so painfully within the ‘rules’ — to be the ‘good guy’ where they were manifestly the bad one - which seemed to infuriate Israeli leaders above all.¹⁰¹ It was this that prompted Deputy Defence Minister Moshe Sneh to exclaim: ‘they have killed Israeli soldiers, and therefore they must be killed ... the rules have changed’.¹⁰² This that drove Foreign Minister Levy to that intemperate and sanguinary outburst that even Mrs Albright saw fit to reprove.

Hizbullah had long foreseen, maybe even dreaded, this moment. Whenever it had been asked whether, after liberation, its armed struggle against Israel would or would not continue, its leaders had unfailingly taken refuge in the equivocal and the oracular. ‘The enemy is deeply confused about that,’ said its military commander in the South, Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, ‘and long may it remain so.‘¹⁰⁵ And so long as it was fighting on Lebanese soil alone, the ambiguity was not too difficult to sustain, the national and the jihadist being inextricably intertwined. But, after liberation, everything would become inescapably clear-cut: the very first shot that Hizbullah fired across the frontier would be the very first shot in jihad, and jihad alone, in the ‘liberation of Jerusalem’ and that ‘obliteration’ of the Jewish state towards which its expulsion from Lebanon had only been an indispensable first step.

The choice, indeed, was a well-nigh impossible one. Not to continue the struggle was to negate Hizbullah’s raison d‘être, to throw away, at the very moment of triumph, the military machine that had achieved it. To continue it, in the conditions that now prevailed, was unrealistic to the point of folly. It was to give Israel no choice - no choice but to make good the threats in which it had wrapped its humiliation and defeat, to ‘flatten’ Lebanon and ‘hit it harder than it had ever been hit before’.¹⁰⁶ That was something which, after all that they had already endured, very few Shiites, let alone Lebanese at large, would have voluntarily accepted; and they would not have looked kindly on the leader, however revered, who brought it on them. Nasrallah might have been a religious visionary; he might really have believed - as he put it in his victory address to the liberated southern town of Bint Jbeil- that Hizbullah’s triumph was a ‘gift from God Almighty’, or even that ‘He [it was] who threw the stone and hit the target, destroyed enemy bunkers and fortified positions, and killed the mighty ...‘¹⁰⁷ But the warrior-priest was a realist, a strategist and a politician too. He was not prepared to renounce jihad. But he was prepared to modify it. He had, after all, done that once before. In the early nineties, with the end of the civil war, he had taken Hizbullah into ‘pragmatic-gradualist’ mode with respect to one of jihad’s two basic goals - the building of an ‘Islamic order’ — the better to pursue the second — ‘Islamic resistance’. Now the time had come to do the same with respect to ‘Islamic resistance’ itself.

The solution which he came up with was, in effect, not to make a choice. And he did that by the simple, if patently contrived, device of contending that, territorially and in other ways - notably the nineteen Lebanese prisoners ¹⁰⁸ still in Israeli gaols - the strictly Lebanese, or national, struggle was not yet complete. The strategem was all the more felicitous in that it furnished Hizbullah’s regional backer, Syria, with the deus ex machina which, albeit for very different reasons, it badly needed too. For when it had finally dawned on President Asad and his foreign-policy chiefs that Barak’s pledge to withdraw was not just a threat but a very serious intent, they had all but panicked.¹⁰⁹ Suddenly, they were to be robbed of the most powerful bargaining counter they possessed, their proxy war as diplomacy by other means; suddenly, they were to be a blacksmith with a hammer - Hizbullah - but no anvil - Israeli soldiers in the South - on which to strike it. ‘If they stay in a piece of land that we consider to be Lebanese’, said Nasrallah, ‘we will persist in our resistance until it is freed.’¹¹⁰ And, hardly had he said it than, lo and behold, there was such a piece. There were the ‘Sheba’a Farms’ - all twenty-five square kilometres of them - of which, till then, very few Lebanese had ever even heard. Adjacent to the Golan Heights, Israel had conquered them in the 1967 war. The nine plots of which they were composed had been Lebanese-owned, but, in terms of national sovereignty, they were Syrian. All the maps - the UN‘s, Syria’s, even Lebanon’s too - corroborated it. Or they did, at least, until, with Israeli withdrawal only weeks away, Nabih Berri, speaker of parliament and Syria’s ‘man’ within the political establishment, came along and staked a formal claim to them on Lebanon’s behalf, a claim which Syria itself graciously proceeded to acknowledge.^III

