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[Background in Hizbollah in south Lebanon. Excepts from the book,
L E B A N O N : D e a t h o f a N a t i o n
by
Sandra Mackey
Quotations limited only to happenings in south Lebanon, whch is
relevant to the discussion here.]
"If you really want to know about Lebanon, ask Ben. He's
been here longer than any of us and speaks Arabic like an Arab."
I turned to the quiet man by the far wall. After some prompting,
the Reverend Benjamin Weir, Presbyterian missionary for
twenty-eight years, began to speak modestly about Lebanon.
"We all talk about the Maronites, and the Druze and the Sunnis,
but no one talks about the Shiites. They are the forgotten ones
in this war. ... The people there have so little, not even roads
to move their produce market in Beirut. And now they are caught
between the PLO and Israel. Someday we may all feel their
anger."
In 1968, Palestenian commando raids against Israel began from
southern Lebanon. ... Palestinian commandos scattered, leaving
the Shiites as the targets of Israeli bombs. As a result, the
image of a woman in a colorful dress squatting on the ground in
front of her collapsed house, wailing over her dead husband's
body, became the caricature of south Lebanon.
In the wake of the Israelis' low-flying bombing raids, merchants
and farmers piled their battered luggage into old Mercedes taxis
or on beds of pickup trucks for the desperate flight to Beirut.
But many stayed, for there was really nowhere to go. Although
Ahmed Hadi Ayub, a farmer, lost his house and two of his nine
children in one bombing raid, he remained. The plot of ground
on which the rubble of his house stood was all he had.
In 1980 ... When Berri took over Amal, the movement's actual
membership relative to the number of its sympathizers was
incredibly small. In one major Shiite village, only ninety men
out of an active male population of fifteen hundred even held
membership. ... But a new chapter in Shiite politics was about
to unfold, and again the catalyst would be the ill-fated Israeli
invasion of 1982. No other facet of Israel's gross misadventure
in Lebanon presents a clearer case of bad judgment and
self-defeating policy than Israel's mishandling of the Shiite
population of south Lebanon that turned a confederate against
the Palestinians into a formidable adversary of the State of
Israel. Even before Israel moved in 1982, a Shiite warned
Israeli Arabist Moshe Sharon, "Do not join those who murdered
Husain, because if you bring the Shi'is to identify you with the
history of [their] suffering, the enmity that will be directed
at you will have no bounds and no limits. You will have created
for yourselves a foe whose hostility will have a mystical nature
and a momentum which you will be unable to arrest."
Initially the Shiites had welcomed the Israelis into south
Lebanon. As tank-led columns rolled through the villages,
smiling Shiites tossed flowers to Israeli soldiers and ran
alongside open personnel carriers offering cold fruit juice
while murmuring words of praise for their deliverance from the
PLO. But soon Israeli arrogance, as had PLO arrogance, drove a
searing wedge between the Shiites and their erstwhile saviors.
The Israeli "iron fist" slammed down on the Shiites, turning the
south's liberation into occupation. Sweeps through villages
gathered up Shiites suspected of sympathies with the PLO. Some,
in violation of the Geneva Convention, were marched across the
border to detention in Israel. Grieving women clutching their
weeping children clustered in nervous knots watching their
houses being systematically blown apart by demolition teams
because the Israelis had accused their husbands or sons. Whole
villages suspected of harboring the PLO were reduced to
pulverized concrete. From June to August, the Shiites of Beirut
lived through the merciless siege, and it was they who were
massacred along with the Palestinians in Sabra. The words of
Musa al Sadr came ringing back: "Israel is the very embodiment
of evil."
Civilian casualties were high in an operation that drew no
distinction between the enemy and the innocent. Surgeons worked
around the clock performing what they dubbed the "Begin amputation"
of limbs shattered by the cluster bombs provided to Israel by
the United States. Others were wounded by shells whose exploded
casings buried in apartment walls carried the message "Made in
the USA." To everyone except the Phalangists and some of their
Christian supporters, this hell was being delivered as much by
the United States as by Israel. To the Lebanese Muslims,
Israel's silent partner in carnage was the United States. It
was American shells, American money, and American political
support that had created the Israeli monster.
