Read Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East Online
Authors: Robin Wright
“The situation in Lebanon is completely different, because it is made of different sects. So we believe the viable formula in our country is the democratic system—provided that it enables everybody to participate.
“In Lebanon,” he added later, “there won’t be an Islamic government.”
Hezbollah’s alliance with a Christian leader may not last. Lebanese politics is a kaleidoscope of constantly moving pieces that retain their colors and shapes but form totally different pictures with the tiniest motion. Yet in making its first alliance, the Party of God was immersed in Lebanon’s distinctly unholy politics—and some realpolitik.
“When you are in the streets, you have certain calculations,” Nasrallah had said in the same speech addressing the Danish cartoons. “And when you are in the state you should have different responsibilities, and that is why you should have different calculations.”
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When we spoke, Nasrallah acknowledged the potential limitations of merging political agendas with a Christian party—or any other group.
“I admit that partnership would mean things move a little bit slowly. But any single-handedness could lead to injustice and the destruction of the country,” he reflected, pulling his hands together from the sides of his robes over his chest.
“In other words,” he said, “to move slowly is better than creating a national problem or putting an important part of the Lebanese population outside the government.”
The reality of governing may have influenced Hezbollah’s shifts. In its first year, the one ministry Hezbollah controlled was not performing well. Electricity shortages still continued for up to ten hours a day in some areas. The state agency ran a whopping 800-million-dollar deficit. And hundreds of its workers went on strike over health insurance. The luster of a victorious resistance movement was wearing off.
Hezbollah was proving to be no government of God.
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The Daily Star,
the popular Beirut newspaper, warned in 2006 that Hezbollah risked “joining the ranks of those described in Lebanese parlance as ‘cheese-eaters,’ those who scavenge on the state with the sole aim of carving out a piece of the pie for their sectarian communities.”
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Yet Hezbollah had become integrated. It had a fully developed political wing, and it had taken a place in Lebanon’s fragile democracy. The evolution, however, was far from complete. Its policies were tortuously two-faced. Hezbollah was both part of the state and outside it. It retained its own private army, and it crafted its own defiant foreign policy.
Nasrallah once admitted reading the memoirs of two Israeli prime ministers—Ariel Sharon’s
Warrior: An Autobiography
and Benjamin Netanyahu’s
A Place Under the Sun.
But in his public language, he still treated Israel as a historic hiccup, a temporary aberration.
“We face an entity that conquered the land of another people, drove them out of their land, and committed horrendous massacres,” Nasrallah told Egyptian television two weeks after Israel’s withdrawal in 2000. “As we see it, this is an illegal state. It is a cancerous entity and the root of all crises and wars and cannot be a factor in bringing about a true and just peace in this region.”
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A few months later, he boasted, “We have liberated the south. Next we’ll liberate Jerusalem.”
Hezbollah’s jihadist cult continued to recruit potential suicide bombers. Shops in the
dahiya
sold Hezbollah videos of previous attacks, while T-shirts were imprinted with martyrs’ faces. Little boys marched in Hezbollah parades wearing bands around their heads—in green, black, or red, each inscribed with a Koranic verse—as potential future martyrs. Toy stores sold miniature tanks and guns with the Hezbollah logo.
After two Israeli invasions, Nasrallah claimed that his militia provided a defense capability that no other force could provide. “The Israeli Air Force could destroy the Lebanese army within hours, or within days, but it cannot do this with us,” Nasrallah told me. “We don’t have a classical presence. We exercise guerilla warfare…. Lebanon still needs the formula of popular resistance.”
Along the fifty-mile border, tensions remained high after 2000. Hezbollah launched sporadic attacks against Israeli troops, mainly around Shebaa Farms. It fired at Israeli overflights as their sonic booms cracked the sound barrier. And twice, Hezbollah launched unmanned drone spy planes over Israel’s northern Galilee. To beef up Hezbollah’s military capabilities, Iran secretly shipped even more potent arms, including missiles with a much longer range than the old Katyushas.
I asked Nasrallah about Iran’s arms supplies, noting international alarm about Hezbollah’s deadly arsenal. He smiled coyly.
“At the military level, there is an expression: ‘The pen broke,’ meaning this issue is not open for discussion,” he told me. “Because if I say there is no military cooperation, they are not going to believe me. But if I say there is military cooperation, this will be harmful. Therefore I leave this issue. It is possible we can talk about it in the future.”
I told Nasrallah I was leaving Lebanon in a couple of days.
He smiled again. “By the future,” he said, “I mean, maybe, in twenty years.”
Yet Hezbollah operations during the third phase were noticeably limited—defying predictions of a hot new guerrilla war along the border, the kind the Palestinians had fought.
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An Israeli think-tank assessment concluded that Hezbollah seemed in no rush to liberate Jerusalem, that it had deliberately “circumscribed” operations to avoid massive Israeli retaliation, and that it had even blocked plans by Palestinian cells still operating from refugee camps in Lebanon to fire across the border. Hezbollah’s focus was primarily deterring Israel, it concluded, not destroying the Jewish state.
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Nawaf al Musawi, Hezbollah’s burly external-relations chief, put it a different way. “This is the new Cold War.”
Hezbollah’s strategy was partially produced by the international reaction to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden’s operation forced the Lebanese movement for the first time to publicly define itself on terrorism—and to differentiate itself from al Qaeda.
Hezbollah TV initially reported that the suicide hijackings were the work of Israeli agents, not al Qaeda. The story, based on widespread rumor in the region, alleged that Israel had tipped off some four thousand Jews employed at the World Trade Center, so they would not report to work on September 11.
But Nasrallah soon shifted gears. He issued a communiqué condemning the attack on the World Trade Center. He publicly called it a “barbarity” that contradicted the teachings of Islam.
