Read Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East Online
Authors: Robin Wright
And it had unleashed an even more potent rival.
Within hours, Hezbollah fighters waving their bright yellow flag swept across southern Lebanon to fill the space that for years had been Israel’s “security zone.” Some clustered along the border to taunt Israeli troops on the other side. Most brandished Kalashnikov rifles; many waved portraits of Nasrallah.
“You lost. You lost,” one group of fighters shouted across a former border post.
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Israel’s retreat was a second pivotal turning point. At home, Hezbollah’s image was transformed—from a scorned terrorist group to a legitimate resistance movement.
“There is only one headline in Lebanon tonight,” pronounced an anchorwoman, beaming, on Lebanese state television. “The liberation of the land. The slinking, servile withdrawal by Israel.”
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Lebanon declared May 25 an annual public holiday to commemorate its liberation.
Hezbollah’s third phase, which began after Israel’s withdrawal in mid-2000, marked the movement’s political evolution. It lasted for six years.
Within days of Israel’s withdrawal, Nasrallah went to the border and gave a speech that was still quoted years later. “This first victory lays the foundation for a new era,” he said in Bint Jbeil, a charming mountain town three miles from the Israeli frontier. “People of the Arab and Islamic world, defeat, humiliation, and shame are things of the past.”
Nasrallah then laid out Hezbollah’s ten military and political goals. In contrast to the rhetorical ramblings of many Arab leaders, Nasrallah’s speeches tended to be tightly structured, with neat sections and numbered points. The Shiite movement is technically led by a handful of clerics in a council called the Majlis al-Shura, or Consultative Council. Nasrallah was its secretary-general. But by 2000, Hezbollah had clearly become his movement. And each point in his address reflected the discipline with which he ran it.
The conflict with Israel was not over, he told thousands of followers assembled on a hot May day. First, Hezbollah had to work to “consolidate and protect” its position along the Israeli border, free for the first time since the early 1970s from both Palestinian and Israeli domination.
Second, the Muslims and Christians of the south had to demonstrate real coexistence. Although Shiites were far more numerous, several southern villages were Christian or had strong Christian populations. “When a trivial incident occurs, if we handle it as a small problem, we can solve it,” he said. “If we exaggerate it, this will mean that it is we who are wasting the chance and undermining coexistence. Keep things in proper perspective….
“Heal the wounds in every town, every village, and among all families,” he said.
Third and fourth, collaborators—a reference mainly to the South Lebanese Army that had collaborated with Israel for two decades—should be a lesson to all Lebanese. But they should be punished only “by the law,” not vigilante justice, he said.
Fifth, Hezbollah did not plan to assume political control of the south. “We are not power seekers…. We are not a security authority, nor do we plan to become one. The state is the party that is in charge,” Nasrallah said. “It is the state that decides who it plans to send here and what to do.”
Sixth, the state also had responsibility for reconstructing the south in an “urgent and exceptional manner,” although he pledged that Hezbollah would “economize every bread that the fighters eat” to extend its own aid.
Seventh, the Hezbollah chief reached out to Lebanon’s other communities—and urged his followers to do so as well. “This is not the victory of one party, one movement, one organization. It is not the victory of one sect and the defeat of another,” Nasrallah said. “Anyone who thinks so is wrong and ignorant. This is a victory for Lebanon.”
Nasrallah admonished his followers to show “greater humility than ever before.”
Eighth, Hezbollah would not accept peace along the border as long as Israel detained Lebanese prisoners—and Nasrallah named some of them—and as long as it occupied Shebaa Farms. Shebaa Farms was a disputed area that abutted the Lebanese, Syrian, and Israeli borders. Disputes over the small territory—less than ten square miles—dated back to the French mandate; they were not settled when Israel captured the area in the 1967 war. Some who lived around Shebaa Farms considered themselves Lebanese, even though a United Nations commission ruled that it was Syrian territory.
Nasrallah’s claim surprised both Lebanese and Israelis. It was widely interpreted as Hezbollah’s pretext to keep its arms—as if it still had to finish “liberation.”
“The resistance has been the strength of the homeland—and will remain so,” he said.
Ninth, he called for harmony between the resistance and the government to foster a “sense of national responsibility.” “The new Lebanon is a homeland of adversity when facing invaders, but a homeland of mercy in the dealings of its sons and sects with each other,” he said.
Finally, Nasrallah said he presented the Lebanese “victory” as a model for the Palestinians.
“This Israel, which possesses nuclear weapons and the most powerful air force in the region, by God, it is weaker than a spider web,” Nasrallah railed. “But if you want to depend on the former Soviet Union, you will get nowhere. If you are waiting for the international community to act, you will not get results. But if you side with God…then nobody can defeat you.”
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Israel’s retreat had elevated Hezbollah overnight to national stature. Nasrallah’s speech was broadcast on state-run television as well as Hezbollah TV. Even Christian leaders lauded Nasrallah for liberating Lebanon. The government arranged a meeting between the Hezbollah chief and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan a month later. In an event unthinkable just weeks earlier, they were photographed shaking hands at Beirut’s presidential palace.
After 2000, Hezbollah became increasingly Lebanon-ized, literally domesticated.
“We are now a full-fledged political party, we have ministers, we have members of parliament, we have municipal council members, leaders of unions,” Nasrallah told me.
“If we have kept our arms until now, it is because the need is still there, because of the permanent, or constant, Israeli threats against Lebanon. And this is a different issue,” he said. “Whether we keep on with the resistance or stop the resistance, we are effectively now a full-fledged political party.”
The postwar period—and economic realities—spurred some of the changes.