The pummeling of Beirut went on and on. To speed up the city's
surrender, Israel ordered saturation bombing on the scale of the
World War II attack on Dresden. Known as "Black Thursday", it
began at dawn on August 12 and continued uninterrupted for
eleven hours. They city burned and there was no water to quench
the flames for the Israelis has shut off the flow. In West
Beirut, where only about one in eighty people was a Palestinian
guerilla, five hundred civilians died. [Total casualties during
the Israeli invasion included 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese
killed, mostly civilians.]
The utter despair that the Israeli invasion had thrust upon the
Shiite community gave fundamentalism an appeal that more
moderate political leaders were unable to match. In a
compelling litany, the militants cried that the Shiites had
suffered at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, the Western
colonial powers, the Christian and Sunni Lebanese, the
Palestinians, and now the Israelis. ... Out of Iran, the Shiite
spiritual heartland, the words of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
washed over Shiite Lebanon: "Thus we have seen that aggression
can be repelled only with sacrifices and dignity gained with
sacrifices of both heart and soul." In the complexity and
confusion of Lebanon, Shiite fundamentalism offered a simple and
comfortable message.
By the fall of 1982, the groups coalesced under a fluid
organization call Hizbollah, the party of God. ... Each
Hizbollah group essentially set and executed its own agenda. As
a result, Hizbollah has never achieved the cohesion of even the
most formless political party. It is but a movement, an
ideological umbrella under which autonomous groups wage their
own version of the Islamic revolution. Although all of
Hizbollah's clerics are fanatically committed to the concepts of
the Islamic revolution, few unquestioningly toe the line for
Iran. All the groups can be influenced by Iran, but none is a
lackey.
Hizbollah did not introduce terrorism into the Lebanese civil
war. Acts of terror played an integral part in the war from the
very beginning. Camille Chamoun, with a characteristic flick of
his well-manicured hand, once said, "Cutting innocent throats to
propagate terror is nothing new in the mentality of the Middle
East." Karantina, Tel Zaatar, and Damour were all instances of
terror directed against communities. Kidnaping was rampant.
Victims were seized at roadblocks, in their homes, and on the
street for no reason other than that they were "suspicious
persons.".. Children were abducted simply to extort ransom
from parents.
Common citizens subjected to wanton acts of terror remained lost
in the media coverage of the war. Only noted foreigners and
Lebanese celebrities rated mention in the newspaper or on the
international wire services.
Of all the miscalculations in America's misadventure in Lebanon,
the decision to shell tiny Souq al Gharb was the single act that
would keep coming back to haunt the United States. When its
military might inflamed the hills of the Shuf, the United
States, along with France, created a new symbol for the Shiites.
Besieged and embattled Muslims facing the firepower of a mighty
battleship fit the Shiites' image of their centuries-old
struggle against their enemies. The highly dubious military
advantage the United States delivered to the Gemayel government
in the operation against Souq al Gharb became lost in the
imagery that the action created for the Shiite militants and
their followers. ...
From their positions off the coast, the cruiser Virginia, and
the destroyer John Rogers, and the battleship New Jersey sent
six hundred rounds of seventy-pound shells zooming over Beirut
and crashing into Muslim village in the Shuf. French aircraft
streaked in after the shells in aerial mop-up operation. ...
The tragedy of America's operation against the Shut was that
from the viewpoint of the United States the strikes were never
intended as an attack on the Shiites. Rather, the United States
had meant to send an unmistakable message to all factions in the
Lebanese war that the Multi- National Force would protect
itself. Ever since it arrived in Lebanon, the MNF had been harassed
by the Druze, the Amal, the Palestinians, and even the Israelis
and the Lebanese Forces. ... The Marine command reported to
Washington, "The fire support situation was best described by
the American Ambassador as being unclear as to who was doing
what to whom and why."