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Shortly after September 11, he also assembled a group of Lebanese not in his movement. Among them was Jamil Mrowe, publisher of
The Daily Star,
a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and a Shiite. Mrowe is a handsome man with a full head of silvering hair who likes a good scotch or two, can talk a blue streak, and has been my friend for more than two decades. He recounted the meeting called to analyze the impact of September 11 and what it meant for Hezbollah.
Mrowe was blunt with the leadership about its rhetoric and mission.
“I told them that no one starts a restaurant in order for it to close. Everyone wants to succeed, including their endeavor,” he told me over dinner at a renovated café on the old Green Line that once divided Christian and Muslim militias. “I told them: ‘Let us imagine you win your war with Israel. You will have millions of Jews on your hands. What do you do with them? Kill them?’
“Two people sprang up and said, ‘Do you not know our religion? How can you even say that? These [Jews] are people of the Book!’” Mrowe recalled, shaking his head.
“If they want to play that game, they have to take that responsibility,” he added. “And that kind of recognition of religion was not reflected in their political positions.”
During our meeting a few days later at his headquarters, I also asked Nasrallah about Hezbollah’s attitude about September 11—and what circumstances or causes justified violence.
“To give a very clear answer, in any war or ongoing battle, you need to distinguish between those who are partners in the war against me and those who have nothing to do with this war,” he replied. “There is the division criterion—partner, accomplice, or innocent.”
On September 11, he applied the distinction. “What do the people who worked in those two towers, thousands of employees, women and men, have to do with war that is taking place in the Middle East? Or the war that Mr. George Bush may wage on people in the Islamic world?” Nasrallah said. “Therefore we condemned this act—and any similar act we condemn.”
“But not the attack on the Pentagon?” I asked him.
Nasrallah paused. “I said nothing about the Pentagon, meaning we remain silent. We neither favored nor opposed that act,” he said.
In the West, al Qaeda and Hezbollah are often lumped together as violent Islamist groups. Both were put on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups—Hezbollah in 1997, al Qaeda in 1999. Both have ideological roots in religion, use identical terrorist tactics, and hate the United States and Israel. But they are hardly identical. The Sunni-Shiite divide also runs deep between the two movements, igniting public friction.
The al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, condemned Hezbollah as the “enemy of the Sunnis” in a videotape message released just days before he was killed in an American air strike in 2006. Zarqawi accused the Shiite movement of protecting Israel from Palestinian attacks—which in fact, and ironically, it did. Hezbollah wanted to control the conflict on its own border on its own terms. It sent aid and arms to Hamas for operations in the Palestinian territories. One major weapons shipment was discovered in transit via Jordan, Hezbollah officials told me. But the militia did not want Palestinians operating again from Lebanese soil. Underneath the common enemy were different national loyalties. So Hezbollah restrained militant cells in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps.
Nasrallah also loathed Osama bin Laden.
The Hezbollah leader needed no prompting to talk about al Qaeda and its Afghan allies, the Taliban. “We do not endorse the method of bin Laden, and many of the operations that al Qaeda carried out we condemned very clearly,” he told me. “We disagree with bin Laden at the intellectual level, theoretical level, practical level, and also on priorities…. We are two completely different movements.
“That’s why since the beginning of Hezbollah and the beginning of al Qaeda there has never been any contact between us and them,” he said.
And the Taliban, Nasrallah continued at a determined clip, was “the worst, the most dangerous thing that this Islamic revival has encountered. The Taliban presented a very hideous example of an Islamic state.”
I asked Nasrallah how his criterion on violence applied to Iraq. The Hezbollah leader did not always take stereotypical positions.
Iraq’s breakup into sectarian pieces, he said, would create a new model of collapse, internecine fighting, sedition, and divisions for the entire Middle East. “The most popular project today in Iraq, unfortunately, is federalism or separation,” he had lamented in a speech broadcast on Hezbollah TV. “Everyone wants to live alone and to stay away from his brother in the Iraqi homeland.”
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Yet when we spoke, he also did not want American troops to remain to hold Iraq together. Any foreign presence on Muslim land was wrong—and justified violent resistance.
“The Iraqis have the right to fight any occupation force, American or non-American. But should they fight or should they not fight? This is something to be decided by the Iraqis themselves,” Nasrallah said.
At the same time, he pronounced, doing harm to the innocent was forbidden.
“To have Iraqis confronting the occupation army, this is natural. But if there are American tourists, or intellectuals, doctors, or professors, people who have nothing to do with this war, they are innocent, even though they are Americans,” he told me. “It is not acceptable to harm them.”
In 2004, Hezbollah issued a communiqué condemning the beheading of American contractor Nicholas Berg by al Qaeda in Iraq as a “despicable act” that did “grave damage to Islam and the Muslims.”
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The day before we spoke in 2006, a suicide bomber had detonated himself at the entrance of a Tel Aviv fast-food restaurant during the busy lunch hour, killing eleven and wounding more than sixty innocent civilians. The bomb was laced with nails and other projectiles; the injuries were particularly gruesome. Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed group, claimed credit.
I asked Nasrallah how he applied his metric on civilians to Israelis. He replied that the issue was “complicated.”
“It is our opinion that in Palestine, women and children need to be avoided in any case,” he said. “But it came after more than two months of daily Israeli killing of Palestinians, and the destruction of houses and schools, and the siege that is imposed on the Palestinians.
“There is no other means for the Palestinians to defend themselves,” he said. “That is why I cannot condemn this type of operation in occupied Palestine.”
Nasrallah’s aides tried to end the interview several times. Each time one of two aides interjected or pointed to their watches, he nodded, and then he continued. He had spoken for almost two hours, and it was almost ten
P.M.