Israel’s withdrawal opened the way for Lebanon to again become a tourist haven. By 2003, more than one million foreign tourists poured into little Lebanon annually for its ski slopes and beaches, Roman ruins, and culture. They came from the West as well as from Middle East countries. Many Arabs were no longer comfortable traveling to the West after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Before the wars, Lebanon was known as the Switzerland of the Middle East because it was neutral ground for both East and West. By 2003, it was again. And for a country with the highest per capita debt ratio in the world, struggling to rebuild from both a civil war and an invasion, tourists meant revenue and jobs.
Peace was good, indirectly, for Hezbollah’s constituents. In 2002, Nasrallah was candid about the movement’s stake in peace.
Once, in a discussion of resistance operations, I told certain officials that “we are concerned about the nation, the state, and the future more than you think.” Why is this so? Because when, Heaven forbid, the country is menaced by security, military, and political dangers or economic collapse, then those people who have capital, bankrolls, companies, children, luxury homes, and houses abroad, flee. They have a second citizenship. It is very simple. They collect the rest of their family and leave the country. [However], our houses, graves, life, death, honor, and mortification—they are all here.
Where else can we go?
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Hezbollah also became the main agent of recovery in Shiite areas, particularly in the southern third of the country. The state failed to move in and provide meaningful resources, personnel, or programs to rebuild the country’s poorest and most vulnerable territory after more than twenty years of strife. So despite Nasrallah’s promise to step aside for the government after Israeli’s withdrawal, the Shiite movement remained in charge. And, in the process, Hezbollah became an even more powerful state within a state.
In 2004, Nasrallah again endorsed holy war against Israel. But he also warned that “this does not mean all is permitted and that we can do whatever we like—while abandoning the blood, money, and property of the people—and perpetrate serious crimes under the banner of jihad and war against the enemy.”
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The shifting balance of military and political power in Lebanon, and the withdrawal of Hezbollah’s allies between 2000 and 2005, also contributed to the movement’s domestication.
In 2000, after Israel’s withdrawal, Iran withdrew most of its Revolutionary Guards. Fewer than fifty officers remained, most attached to Tehran’s Embassy in Beirut.
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Hezbollah fighters went to Iran for advanced training, and the Islamic republic remained the primary source of funds and arms. But the conspicuous Bekaa Valley camps were closed.
In 2004, Syria also came under pressure to remove its 14,000 troops. The fury after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri on Valentine’s Day 2005 then forced a showdown. Hezbollah was the largest faction to side with Syria, and Nasrallah tried to mobilize support for Damascus. Three weeks after the bombing, he summoned hundreds of thousands to a rally that was not in the
dahiya
but, for the first time, took Hezbollah politics to downtown Beirut.
But Nasrallah’s March 8 rally backfired. It instead unified the rest of Lebanon. On March 14, on the one-month anniversary of Hariri’s murder, the largest public demonstration in Lebanon’s history assembled near Hariri’s grave. More than one million Lebanese took to the streets to demand that Syria leave. Six weeks later, Damascus withdrew. The twenty-nine-year Syrian military occupation of Lebanon was over.
Hezbollah no longer had an ally and protector at its fingertips.
Weeks later, Lebanon held its first free elections in over three decades. All the foreign armies that had controlled Lebanese turf were gone. And Syria no longer ran the political show with the intimidating help of its army. Capping the Cedar Revolution, the new March 14 coalition won the largest share of votes.
And Nasrallah reversed policy again.
For the first time, Hezbollah joined a coalition government—led by March 14 politicians. Hezbollah was no longer the opposition. One of its top officials became minister of energy. A sympathizer became minister of labor.
Hezbollah also launched outreach to other sects and even a bit to the outside world. In 2005, Nasrallah went to a conference in France attended by many sectarian leaders—as well as the American ambassador. He was photographed shaking hands with the Maronite patriarch.
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In 2006, Nasrallah made an unusual alliance with a former Maronite army general, Michel Aoun. They issued a detailed political agreement. Again, Hezbollah’s language mellowed—at least on Lebanese issues.
The Shiite movement had a greater stake in a pure democratic vote—and ending confessional quotas—than any other party because of the surging Shiite numbers. For years, its platform reflected that preference. The Party of God had originally criticized the 1989 Taif Accord, which ended the civil war, for entrenching society’s divisions in a revised quota system. Its 1996 election platform advocated abolishing sectarianism altogether, calling it Lebanon’s “essential flaw.”
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Yet a decade later, when I met him in the
dahiya,
Nasrallah sounded almost protective of the Christians and Lebanon’s old confessional system.
“People have talked about abolishing political sectarianism and the confessional distribution of the three senior posts—president, prime minister and speaker of parliament—and also the number of ministries or parliamentary seats,” he told me.
“This proposal frightens Christians because the numbers of Muslims are on the rise, and this means that the majority in parliament will then become Muslim—and will influence [parliament’s] election of the president, the formation of the cabinet, and the speaker,” he said. “And then perhaps Christians will feel that they don’t have guarantees.”
“In a nutshell,” he added, “we are not working to abolish political sectarianism, not because we refuse the idea, but because it worries our partners in the homeland, the Christians.”
Hezbollah had edged away from the idea of an Islamic republic.
In person, Nasrallah speaks calmly, not with the vibrancy of his public speeches. He holds steady eye contact, smiles slightly when he completes a thought, listens intently to translations, occasionally corrects his English interpreter, and seems at ease, engaging, even with an American. But when I asked Nasrallah if he hoped the Lebanese would someday, down the road, embrace Islam, adopt Sharia, or imitate Iran’s theocracy, he shook his head and waved his hand dismissively.
“In Iran, ninety percent of the people are Muslims, the overwhelming majority of them Shiite—in spite of the fact that they come from different ethnic groups,” he said. “So Iran has the basis and ability to have an Islamic regime or system.