Israeli fears about the Palestinians in south Lebanon have been
real, and response to those fears predictable. ... The
Palestinians, joined by Hizbollah launched punishing attacks on
the Southern Lebanon Army. For the first time, Israel responded
to attacks on the security zone than on Israel proper. In May
[1988], the Israeli army moved roughly ten miles beyond the zone
to sweep Lebanese villages as far north as Maydoun. And once
again it was Shiites who paid the price. On suspicion that the
occupants were aiding guerilla forces, Israeli demolition crews
leveled more than sixty houses within Maydoun under the gaze of
the families who once called them home.
For Israel, the torment of Lebanon is that, as a staging area
for the PLO, it cannot be ignored. Yet what Israel regards as
legitimate operations carried out in the name of Israeli
security simply add to the Shiites' corrosive hatred of Israel.
Militant Shiism feeds on Israel's tough tactics against civilian
populations. Villages where children cannot go to school
because fear of Israeli reprisal raids keeps teachers away and
where farmers can work their fields only in sight of soldiers of
UNIFIL are the most fertile ground for Hizbollah enlistment.
With their recruits pulled from these villages, the militants
strike Israeli troops and units of the SLA in a passionate mission
to drive them out of Lebanon. Periodically they are joined by
Amal, forced into action by an alarming loss of support in the
south. With the groups as bitterly hostile to each other as
ever, the limited cooperation between Amal and Hizbollah rises
from the apprehension that the "security zone" is about to be
incorporated into Israel.
As if the situation were not chaotic enough, the Israelis use
south Lebanon as the dumping site for the Palestinian exiles of
the intifidah. There they join those driven by a loathing of
Israel. Thus grappling with the Palestinians, the Israelis have
created new enemies, forging an alliance between radical,
fatigue-clad Palestinian commandos and the fighters of Hizbollah
often wrapped in the blood-soaked rags of their own martyrdom.
...
Even more than the West, the Israelis condemn Arabs to an
inferior status. For years, the powerful Israeli propaganda
machine succeeded in portraying the Arabs to the West first as
rough, semi-educated zealots and later as inhuman "terrorists".
Within Israel itself, a kind of apartheid exists between the
Jewish and Arab populations. And even before the 1987
Palestinian uprising or intifadah, Israeli policy in the
occupied territories ground the Arabs into a distinct underclass.
The whole Palestinian issue created by the 1948 war for
Palestine fits what Arabs see as the pattern of Western
exploitation of the Arabs. The West, particularly the United
States, has never addressed the moral issue of the Palestinian
diaspora. By refusing to acknowledge the Palestinian cause as
represented by the PLO until late 1988, U.S. policy contributed
to the process by which an increasingly angry population was
dumped on its neighbors... Lebanon was the least able of all
the countries in the region to absorb the Palestinians. Yet
they came, and from Lebanese territory they struck Israel. And
Israel struck back with such force that it speeded Lebanon's
demise, all at the sufferance of the West.
Regardless of the nature of Israeli actions, American support
for Israel never seemed to flinch. Step by step Israel and the
United States marched together until it appeared they stood as
one against the Arabs. When Israel dropped its deadly bombs on
Lebanon, the United States restocked the Israeli arsenal. When
Israeli raids into Lebanon were condemned by the United Nations,
the United States vetoed the resolution. While the Israelis
ruled southern Lebanon with their "iron fists", the United
States signed an agreement formalizing its strategic alliance
with Israel. Non of this was lost on the Arabs, especially
those of Lebanon, who had suffered the brunt of Israelis' hard
deeds. It all came to rest in the virulent anti-Western
campaign of the Hizbollah.
Hizbollah has melded the Arabs' deep hostility to the West and
the Shiites' fury against Israel into a powerful weapon. ...
Israel's "security zone" in south Lebanon has become an arena
where the zeal of the Shiites and the anger of the Palestinians
push against the Western-armed military might of Israel. It is
a conflict Israel may pay a high price to contain, one that may
call into question once again the wisdom of building American
strategic concerns in the Middle East almost exclusively around
Israel.
The war in Lebanon is far from over. Yet, for the West, it has
already ended. A broken Lebanon has established its Arab
identity and in so doing has closed the West's gateway to the
Arab world. The tragedy of Lebanon is also a tragedy for the
West.
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