As for the other, involuntary party to this subterfuge, the hapless Lebanese government, it duly forsook the position which Hariri had so long and repeatedly proclaimed, namely, that once Israel withdrew, ‘resistance’ would lose its raison d’être, Hizbullah would disband, and - in accordance with Security Council Resolution 425 of 1978 — the state would re-establish its long-lost authority in the South. It now asserted that it would not serve as Israel’s ‘guardian’ by sending the army south - not so long as a particle of Lebanese soil remained in Israel’s hands. Nor would there be any Lebanese-Israeli peace agreement before the Palestinian refugees - those ever-present, potential disrupters of the country’s internal sectarian balance - had exercised their ‘right of return’, and Israel had withdrawn from the Golan as well. Meanwhile - it furthermore at least implicitly acknowledged - Hizbullah’s non-state irregulars would make better defenders of the state and nation than the regular army itself.¹¹² Thus to Hizbullah went the mandate to fill the unexpected vacuum in the South. It duly did so, with, on the one hand, the kind of services that states normally provide¹¹³ — public works and reconstruction, health care and agricultural assistance programmes - and, on the other, with a full-scale military capability, with tunnels and bunkers, the stockpiling of weapons, observation posts and the monitoring of enemy activities, training and the drawing up of battle-plans. Before long it had assembled, ready for instant use, a massive arsenal of Katyushas and other missiles. According to the Israelis, there were a good 10,000 of them. They included updated and longer-range models which, from these new forward positions, need no longer be trained on Kiryat Shmona as their only decent urban target; now they could reach Safad, Tiberias, Nahariya or even Haifa too.

With this legitimacy, this popularity, freedom of action and weaponry, Hizbullah resumed its ‘resistance’. It was strictly national, strictly Lebanese in official purpose, presented as a tending of the country’s still ‘bleeding wounds’ - the continued occupation of a small piece of the country’s territory, the detention of its citizens and the ongoing violations of its sovereignty. What Hizbullah sometimes called its ‘reminder operations’ were relatively few and far between, and very carefully calculated in scale, timing and likely political impact. In the six years that followed the withdrawal, only nine Israeli soldiers died in premeditated attacks on Sheba‘a, and only eight more in clashes that spread, for one reason or another, to the rest of the frontier.¹¹⁴ Nonetheless, in spite of the great reduction in its activities, Hizbullah was actually, in a way, achieving quite as much, militarily and strategically, as it had been doing before. It did not want to push the Israelis too far, thereby igniting that massive retaliation against civilians that would in turn redound against itself. On the other hand, the Israelis themselves were well aware that if they did respond too forcefully to Hizbullah’s occasional, but deadly, assaults, they risked Katyusha barrages of an intensity they had never before experienced. Thus it came about that an irregular, part-time force of a few hundred highly trained, highly motivated guerillas succeeded in establishing a ‘balance of terror’ with the Middle East’s military superpower, keeping it in a permanent state of uncertainty, apprehension and frustration. This semi-official, ‘quasi-Lebanonization’ of the resistance corresponded with a deepening of Hizbullah’s role in domestic politics. It performed handsomely in the first parliamentary elections to follow the withdrawal, and even better in subsequent municipal ones.

Yet, however ‘Lebanonized’ the resistance became, it remained inescapably jihadist on Palestine’s behalf, too. There was an inevitable confusion between the two. But though the rhetoric on the subject may have been deliberately vague and allusive, its import was unmistakable.¹¹⁵ It was not that Hizbullah presumed to take on the Palestinians’ struggle in their place. Rather, as Nasrallah put it in his victory speech:

We offer this lofty, Lebanese example to our people in Palestine. You don’t need tanks, strategic balance, rockets or cannons to liberate your land; all you need are the martyrs who shook and scared this angry Zionist entity. You can regain your land, you oppressed, helpless and besieged people of Palestine; you can force the invading Zionists to return whence they came; let the Falasha go back to Ethiopia and the Russian Jews to Russia. The choice is yours and the example is clear before your eyes. I tell you: the Israel that owns nuclear weapons and has the strongest air force in the region is weaker than a spider’s web.¹¹⁶

Hizbullah immediately sought to link itself with this renewed Palestinian struggle. Supporting it was a ‘religious and Islamic duty’.¹²¹ Naturally, its first operation in the ‘Sheba‘a Farms’ - the abduction of three Israeli soldiers as bargaining counters for the release of Israeli-held prisoners - had its official, its strictly Lebanese purpose, but more important, really, was its unofficial, jihadist, one: which was to coincide with, and add encouragement to, the Intifada.¹²² When, in 2002, Sharon, now prime minister, launched Operation Shield, his re-invasion of the West Bank, Hizbullah unleashed a two-week barrage of very professional mortar, anti-tank and rocket fire on Israeli positions in the ‘Sheba’a Farms.’ In prisoner exchanges it demanded freedom for Palestinians as well as Lebanese, and secured the release of 400 of them in one such deal in 2004.¹²³

It also furnished the Intifada, where possible, with direct if clandestine assistance: funding, training, technical expertise and the smuggling of weapons into the occupied territories. It apparently played an important role in the ‘Karine-A affair’. In January 2002 the Israelis intercepted a ship of that name which, they said, was bound for Gaza with fifty tons of brand-new, mostly Iranian-manufactured weapons - Katyushas, mortars, rifles, machine guns, anti-tank mines and other explosives - on board. What really disturbed them, and caused them to raise an international hue and cry, was the fact that, according to them, the weapons were not just destined for like-minded Islamist organizations, Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but for the Arafat-led resistance as a whole.¹²⁴

Then there was the publicity, the endless, highly empathetic publicity, on Palestine’s behalf. In addition to its raw coverage of the Intifada, using Palestinian correspondents and cameramen on the spot,¹²⁵ Hizbullah’s al-Manar television station offered a kind of ‘how to’ campaign designed to instruct as well as inspire.¹²⁶ South Lebanon, Palestine - they were one and the same. Thus, during Operation Shield, shots of Palestinian youths resisting Israeli advances into Ramallah were interspersed with those of Hizbullah fighters simultaneously storming an Israeli position in the Sheba’a Farms from which the defenders had been driven out, and planting their flag on top of it. Around the clock the names of the latest Palestinian ‘martyrs’ flashed across the bottom of the screen. At a conference in Beirut, Hizbullah brought together Sunni and Shiite ulema, with Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the firebrand Iranian cleric who had presided over Hizbullah’s creation, hobnobbing with the likes of Sheikh Yusif al-Qardawi, the stately, erudite Egyptian television preacher, who declared that ‘Arabs and non-Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites, are forbidden to give up an inch of Jerusalem, and we are ready to fight until the last breath in us.’¹²⁷ Hizbullah was not only making itself a bridge between Shiism and Sunnism, Iran and the Arabs, but, as the only external force engaged in active combat on the Palestinians’ behalf, projecting itself as the spearhead of the whole Arab/Muslim struggle against the historic Zionist foe.¹²⁸

For Nasrallah it was good - but it was not good enough. Arabs and Muslims had to do more than merely admire Hizbullah, they had to emulate it. Its leadership knew very well that neither it - nor it, Hamas and Islamic Jihad combined - could get back Palestine on their own. It knew that for the foreseeable future the whole existing balance of power was weighted overwhelmingly against it, and that the only way to shift it in its favour was to spread the circle of resistance all around the enemy’s frontiers. Other ‘front-line’ peoples, Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, had to make their contribution too, either by throwing up non-state actors, other Hizbullahs, of their own, forcing their governments to join the fray, or replacing them with new ones if they would not. In the end, everything hinged on this. It was, in effect, the Islamist version of that ‘supporting Arab front’ which, forty years before, Yasser Arafat and his Fatah comrades had so fondly, but fancifully, expected to spring spontaneously into being once they launched their ‘popular liberation war’.¹³⁰ Meanwhile, the most that Hizbullah could realistically do was to go on waging jihad in the ‘gradualist-pragmatic’, essentially symbolic, mode it already was. For who could tell how long it might be before the Umma actually followed this example, summoned up the will and means to join it in the general, all-out ‘militant and armed jihad’ which alone could bring final victory?¹³¹ As things stood, that was unthinkable. For the regimes would strain every nerve to stop it. They were more afraid of Hizbullah, and its potentially explosive impact on their ‘street’, than they were of Israel itself. That was certainly true of the so-called ‘moderate’, pro-Western regimes such as Jordan’s, Egypt’s or Saudi Arabia’s. But it was little less so, probably, of ‘radical’, Hizbullah-supporting Syria; since its patriotic pretensions were much greater than theirs, so, in the eyes of its people, was the gap between pretensions and actual performance.

