Lebanon pays for Hezbollah’s sins

A report from Lebanon’s south, ravaged by retaliatory Israeli strikes.

By Mitchell Prothero

Beirutis expected the worst when word
came Wednesday that Hezbollah, the militant group based
in south Lebanon, had killed eight Israeli soldiers near
the border and seized two more. The region was already
on edge, with the Israeli siege of Gaza in its 18th day
following the Palestinian kidnapping of an Israel
Defense Forces soldier. Everyone knew that Israeli
retaliation would be severe. The only question was
whether Israel would confine itself to attacks on
Hezbollah, or if it would hold Lebanon responsible and
launch attacks across the board. Israel chose the latter
course and has meted out savage punishment to this small
country.

On Wednesday, IDF strikes destroyed the bridges
connecting south Lebanon to the rest of the country. By
nightfall, Israeli fighters had blasted the major
highways, essentially sealing off the southern third
from the center of the country. Early morning Thursday,
warplanes bombed Rafiq Hariri Beirut International
Airport, knocking out the runways. Minutes later, an
Israeli rocket struck Hezbollah’s television station,
al-Manar, wounding one person and sending local media
into a frenzy over access to the scene that dispersed
only when an IDF fighter screamed overhead and people
ran for cover.

And so it continued all day. Bridges used just an hour
before were smashed into rubble. Gunboats off the coast
fired wildly into Palestinian militant camps. Attack
helicopters ignited a fuel depot at the airport, while
leaflets rained down upon the residents of the rundown
Hezbollah-controlled neighborhoods in southern Beirut,
warning them to flee or face further airstrikes aimed at
the Hezbollah leadership. The IDF also announced a total
blockade of the country by air and sea. Late Thursday
night it bombed the only major route out of Lebanon, the
road to Damascus. In all, Israeli airstrikes were
reported to have killed at least 55 civilians.

Israeli generals have said they want to deal Hezbollah a
devastating blow and permanently clear the group away
from Israel’s northern border. Whether they can achieve
this is uncertain. While there is no way the militant
group can stand up to this kind of aerial assault,
Hezbollah is a much more formidable adversary than the
Palestinians militants in Gaza. The Islamic Resistance
of Lebanon, as Hezbollah prefers to be called, is
probably the most competent organization in the entire
Arab Middle East. No other Arab army has defeated the
mighty IDF, one of the most powerful armies in the
world, as Hezbollah did in 2000 when it drove it out of
south Lebanon. Syria has been whipped half a dozen times
at Israeli hands. Jordan has lost so much land and
earned so many refugees that it chose to anger the
entire rest of the Arab world (and two-thirds of its
population) and sue for a long-term peace deal just to
avoid future losses. And Egypt? The most powerful and
populous state in the Arab world doesn’t even want Gaza
back, let alone have another go at the IDF.

Hezbollah remains the only military force that the
Israelis really respect, based on its top-notch training
and equipment supplied by Iran, and a brand of Shiite
Islam that lends both extreme discipline and total
fearlessness. Hezbollah boasts thousands of fighters,
many battle-hardened, backed by a significant number of
artillery pieces and rockets. It constitutes no threat
to invade and hold northern Israel. But the daring and
successful operation it pulled off on Wednesday shows
that it cannot be taken lightly. Ambushing an IDF Humvee
patrol, Hezbollah forces killed three Israeli soldiers
and seized two more. When the Israelis sent tanks across
the border in pursuit, a powerful cache of buried
explosives destroyed one tank, killing its four-man
crew. And in the face of massive air, artillery and
naval strikes against Lebanese infrastructure and
military targets, Hezbollah has managed to fire hundreds
of rockets and artillery shells into northern Israel;
late on Thursday, rockets were reported to have struck
the major Israeli city of Haifa. Even the U.S. Navy
reportedly pulled its ships out of Haifa’s ports.

On Wednesday, Hezbollah leader Sayeed Hassan Nasrallah
proclaimed that his group had kidnapped the soldiers and
set a major prisoner swap as the condition of their
release.

Israel rejected any negotiations and launched massive
retaliatory strikes. "The Lebanese government needs to
understand that there is a price for its inaction. They
need to understand that if they are not able to deal
with terror, we will have no choice but to fight with
them," IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz told the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz on Thursday.

But while Israel’s actions could be defended as a
deterrent against an act of aggression, they also amount
to the collective punishment of the Lebanese society and
government, which have little say over Hezbollah’s
activities.