Not surprisingly, the only regime which looked with unmixed satisfaction on Hizbullah’s triumph was the one - non-Arab Iran’s - which had nurtured Hizbullah in the first place. For Ayatollah Khamenei, to whom Nasrallah once more proclaimed his absolute allegiance, Hizbullah had now positioned itself ‘in the front line of the Islamic world in its fight with the Zionist enemy’; what had happened in Lebanon could happen in ‘occupied Palestine’; ‘sections’ of it and ‘ultimately the whole of it could be returned to the Palestinian people’.¹³² Eight years before, Khamenei had authorized Hizbullah to ‘Lebanonize’ itself and join the domestic ‘political’ process without, however, renouncing the ‘resistance’ which at the time was still amply justifiable in national, Lebanese terms. Now, with those justifications all but gone, it was he who decreed that ‘resistance’ should continue all the same. And, in response, Nasrallah pledged that, ‘as you are the Wali of the Muslims‘, it would do so ‘until the liberation of all the occupied [Palestinian] land’.¹³³

Obviously, given the circumstances in which it was made, that pledge was more rhetorical flourish, lip-service to an ultimate ideal, than statement of immediate, practical intent. For otherwise it would have meant war. And, as we have seen, Nasrallah did not want war,¹³⁴ not one, at least, which his own people, never mind the rest of the world, would have blamed him for starting. All he wanted, for the foreseeable future, was jihad within those new, expressly ambivalent ‘rules’ of his own creation, in the hope - and not unreasonable expectation - that Israel, not wanting war either, would confine itself to them too. Yet he was running the ever-present risk of getting one. His own actions - however judicious, however finely calibrated they might be - were reason enough for that. But the actions of his enemies were, or would soon become, much greater reason still: if Hizbullah did not bring war to them, they assuredly would to it. For one thing, the ignominious withdrawal itself, and the second Intifada which it had helped inspire, bred in Israel the desire for an eventual settling of scores; fortress state that it was, this was also a question of strategic necessity. Then - for another, infinitely greater thing - came 9/11. With that, the epic, masterly, defining atrocity of our times, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda global terror network excited in Bush’s America emotions and ambitions which dovetailed almost perfectly with those of Israel. But, of course, the US being the world’s only superpower, they far surpassed them in their consequences. Indeed, they brought to full fruition a determination, long in gestation, to tackle the whole Arab/Muslim milieu from which the diabolic deed had sprung: to invade, subdue, shape, and utterly transform it. As a result, the Middle East and beyond entered an era of turbulence and upheaval the like of which it had not witnessed since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Sykes-Picot, Balfour, the Versailles peace conference and the whole new order which it had brought into being. If this order could be said to have taken on any formal, constitutional expression, it was what the Arabs had in due course come to call al-Nitham al-Arabi, or ‘the Arab system‘, with the 22-member League of Arab States, originally a British-encouraged creation, as its central institution. Already in advanced decline, the ‘system’ now began, quite manifestly, to fall apart, in a process which the noted Palestinian columnist, Rami Khouri, dubbed the ‘Great Arab Unravelling’.¹³⁵ Eventually, no doubt, it would throw up a new system in its turn. What shape that might take was, at this early stage, very difficult to foresee. For in its torment the Middle East had not only established itself as the most pivotal, and globally contentious, region on earth, it was also, in and of itself, about the most complex too; and that meant that, in addition to the foreign actors, its vast profusion of domestic ones - dynastic and tribal, ethnic and sectarian, religious, secular and ideological - were going to involve themselves in the ‘Great Unravelling’.