The situation puts the Lebanese government and military
in an extremely tough position. The government simply
cannot control Hezbollah. It cannot take it on
politically because of its support among Lebanon’s
Shiite Muslim population, in a country where almost
everyone still votes for their religion’s candidate
regardless of merit. Nor can the well-trained but tiny
and underequipped Lebanese army take on the Shiite
militia.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has had to walk a
political tightrope over Hezbollah’s close relationship
with Syria. Now, Hezbollah’s actions and the Israeli
response have put him in an almost surreal position. A
favorite of the Bush administration for throwing out the
Syrian military occupation last year in the wake of
Rafiq Hariri’s murder (widely believed by Syrian
agents), Lebanon’s new government has been gently
pushing Hezbollah into political dialogue, with the goal
of disarming the group or integrating it into the
Lebanese army. But now Siniora’s government faces wanton
destruction at the hands of America’s other favorite
Middle East country, which is demanding two kidnapped
soldiers that Siniora simply cannot deliver.

Most of the country’s non-Shiites distrust Hezbollah for
remaining an armed group outside government control, and
join the Shiites in disliking Israel for its policies in
occupied Palestine and its bloody history in Lebanon.
The past two days are forcing people to choose sides,
but most are refusing to do so. They appear to see this
as a fight between two sworn enemies with a long history
that has little to do with them directly.

So far the Lebanese seem to be choosing to hoard bottled
water and stay quiet. It’s hard to imagine them picking
either side, even as they watch their highways, airports
and villages being bombed, while hordes of Arab tourists
flee to Damascus, taking with them the tourism money
Lebanon counts on to survive.

But down in the south, in a village called al-Dweir,
amid Hezbollah’s strongest supporters, the case is
clear-cut. They regard Hezbollah as having mounted a
military operation against a military target — and see
civilians paying the price.

At about 4 a.m. Thursday morning, Israeli warplanes
bombed the home of Sayeed Adel Akkash, a Shiite cleric
probably associated with Hezbollah. The bomb flattened
the home and killed Akkash, his wife and their 10
children, leaving only three bodies identifiable as such
and a surprisingly small pile of body parts.

Dr. Yousef Akkash is a French-educated surgeon and
Adel’s brother. It is his job to oversee the funeral, as
his father is too distraught to do so. He enters the
basement of a mosque near the family home and joins two
doctors whose job it is to separate out body parts and
try to figure out which part should go in which grave.
It’s extremely messy. Finally, with a cleric’s approval,
they decide to put the 12 mangled corpses into six
graves.

Dr. Adel claims to not know if his brother really was a
Hezbollah official but says he hopes it’s true, "so
there can be some reason behind this tragedy."

He’s upset and angry but can still talk of peace with
the people who did this. "All people want peace," he
tells me in English. "As do the people of Lebanon, but
we need justice amid this occupation. We want peace and
justice for all people, Muslim and Christian, Arab and
Jew."

But in the makeshift morgue he holds up part of a baby’s
body and asks the recoiling reporters to come closer.

"Come see the arms and weapons my brother had," he says,
holding up a tiny arm. "Here is your ’terrorist.’"

Denials aside, this is clearly a Hezbollah funeral, as
shown by the flags all around it and the arrival of a
bunch of men who are clearly part of the group. And the
funeral is being watched. Even as we can hear Hezbollah
rockets being fired at Israel just a few miles away, the
constant buzz of a unmanned surveillance drone can be
heard. And from time to time, an IDF fighter roars
overhead.

A man named Tahir Ahmed asks me where I am from. When I
tell him, without a trace of hostility he asks me to
"tell the American people we are thankful for your
country because it gives weapons to Israel that are used
to kill our children."

I begin to talk to Tahir Ahmed about this statement, and
he elaborates. "We distinguish between your people and
your government. But if your country did not cover
Israel, then Israel could not do these things. There is
a big error in the mentality of the American people.
Because of movies and Hollywood, you think like cowboys.
There is a good guy and a bad guy. And you see the Arab
as the bad guy and the Jew as a good guy. It is naive to
see only good and bad in the world."

"If Hezbollah kidnapped two soldiers, this is a matter
between two military groups. Why do they involve
children? She was not attacking Tel Aviv,’ he says of
Akkash’s 6-month-old daughter, killed in the strike.
"She was sleeping with her family. I hope the American
people think of a 6-month-old-girl killed with an
American fighter, flown by an Israeli pilot. If she was
with a soldier at the front, then these things happen.
But she was asleep with her family."

Late Thursday, Israeli officials said they were not
ruling out a ground invasion. For many Lebanese, caught
once again in a fight not of their making, an old and
terrible history seems to be repeating itself.

— By Mitchell Prothero Salon Media Group, Inc 101 Spear
Street, Suite 203 San Francisco, CA 94105 Telephone 415
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