It made for an almost unfathomable maelstrom. Nonetheless, for the foreseeable future, it could be said that, at its simplest, this would break down into two broad, opposing camps. In one stood the region’s Islamists, or Islamo-nationalists. These were composed, essentially, of Iran and Syria, non-state forces such as Hizbullah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and, very loosely speaking, a range of movements and parties such as the multi-national branches of the Muslim Brotherhood. This all added up, of course, to a very motley crew; its chief anomaly was the stoutly secular Syrian Baath, which, ideologically, did not really belong to it at all, but which, in terms of actual policies and alliances, was central to it. By contrast, although al-Qaeda seemed supremely qualified ideologically, in practice, being almost a law unto itself, it had no role in it at all, or, at most, a very occasional and furtive one. The rival camp was even less coherent, an agglomeration of forces so diverse, and often so frankly hostile to one another, that it was really only in opposition to the Islamist camp that they qualified as any kind of coalition at all. It was composed, essentially, of the United States, Israel, ‘moderate’ Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan and (the highly Islamic) Saudi Arabia, and, very loosely speaking, the non-state secular, liberal, or democratic forces of the region. Its greatest single contradiction lay in the fact that, for the most part, its Arabs and Muslims - though people much more than regimes - disliked or feared its Americans and its Israelis quite as much as the Islamists or Islamo-nationalists did themselves. And what made this contradiction all the more peculiar was that, out of the Great Unravelling, ‘neo-imperial’ America was striving to shape a new order which, if it ever came to pass, would be no less unpalatable to the inhabitants of the region than the one which once-colonial Europe built before it; indeed, in one central respect - the pride of place it assigned to their historic Zionist foe - it would be even more so.

As for Lebanon, its role and destiny in the Great Unravelling were likewise hard to foresee. Certainly, however, it already was, and would remain, in the thick of it - all the more certainly, indeed, in that it was no longer quite the ‘small state’, object rather than agent, in the sense that Mikhail Bakunin meant. Its aggrandizement was Hizbullah’s doing, thanks to the unique standing which it had acquired, not only in Lebanon itself, but in the region at large. From Kurdistan to Palestine, Iraq to Lebanon, an obvious feature of the Great Unravelling was the emergence of non-state actors assuming functions, most crucially military and coercive ones, that are normally the exclusive preserve of states. Typically, these actors were nationalist, or ethnic, in identity - as in the case of the quasi-secessionist Kurds of Iraq - sectarian - as in the case of its Sunni or Shiite Arabs - or both sectarian and Islamist at once. Uniquely, thanks to its exemplary struggle against Israel, Hizbullah commanded authority and prestige on all three grounds, the pan-Arab nationalist as well as - and in spite of - the sectarian and Islamist. Another thing was certain too: in the Great Unravelling, those other peoples’ wars and conflicts of which Lebanon seemed forever doomed to be a battleground would at least equal, or outdo, any of their predecessors in their scope, means, and import for the region and the world.

‘A MESSAGE TO TERRORISTS EVERYWHERE’

A NEW LEADER FOR HIZBULLAH

‘BETWEEN HONG KONG AND HANOI’

BLEEDING THE ENEMY SLOWLY

THE RULES OF THE GAME

ACCOUNTABILITY, 1993

GRAPES OF WRATH, 1996

THE SHADOW OF IRAN

A PUBLIC THIRSTING FOR VENGEANCE OF ANY KIND

A GRISLIER FIASCO THAN ‘ACCOUNTABILITY’

MASSACRE AT QANA

CONVERSION ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

JUMPING CLAYMORES, ROCK BOMBS AND OTHER EXPLOSIVE DEVICES

‘THIS MOLOCH, THIS CURSED PLACE’

AN IGNOMINIOUS SCUTTLE

AN ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE

BLACKSMITH WITH A HAMMER BUT NO ANVIL

WEAKER THAN A SPIDER’S WEB

GOOD - BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH

9/11 AND THE GREAT UNRAVELLING